4mo ago

TIL part of the left supported eugenics during most of the 20th century

www.cambridge.org

A Brave New World: The Left, Social Engineering, and Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Europe* | International Review of Social History | Cambridge Core

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Read about the Southern Strategy and you will realize it's the same people that just switched sides.
- Thanks for sharing this
But do they support it now... because I'm pretty sure the other side still does.
Eugenics can sound pretty appealing until you take a moment to really think about it and aren't the type to just be okay with whatever suffering you may cause in the name of the "greater good".
And making it illegal to have children with close relatives is a form of eugenics, i.e. it's still practiced and widely accepted in most western countries.
- Hell, providing free condoms to low-income public schools is eugenics and we all agree that it's a good thing
  
  No, it isn't. Eugenics is about changing genetic distributions, and low-income is not a genetically passed trait. If you ONLY gave the free condoms to black students at those schools and encouraged the white students to not use condoms, then I'd agree with you. Or if you only gave the condoms to kids who weren't getting good grades or were bad at sports, then I'd agree with you.
  But blindly giving out condoms to a large population without any look at genetics is not eugenics.
- Appealing or appalling? Big difference.
Yea no shit. There will always be people on both sides who support horrific things.
TIL the entire right supports genocide in Ukraine. Communism and the Nazi party.
During the four decades that passed between implementation and abolition, almost 63,000 Swedes were rendered infertile, in many cases in response to pressure from the state and sometimes as a result of outright compulsion. Furthermore, it was chiefly those regarded as “unproductive” who were the targets of that social policy.
So it sounds like the vast majority wasn't compulsory...
But in a few rare cases it was, which were likely when the patient couldn't legally give consent considering the subject.
Quick edit:
Was also in the 1930s when there was less options for non permanent birth control.

11 comments