[cbeach]

I admired Tesla's research. Now I've heard his words on eugenics, my admiration only grows. Eugenics is not about killing people. It's about ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed.

Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work in sterilizing drug addicts (voluntary sterilization in exchange for cash) to prevent children being born into misery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention

We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics and consider why a number of national heroes (including Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg) were proponents.

[dragonwriter]

> Eugenics is not about killing people. It's about ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed.

No, its not. Eugenics is about ensuring that only people with the "best possible" (from the point of view of its proponents, which is always subjective) genetic makeup live. Killing people with undesired genetic makeup, penalizing or preventing reproduction by those with undesired genetics, and promoting or compelling reproduction by those with desired genetics are among the means of eugenics.

"Ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed" is not eugenics.

> Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work in sterilizing drug addicts (voluntary sterilization in exchange for cash) to prevent children being born into misery.

Aside from discussion of whether that's a desirable policy, if it's really motivated by concern for childhood environment and not about eradicating drug addiction on the assumption that it is purely hereditary and preventing drug addicts from reproducing will prevent drug addiction, its not eugenics at all (as your wikipedia link correctly states, its been compared to eugenics, which is not the same thing as being eugenics.)

> We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics and consider why a number of our national heroes (including the likes of Walt Disney) were proponents.

Just because someone is a "national hero" because they did (or are national mythology has attributed to them) something good in one domain doesn't stop them from holding reprehensible views in other domains. "National heroes" are not gods, and we are poorly served by treating virtue in one domain of life as granting special consideration in unrelated domains.

[spindritf]

Eugenics range from encouraging some people to reproduce to genocide and includes everything in between: selective anti-conception, sterilization, and abortion. Reducing it to just genocide is dishonest.

And, if we're going to judge by modern standards, it's not even unpopular in our times. The word was dropped after the atrocities carried out by Germans but often the same people who express their horror at the idea laud and support Planned Parenthood despite its roots and policy.

[npinguy]

That program is extremely controversial, as your link says.

Drug addiction is all about the inability to commit to long term plans in favour of the quick short term happiness. Drug addicts are not capable of making rational decisions when faced with cash on the spot. There is a reason why we don't have a problem with boxing or MMA, but "bum fights" is unethical and looked down upon.

Offering drug addicts money for sterilization is unbelievably unethical. It is reinforcing the idea in their minds that their addiction is irreparable, probably guaranteeing after the fact that they will never seek help and recover. And if they do turn their lives around and are faced with different priorities than they did during addiction? Too bad so sad?

By the way, I'm not at all expecting to change your mind on this. Given your use of phrases like "left-wing metropolitan elites", I don't see how you could possibly be interested in a debate that involves you questioning your preconceived perspectives.

[stevesearer]

Eugenics generally gets lumped into the activities of the Nazis leading up to and during WW2. Because of this, most people probably don't know that the United States and its citizenry were fairly fond of it and put it into practice regularly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

[jerf]

The "real" problem of Eugenics is that, much like Communism inevitably mutates in an ugly direction, no matter what Eugenics starts as, it virtually always turns into something really, really ugly where some group of people, no matter what pretty words they may use to draw a veil of obfuscation over their actions, are just killing off some group they don't like.

[parennoob]

> We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics

This is one of the few cases in which Godwin's Law probably doesn't apply. The implementations of the National Socialist Party by themselves are an excellent argument against eugenics of any sort.

Meanwhile, it is worth mentioning here that Winston Churchill, while a "national hero" to some people, was unusually strongly racist even for his time. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest...

[heliostatic]

I'm not sure if you're serious, but the problematic history of eugenics goes back to a nice long way.

For a good time, read the proceedings of the international conferences, starting in 1912 and running for the next ten years or so. Some great scientific efforts, combined with some pretty appalling work, as well.

Check out 'The Cause of the Inferiority of the Physical and Mental Characters in teh Lower Social Classes' to start, from 1912: https://archive.org/details/problemsineugeni00inte

[ollysb]

This is one of the most abhorrent ideas I've read about in quite a while. To call an addict's decision to do this "voluntary" is disingenuous to say the least.

[spxdcz]

Tesla: "prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization"

Who decides who is "unfit"? In the not too distant past, and possibly even today, that might include the non-white, non-straight, non-wealthy, etc. I find it incredibly scary that you could so easily agree that others should decide who gets to enact their human instincts. Let's face it, it would almost certainly be old, white, wealthy men that would make those decisions.

[ch4s3]

What? Just because Roosevelt et. al. were proponents doesn't make it a good idea. You hypothesis presupposes something about human nature that I think is fundamentally flawed, namely that people will be inclined to evenly disperse the benefits of such a program. Much like communism, or some sort of stateless libertarian utopia(what ever that's even called?) it sounds nice on paper if you squint and hand wave away the way real people actually behave.

[jerf]

"stateless libertarian utopia(what ever that's even called?)"

Anarchism. [1] "Stateless libertarian" is by most useful definitions an oxymoron.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism - the popular conception of the term and the totality of what is lumped under that term are quite dissimilar. Non-disclaimer, I'm not an anarchist, only a libertarian.

[ch4s3]

I'm familiar with the word, I didn't use it because I was trying keep the focus on libertarianism which I don't necessarily connect with anarchism. Maybe Propertarian Utopia would have better captured what I was trying to say.