War Against the Weak
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race is a 2003 book by historian and journalist Edwin Black. Overall, War Against the Weak shows how the eugenics movement was supported and promoted by a wide range of individuals, organizations, and corporations in the United States, and how this led to the forced sterilization and persecution of millions of people. According to professor Jack Fischel, "It is apparent from Black’s research that American eugenicists contributed to Nazi racial hygiene policy."
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What Hacker News says
- Ummmm, read "War Against the Weak" by Edwin Black.
You are a bit incorrect, no, a lot incorrect.
- Same thing for US and various disabled citizens during the 1950s to 1970s.
A good refresher is this book "War Against the Weak", by Edwin Black.
https://books.google.com/books/about/War_Against_the_Weak.ht...
- I would be inclined to agree, but I'm reminded of passages from Edwin Black's book [1] depicting the capriciousness of medical providers. E.g. a board of doctors was typically responsible for sterilization decisions in America when eugenics was mainstream during the early 1900s. It seems reasonable that doctors should be final arbiters of medical decisions, as in releasing this aforementioned hacker from a mental hospital. But the book revealed how these doctors would often inconsistently apply their sterilization standards to favor prominent local families whilst punishing the usual victims, i.e. minorities and poor whites.
In this regard, I find this case deeply disturbing, and would prefer if he simply got a definite sentence.
- Even Rose's article (I haven't read his book yet so I can't really say about that) tiptoes around what was going on here. It wasn't just a naive application of statistics. Rose gets through the Norma story without mentioning eugenics once, but the whole episode is so obviously part of America's pre-WWII eugenics swoon. Beyond specific beliefs about politics, race or genetics, but linked to them, there was a whole Zeitgeist, the collectivist spirit of the age that gave us Busby Berkeley musical numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysvQ5MaUbd8 and the IBM company songbook https://www.networkworld.com/article/2333702/a-history-of-si... . This was a time when it was acceptable, indeed it was progressive, to be violently hostile to difference or defectiveness: see for example War Against the Weak https://waragainsttheweak.com/ and, maybe most especially, The Black Stork https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-black-stork-9780... . And of course it's no coincidence that the pioneers of statistics tended to be particular fans of eugenics themselves.
(I am not an expert on anything.)
- > People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all.
It's great to read comments like these because it's one of the rare times when these people go mask-off and just tell you that they're eugenicists. Kudos for honesty.
Genetics and race-science cannot be separated, as they were forged in the same (American) fire [1][2]. The role of the former in supporting the latter never goes away; it just changes forms. For every phrenology that's utterly falsified, there's an "omg but what about polygenic risk scores!?" that pops up in its place [3]. Intelligence scores, IQ, psychometrics? Same thing: willing and enthusiastic handmaidens of selective breeding and strengthening the gene pool. Forced sterilization came soon after (60-70k people in the US).
Don't let these guys fool you: there's no "debate" about intelligence and heredity, or really any behavioral genetics, only a reactionary moral and political project: find the vulnerable, the poor, and the sick, and grind'em into dust.
Meanwhile:
> and willingness to look truth in the eye.
Mask on or off, this is a constant: "I'm a brave teller of hard truths in a world intent on hiding from them." You wonder if they'd really be exempt from their own "programs of genetic improvement."
2. https://books.google.com/books/about/War_Against_the_Weak.ht...
