Perfection- Part 2 – Improving the Herd

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

At some point someone on our side was maintaining that it’s silly to claim Nazis were leftist, because their approach to governance was more traditional and not at all like the Communists.

Me? I say it’s stupid to call something derived from Marxism, and that called itself socialism “right wing” — in the American sense — though the terms right and left are both inadequate for the battles taking place now. I also say that there is nothing more “traditional” than the end result of communism, which ends in a kakistocracy akin to capricious and not very smart tribal leaders, but with power over a much vaster land than most tribes. Which in turn causes a lot more deaths.

Leaving that aside, the “national socialists” — though the Nazis were a special and extreme case — did take a more traditional approach to improving humans.

Okay, first, let’s establish that most people who didn’t leave inside Marx’s head — that is all of humanity — understood and understands that utopia is impossible with humans as they are and have always been.

It is built into both philosophies derived from Marxism, the national socialists and the international socialists (but really secretly Russian Nationalists) the idea that humans must be improved.

The traditional form of this, appealing more to the national socialists, I guess because they tend to idolize farmers and pastoral idyll — as opposed to the international socialists who idolize factory workers. Note neither real farmers nor real factory workers are listened to by the so called “leaders”, these are just a philosophical ideal — is the approach taken by farmers from time immemorial, to improve the stock in farms.

The eugenics movement that was all the rage across Europe in the early 20th century, before the smoke from the death camps showed what a very bad idea it was, and which keeps rearing its ugly head was a manifestation of this. And it never really went away.

Early on it was brutal and clear. “Defectives” would be sterilized or killed, to put them out of general society’s misery. This would be done incrementally, till at the end of it, there would be, standing tall, an ideal humanity, which could be trusted to live in utopia, and– Bah. go read science fiction from before World War I. They don’t even try to disguise it.

The fact that they had the current lefties (who actually have a lot of happy fun eugenics ideas still, just buried) misunderstanding of culture for race, and looked at the end result of cultures as meaning some races are “defective” just made this all the more bizarre.

I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets when I say that Margaret Sanger formed planned parenthood to discourage the “inferior races” from reproducing. At the time, of course, this included not just black people, but everyone who could tan, and probably a lot of the Irish. And that part has now a definite “off” whiff in America. You see, it included the Jews too. And the GIs returned from WWII knowing exactly where that led.

But–

But it’s not the end of the eugenics project.

A lot of it in the mutated national socialism, like, say, in Portugal, the softer, gentler — spits — “will not feed you in batch lots to the ovens, but will make you very poor” version, which was also tried here by FDR (for the record, having read mom’s school books, not only did Salazar crib FDRs programs, he probably plagiarized FDR’s speeches. Bah.) still goes on.

Part of it is to discourage breeding. This crosses with the crazy insane bits of the sixties and seventies — from the left, psychology — which thought a society without sexual frustration would be utopia. Because it was repression that made you angry and mean, or whatever.

Okay, so, there is (still) a strong cultural push to screw a lot, but not reproduce. Both because this is supposed to keep the welfare classes (and if you’ve never found yourself in trouble, you don’t know how hard Welfare is to refuse — we did — or to come out of — some friends did) from reproducing (it’s not working, but that’s for other reasons) and because of our new idea of what makes ideal people. Ideal people, you see, are WANTED babies, and then coddled, watched, guided within an inch of their lives.

The number of times I’ve had someone explain to me that yeah, abortion to the day of birth is needed because not everyone is wanted, and therefore they’ll be born to a life of misery and be unhappy and probably criminals their entire life.

I’m here to tell you that I haven’t — yet — taken one of these “helpful” beings heart out through their mouths. Yet. But there’s always tomorrow.

You see, neither Dan nor I were wanted. Oh, he was. Until it was discovered — fortunately at the time this was impossible to do pre-birth — he was a boy. I just wasn’t. Mom had determined the way to wealth was to have only one child and lavish all resources on him. Don’t blame her too hard. After all the UN was making posters pushing that idea about that time.

And yet, shockingly, surprisingly, we’re both here, and even more shockingly, we’re both productive, happy, and the only type of criminal I am is “thought criminal” which should not exist in the US.

Further, anyone who looks at craigslist or other place where people list animals for re-adoption knows that no matter how wanted you are at birth, circumstances change. The number of breed dogs and cats being given up because the owners found out the having isn’t as much fun as the wanting. Or because an adopter died, got sick, or has to move to a place that won’t accept pets.

For children, let me assure you both the inconvenience and the changing circumstances, over 18 to 20 or 22 years (which seems to be as long as it takes — minimally — to launch them these days) are much, much higher.

So being wanted at birth is not something that determines trajectory in life. This is however something that is almost impossible to penetrate in the modern mind, and some of you are probably cringing that I dare question it.

Then there are various issues we test for, and which you’re encouraged to abort for. Look, I am not even judging those who decide to. I do understand the fears all too well, okay?

Every time I got pregnant, I compounded with fate for what defects I’d prefer. I know that sounds lunatic, but there it is. ”Blind? I can take blind.” Or “missing limb. We’ll figure it out.” Anything, anything but mentally defective, because I wasn’t sure I could bridge that or live with it.

So, of course, what we were told is that older son would be mentally defective and probably never be able to live independently — he says he’s mentally defective, because of the circumstances of the pregnancy. As for living independently, he tends to forget to eat vegetables if his wife doesn’t make him, but other than that he seems okay — and were encouraged to abort. That we didn’t was more that I couldn’t live with that EITHER, particularly after six years of infertility and having gone through a very difficult pregnancy and being profoundly aware that he was likely to be our one and only. (We got lucky.)

However I remember the fear, the struggle, and the convincing arguments the other way. I come not to judge, nor to condemn, only to say that it is a slippery slope.

Slippery? Well — where do you stop? Yes, a profoundly mentally deficient child will need life long care, and I know how difficult that is, and how much a parent will worry about their own mortality and leaving behind a kid who can’t survive on his own. Of such things are murder-suicides made.

But then, what is an handicap too profound to survive? What justifies abortion or, probably, in forthcoming developments, simply culling certain genes out? And how much is genetic, and how much is environment? I think we’re in the very infancy of genetics and much of what we think we know ain’t so. And culling for genetic defects would be stupid. Even if we knew more. Yes, I can explain.

First of all, though, I’d like to point out we don’t know what’s survivable, what’s a full life, what’s happiness — for others. You know that “Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about?” Well “Everyone has a value you know nothing about.” Sometimes the value — I often think mine — is to be a negative example, granted.

However, I think I went to college with a Thalidomide baby. I’m not sure, because I don’t even know if it was distributed in Portugal. However, he had the characteristic lack of limbs, hands emerging from shoulders and either feet from trunk or severely shortened legs. I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t part of his group.

His group? Oh, yeah. He had to write tests with his feet, and his mom came in on test days, to deal with that. However, the rest of the time, he was surrounded by a coterie of girls at all times, and he was one of the top Language students in my year. (Though I think his emphasis was Latin languages, so we had very few — and all amphitheater — classes together.) He was one of the student leaders, running for various student-political-leadership offices. (Not a communist either, so genuinely not stupid.)

I have no idea what happened to him after college, but I’d not be surprised if he were married with half a dozen perfectly normal kids, and working somewhere in the back room of an embassy. (Though frankly, because his mom looked upper class, he’s more likely to have one or two perfectly normal kids.)

The girl in my class who was educable mentally retarded was married to a boy with the same issue by her parents (and his parents) when they were in their late teens. I’m not sure what the reasoning was, but it’s not an unusual arrangement in traditional societies, even though you would cringe from it because, well, eugenics ideas.

They were given a place to live, and she cleans houses, while he does simple repairs and day laborer type stuff. Unlike what would happen here (likely) they were not sterilized, and no one realized (literally) that they didn’t know what caused babies until they’d had either four or five. At which point she asked and someone explained. At any rate, even though I’d have assumed that her issues were genetic (her people were welfare cases and not overbright. I don’t know about his) their kids are fine and at least two — I stopped keeping track after that. Or mom did, so I got no reports — graduated from college.

So it’s probably a good thing they weren’t sterilized, but it’s probably a good thing anyway.

You see, the eugenics project is based on a completely demented premise no one ever bothered to test: the idea that a very healthy body will create a very healthy mind, and a temperament such as that of the angels, knowing good from evil and choosing good every time.

It takes no more than a drunkard’s walk through history to know this is poppycock.

Yes, sure, a non-idiot ruler is preferable to an idiot one. But assuming at least vaguely educable and grounded, non-geniuses are less likely to run away with an insane idea and be unable to back track when it’s proven insane.

Victoria did all right as a queen, within her system, and having read a lot about her, I don’t think anyone would consider her better than average.

But not everyone is a ruler. And not everyone is going to work in a profession of high abstraction.

The number of people capable of high abstraction I think — note think, we don’t really study this or the effect of culture on this — is always a small percentage. And, mark me well, they are not inherently superior.

The number of people who score above 132 IQ in the Stanford-Binet tests is 2% of the population, give or take. And higher than that becomes increasingly rare. And above 165 is meaningless, because there aren’t enough at that level to establish deviations, since IQ is a statistical measurement.

It is also a measurement of being able to perform a certain number of tasks that correlate well with doing well in academic circumstances.

Because of the way the rewards were stacked in the last century, we — in the West, but really worldwide, as long as there’s some kind of technological civilization, however weak — have a strong prejudice for high IQ as being superior and the mark of the better human, and the one capable of implementing the best policies, to bring about “utopia”.

This is sometimes taken to the point that regions and people who test consistently badly are spoken of, on the right, as being inferior and should be discouraged from reproducing. And on the left as “needing help” to reap the benefits of society.

First, besides the point that a group-IQ tells you nothing about an individual in that group, because the true avis rara, those with IQ above 132 can appear in any APPEARANCE group (because appearance is very bad at following IQ, and we’re all mixed.) Second, counterproductive, because IQ is not a measure of worth, or even of fitting well/doing well in society.

In the comments blow-up here sometime ago, someone threw a hissy fit that perhaps the reason people with higher IQs who are in Mensa don’t do well in life as a hole, because they are “the type of people who join Mensa” not just high IQ.

That is a big silly, because the reasons to join Mensa are as varied as members. Yes, if go to certain chapters, you’ll think the purpose of the organization is to get together and talk about how smart one is, which would seem to encourage people of little accomplishment beyond IQ.

But– But that’s not the only reason people join. I belonged for years — till we moved, and for various reasons we dropped it — to a chapter that devoted itself whole heartedly to beer and bad puns. Because we were in what was then still fairly insular South and were most of us outsiders. Which meant, we had trouble making friends with locals. We didn’t speak the social language. And therefore the group was just a social group.

I’ve also known a lot of people along the years who join but never attend, because it’s useful for their resume/impressive for their bosses. In their defense, I got two jobs by putting in the line that I’d edited the Mensa newsletter. A boss who belonged, and one who knew what it was, were willing to take a chance on the girl with the accent and the foreign degree on the strength of that. So it’s a reason to take it.

Also, within Mensa, there’s a lot of variation of IQs. So even given “they’re all the type of people who join Mensa” if IQ had anything to do with success in life in general, you’d think the higher the IQ the higher the success. Note I always refer to my kids being “diagnosed” with high IQ. To the extent that people were successful in life in general, it seemed to be the ones who’d come in with the bare minimum to qualify. After that, results got worse.

The very successful ones (eh. We count. LOL) were also in professions of high abstraction.

Here’s the thing, there is a reason for the stereotype of the mathematical, or engineering, or physics genius who has to be told when a shirt is too small a size, or that they shouldn’t wear a wool pullover in high summer. High abstraction intelligence doesn’t correlate well with …. life. Because life isn’t abstract. It’s immediate, it’s small, it’s petty, it’s irritating. I can’t be the only person who sometimes wishes she could fast forward from waking up to being fully dressed and working. Or who lets dishes accumulate because they’re not interesting enough. Or who forgets to do the needful to lubricate social links, from answering emails from friends, to sending thank you notes, to– if you’re my friend and I seem to ignore you for months on end, I probably think of you daily, but am pursuing something that is taking all my mental resources and I forget to call or write. It’s truly nothing to do with you.

Or of course, I’m down in the depths of depression again.

Now, I’m not using myself as an example, though I’ve confessed above I test okay. But I’ve also looked around. I have eyes to see with. And I can see the obvious when it’s written in letters twenty feet high and made of fire.

Most of the highly successful people, in just about any field that doesn’t require high abstraction — including managing the people who work with high abstraction — are people who fall just short of that top 2%. In fact, most of the students identified as “gifted” by their teachers are not those in the top 2% let alone above, who are usually identified as “there’s something wrong with him/her” or “He/she is oppositional-defiant” are in the top 10% or so of intelligence. Smart enough that they look “really smart” to normal human beings, but still can read all the social signals, etc. And ping as “normal, just better.”

I always laugh when I read something about how China (It’s usually China) is going to increase IQs of every child born to 148 — it’s always 148 — because that would be the end of their regime, and probably not because the geniuses would question everything, though they might, but because the kids wouldn’t be able to do anything else but high abstraction successfully.

And on top of that, geniuses aren’t more compliant, more altruistic, and definitely not more agreeable or objective than the average human being. Again, mostly they just can make all the human mistakes, only faster and harder.

However, because of the bias in the culture, we do have eugenics ideas that cause real trouble in the real world. From trying to prevent the reproduction of those who aren’t geniuses, to welfare that amounts to hamstringing people we think can’t survive because of “low IQ”. And thereby the creation of a dependent class (a lot of them government workers, because the left thinks we need make work jobs for the unfit. The others just welfare) of one sort or the other. Oh, and the favoring of these people for promotion, etc, because the poor dears supposedly can’t make it on their own.

Which in turn is breaking every single field. Because every field needs competence of some sort. And choosing for any reason other than competence IN THAT FIELD AND JOB ultimately ends up in choosing people who can’t do it. (Looks at Harvard and clears throat. And do, please, realize that your medschool works exactly like Harvard. Sweet dreams.)

The point I’m trying to make is that despite our strong bias for abstract intelligence as being “superior” and despite our trying to encourage “superior” people in the understanding this makes the world better or reduces the burden on society (the only reasons for it to be a burden on society boil down to socialism) it’s not necessarily so.

By reducing the number of average or lower IQ people, even, who are allowed to find their place naturally, without “help” from rules, regulations and various forms of welfare, we are in fact destroying society.

Part of this is that humans can’t really be bred like sheep. We are more complex than sheep (or even cats.) Highly desirable characteristics come paired with highly undesirable ones. Or are negated in expression (something we’ll get into on the next post on this, probably Monday) because of nurture. Because they’re culturally discouraged. Or because there’s some defect that runs with it.

It’s a joke that extreme ADD is a diagnosis of high IQ. It’s not always true, but it often runs together. Is that due to poor training? Quite possibly, but training is highly individual and probably can’t be completely got around.

More importantly, I’ve noted among my fellow creatives (I hate the word, but it’s the best term) that innovative creation is often paired with neuroticism and the resultant type of history you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Oh, also with auto-immune issues way above statistical likelihood.

What does this mean? Search me. It’s entirely possible that creativity in humans is like a pearl in an oyster. It looks very pretty, but it’s formed through pain and irritation.

I think if we tried to breed out, say, ADD, we’d find ourselves breeding out something we’re desperately in need of. (Or think we are.)

Also, because sometimes a desirable characteristic shows up as a throw back in an otherwise unexceptional or even completely moronic family. Leonardo DaVinci had a lot of siblings by each of his parents (separately so far as we know) and neither is known to history. And speaking of the illegitimate son of Ser Pero DaVinci, let’s agree the man had major issues which impaired his functioning and make it a miracle he accomplished as much as he did.

Human generations are too long for a sane breeding program anyway, or to realize that by doing it on the slow “convince them not to have kids” program we not only eliminated mentally slow people, but also creatives. Or people who are really good at plumbing. Or–

None of which stops the soft form of eugenics from going on. Which often turns into reverse eugenics, since welfare does pay per baby. And then keeps that baby ignorant, feral, and trapped in the soft mitts of the eugenicists, making everything worse for everyone.

Let’s not forget too that this form of soft eugenics can suddenly go weird and hard. Particularly now that the international left has adopted a lot of the ideas of the national left.

You have only to look at Canada to see a program of soft eugenics “with the best intentions” go feral. You start by offering and more or less pushing (hard pushing, trust me) abortions for defective babies (which includes, of course, unwanted ones, because “everyone knows” they’ll be criminals) and euthanasia for the hopelessly ill who are “just suffering uselessly.” Next thing you know you’re offering euthanasia for people who are depressed. And people who are just not that smart. And, soon enough, with a little advance of the forecasting ability of genetics for unborn babies, for kids who are just not that athletic, or will be prone to colds, or aren’t that smart, or by the by “just won’t be very pretty.” You know it, and I know it.

And then all of a sudden the smell of the death camps is upon us, and you’ll be shocked Pikachu about “how could we have got here? We had the best intentions.”

But a society built for humans needs to hold the individual human being, always flawed, always imperfect, as the center and measure of itself. It has, by definition, to accept non perfect humans, not to kill them or otherwise destroy them in the name of perfection which everyone assumes would be a) achievable. b) better for everyone.

Otherwise, it’s the unmaking of all that the West has achieved, and a return to famine and barbarism. Oh, slowly, by the scenic route, and perhaps with a drastically changed humanity that can never climb back up.

But an unmaking, anyway.

As much as in our intellectual pride we value the abstract “intelligence” of the “experts” the last three years should be a sound warning not to give them leeway, and to prize instead the battles no one sees, and the triumphs, too: the not particularly intellectual woman who is good at cooking and cleaning and keeping a nice home. Or who is good at looking after people. Or the not highly abstract-thinking-man who is an excellent brick layer or plumber, or anything else.

We don’t know what humanity will need in the future. The future is notable for not being here and not being known.

Let’s keep the vast variety of humans. We might need them later.

[Next up, probably Monday, Killing Me Softly on rebuilding humans from the inside out. (With understanding that as already shown in this post, both methods blend and socialists of both stripes end up adopting both, just sometimes one before the other.)]

137 thoughts on “Perfection- Part 2 – Improving the Herd”

      1. FYI-
        Jill McGown died in 2007. I came here from Mad Genius, and I’m too tired (it is Friday and I’m still at work) to figure out how to comment over there.

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        1. Always remember –

          When people ask, “What would Jesus do?”, sometimes the answer is, “Fashion a scourge, and flip over tables.”

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          1. Or “Sell your possessions and buy a sword” (Luke 22:35-37). The left far too often pictures Jesus as some simpering blob of sweetness. My evangelical brethren all to often forget to apply the WHOLE of scripture and pick and choose the relationship bits they like. C.S. Lewis gets it very close to bang on in Lion Witch and the Wardrobe where Susan asks bout Aslan (Jesus/Messiah Allegory)

            “Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

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      3. Sometimes links just don’t want to cooperate. There’s a humongous number of good passages in “Atlas Shrugged” that apply to our present circumstances.

        One paragraph of Cheryl Taggart speaking to Dagney stands out in similarity to some of the Black Dog comments of recent weeks.

        “Yes. . . Yes, I feel that there’s no chance for me to exist, if they do . . . no chance, no room, no world I can cope with. . . I don’t want to feel it. I keep pushing it back, but it’s coming closer and I know I have no place to run. . . I can’t explain what it feels like, I can’t catch hold of it — and that’s part of the terror, that you can’t catch hold of anything — it’s as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion — an explosion is something hard and solid — but destroyed by . . . by some horrible kind of softening . . . as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone wall and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds — and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo.”

        Scary.

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    3. Interestingly enough, I was just listening to a speech by Tim Tebow where he refers to humans as “Image Bearers.” That girl with Down’s Syndrome over there? She’s made in the image of God. The boy with dwarfism? Made in the image of God. The kids with missing limbs, those who can’t walk straight, the ones who’s brains can’t manage even basic tasks? All image bearers.

      Christianity is not only compatible with what Sarah’s talking about, it accepts all of it as a premise. Because otherwise, you have to go before God and say, “Yeah, that kid you made in your image? Frankly, you just screwed up so bad there that I had no choice but to destroy it.” And I can’t imagine the Lord is going to be very pleased with that speech.

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      1. Frankly, you just screwed up so bad there that I had no choice but to destroy it.” And I can’t imagine the Lord is going to be very pleased with that speech.
        ……………………..

        May they reap what the sow before their souls are forced to accept their after life reward of enteral torment. Their chance of redemption forever denied. (On this topic, I am not very forgiving.)

        My cousin, born 1967, was so lucky to have been born then VS now. As it was her parents had to fight to have medical clean her and give her a chance to survive. Spina Bifida. Yes, treatments and aids have improved since then. More than a few because of her. Uncle created any number of aids for her that weren’t available back then. Sure the newer stuff is less bulky but hey it has been 44 years since she died (at age 13). Now days? They’d push her parents for a “post birth abortion” not just neglect.

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  2. “the idea that a very healthy body will create a very healthy mind, and a temperament such as that of the angels, knowing good from evil and choosing good every time.”

    Well. That’s… certainly one way to understand mens sana in corpore sano.

    shudder

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  3. I recollect – from a college anthropology course maybe? – that while it could very well be that humans could perhaps improve the general health of offspring by mating with an eye toward combining good qualities, there were two problems with human eugenics. One – who decides what are the desired qualities for the population, and two – the problem of a genetic monoculture being vulnerable to all kinds of plagues. So it might be better to marry and breed with a mate as genetically different from you as possible. Hybrid vigor in humans, in other words. Just about every mixed race person I ever met in real life was extremely attractive, physically, so perhaps there is something to it.
    (I’ve read that it does sometimes present a problem, when a person of mixed race needs an organ transplanted, though – hard to match them with a suitable donor. Anyone who knows more on this matter is free to correct me if I am mistaken.)

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    1. You’re not mistaken. I see calls for out for mixed-race bone marrow donors all the time, and kidneys. (Probably liver, too, since that’s one of the three live-donor options, but it’s rarer.)

      You can get lucky, though, when you’re in an area with a high prevalence of certain mixed-race groups. Like my area, which had a large influx of Vietnamese immigrants. Sure, there’s a lot that married within the diaspora culture, but there are also a lot that looked to the folk already here.

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    2. Olaf Stapledon’s, “Last and First Men,” included a species that was obsessed with selective breeding/genetic engineering throughout its existence. In that species, a man had to convince a potential mate, “not only that his mind could bring her mind to a state of joyful completion, but that together they could create children of a peculiar excellence.” He continued that they consistently bred for a small suite of factors – longer lifespan without senility, good looks, skill in “the vital art,” and so forth. He added that while there would be fads for a particular physical appearance, talent, etc, none of them lasted long enough to actually change the species.
      Of course, being Stapledon, they came to a bad end (they bred for “brains above all,” and produced super-intelligent and utterly amoral organic computers).

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    3. Some years ago, I read about a study where women were given small pieces of fabric that had been exposed to the sweat of different men. Purportedly there was a consistent tendency for women to prefer the smell of men whose immune spectra were different from theirs (presumably resulting in offspring with a wider range of immunities). That seems rather like the effect of hybridization you’re talking about.
      However, there was an important exception: Women who were pregnant preferred the smell of men who were genetically similar to them, perhaps because those were likely to be relatives who would be more motivated to protect them. I saw a comment that being on the pill shifted women’s hormonal pattern to one more similar to pregnancy, and might result in different preferences.
      I don’t have a link for the story; I’m giving what I remember of it. It seemed to suggest some interesting possibilities.

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      1. I think I saw that same study. The summary I read noted that it might be a factor in the high divorce rates: women are put on the pill during the years they’re looking for a mate, find someone attractive to them, marry, and then go off the pill with the idea of having children. Only, at that point, they realize that this guy who was so attractive while they were on the pill is now repellant to them.

        Don’t know if I accept that, but it’s an interesting theory.

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        1. I wasn’t on the pill when we met and married. Didn’t stay on the pill after we were married. Couldn’t tolerate it. I got migraines. Doctor didn’t detect usual causes for the migraines (raised BP, etc.). I wonder if it changed my perception of hubby’s scent. I am affected by migraine causing scents at lower delectable levels than others.

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        1. Karl Gallagher’s story “Matchmaker” on his Substack alludes to that finding.

          I have to say I’m coming increasingly to think that maybe the widespread idea of the second half of the twentieth century that we could improve human functioning by dosing people with metabolically active chemicals might have been a dangerous delusion. Take this pill to lose weight, take this pill to avoid pregnancy, take this pill to suppress your appetite, give your son this pill to make him sit still which his teacher talks . . . and none of them can possibly do you any harm. Or so people wanted to believe.

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    4. Your thoughts have merit. What seems interesting is the research that keeps coming back to humans having gone through a couple of significant population bottlenecks in the past 70 and 150 thousand years having pruned off a number of human variant populations, and left us with a very restricted and homogenized genome. That screams to me that the various “races” of humans is extremely superficial, and there isn’t much difference between us. That extreme genetic closeness was probably recognized over a thousand generations ago, with attendant monoculture genetic vulnerabilities, and genetic diseases like those besetting the royals of Europe reinforcing the taboos against close relatives marrying and reinforcing those deleterious traits.

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      1. Sometime in the past year, I read that the genetic diversity of all non-African humans is a fraction of that of African humans, and among them, the genetic diversity of the original southern African population far exceeds that of all the rest of Africa . . .

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    5. Eugenicists are taking a very shallow and general understanding of animal husbandry and attempting to apply it to an entirely different problem, ‘improving’ humans. When you set out to improve a cow, you have clearly defined traits you want to breed for. More meat, or more milk, or richer milk, are all fairly simple traits and you can measure them in the existing herd and then breed the animals that display them best (which inevitably includes line breeding, if not direct in-breeding) and then ruthlessly cull ‘defectives’. But human excellence is neither a simple one facet trait, nor is it easily measurable. And those cows we bred so successfully? They are great at giving milk, or meat, but they are also almost entirely dependent on human intervention to survive. Eugenics mistakes “improved” in the limited sense of “more suited to a particular use” for “improved” in the sense of better all around. It can only ever work if the goal is to reduce human beings to livestock.

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  4. One of my many incarnations being that of an evolutionary paleontologist. I can thus say you have struck the bell. We do not know what challenges our species will face and we can not afford to drain the gene pool and decrease our options.

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    1. THIS THIS THIS. The entire “survival of the fittest” is in reality “…the fittest for unpredictably changed environment which that future organism will experience”.

      And predictions are hard, especially about the future.

      We cannot possibly know what odd genetic variation will be the one that is best adapted to differing – again unpredictably differing – future circumstances. So the widest possible variations within the bounds of what is viable to survive and reproduce constitute “optimal” – a full gene pool is money in the survival bank.

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  5. From looking at the history, it seems to me that, on one hand, “fascism” is taken as the unique and unspeakable evil in politics, but on the other hand, the Nazis are classified as fascists and fascism is therefore considered to lead to mass murder of a country’s own population. But when I look at countries that are commonly called “fascist”—Italy, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, I think Brazil (during certain parts of each one’s history)—none of them seems to have had an apocalyptic death rate. They were authoritarian, and repressive, and treated political dissidents abusively, but I haven’t heard of anything like the German genocide. And on the other hand, for apocalyptic death rates I can point not only to Hitler, but to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. So it seems to me that Nazism and Leninism are similar in an important way, and that ordinary fascism is different from both, and perhaps parallel to less murderous forms of socialism. Neither is anything I would want to live under, but both are survivable for most people and fall short of the utter horror of Hitler and Stalin and their ilk.

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      1. The big thing that communism, socialism, and fascism have in common is the belief that a central government can plan and run a successful society. Humans being humans, that belief is wrong and doomed to failure. Central planners can never know enough to run a country successfully, so any form of socialistic society will fail in the long run.

        The knowledge that humans are imperfect is also the driving force behind many of those totalitarian governments’ attempts to create a perfect mankind (by their lights). Whether it’s the Nazi ‘s Aryan Master Race, the New Communist Man, or any other such slogan, all these attempts also must fail but in the trying they will kill millions of their own people.

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        2. I wouldn’t attribute the falsity of that belief to peculiarities of the human species. I think it’s a matter of the costs of communicating and processing information in general. Market prices are a way of conveying information about alternative uses for resources and alternative means of accomplishing goals with minimal bandwidth, letting each decision maker plan for their own operations without needing to come up with a comprehensive scheme for an entire system of production. Informational constraints would still apply to intelligent cephalopods or sentient computers or any other nonhuman minds.

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        3. Which might be one of the key reasons why most of the fascist governments haven’t gone to such extremely high levels of mass slaughter. Most fascist governments seem to be more narrowly focused on maintaining control of the population, ignoring the utopian new man ideal in favor of more immediate issues.

          And thinking about that caused me to note something –

          While everyone remembers two current Asian communist countries – China and North Korea – there are actually four. The other two are Vietnam (who most of us should remember)… and Laos. Since some of you might be saying, “Who?”, Laos is a small country situated between Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia (and China and Myanmar), and is largely under Vietnam’s influence. To the best of my knowledge, neither country has engaged in the “new man” foolishness. And to the best of my knowledge, there haven’t been any “internal mass slaughters” in either nation since the end of the re-education camps created when North Vietnam forcibly reunified the country.

          Does it mean something?

          I don’t know. But it’s a data point.

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          1. C. S. Lewis’s quote about how it’s better to live under a tyrant than a busybody, perhaps. Those who are primarily concerned with maintaining power might be willing to let you keep living your life the way you want, as long as you don’t challenge their rule. The true believers in The Cause, however, will never stop trying to force you into their mould—after all, the Glorious Future of Humanity Depends on It!

            Of course, it’s never safe to assume that the power-maintainers will stay that way. I can think of at least one example of a power-maintainer who swallowed his own propaganda and became a monster.

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  6. THIS. All of this. We were also WARNED. REPEATEDLY. That this would be the result. Everyone who warned was shouted down, ignored, mocked, and even killed. But people still kept fighting and refusing to take the Death Cult Pill en masse. Among the best fighters was Dr. Martin Couney (https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/2023/05/19/review-the-strange-case-of-dr-couney-by-dawn-raffel/) who showed off preemies and weaklings in incubators in sideshows to save their lives and never charged their parents a penny. Too few people know about or remember him, but we might not have incubators today without him.

    He was a showman, too, not an actual doctor. He used that title to curry credit and make sure he saved lives. I say when someone gets the chance, they should find a way to put up a plaque honoring him or name a building after him. Take that, eugenicists!

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  7. “There will never be Death Panels! That’s just a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory!”

    A few years later: “M.A.I.D. is not Death Panels!”

    There are no formal Death Panels denying people treatment, either; it just takes 8 months to get an MRI appointment. Not their fault if you up and die before then.

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    1. Of course the elitists have their own separate health care system which is not nearly as bad (and you pay for, and are rigorously excluded from).

      95% of new life-saving drugs are developed in the U.S. because we have the least broken health care system remaining in the world. Which doesn’t stop the idiots trying to break it.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. To steal and alter from Winston:

        Many forms of health care have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that ours is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that our health care system here in the United States is the worst form except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. That, and we can afford the drugs. My understanding is that Americans basically subsidize drugs for the rest of the world. Because if drug makers don’t lower the prices to ridiculous levels in other parts of the world, the local governments will basically copy the drug recipes, manufacture them locally, and challenge the drug makers to enforce their drug patents in that country’s own courts.

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    2. You are dreaming too small.

      https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2024/02/01/the-doctor-will-kill-you-now-6/

      “In Canada, if you interfere or impede someone from accessing Medical Assistance in Dying, or cause them “fear”, you could be arrested and put in jail for up to 10 years.”

      Causing “fear” by suggesting, just for instance, that suicide is a mortal sin. Or maybe causing “fear” by reminding the patient that MAiD is not a treatment. They -kill- you. Making you dead, not better.

      So not only will they kill your Grandma, you won’t even be allowed to object. Planning ahead for the next big Freedom Rally-type event, I expect.

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        1. According to the city’s web site, 76,000.

          Almost twice as many as the District of Columbia, so not as many sharesies would be needed.

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  8. This reminds me of a movie that is a couple decades old now: Gattica. Where babies can be designed in the womb and if you can’t pass the genetic hygiene tests no one will hire you to do anything more than sweep the floor.

    Selecting for only abstract thinkers is moronic. Abstract thinkers aren’t generally good at the tedious, but needful tasks that keep a giant civilization going. If the eugenicists managed to get their way, who would get up at O’dark-thirty and bake the bread? Who would watch/teach the kids during the day? Who would lay the bricks? Who would drive the buses and trucks and delivery vehicles? Who would grow the food? Who would stand guard?

    Getting caught up in abstract thinking during any of the above is a quick route to it turning out very badly.

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    1. In reply to all of the “Who would”s, my preference would be to force the elites and eugenicists (if there’s a difference) to do so. At gunpoint, on pain of summary execution for failure.

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  9. not only does welfare pay per baby, they pay the most while they are babies, hence why you’ll see welfare moms with a herd of kids all 2-3 years apart.

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  10. Although it’s pretty clear, reading “Time Enough For Love” and some other works in that universe, that Robert Heinlein was actually a believer in eugenics.

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    1. True – partially. Of the “soft” variety, which was (and actually still is) the cultural default attitude. Even in his most “eugenic” world (Beyond This Horizon) the “hard” eugenicists were cast as the villains.

      Even in the Lazarus Long timeline, he recognized that the “defectives” could have unusual and critically useful abilities (ref. Methuselah’s Children and the psychics produced by the inbred Howard lines).

      In the story and novel within the Friday world, he even recognized that the “New Superior Man” notion was, inevitably, a failed experiment.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Yes. To some extent. But not the repulsive, imposed from above of the earlier authors.
      He was a man of his time, and he believed that we had overpopulation, etc.
      Also, not eugenics. Genetics, far more advanced than ours.
      Note, if you read TMIAHM he has sympathy for little doesnt-fit guy and he doesn’t want them exterminated. on the contrary, the people “thrown away”make a good thing.

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  11. I fear the day when the collectivists will start to wonder aloud: “Why don’t we just genetically engineer people to be born socialists?” because you just know that anybody who dares to object will get labeled . . . guess what.

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    1. Instapundit will occasionally post yet another link to some psychologist who has published a new paper claiming that conservatism is a form of mental insanity.

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      1. That one goes back to the 1940s when a member of the Frankfurt School of imported European Marxists popularized the idea of “right-wing authoritarianism.” Wanting to tell people how much of their income should go to support which good causes, or how they should run their businesses, was not considered “authoritarian” (I would call that sort of thing “left-wing authoritarianism”); rather, objecting to such things was considered authoritarian. The idea has been with us ever since.

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          1. They literally labeled thinking that the best way to get ahead was to work hard as “authoritarian.”

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        2. Frigging town just put a warrant article up to forcibly change everyone in town over to a specific electrical supplier, and you have the specifically OPT-OUT if you don’t want it. I spoke up at the deliberative session and said even if it was a good deal, it was an abomination and unlawful interference with existing contracts between individuals and their current electrical suppliers. They refused to change the warrant article wording; so, I’m on a crusade to get the town to vote that tyranny completely down. And if it does pass, they’re going to have a big legal action on their hands.

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      1. That is a secondary consideration, since they intend to impose socialism regardless of the will of the people anyway; just look at what they impose now notwithstanding overwhelming public opposition. They primarily think that masses of people who come into the country illegally will vote for them in order to avoid deportation and to keep the government goodie train flowing. NYC is handing out $53 million in pre-funded credit cards to illegal aliens in the city, paid for by nonprofits through a “friend of the program”.

        https://nypost.com/2024/02/02/metro/nyc-to-hand-out-prepaid-credit-cards-to-migrant-families-for-food/

        Expect all of the illegal aliens receiving this stuff to “somehow” manage to have ballots cast in their name and counted in New York and other places controlled by Dems in sufficient amounts to swing results so that Democrats can keep the puppet in the White House and take total control of Congress. Shortly after, with the filibuster completely gone, the Supreme Court will be packed with radical leftists, and the Constitution and Constitutional Republic will effectively cease to exist.

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    3. I am beginning to think that genetic engineering is not the way in which they will create “The Perfect Soviet Man.”

      I commented the other day (over on VG) that I’m not particularly concerned about Elon’s NeuraLink – because it is output only. Meant for dealing with loss of motion.

      What I am getting concerned about is the input devices being developed elsewhere. With only good intentions, of course; enabling the blind to see and the deaf to hear. But, at the end point of this development, it will be possible to control what a person sees, what they hear – and thus what they can think. “My lying eyes, my deceptive ears” – that will be the “truth,” and there will be nothing to contradict it.

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  12. Oh my. The big Canadian forest wildfires… are preparation… for the time the wood smoke will (try to) cover the smell from the camps. {Yes, is fiction… may it remain so!}

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    1. Won’t work, Orvan.

      Back in the Dark Ages (1960s), my Dad was a veterinarian. He had a burn barrel where he got rid of the medical waste he generated – parts from neutering, etc. We were in the Rim Country of Arizona, so we had periodic brush fires and, less frequently, forest fires around the area.

      Didn’t mask the smell of the burn barrel one bit. In fact, the City, once or twice a year, would burn the city dump (Dark Ages, remember) – and that didn’t do it, either.

      The only thing that did was when the smoke from the copper smelter would get trapped in the low places (Dark Ages, again). Sulfur oxides could mask anything. (I wonder whether tire dump fires might do it, too – they are certain nasty enough. But I didn’t go through one of those until I was long out of my home town.)

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  13. As far as “improving” the species goes…. IMHO eugenicists belong in the same “special hell” as child molesters, for many of the same reasons – untold damage to the innocent. Only they get even more support from those of society who can’t seem to see what all the bother is about.

    I quote my mother, who was a firm believer in Ehrlich: “If you were my goat, I’d cull you.”

    Everyone around her: “Oh, she was just joking… she’s your mother, of course she’d never do that!”

    It was not a joke, and you have no idea how much terror that inflicts on a child. You call that a joke, and what you do is assure that child your parents can kill you because they don’t like your looks, and no one will stop them.

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    1. It’s amazing how much evil can be done and then dismissed with the phrase, “Oh, just kidding.” Tangled illustrated that perfectly, but since I watched the movie, I’ve seen it far more places than I would care to count.

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        1. Could be worse. I was told I was supposed to be another girl and she wished abortion was available. My cousin (girl) was told the opposite by my aunt.

          I think my grandparents really screwed up their children…

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        2. Remember, when respondong to bullies and sadists:

          Fist first. Quip second.

          Ideally, close their mouths on their unfinished taunt with your fist.

          And never monolog.

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  15. Something that struck me today, was talking with my middle brother and asked “technical problem or people problem?”

    His response was, they are all people problems. Even the technical ones are really about getting the right people to work on it, or if they aren’t available, changing to a solution that the people you do have can actually do.

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    1. Some ‘technical problems’ are caused by those with zero understanding of the technology demanding the impossible. ‘Designed by the marketing department’.

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  16. Full disclosure, former Mensa member, local area president (aka locsec), and newsletter editor for several years. Did have certain benefits such as always having a social group when in a new city. Networking got my ex her first aerospace job contracting with NASA. And as the saying went, it’s nice to hang with folks who get your jokes.
    But as a general rule most who qualify become members for one year for bragging rights and then drop out as for many said benefits not being worth the dues.
    Personally, I quit because the organization was leaning increasingly progressive left which goes to prove that with high IQ one can still be misguided and ignorant of history.

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    1. I would probably qualify for Mensa, but have never investigated it. I definitely would qualify for Sons of the American Revolution, but have never even looked into joining.

      I have a high CQ (Contrarian Quotient) score. I completely agree with Marx (the other one), in that “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

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      1. Our son qualifies for “Son of the Revolution”. While I qualify for the “Daughters of the Revolution”. Technically through both my maternal and paternal branches. But only have the documents from paternal side. Not sure about hubby’s side. I think one of my sisters have copies of the relevant documents she got from paternal aunt. Need to get a copy for us. Add our documents and have it on file for dad.

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        2. All I would have to do (apparently) is file something showing that I’m my mother’s blood son. She did everything to settle her membership – just to prove that she could do it.

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      2. I qualified based on SAT scores, and those kept improving over the years, which is a good indication that either IQ isn’t static, or you can learn to test better. (And don’t tell me to embrace the power of “and”, or I’m going to give you an F in logic.)

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        2. I wouldn’t dream of getting into a fight with someone who apparently took the SAT for shits and giggles… I was once and done with 1563. Tests don’t scare me – they just bore me.

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          1. I wish I could say it was for s&g. The reality was I was in the military, getting bounced from one base to another, and each time I got transferred, the colleges providing classes at each location, changed. And every one that I ran into demanded a new SAT for enrollment.

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            1. First word that came to mind was “Incredible!” Then, no, that is something that a typical college admissions department would come up with. Nobody ever sat down with them to explain that it means “Scholastic Aptitude Test.”

              Which, unless you took a good blow or two to the head at your previous base, doesn’t really change. (Except to get better, as you noted, as you get more experience with the “scholarly” environment.)

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    3. In my early 20’s, introverted and socially awkward, I joined Mensa (I qualified on SAT scores back when it still discriminated at that level) to meet people. The group in my city didn’t do much but the one 30 min south was terrific. There were some Interesting, welcoming people (and some others even less well socialized than I) in whose company I learned to better navigate in regular society. When I moved away from that area ~20 years later I let my membership lapse. I no longer needed what they offer. But I’m very glad it was there when I did.

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  17. Every time “improving the species” comes up, I think of Doc Savage’s “up state hospital” where the good doctor sent all of the villains he defeated to be cured of their “criminal nature”.

    There was little talk (or no talk) about just how they were cured and later in the series, it seems that the cure didn’t work all of the time.

    Of course, curing criminals was the “thing” that our betters sometimes believed (especially when Doc Savage was created).

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      1. But but…

        These are the Experts! They know how to cure those “poor little people”. Trust The Experts (ie the Top Men). :lol:

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        1. Experts. Why can’t I help seeing the last scene in ‘A Clockwork Orange’?

          ‘Curing’ criminals would require mind control technology. If the government had that, it would be used on everybody ‘for their own good’.

          Of course they’d start with the criminals, and only the worst ones at that. The ‘Cure’ would gradually be extended to lesser offenders and petty criminals, and then — ‘potential’ criminals. “Curing them before they commit their first crime would be sooo much better, no?”

          From there it’s a very short step to ‘curing Wrongthink’ in political dissidents (‘MAGA Republicans!!’) and arriving at their vision of the ‘Perfect World’: a human termite colony with not a single worker termite out of place.
          ———————————
          There is no shortage of people convinced they can create the Perfect World. They just have to eliminate all those imperfect people who don’t fit in it.

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          1. Well, that would be the plan, but to whom such technology could be applied is very easily redirectable, so those who plan such a plan should remember they are just one reversal of overlords away from being ‘cured’ themselves.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Many years ago I read the English translation of The City Underground. One thing that struck me at the time was that the leader and his son (putative heir) were the only people who weren’t mind controlled. For their own good, of course. When he returned to the city, even his own mother didn’t remember he had been gone.

            Since sll memories were stored in a computer rather than the brain, it was simple to remove anything that didn’t fit.

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        1. In the Real World, that’s what they had.

          The idea was that Doc Savage was a medical genius so would have something better than that.

          And of course, even in the 1930s what Savage did in the stories would be illegal.

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    3. Given that criminal behavior is much more common in males than in females, and that the peak age for it is late teens and early twenties, I’ve long had a theory of where the “crime glands” that Doc was surgically removing were located. At least they’d have been easy to access.

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  18. A good society should be one that allows a maximum of its people (as they are, and not as a government, ideology, or statistic sees them) to flourish as they see fit.

    More are capable of that than any C Ark builder can recognize.

    IQ. Where to start? Not a measure of ethics, social functionality, ability to contribute.
    More accurate at identifying ‘slow’ than gifted. Heritable broadly confused with genetic, and genetic with deterministic. Flynn effect. Not useless, but probably as limited as GDP as a picture of reality, and just as gameable.

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  19. A society does not ever die from “natural” causes, but always dies from suicide or murder-and nearly always the former…

    A. J. Toynbee in his book “A study of history”

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  20. It does not matter how or where you start in life, just how you live that life and what you do with that life that matters. Too many in their quest to figure out what life is, to make it understandable to them, build boxes to keep their assumptions in. It makes it neat and tidy for them, they like neat and tidy, they also like shinny new things. The box also determines your behavior by the way, if you are in box A, you should behave thusly, Like all the other A’s. etc. for the other boxes. The problem being all you have to do to upset there little scheme is don’t behave like one of the boxes, or simply lie. We complicate things because we don’t believe in boxes, or shall I say like Schrodinger we know all the boxes are both empty and full, right and wrong, all at the same time. A box is nice for keeping things tidy, true, but not really good for much else. Also if things were that important, you wouldn’t keep them in a box, the only thing you put in boxes are things you want, but can’t use at the moment. A fair metaphor I think, not the best, but neither am I, I am just me one of how ever many people are on this planet trying to stay out of a box.

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  21. Yes, eugenics is an interesting thing.
    I was one of nine sons. My father was born in 1918, my mother in 1922. They were raised on that crap.
    Two of us were judged not good enough. We had ‘hernia surgery’. No one on our street thought any less of my parents for their decisions.

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  22. A note on ADHD: The drugs that “treat” it work by suppressing the urge to play. (I got this from Jordan Peterson, an actual expert.) Creative work is a balance between focus and play. Make of that what you will, but in a society surrounded by threats, excessive focus could be lethal.

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  23. > those with IQ above 132 can appear in any APPEARANCE group (because appearance is very bad at following IQ

    Back in the 1980s Intel ran full-page ads for its new 80386 microprocessors. Some of them showed a lineup of the chip’s design team.

    The part that struck me was they looked more like I’d think of as some kind of laborers than electrical engineers with doctorates. The apparently nonexistent Intel dress code might have influenced that, though.

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    1. Older son…. At graduation people try to strip honors cords from him, neglect to mention second majors, etc. etc. etc.
      Why? well, he looks like stole some graduates gown and is there to beat someone up….

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  24. I’ll admit that since getting diagnosed as autistic the eugenics arguments feel much more personal and horrible. Not that they weren’t always horrible.

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    1. Indeed. And learning that
      AutismSpeaks is funding research for prenatal identification with the apparent goal of putting themselves out of a job…

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    2. Have you run into the activists who want to “cure” autism the same way they “cure” Down’s, and are upset that high functioning autistic respond like they’re a deadly threat?

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      2. About 20 years ago there was a criminal case in central Illinois involving a woman who, I believe, was a psychologist or had some kind of medical or nursing degree, who had a daughter that was autistic. She belonged to the local autism support groups and sent the girl to all kinds of specialists and even to a special school out of state trying to “cure” her, and when that didn’t work, went over the edge and smothered the poor girl to death (she was only 3 or 4 years old at the time) because she didn’t want her to “suffer” for the rest of her life. She ended up getting life in prison IIRC.

        When our daughter was diagnosed as autistic, initially we got in touch with various support groups but we got turned off to them rather quickly because they put a LOT of emphasis on activism and calling your congresscritter/state rep to demand more government money for various measures. We also couldn’t get into stuff like totally gluten free diets and 40-hours of week of ABA therapy. Instead we brought her up more or less like we would have a “normal” kid, just with more supervision and taking more time to teach her stuff. She was in special ed all the way through school and stayed in high school until she aged out of the system at 21. (Fortunately, that was some years before transgenderism and wokism started really infecting the schools. I have no doubt but that if she were in school today someone would be trying to persuade her that she might “really” be a boy.)

        Today she’s 28 years old and still lives with us, and functions on the level of a grade school kid — I’d say about like an 8 or 9 year old, maybe even 10 — but she can function on her own as far as bathing, dressing, and preparing meals and will help me with household chores and shopping. She used to have a job at a local sheltered workshop but that closed down during COVID and she hasn’t been back; trying to find a job for her is our main concern and we haven’t had much luck (despite the apparent labor shortage). Now I wonder if she would be higher functioning today or close to normal if we’d tried harder to “cure” her from the start? Maybe, but at what cost?

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          1. Thank you for your encouragement. She likes her routine, of course, but she can be flexible when necessary, and she remembers stuff that I tend to forget — just this morning, for example, I forgot to take my cell phone off the charger before going to work, and didn’t think of it until I was halfway to the office, but I checked my purse and sure enough, DD had put it there for me.

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        2. Try local grocery stores? Our local Kroger employs handicapped employees under supervision. Obvious ones are downs syndrome. But a grade school functioning adult could retrieve carts safely, help stock shelves. Self directed? Maybe not. But under supervision? Not sure but might be under programs where the store gets assistance for paying the employee (a program pays part of the pay). I don’t know about Safeway/Albertson/Walmart, etc., as I don’t shop them. Costco, or the other warehouse types won’t shouldn’t, wrong environment, even under strict supervision (IMO). Worth looking into?

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  26. It would seem to me that a real Übermensch would be someone who could both think at a very high abstract level AND make all the right choices in immediate life. Not to mention also being at the top of physical performance.

    I don’t have a problem with people trying to improve human beings by the tried-and-true methods of farm stock breeding. If you want to choose your spouse from a set list of desirable traits and encourage your children to select their spouses from a similar list; knock yourself out. Just keep in mind that you may miss marrying your soulmate; or worse, marry the absolute worst person you possibly could. The question that always comes up is what’s considered an improvement; and that always seems to be based on a particular person’s values, which never completely align with anyone else’s.

    As for autism, I seem to recall a correlation study done decades ago now, that showed a 7 to 10 times higher incidence of gender dysphoria in autistic boys. That would equate to a large number of autistic males engaging in non-reproductive behaviors, and hence, self-selecting themselves out of the breeding population. Which has pretty much happened to my youngest child.

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    1. For centuries, the English used those methods to breed for landedness. It worked for a while, too . . .

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