I wouldn't argue that there is an extreme paucity of nazi-style authoritarianism.  Just that nazism is distinct from, say, Christian Dominionism.  There are, in fact, Hitler-style waves of genocide on the African continent that have happened in the last thirty years.  But it's not simply their torturing and ruling that makes them Nazi, it's their racial/ethnic hatreds.

In America, racial/ethnic hatred is at least perceived as fringe, but anti-disabilist rhetoric is not.  Anti-disablism is often cloaked in "what's best for the disabled" but it's no less eugenic than racism.  It just sounds different.

Ok.

Common, unifying traits of autocratic, totalitarian regimes:

1. Elimination of people who question some sort of central cultural icon or centralized gov't authority
   
2. Elimination of dissent/zero tolerance for dissenting opinions
   
3. Elimination of "undesirable" groups; usually but not always minorities or 'alien' cultural groups
   
4. Idealistic origins in some sort "revolution"/a past involving a "betrayed revolution"
   
5. A central individual that could be said to have a 'cult of personality' or status of 'national cultural icon'
   
6. A military that, along with domestic law enforcement, deals with legal matters as well carrying out the will of the aforementioned centralized authority (sometimes given the euphemism "will of the people")
   
7. harsh monopolization of commerce and industry into gov't control
   
8. innate desire for conquest of international enemies.
   
9. innate desire for empire-building
   

So... let's name one autocrat whom these criteria do not apply to.
(Yes, I've agreed for most of this thread that comparisons to Hitler simply because someone employs hate speech, vies for a eugenically 'cleansed' society or has near-total control of domestic government is NOT automatically valid. More criteria is needed. A person should not automatically compare every dislikable political figure in the world to Hitler without offering a well-reasoned basis, first.)

The actual definition of eugenics...
(as opposed to the made-up one largely being confused with genocide)

1. eu·gen·ics  (y-jnks) n. (used with a sing. verb) The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.  The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
   
2. eugenics [juːˈdʒɛnɪks] n (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Genetics) (functioning as singular) the study of methods of improving the quality of the human race, esp by selective breeding [from Greek eugenēs well-born, from eu- + -genēs born; see -gen] eugenic  adj eugenically  adv eugenicist  n eugenist  [ˈjuːdʒənɪst] n & adj  Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
   
3. eugenics the science of improving a breed or species through the careful selection of parents. — eugenicist, n. — eugenic, adj. See also: Improvement  -Ologies & -Isms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
   

Definition of genocide (no, not the goofy, legalistic definition utilized on pro-neurodiversity websites);

1. gen·o·cide  (jn-sd) n. The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of an entire national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. [Greek genos, race; see gen- in Indo-European roots + -cide.] geno·cidal (-sdl) adj. geno·cidal·ly adv.  The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
   
2. genocide [ˈdʒɛnəʊˌsaɪd] n (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) the policy of deliberately killing a nationality or ethnic group [from geno-, from Greek genos race + -cide] genocidal  adj  Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
   
3. genocide 1. the deliberate and systematic extermination of a racial or national group. 2. an actor in this process. — genocidal, adj. See also: Race
   
4. the killing of an entire people or of a very large number of a people. — genocidal, adj. See also: Killing  -Ologies & -Isms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
   

We clear now?

Oh, what are you doing playing around with dictionaries, Kappers?  Put that moldy thing away, it never proved anything.  Here's some actual historical info about eugenics.  

Eugenics as a social movement partially comes from traditional European beliefs about disease and crime, and partially from the social aspect of the industrial revolution.  As an intellectual movement, it mostly depends on the writings of Francis Galton and contemporaries.  

Where previously, ideas of demonic possession, and the punishment of the sins of the parents had been the social construction of heritable disease and "disfigurement," (as an example, before the work of Giles de la Tourette, tick disorders were conceived of as demons and people were often killed by the intensity of the exorcisms apparently required to drive out these evil spirits) the industrial revolution brought sudden stark examples of the rationality of the universe.  As can be expected, the most common explanations for this new society tended to be moral justifications for its structure.  Since disease and poverty was no longer being caused by original sin, new explanations gained popularity.  Ideologies like social darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenics though distinct were mostly complementary.  

The notion of eugenics that Galton successfully advocated was that modern society had suspended natural selection, and that as a species we were ultimately doomed by this.  Although he did not advocate forcible sterilisation, selective abortion and infanticide, and large-scale organized genocide, it was this notion of eugenics that underpinned all such actions advocated by later eugenicists and eugenic ideologies.  The main enemies that eugenics created for the human race (or for the master race) were intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities, differential resistance to disease, and innate tendencies to commit crime.  These were the basis of Hitler's and the Nazis' arguments against the Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other slavs, and against those "Aryans" which were selected to be removed from Germany's gene-pool.  But the sort of state imposition of eugenics was not limited to Hitler's Germany at all.  The first eugenics law was passed in Connecticut in the 1880's.  It allowed for the forcible sterilisation of persons deemed unfit to procreate.  Other laws were soon passed in the area.  This is especially significant because New England was a hotspot for American Deaf culture.  Deaf (big d) schools were shut down, and sign language was banned.  Audiology, as advocated by Alexander Graham Bell, became the only choice of education for deaf (little d) people, but many deaf (little d) did not get to choose it.  They were sent to institutions where they and other disabled people would often as not be sterilized.  

Up to the end of world war two, papers were published about feeble-mindedness, deafness (little d), resistance to cholera, propensity to commit crime, and physical disability, all relating to the issue of eugenics, and whether such people should be allowed to reproduce or participate in society, or even live.  Though Galton had advocated breeding programs so that upperclass persons (who in his mind had proven their reproductive fitness) could increase the number of children they had, not unlike some of today's dating sites, and simply breed out the poor, who had proven their unfitness, all of the responses to this ideology were forcible.  People with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and deaf people (little d) were all given the snip.  In fact, deaf (little d) was rarely distinguished from "crazy" or "feeble-minded."  Deaf culture (big d) was driven underground and nearly went extinct.  Forcible sterilizations also made their way through prisons across the western world.  Papers were published endlessly (and are still being published today) about the heritability of crime.  This is in fact the origin of the "nature versus nurture" debate.  Eugenicists claimed, and continue to claim, that criminal behavior is genetically determined.  Though the evidence remains elusive, links between criminal behavior, disability, and mental illness are constantly being proven then disproven, genetic surveys are done in prisons across America, and the debate rages on.  

Recently, apologists have sprung up, because of recent advances in genetics technology.  Genetic disablities can now be eliminated before birth and eugenicists have gone to work high-jacking the pro-choice movement.  Genetic disability, not saving the pregnant woman's life, is now the "debate-ender" between prolifers and prochoicers.  According to one paper "forcible sterilization and other forms of genocide are no longer necessary."  

Of course the idea that modern nations are totally unique in human evolutionary history for taking care of the sick and the weak is a proposition eugenics has never been able to prove.  Archeological and paleontological evidence for this aspect of human society stretches back before everyone can agree that "human" is the correct label.  Yet eugenics continues to insist that our reproductive and social health depends on eliminating undesirable genes.

This post was last modified: 03-09-2012 01:34 AM by Lang.

Ah yes, "dictionaries are always wrong when they conflict with humanitarian morality". Historical contexts are nice, but they have little bearing themselves on the actual meaning of words. The (rather common, I might add) Neurodiverse attitude that "I can use language however subjectively I wish" fails when speaking amongst people who have their language socially-learned (those who babble as infants.) Words have meaning, not "whatever meaning I wish to assign to them!", as neurodiverse people so blatantly assume sometimes.


Insert coin, try again.

Dictionaries are compiled by lexicographers to document the usage of terms.  If a common usage is not in a dictionary, it means the lexicographers missed it or deliberately excluded it.  

If you did some research on eugenics, instead of looking it up in a dictionary, you'd be more informed about what is relevant to the topic.

Which is why I posted...

I think you and I are at an impasse, so I'm going to ask "agree to disagree?" and move on.


Agree to disagree?

I'm not sure what we're disagreeing over.  The eugenics I was referring to was of course the social movement codified by Galton and expanded by his successors.  I gave an explanation of that.  I clearly wasn't referring to the captive breeding of dogs, for instance.  Nor did I mean the watered-down definitions eugenicists have been circulating as part of their P.R. campaign.  Yes, Galton advocated selective breeding, but he was a rare one.  That's the point I was trying to make.

This post was last modified: 03-09-2012 04:54 AM by Lang.

Personally I would after taking my throne as emperor of earth and humanity do the whole eugenic thing differently.
The only people I'd actually have killed are two rapists and a paedophile, along with a small list of personal enemies. Actually, no, I would confront those, and kill them myself. Hey, nobody is going to arrest the supreme overlord of all humanity. And certainly not for quietly removing a handful of vermin from the gene pool.

And  try and pretty much run the show as its already going on, only by attempting at least, to create incentives for improvements to the human genome to be born. Such as for example, making life extension technology a priority, encouraging, and setting down an infrastructure

I've always thought the whole eugenic movement got it completely backwards, and those who tried seem to be personallly greedy, and generally psychotic (all the drugs being used on Adolf Hitler himself would have sent him pretty west...meth for a wakeup, barbiturates for sleeping...that alone would send anybody at least slightly loony, couple that with an ideology and oh boy oh boy better have one big umbrella handy when THAT ordure hits the
air-cycling unit because its going to rain buckets of the stuff



Its probably, realistically speaking, not going to be all that many years before the technology is decent enough to start progressing to where we can implant or excise genes at will...and know what will happen and where they are going to go, in the chromosomes targeted without brutalizing cats, mice, rats, dogs and rabbits by the hundreds of thousands. if it were me, as opposed to elected scientific panels...doing the gene selecting....I would cut out those that are de facto lethal before birth/after a short post birth bit of misery etc.

Those who wish to remain apart from such a society would simply be left to fend for themselves in whatever ways they feel right, such as say, the north sentinelese people....such societies would I think...be left a a message describing the society outside their world, a few times in a generation, saying 'door is open as long as you have no hostile intent'

And rather than eugenics via removal, other than of lethal traits, I'd focus on building on the existing genome, voluntarily. Nietzsche has several pretty good ideas and points. Ol' uncle Adolf, on the other hand, never really did him OR the  possibility of using science to improve the genomeThT any favours by way of good PR. He shoulda hired the guys Monsanto use (I am most definitely joking here, Monsanto are probably as bad as hitler in a  few areas

There has for instance, genetic manipulation experiments on mice (uggh do I ever HATE animal experimentation)  that resulted in VASTLY  improved muscle mass. Such treatments I would offer for free, or at very low cost at least, but would i make it mandatory? no. And of course corresponding increase in bone density would be needed in some cases of use of that example.

And those born blind, deaf etc, would still be cared for  just as they are, and where possible the condition(s) corrected prebirth to restore correct functionality. I would not, for example, 'cure' downs syndrome babies. Sure as hell would repair any cardiac malformations though.

And Other than that, sit back on my throne and probably have a flunky (preferably one with an interesting mind) search the library for a good book. Hey....I'm not stupid.....overlords get to have at least a couple of people who get shite done....and besides....somebody would HAVE to tell the believers out there 'no...he is just a human being and no he isn't a prophet either'

Here we go:

Contrary to what many neurodiverse people think, language is not something you get to redefine as it suits your worldview. I say "neurodiverse people" because I've spotted a few aspies and auties who like to redefine language based on their personal agenda. Go to chatautism, sometime. You'll find one guy named "beware" who does it nonstop. (He is otherwise fluent in english)

I think selective breeding of humanity is a great idea, but ELECTIVE selective breeding. More along the lines of 'gene-profile-based demographic search numerical mass reduction facility' than zyklon-B and the SS.

And to throw another firecracker into the political petrol can....as for the death penalty...I would see the sort of true bona fide monsters forced to labour instead. Such as Joseph Fritzl, etc. in a supervised containment facility for such creatures. Why waste food keeping brutes and evildoers alive only to kill them. When their punishment could instead be something more like being forced to produce food for the families of the victim or monotonous stirring the vats of nucleotides intended for breeding programs

A corpse is only any good as a mine for for a few micrograms to milligrams usually, of a few hormones, blood products and the like.

Kappers, I did not redefine anything.  Again, read some of the journal articles submitted in the last two hundred years on the topic of eugenics, you'll find my usage of the term less confusing.

"Lol! Srsly?"

You came to some of AFF's threads make a stink about "ableism", you suggest dictionaries are invalid if they don't include the "common use" you have decided to (obsessively) focus on in a thread and you are currently hung up on history lessons.

I thought a common basis for words would help. Nope, Webster's has no place in a thread where someone has decided the thread should be about ableism rather than... well... what two "philosophers" from austrailia think about abortion. I, personally, am wondering why you couldn't post these rants or two about "ableism" in it's own thread, rather than threadjack a thread already under progress.

So I say, again, "agree to disagree?", or... is such a concept really beyond your linguistic comprehension?

If you say so, Kapkao.  You may choose to believe I've redefined eugenics.  I'm not sure how, I simply tried to give a more in-depth exposition of what eugenics ideology really advocates, but never mind.  We'll just forget the whole thing.  I'm out.