Dear conservatives.
If you want eugenics allow people to abort and do generic testing on their kids before they’re born. It accomplishes the same thing without the brutal state control and human rights violations.
What? No they don’t want eugenics to eliminate diseases. They want it to eliminate Jews, and weirdly also pitbulls.
It’s a stepping stone.
They can’t say Black people are stupid criminals because they’re descendants of slaves.
So they say pitbulls are violent psychopaths because they were (supposedly) bred to be tough and aggressive. They act like all that matters is they’re pitbulls, and it’s nothing anyone can change because “that’s just science”
The implication is individual variation doesn’t exist and any population that’s been artificially separated for a couple generations makes them inherently different.
Racists have always loved taking a tiny grain of truth out of context and then just bullshitting till they end up with their preconceived result. Then if anyone challenges it, they grab that tiny grain of truth out of their giant mound of shit and claims that proves everything.
Fashion trends seem to follow a 20 year cycle, and a 30 year cycle, where ‘90s trends are coming back into fashion.
Fascism trends seem to follow a 90 year cycle, where ‘30s trends are coming back into fashion.
When you’ve experienced something personally, like war for instance, you’re going to know and remember personally how it felt to you, you will have strong opinions on it.
If it happened before your time, you will lack these feelings, and you will be basing your opinion on more abstract understanding that may or may not be accurate, since your understanding can only ever be as accurate as the historical material you were given.
Authoritarianism is a good example of this. It’s seductively simple, and it sure would be nice if it “just worked” and we could live successfully that way. Sometimes a person needs personal experience of their own direct suffering before they can wake up from their fantasy, though, before they come to realize that we have the systems we do not because they’re perfect or even great, but because they’re demonstrably the least shitty of them all. Our way may be fairly bad, but other major ways are worse.
This is a very unpleasant conclusion to come to, and I understand why people may wish to hide from it inside their own fantasies of power and simplicity.
Authoritarian attitudes was the #1 predictor of Trump support if I recall.
I haven’t lived through an authoritarian regime, but I lived through a terrible parent - so I’ve experienced the feeling of ‘oh shit the structure that governs my life is fucked up and I must escape’. I think that’s what made me anti-authoritarian.
I often wonder if there’s a way to get people to shift away from authoritarianism. I think I get the appeal of ‘simple, easy, you don’t even have to think for yourself!’ - but everyone needs to recognize those are trap cards.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with your thesis here. Many, many people who supported Hitler and Mussolini had been through WWI. Hitler himself was wounded in WWI.
I highly recommend “The Fourth Turning” by Strauss & Howe.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” - G. Michael Hopf.
I was once talking about the Strauss-Howe generation theory with a conservative buddy of mine and the above quote is what he was familiar with and made sense to him.
The young puppy kickers trying to make kicking puppies respectable again
Huh. Looks like we’ll be getting the Eugenics Wars after the Bell Riots in this timeline. Still on track for Irish Unification, too.
Just so you know, if you’re really quick you can hit Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C and copy all of the article text before the paywall pops up. You can then just paste the text into notepad and read the full article. I was going to post the complete text here, but that big of a post seems to make Lemmy choke.
