The idea that with a little more effort we could breed the perfect humans seems to be a persistent defect of the human mind.
It’s of course part of all other attempts to make humans perfect, including “if only we change society this way.” (You will be forgiven if you hear a very old voice saying “you will be like gods, knowing good from evil.”)
What most Americans our generation are not aware of (I think. And note that our generation is those born about 20 years after the end of world war II) is how prevalent eugenics is in the thought and mental scaffolding of the generation just before and the generation that went into WWII.
Germany, sure, took it to an insane, by the numbers “let’s kill everyone we think shouldn’t reproduce” level because that was part of German culture at the time. They’d put themselves to such great effort to come up from behind on industrialization that organization (they used to be considered sloppy and backward in Europe, then they remade themselves) that they became a bit autistic about it, and since everyone agreed the way forward was eugenics, they just powered ahead, past all sanity and instituted those in their very own way. Which ended up with 12 million dead.
But “everyone” agreed the way forward was eugenics. It’s hard to overestimate how prevalent the ideas were, low level, in everything. If you read any writers of the period from the latest 1800s to the beginning of WW II it’s impossible not to trip on it, unless you too are dulled to the idea because it’s in the water you drink. And you might be, because it’s still prevalent in our midst.
It’s an old, old, old idea. In Sparta, the father could reject any infant for any or no reason and the kid would just be flung from the top of a rock. There is thought that maintains a lot of the sacrifices to Moloch were children who were defective and would need life-long care and/or children who were born either out of wedlock or to parents who were too young or too poor to support them. “Sacrifice him/her to the god” gave an honorable way out. My family jokingly told me that if my father had been ancient Greek, a puny, not fully formed critter like me wouldn’t have survived the hour. (Of course, that posits a world in which dad wasn’t terrified of grandmother which means a world that didn’t exist.) I’m fairly sure they were just joking, but the exact same reasoning is used to deny care to children born disastrously premature in most of Europe. And weirdly it’s not even — though it partially is — because the kids would take too much time, money and effort to allow them to survive. Mostly it’s because they still have a high chance of dying and would mess up the government’s health care numbers.
However you see support for that even here and it will be stuff like “well, if the baby is that weak, he’ll be a sickly adult and consume resources all the time.” And, yeah, I do realize I’m not the best the showcase against this, given that I’ve spent approximately 70% of my life sick, and most of the time in a way that can’t quite be pinned down. As in “probably auto immune.” At the same time, I’ve been fairly productive in my life, as well (though not always in a monetary sense) in a way that people who were born full term and in ruddy good health haven’t been. Meaning there’s more to a human than being healthy or not, full term or not, unimpaired or not.
Sure, good health and a strong body help, but there is way more to being human than that. And if you start making health the be all end all of what makes a good human, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with a herd of very healthy animals who cannot create or think or do much of anything innovative. Because those who do noteworthy things are so often impaired in other ways that in popular imagination being sickly or outright insane has become a requirement of genius. I think this is because if you are very smart you are almost certainly “neuro-atypical”. I mean intelligence is qualitative not quantitative, and the quality is weirdness, in general. (Bodies as weird as their minds, as Kate Paulk put it about Science fiction fans.) Partly because if you are very smart but your primary value is to fit in with the herd you’ll manage it. It’s what humans do. Change themselves to fit in. We’re infinitely plastic after all.
Then there are those still who fetishise “IQ” or intelligence, in whatever form. The ones who take IQ measurements of peoples where the majority is illiterate or subliterate as being accurate would be funny if they weren’t so horrifying. For the record, if those IQ measurements were real, i.e. meant the same as those applied to children in our own country, most of those countries would be full of corpses within days. Because people that dumb could not live, let alone live well.
There is a difference between IQ — which is relatively accurate for the possibility of academic success, given people who have come through broadly the same type of Western schooling — and intelligence. And that’s not a call to water down the IQ tests in our country (Though, LORD are they doing that, including their talk of multiple “intelligences.”) For what they were designed to do — predicting success in a specific type of educational or work environment — IQ tests perform admirably. They still have some blind spots, like missing the extreme of genius which often tests like the extreme of moron particularly very young (and for the idiots scoffing, no that doesn’t apply to me. I test technically “genius” but not extreme and I’ve never texted extremely low) which gives us the whole idea of idiot savant. But anything trying to measure humans will have blind spots. Which is part of the reason we can use measurements to figure out how best to employ the talent we do have, but it should not be used to advocate for death or other forms of disbarment (“too dumb to teach” say) for any group of people. Or really any individual.
And then there is the eugenics in breeding. Oh, dear bob. You really don’t want to dive down that insanity, but it’s there. Not so long ago people were lamenting that most people coming out of ivy leagues weren’t reproducing, which they were sure meant that the human race would become dumber. At the time I snorted so hard I almost gave myself an aneurysm. To some extent, yeah, sure, there are some people who get into the ivies for merit (fewer and fewer every year, seems like, since it became a DEI swamp) but having attended some mingles on the prospect of their recruiting sons, let me tell you, most of what they were evaluating for is “Are they of our sort dear?” (We weren’t which was so obvious even we knew it.) And it has nothing to do with raw intelligence. Perhaps a sort of “social intelligence” if you allow for the multiple intelligences (snort giggle) theory. But, yeah, no. You don’t take an IQ to test to enter an ivy league school, and if you did it would be so far down the evaluating criteria it might as well not be there.
However, the laments, and the persistent return of the “lives unworthy of living” because they’re sickly, or young, or old, tells you eugenics is still with us.
It’s no longer out and proud, beating its chest and screaming how important it is that we cull the less “fit” members of the population. It hasn’t been that since the Nazis showed the world how ugly and stupid that was in practice, but it’s still there, lurking under “Of course it would be better if.”
It’s still feeding Moloch all the premature or “not quite right” kids in Europe, and all of those who have a dubious (they’re all dubious though some more than other) pre natal diagnosis and get aborted there and here, and all the people who are chronic depressive or have some bizarre auto immune condition, both here and in Europe, or those who are old and whose heirs get a case of desire to inherit.
And it’s no different really than the stuff that went on before WWII, all the “They shouldn’t reproduce” and “they’re just taking resources” and–
In the end, I suspect we’ll never get rid of the eugenics thinking in humans. Thinking of ourselves as better than others is part of being human, and from there to “how dare they go around breathing and everything while being so useless” is a small step. (I’m bitterly amused by the people who try to say it would be better for unwanted children to be aborted. As an unwanted child married to an unwanted child, I want to tell them to shut up, because being wanted and growing up to live decent lives, and even happy ones don’t co-relate. Some of us — looks significantly — mature past the emotional age of two where being unwanted hurts a lot.)
It might be impossible to eradicate. After all eugenics and the idea humans could be bred for perfection is what fed the entire idea of nobility and the sacredness of kingly lines. (And led mostly to the Hapsburg jaw and far far worse.) Blue bloods were considered the best of the best because they came from the best lines, after all. Whatever was thought “best” at the time.
Again, it might be impossible to eradicate the thought and the bits of hating whatever group is considered inferior in mind or body. However, what we should never, ever, ever, do is make it official by giving the government the power to act on it.
While Germany managed to discredit wholesale genetic culling in batch lots and by classification numbers, governments still keep trying to do it.
Partly because we’ve made governments the payees and grantors of such things as health care, which means suddenly the government has an interest in whether your baby is healthy or your 70 year old is still productive.
People, that’s the way to hell, on greased tracks, in a flaming handbasket.
Once government pays for you to stay alive, government can decide when it should unalive you.
The new incarnation of eugenics is relatively new, yet it’s old as time, and it’s already racking up impressive numbers and piling on impressive injustices in Europe and Canada and some even here.
Whether you call it assisted suicide or therapeutic abortion, it is eugenics and I say to hell with it.
You — yes, you, gentle reader — are descended from geniuses and morons and barely smart enough to survive. You’re descended from athletes and cripples, from the strong and the weak. There is a thing in genetics known as regression to the mean meaning that the extremes tend to breed towards the middle, or if you prefer, geniuses or morons, your kids will tend to be middling. There is also a never mentioned, but any of us who grew up in a village with a long memory knows this, fact that any line no matter how moronic, will throw off the occasional genius. And vice versa.
Ultimately we are all human. Humans are very bad at measuring humans. Much less at deciding who should live or die.
Was it Penn Gillette who said something about being against group justice because that always ended up in picking on the weird kid, and he was always the weird kid?
I think most of my readership are the weird kid. I know I was and am. Giving anyone — particularly a governmental body — the right to kill part of the population not only always ends up in massive numbers of dead humans (almost at random, honestly) but always and forever, it ends in the weird kids being killed.
As weird kids, we should fight against it with all our might.
According To Hoyt 
It’s worth remembering that eugenics was the original purpose of “Planned Parenthood”. That’s as good an explanation as any for the relative prevalence of abortion among black Americans.
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And why so many pro-abortionists are so insistent on providing “reproductive healthcare to the disadvantaged.” They’re trying to eliminate the disadvantaged.
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Yep.
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The Left goes to great lengths to keep Sanger’s writing out of print.
She used terms like “human weeds”.
The more you dig in that pile, the more monstrous it gets.
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“Abortion: we’ve got to do it for the children!”
Eugenia Ticyst
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In dark irony, native black America would have achieved, despite its relative dysfunction to any part of the population not identifying as the same, something like what-? quadruple their representative power had they eschewed the abortion mills.
On this Mr. X was correct: no one is more dangerous to a black man than a white liberal.
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And I’ve never been sure whether the “original intent” on that one was more “individually planned parenthood” or instead “centrally planned parenthood” — knowing enough about the origins of PP, I’m actually none too eager to deep-dive into those poisoned waters and figure it out for myself.
Given what I’ve (already) read about PP and its founder, I could easily believe either one.
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Margaret Sanger called for a marriage license to be a license only to co-habit, not to have children.
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One idiot (elsewhere) thought that it’d be a Great Idea for Voting To Be Only For The “Elites”.
Personally, anybody who thinks That Would Be A Good Idea shouldn’t be allowed to Vote.
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Since the Elitists have taken over counting the votes, they have effectively disenfranchised all those ‘Deplorables’. 😡 Like we’re seeing Kalifornistan.
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Define “elite”. Countless times I’ve been accused of “elitism” for such varied stances as expecting
1. everyone to be functionally literate;
2. people not to crap on the sidewalk;
3. persons with access to running water to WASH once in a while;
4. asking speakers to watch language and NOT curse like a drunken sailor…..etc., ad infinitum.
Having standards of ANY kind gets SOME persons to bring out the word “elitism.”
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Well, the Idiot thought only around 10% of the adult population should be allowed to vote.
I’m the one who decided to call his “10%” the “Elite”.
And I thought that I made it clear that I saw it as a Stupid Idea.
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Once the proposed elect electors get down to 10% to 5% or lower, they tend to stop having the force of arms to in practice back that proposal up.
I don’t care if 9%, or 4%, or 1%, or 0.25% of a population are meeting whatever requirement is of being in theory smart enough to make whatever deals or choices underpin the society. The level of peace, etc., is really a function of the behavior of the total.
Small numbers can have a disparate effect, yes. But it is easier for small numbers to create hard, and perhaps impossible for small enough numbers to create peace.
If peace exists, some persons made those choices. If a model says that only 1 in 20 persons is literate enough to follow policy discussions, that model of how peace shows up is probably wrong.
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Admittedly, the idiot didn’t think that the change could currently happen, but “imagined” that a future US might “think” it was a good idea.
Mind you, I agree with you about “what would happen if it was somehow forced onto the general public.”
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Democracies and republics are about sharing power among the shock infantry army that holds the territory.
The splicing on of Christian ‘all children of God’ theory is a backinvention, that is not the real practical foundation.
Naked force on its own does not successfully create stable peace.
But, persuasion can get misdirected by internal capture by group think.
It is kinda important to realize that there will almost always be people who are not persuaded by the consensus of your subset, that force becomes important if you push where persuasion has failed, and that force sucks as an option.
It sucks because the outcome is not fully predictable or controllable, and it is very easy to convince yourself that it will work for you until it does not.
The academic theory of politics is riddled with bad ideas, and not simply the ones the instructors make claims about being bad.
All behavioralist ideas about politics are reduced order. If we use the metaphor of a taylor series expansion, the first N terms that the instructor talks about are not complete. Once a plan to game the first N terms is widely distributed, then the content of the ‘N+1’ term becomes very important in surprising everyone who thought the rote understanding was complete.
Almost all of the simple ‘this one change’ models are potentially bad, and we are confident in them at our peril.
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Ahem. Drunken sailors generally have excellent command of profane language, unlike these idiots.
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Well, there’s eugenics, and then there’s eugenics. Killing everybody who’s not Perfect is the old brute-force sort of eugenics we all know and loathe. We are approaching the day when genetic engineering can be used to eliminate undesirable traits without killing people. I know there’s still potential for abuse, but also enormous benefits. We could prevent all sorts of hereditary conditions, like autoimmune disorders, allergies, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer… We could repair the broken genes that prevent our cells from synthesizing certain compounds, the ones we call ‘vitamins’ because they are essential for life.
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“We are approaching the day when genetic engineering can be used to eliminate undesirable traits without killing people.”
Yes we are. Here is my “War on nerds” rant from 2018.
https://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-war-on-nerds-could-be.html
I’ll say that back in 2018, I felt it might be a little tinfoil-hat to be raging on about stuff like this, even though it seemed quite obvious to me.
But now, post Covid, we can see that they’ve been DOING IT ALREADY.
Witness the Covid mad-science vaxx shot. They’ve proven you can release a genetic modification vector into the world population without killing everyone. And they tested it by f-ing well releasing a genetic modification vector into the world population.
So if anything I was probably optimistic.
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As far as eugenics goes, I think that I am also a creature of nurture, so I think that cloning me is an extremely stupid idea, no matter how much someone convinces themselves that I have an unusual amount of intelligence.
This is partly inspired by a proposal that cloning Von Naumann was a good idea.
I’m okay with sexual reproduction. The limit of how far into Eugenics I am willing to go is that I think that /cloning/ specific extremely intelligent people is silly and often has a lot of magical thinking in the driver’s seat.
I think trying to do the test tube stuff between the gametes of strangers based on some form of standardized testing is also pretty stupid. There is room for discussion about the morality, and about the law of stuff. Couple who wants children, versus technocrats trying to do reproduction as a program.
Technocratic reproduction-as-policy tends to dehumanize the kids a wee bit too much.
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Trying to recreate Batman is also probably not a great idea. (Remembering one of the DCAU Justice League episodes.)
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Well, Terry isn’t a clone of Bruce but is Bruce’s genetic son.
And yes, Walker decided to NOT kill Terry’s parents like Bruce’s parents were killed.
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Terry turned out to be a pretty good Batman (Beyond).
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I’m not against genetic screening. My brother-in-law had three sisters die of cystic fibrosis and when he married my sister, they were both tested for CF. My sister is a carrier, he was not so they went ahead and had eight children. I think they still would have had kids if they had both been carriers but not so early and not so many perhaps.
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That I do not disagree with, because the couple was already there.
Trying to create zygotes without a couple I have doubts about.
Trying to pair up people as couples based on genetic tests, I am opposed to.
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“I’m not against genetic screening.”
Absolutely. A prudent use of technology is what we always hope for. Avoiding problems for yourself and/or others is never a bad idea…
…when -you- are the one who decides to get the screening (or not), and -you- decide what to do about the results. Free will can be a pretty wonderful thing.
Lefties hate that. They want to decide for you. This is why we don’t like them.
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I think the law of unintended consequences will take most efforts at genetic engineering of humans down. That doesn’t mean there won’t be horrors created by the efforts to perfect mankind.
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There is, of course, the issue of “Who gets to define ‘undesirable’.” The examples I listed should not be controversial, but if somebody identified ‘gay’ genes, or ‘conservative’ genes, or only believed they had, we’d be in for a vicious sort of civil war.
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We could “fix” things, once we know what else is colocated or affected by the erring gene. I really do not want to find out that correcting the gene for Cystic Fibrosis causes something worse to appear later.
And you know darn well someone will pay cash to have their child “fixed” to be perfect in every way, with the proper eye color, hair color, height, build, sex, and so on. Especially if the child might have, oh, a “gay” gene, or be female, or … Make it illegal and people will go to where questions are not asked, and return with the product. Of such are dystopias and private h-lls created.
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Aren’t people already attempting that when they choose sperm a/o egg donors sometimes? I remember reading an article to that effect.
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Yep. They’re trying.
Including buying eggs and sperm for a surrogate to incubate.
At least one of those, they tried to force the woman to have an abortion, because the child they ordered seemed to be not meeting the desired specifications. (The kid was born while the case was in court, and they did have to pay the fees.)
There’s also been a couple of cases of “describe the guy you want to inseminated by” where it turned out all the resulting kids were the head doctor’s offspring.
(And this, boys and girls, was predicted by those dum dum kill joy Catholic theologians, as an aspect of divorcing sex from procreation!)
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Doctor Rosypalm had scores of kids. (Hundred plus?) Enough where folks in that area should check lineage before marrying.
Supermax prisons need doctors.
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Yes, I’m sure we’re all eagerly awaiting our forced Alpha-gal syndrome
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One of the big moral issues with genetic elimination of problematic traits is that you are putting someone at deadly risk, so there needs to be a grave reason.
I sometimes shock folks into thinking by pointing out that I’ve been gutted, several times. It was to save my life and the life of my unborn child. That’s a grave reason.
Way too many folks are still in the eugenics-of-pre-WWII mindset where “but I was trying to make them better” is an acceptable reason to risk someone else’s life.
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And they completely dismiss the tragic fact of life that is possible to do harm while meaning to do good.
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Define “undesireable”. Now consider that most of this crap has tradeoffs (obvious example is sickle cell anemia, but there are others). Just how sure are we that we know what we’re doing?
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early onset Alzheimers is linked to exceptional precocious intelligence, according to some studies.
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“The idea that with a little more effort we could breed the perfect humans seems to be a persistent defect of the human mind.”
I won’t go so far as to say “Human”, but it does arise frequently, if not universally.
“Partly because we’ve made governments to payees and grantors of such things as health care, which means suddenly the government has an interest in whether your baby is healthy or your 70 year old is still productive.”
Yes, and here in Canaduh we burn the candle on both ends. The young, the old, the sick, the crazy, even the poor, all eligible for what I’m going to call Death Therapy. It’s killing with a white doctor’s coat on it and a happy face sticker. I won’t say “murder” because that’s a legalism regarding intent. Currently “voluntary” (except for the pre-born, they don’t get a vote) and I put that in scare quotes because you know what I’m saying here, but that may change at any time. As we know from the history of the 20th Century, to a socialist “voluntary” is a euphemism for “whatever we can get away with this week.”
My brief TL/DR is that ‘the hunt for the perfect human’ business is the last dying gasp of Feudalism trying to kick it’s way out of the casket before the burial is complete.
Education is the policy which illuminates the intent. Who is “education” actually for? It’s for the GENTRY, that’s who. It’s for the monied class, so they can have skilled peasants to do all their work and fight in their wars. That’s why public education is one-size-fits-all. They only care if they get the sufficient number of trained workers to move their companies and farms along.
What happens to any individual student is completely irrelevant. Indeed what happens to entire cities full of students is irrelevant if the economy has enough workers at the moment. See Detroit, New York, San Francisco, LA, Toronto etc. for details.
Group anything excludes the weird kid. Because the weird kid is INCONVENIENT and probably annoying as well. Either they consume resources that could be re-directed to the gentry, or they’re too smart and they screw up the cozy situation by asking pointed questions and inventing disruptive sh1t. Like the cotton gin.
That’s why they hate Elon. He’s the biggest wrecking ball since Gutenberg made printing cheap. Weirdo, too smart, kicking over their crooked apple carts and making them look bad into the bargain.
Imagine being a honcho at NASA right now. 50 years ago they landed something the size of a three-hole outhouse on the moon, that’s their big claim to fame. So now Elon is preparing to land a 40ft RV on the moon, and he’s going to do it in about a quarter of the time it took them to build Apollo. And just to twist the knife even more, it’ll look like every 1940’s SF magazine cover. The slim rocket ship standing on it’s own legs. Buck Rogers for real.
So now every American is looking at NASA and saying “If it’s that easy, what have you jerks been doing for 50 freakin’ years? Are you stupid?”
If “Education” was for us, and for the betterment of Humanity like they always tell us, they’d be trying to find and nurture evey guy/gal like Elon in the country. Nation-wide effort.
What are they doing? Almost the exact opposite of that. So there you go. Feudalism’s last try for the brass ring.
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NASA proved they had transitioned from a space program to a political welfare program when they let Nixon reject the first 3 Space Shuttle designs. They proved bureaucracy was more important than engineering when they dismissed all concerns about launching Challenger under unfavorable conditions. Today it’s all about the iron rice bowl.
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“Today it’s all about the iron rice bowl.”
Isn’t it always?
Socialists, p-ing in the soup. They do it every fricking time.
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DataRepublican is another I’m sure they’d have preferred take their MAID services
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And what a treasure that is, made for this time and this place. G-d bless her parents forever.
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Grinding everyone down instead of trying to build everyone up.
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Because turning success into failure is sooo much easier than turning failure into success. Also more satisfying, to a certain nasty type of ‘activist’.
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(Singing) “Now theres no more Oak Oppression, for they passed a noble law, and the Trees are all kept equal, by hatchet, axe, and saw…..”
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I can’t remember whether it was here or somewhere else, but I read recently about a case in Canada in which the elderly woman in question (who was in the hospital receiving treatment) didn’t want to get offed… so the doctor declared her mentally incompetent and talked her family into it.
Though I may have read it in a post on X, which means it might not be accurate. Still, something to think about because even if the specific instance wasn’t accurate, I suspect it’s still very possible under the present system.
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You likely saw it via Larry’s TwiX, when some… individual… reported the woman sharing the story and “spreading misinformation about MAID” or something.
….k, the gloating-about-reporting-you gal either deleted or locked down the post so the chain is gone… poking around with keywords on Larry’s post…
Found it!
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Thank you
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It has been reported that there have been some “MAiD recipients” who were “restrained” when The Doctor came to “medically assist” them, as the euphemism would have it.
As in, the helpful staff tied them down because they were flipping the f- out and didn’t want it. For their own safety, you know. And this is not one case. This is “cases.” A quick google will no doubt turn up the ‘allegations’ as they say.
I am sure, eventually, there will be an accounting. As the euphemism would have it.
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funny how those most interested in “improving” the species are always utterly mediocre themselves.
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Not according to themselves, they’re not. They always find some standard by which they are the superior ones.
The tendency to do this – to judge people by a standard that overvalues one’s own traits and abilities and undervalues other people’s – is, I think, universal among humans who do not make conscious efforts to check it, or who are not trained to refrain from doing it. It is one of the most common rationalizations for the sin of Pride.
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Murder is murder. It’s perhaps even more murder-y when it’s excused as ‘so they won’t suffer’ or ‘better for society’.
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Yes.
Maybe we should free the Palestinians from the hardships of this earth, by killing the genetic communists, and pretending very hard that this can never be statutorily the crime of murder, nor morally the sin of murder in Christian teaching.
I think that the hardness of heart on my part in making such a proposal is something that many theologians would explicitly say makes my sinful heart worse.
Think of how much the people in the Mid East suffer because America’s Jacksonians have not taken reign of American policy, and gone to an extreme that would make Jackson himself leave the grave to suggest that we are too irritable and could maybe stand to calm down and act with more deliberation.
#MotieLivesMatter
XD XD
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My mom’s line is “put him out of your misery.”
She’s really good at deploying it, folks urging someone’s death usually take about five minutes to catch what she actually said.
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My mom is the same way.
You don’t know you’ve been skewered until she is well out of the way of any flack descending. All you can do is state “burn, ouch”.
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When I say ‘put him out of your misery’, or ‘put them out of my misery’, or any variation thereof – and it used to happen fairly often – nobody even notices that I’m doing it, nor does it ever have any detectable rhetorical effect. It simply disappears into the silence without leaving a ripple behind.
I must be doing it wrong.
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:sympathy:
I get that from the folks who aren’t actually listening to a blessed thing that I say.
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Neither of you are alone.
I did not inherit my mom’s abilities.
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People hear what they expect to hear. Famously, George Bernard Shaw made FDR disgrace himself, because when FDR said that he had murdered his grandmother that morning, Shaw actually heard it, and said that the old bat had it coming.
FDR had been saying that for a long time at that point.
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“I must be doing it wrong.”
Or, and stay with me here, there’s a good possibility they’re not smart enough to process the joke.
Remember, the bell curve shows us that half the population is below “normal”. And “normal” isn’t that high a bar, if you ask me. ~:D
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Moloch is still being fed, to the tune of @ 1.1 *million* abortions a year in the US. That’s roughly a city the size of Austin, TX not seeing the light of day each year.
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You can rationalize anything so long as you do it in the name of heaven.
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It’s even easier if you do it in the name of The Revolution or The Common Good or The General Will, or some other abstraction of no defined meaning. If you do it in the name of Heaven, it had better agree with your audience’s idea of what Heaven is about, or they will kick. And at that point they are liable to realize that what you mean by ‘Heaven’ is something you made up privately to please yourself, whether there is an actual Heaven or not: like the rather pathetic Hindu character in the Kipling story who carried his god around with him in the form of an ugly little statue, and beat it if it didn’t grant his prayers.
If you do it in the name of a sufficiently intellectual abstraction, people will be a lot less likely to ask, ‘How can doing this possibly help you achieve that?’ Many dictators, their thugs, and their apologists, used the old line about how you have to break eggs to make an omelette. But it took the genius of Orwell to stop them and ask, ‘But where is the omelette?’
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What really pisses me off is how insufferably haughty they are about their ‘Old Money’ — meaning the money they inherited from somebody else due to an accident of birth — and how they look down their patrician noses at people who worked hard, created value and earned their own money. Something none of those pampered parasites could have done. And how the more useless they are, the haughtier, as if virtue consists of spending money they did not earn. See 0bama.
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In the nineties all the really smart people thought Radio would be dead by now, replaced by Video, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ anyone?. Today video channels are gone, radio is bigger than ever. They are not as smart, nor as rich as they think they are. I wonder how many of them who want all the dirty people gone ever realize that without all the dirty people to compare themselves too, the other rich/smart/socialist would make them the dirty people. Hence the term, dirty people with money/new money.
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They will try again. Maybe on another world. Maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, 10, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people…better. And I do not hold to that.
So no more runnin’.
I aim to misbehave.
Capt. Mal Reynolds
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Also very close to something said by Heinlein….
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“In Sparta, the father could reject any infant for any or no reason and the kid would just be flung from the top of a rock. “
I think that’s an unfortunate phrasing because it suggests that it’s a peculiarity of Sparta. Ancient writers do not point that Spartans kill infants. They point out that Jews and Egyptians do not.
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Sparta made a point of making sure the rejected offspring died; contrast with Rome’s mere exposure where they could be harvested for other purposes.
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Point, though Sparta was its own nest of rats.
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I think it was Tacitus who pointed out that such and such a tribe were clearly barbarians because ‘they rear all their children’. Infanticide was the mark of civilization, you see.
If you ever really study the Romans – that is, approach them as a different people from yourself, with a different culture – you are liable to come to two ghastly realizations. One is what monsters they were: not just infanticide, ritual suicide, mass enslavement, and the rest of it; details like the Emperor Domitian’s law, enacted because it was a real practice that needed to be stopped, against selling one’s children into sexual slavery before the age of seven.
The second realization is that the other peoples around them were worse. Rome, horrible as it was, really represented the apex of human civilization and human ethics at that time. There is an awful truth in what Chesterton says in The Eternal Man: in the Roman Empire, all the nations pooled the best and noblest and most precious things each of them had to offer – and collectively, they were all bankrupt just the same. Their very best was not good enough even to keep the Empire alive, or to prevent the combined peoples from dying out in mutual slaughter and chosen sterility.
It took Christianity to save the Empire even in a strictly temporal sense, whatever you think of its spiritual promises. Rodney Stark points out how much of the growth of Christianity happened simply because the Christians rescued unwanted baby girls who had been exposed to die, and reared them as their own; so that over time, in a society constantly short of women, pagan men kept having to settle for Christian wives because those were the only brides available. And the Christian mothers raised their children as Christians, too. By the time this newfangled habit of not exposing girl children really caught on, the population of the empire was perhaps half what it had been in the first century, and its continued existence was in jeopardy.
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“It is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child” — Tacitucs.
On the Jews.
https://www.livius.org/sources/content/tacitus/tacitus-on-the-jews/
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Aside:
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I mean, if Jeremy Clarkson’s not going to be on the ticket…
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+1000!
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Granted.
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Still think the cat is a better candidate.
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Statement from Larry the Cat (10 Downing St Resident since 2011).
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They’ve certainly had worse.
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It’s a difficult call to make. I generally approve of genetic engineering.
The back-story for my genetically engineered telepaths has them starting to show up around now as people select for red hair (the most popular dye color) and get telepathy along with it. 30 years later, the story begins.
That sort of thing is only a temporary condition. One assumes we’ll get fewer unintended side-effects as we get better with it. I can see “packages”. If you want to remove the cystic fibrosis gene, you also need to add blond hair or some unexpected bad thing happens.
I don’t see selecting one’s child’s genes as “evil” – we’ve been doing the moral equivalent for millennia – but it is definitely dangerous and the side-effects may be very, very long-term.
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Have you seen Gattaca recently?
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My genetic engineering backstory produced a Solar System wide war that wrecked economies and entire space faring corpo-nations. The secrete spoilerific spoiler spoiler mumblety thing involves eugenics as a niche kind of thing that spoiler spoiler mumblety things an element of the plot.
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everyone knows my two universes with genetic engineering are… uh…. special.
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My characters can do genetic engineering like falling off a log. But they don’t.
They can re-write a human’s brain and nervous system without killing him. But they don’t.
They can even copy an entire human to the cellular level and set them going, identical to the original. But… they don’t.
Generally they do very little, and strive every day to do even less. Things are bad enough without some smart-ass who thinks he knows everything sticking his grubby digits into the gears. Their rule is “the more you can do, the less you can do.”
Because Murphy was an optimist.
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”…eugenics in breeding…”
Ah. “Idiocracy”.
”That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”
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I’ve ranted before about people thinking Idiocracy is a documentary.
I’ve also ranted about being informed that, since I have children, I cannot be intelligent. Especially not with so many kids.
Recently, I had someone claim that I was stupid because “you can’t even spell the name of the college you said made you an offer.”
…I’d mentioned that I was offered Nuke.
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Being a proper mother to any child, let alone multiple, demands intelligence in spades. And patience. And perhaps coffee.
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barrels of coffee sir, barrels. Also pallets of books (to keep you happy when you’re way too worried about them.)
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“Intelligence”, adaptability, and cunning, “in spades”.
FIFY
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low cunning helps too.
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Soooooo much coffee…..
I just remember how freeing it was to realize that their view was non-falsifiable. The only way anyone could be smart, was if they didn’t have kids. So it was not possible, in their world-view, for anyone BUT stupid people to breed. So I didn’t need to listen to them. ^.^
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Making an exception for their parents, of course.
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Yeah. I remember the idiot (published author now) who thought I hadn’t finished high school, because I had kids, and I crochet….
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Wait – what?
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well, she was in my writer’s group, so that was private, but she was working for a masters in english and when I mentioned it doesn’t get you that much she was shocked I had more than that, because, well, I had toddlers, and I used to crochet during meetings (It’s a fidget to stay attentive.)
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It is a model that is perhaps only found in the most rote and mediocre of thinkers.
Actually, I use mediocre as condemnation too much, as a rote habit.
Here I may have accidentally used it in a way that it may count as praise. I did not intend it as praise.
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:laughing:
Can’t remember the Latin, but misuse does not rule out proper use?
Many sortcuts work fine…in the right place.
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As in, the Navy nuclear power program?
I don’t think they’re assigning women to subs. so you’d have been on an aircraft carrier.
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Yes, if I was willing to sign up for 6 years, for a go at a high stress program, with no intention of making it a career.
I wasn’t, I thought it would be a waste of both my time and the Navy’s resources, and I applied to the Navy because I didn’t want to make “This is going to be entire rest of my life” off of stupid foundations.
But they do not offer that to stupid people.
Very, very, VERY weird ones, but not stupid. (Seriously, nukes, even wash-out nukes, are very comfortable to hang out around– it feels like being at a really good scifi convention.)
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I get told I’d be sent straight into languages because I’m digit dyslexic, so I can’t be a nuke, but other than that….
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Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus Long.
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I suspect there is also a certain amount of pride, or at least fear of shame that drives eugenics and assisted suicide.
Because the justification is they would rather be dead than be gross or dumb or hobbled.
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One of (many) eye-opening things in The Strange Case of Dr. Martin Couney, by Dawn Raffel, was how prevalent eugenics was in America at the turn of the 20th century and into World War II. Among other things, it clocks a Marvel fan between the eyes with, “Oh, so this is what Steve Rogers would have grown up with – oh, crap, that explains a lot.”
Most people think Steve Rogers/Captain America (and several subsequent Marvel heroes) were designed to fight the Nazis and then the Commies. They were designed for this, indeed, but they were also designed for more. We do not know just how much homegrown nonsense and evil the heroes were designed to stand against, because either we are swimming so deep in whatever it is we don’t recognize it, or more likely wee never learned about its existence in the first place.
Unless you look into the history of incubators or want to know about the not-doctor who called himself Martin Couney and saved around 7,000 babies with his sideshow at Coney Island (which yes, Steve Rogers and the writers who made him WOULD HAVE VISITED OR KNOWN OF), you won’t know how important Cap is. You won’t entirely realize why Stan Lee fought to bring him back to public consciousness post-WWII. It wasn’t just patriotism; it was the principles on which the nation was founded, the ones so many fight to destroy confidence in. Because those principles are directly anathema to the perennial evil of eugenics.
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I have not heard of that book before. I need to add it to my TBR pile I think
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I’ve read a summary of his work (Caroline, was that your article?), and it’s quite amazing.
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Yes. And the personification (I guess it would be) works in other ways as well.
When I hear our Mr. Rogers say, in the middle of a fight scene, “I can keep this up all day,” I nod and think of Liberty ships.
The Enigma intercepts (of U-boat coded orders) were important, but they weren’t essential. The (cast of concrete) Liberty ship lines could literally produce new, ugly-but-usable transport ships faster than the German U-boats could sink them — “we can keep this up all war” in fact.
America herself (a little less than 250 years ago) used to be the scrawny, misfit, just plain weird new kid on the world stage, the odd-man-out in a gentlemen’s club of empires. “Yankee Doodle” in all its nastiest nuances. Who grew up to be just a little bit more than that. Steve Rogers’ story is America’s story, so many different ways…
The real-world magic superhero serum isn’t medical. It’s cultural. If You Know, You Know.
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Riveted construction: several months to build. Welded: eventually down to 39 days.
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That was supposed to be a quote and a comment, without WP(DE) enhancing it.
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The amount of semi-information floating around on stuff like this can be amazing, and very not characteristically I didn’t do the “due diligence” search(es) to check. But it’s always struck me as a little far-out, anyway, that concrete idea… I was at a “go or be late” point and just went with what I sort-of remembered on that.
Welded construction makes much more sense — and of course it did become mostly-standard in shipbuilding after the war despite (literal) generations of heavy riveting. Plenty of steel available in the America of that era, too.
World War II did see a lot more exotic ideas than the ships-of-concrete (which has been, IIRC, used in barges) one. Case in point: “pykrete” as a ship / floating airstrip material.
Pykrete is fiber (e.g. wood pulp) reinforced ice. No kidding. Nobody ever built much out of the stuff, but lots of research was done. That one makes concrete ships look pretty tame.
Maybe someday, glass-fiber pykrete domes on Mars..? The glaciers there have plenty of water.
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For what it’s worth, concrete hulls can be (have been?) done on sailboats. There’s a lot of steel forming to do to get the rebar in the right shapes, and then you have to get the ‘crete in. I’ve seen one as a WIP, but have no idea if they got the hull done.
$ROOMMATE at the time built a boat. Started with a fiberglass hull from a vendor, then took it from there. Took a couple of years (part time) to get the boat in the water, and some more time to get it fitted. Still, it made sense.
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The whole eugenics mindset allows for some to feel vastly superior (even when it’s clear they aren’t) and appeals to all the prejudices of various cliques. Whether it is deliberate extermination, denial of medical care or pushing for the abortion of those deemed “undesirable” it is a blot on humanity. It is evil to the core.
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IIRC Theodore Roosevelt developed his voracious reading habit because he was sickly as a child and couldn’t go out much. I can’t imagine a United States without him, so I always think of him as being the poster child for anti-eugenics arguments. It’s pretty much impossible to classify someone at childhood and have it be accurate throughout their life.
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As ADD (AF) as I am, if I weren’t sickly and growing up in a place that hadn’t internalized antibiotics and therefore hard-core quarantined the sick for WEEKS I’d never have taken up reading for a hobby. But I was SO bored. Only my brother read to me, and he was on an accelerated academic schedule. So…. reading it was. And then, I fell in love with stories.
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“Once government pays for you to stay alive, government can decide when it should unalive you.”
Yes; and it’s not even strictly limited to formal, literal governments.
Push the metaphorical rewind button to go back a few days here, to that (Datarepublican?) bit about activists (or useful innocents) doing “unpaid” intelligence work against agencies like ICE. Who can “afford” to do that because they live in “mutual aid” areas where rent, food, medical care, legal services, etc., all just somehow happen “by themselves” (through donations by capitalists who want you to be a socialist, or outright kleptocratic embezzlement/diversion of tax dollars).
It’s not quite technically a government; but consider the peon’s-eye view.
You get all the necessities of life, as long as the socialistic manna keeps falling from Heaven (or at least Somewhere). You earn nothing, you gain no employment history, no generally useful skills, you do nothing that could ever be added to a resume or CV or produced as proof of competence. There is no “earn as you learn” in either sense. Just magical goodies you don’t provide or control.
At some level, you’ve got to be aware you’re standing on an economic trapdoor with someone else’s (invisible) hand on the trigger. Of course you fight for national socialism; it’d be (or at least seem) less precarious, every minute of every day of your life (until and unless you escape).
Socialism was always the worst gateway drug of all.
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Test.
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passed. Has there been a problem?
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Tried to post a comment on Cherryh’s Cyteen series for Bob- in Cyteen the elite could have themselves cloned and being up the child;said children turned out different than their parents. Plus someone (government?) cloned a mathematical genius and raised him telling him he was a mathematical genius and the poor kid was a hot mess. So when they needed Ariane Emory II they decided they had to reproduce her childhood experiences as closely as possible, including the trauma.
WP refused to print. WPDE.
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People come up with these ideas about clones, but forget that we very nearly have a form of it already, and they’re almost always raised at the same time in the same household. And even with those elements in common, identical twins usually turn out quite different from each other.
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Had identical mirror image twins. Identical, but one right handed, one left. They would lose their baby teeth on the same day on opposite sides of mouth. Hair whorls on opposite side of head.
In third grade teacher asked one “What do you call two people born at the same time”. Teacher thought would answer “Twins”.. My child answered: “Individuals.”
We like to put people in boxes: “Asian”, “African”. Those categories do not exist. We need to learn what we don’t know.
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Thanks.
I think personality gets formed in the womb, in a way that might be a random variable.
But, some of those very early experiences after birth are of significantly stronger influence in the development of precociousness, and some of them are filtered out.
I think that if we had the information recording, and the automated decision making to reproduce the environment, and if the basic personality was the same, the attempt to reproduce the environment and the consequences would still fail.
But I also have doubts that I can unpack my thinking on that in a convincing way.
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Pass.
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‘Though, LORD are they doing that, including their talk of multiple “intelligences.”’
Yeah, that’s another corruption of my beloved English language. Intelligence is, at a rough and hackneyed definition, the ability to take in and use information and sensory data. I mean “use” in this definition as the second level of learning (memorization- “having” it, utilization- “using” it practically, synthesis- combining it with other things). The different flavors of “intelligence” are like the different flavors of justice. They’re not.
“Social” intelligence, even though I’ve used the term before as shorthand, appears to be relatively increased aptitude in social settings/attention to social nuance. That can be learned or by dint of preference (a hobby, though I doubt many would agree with that term for it). There are those that can remember conversations, physical mannerisms, and relationships with encyclopedic veracity, but are utterly hopeless with a grocery list.
For contrast, sci fi nerds. We could debate Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica for pages but be utter naifs in unstructured social situations. That’s not nerd intelligence, that’s just nerds who are also intelligent. Don’t think there are dumb nerds? {sweeps aside curtain} I give you the population of reddit, et al. {closes curtain so the crazies don’t get out}
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One of the things about the Scopes “monkey” trial that doesn’t get said enough is that the textbook that William Jennings Bryan did not like was explicitly eugenic and actually seriously racist in that it said black people were much more closely descended from apes than other people were. Awful. If you want to make yourself sick, read the first few chapters of The Urantia Book, published in 1935. It’s a “revealed religion” where the angels add in all the stuff the Bible left out. It’s actually worse than the textbook I mentioned above. Just sayin’
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Test.
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Grade. ;)
D-. Please use complete sentences on the exam, as is stated on page 3 of the syllabus.
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:D
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Is :D higher than D– or lower?
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“For the record, if those IQ measurements were real, i.e. meant the same as those applied to children in our own country, most of those countries would be full of corpses within days. Because people that dumb could not live, let alone live well.”
Thank you. I’ve been saying that for years, but nobody who takes those measurements seriously seems able to comprehend what an average IQ of 61 would mean. Because that’s the average; it would mean 37.5% (or so) of the population had an IQ between 54 and 61, and 12.5% had an IQ lower than 54. And given that an IQ of 70 (if the measurement is actually real) is already down at the level where someone is unable to cope with daily life and needs assistance, an IQ down in the low 50’s or even lower is someone who could NOT cope with life. And yet if you actually were to TALK to those people in Africa scoring an average of 61, you’d learn that they know way more than you about the eating habits of cows, where to find the best grazing ground for cattle, which plants you should make sure the cows NEVER eat, which plants are halfway decent for snacking on while you’re watching the cows, how to milk a cow without getting kicked or stepped on, how to make yogurt from freshly-milked cow’s milk, and a hundred other practical skills that you have never learned (unless you’re someone like my wife’s aunt and uncle who run a dairy farm).
The IQ measurement has nothing to do with ability to learn, it only measures academic performance. Which is also why IQ scores can go up with more years in a good school. Norway did an accidental experiment with that when they required two more years of school, back in the mid-20th century, before their mandatory military service during which an IQ test was administered to everyone. Only measured boys (because military service), but they found that the kids who had gone to school until age 16 then dropped out, compared to the kids who entered military service after the mandatory school attendance period was raised to age 18, had a measurable difference in average IQ: the extra two years of school were producing a +3 change in average IQ points over the entire male population entering military service.
And if a good school can raise average IQ, a bad school can lower them. And, well, you know that average score of 61 that I quoted? That was from the country I lived in for one year. It was, and is still, a completely dysfunctional country. For example, the schoolteachers often didn’t get paid, because someone in the government would steal the money and pocket it instead of paying it to the teachers. And forget about equipment for the classroom. Some classrooms didn’t have enough desks and chairs for all the students! In that environment, is it any surprise that huge numbers of students were underperforming academically? No matter how “genetically predisposed to intelligence” you are (in quotes because it’s far more complicated than that), you’re not going to express your natural intelligence in that environment.
Want more proof? I know a man, a Christian named Mahamad (he didn’t choose the name his parents gave him), from that same country. Until age 14, he didn’t go to school at all because he had to take care of his father’s cows. By age 21, he had graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. Yes, in seven years he managed to get ALL of his primary education plus a college degree. If his IQ had been measured at age 14, he would have scored down in the “can’t function on his own” range — but that would have only been measuring his lack of education, not the capability of his brain.
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I can think of a few people (I have a little list) who might benefit from experiencing a rural Africa variant of the IQ test. Perhaps they’d shut u about it. Nah.
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My son went to school with a kid who tested in the 50s. He was literally a sub- two year old in a ten year old body. He needed everything done for him, and couldn’t be left alone and unsupervised for fear of what he’d do. (Drug addicted mother, used while pregnant. Very sad.)
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Don’t know their stories or their perceived IQ.
Local school district (the one we pay taxes to) has shut down at least two grade (and middle) schools. This has concentrated all the “short bus” k – 5 grades at the elementary school across the street (close enough). Before they brought them in this last year for the first time ever, the grade school has had a fence around the playground (separate* one around the schoolrooms, “safety”, for all that it took decades for it to happen, I digress). Most the houses backing up to the school grounds have one fence or another, not all. Any that do but fences only 4 to 5 feet have the new 10′ gates. Any without a fence, now has a 10′ wrought iron one. Gates are locked during the school day. Reason for the playground access closure? Runners.
Bad and dangerous enough, that a neighbor who is a paid resource aid (reading), decided “Nope,” and got a sales retail job.
(*) No going into the office through the gate just because, except when gates are unlocked (start or end of school); back side gates on the playground open all day.
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As I like to remind people, back during WWI, when the U.S. Army began to administer standardized IQ tests, one of the groups that scored the very lowest – so low that the Army considered them, en bloc, ‘uneducable’ and unfit to be trained – were Ashkenazi Jews.
Look at the Ashkenazim in America now.
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I basically think that from first principles, it should be absurd to think that the psychologists must have correctly been able to make all of the instruments line up neatly.
Officially, the psychologists allegedly signed off on elements of the trans push.
I’m not using that to dismiss their institutions as politicized, or argue that the trans research interpretations were correct.
Their institutions might be politicized, sure.
Where I am going, IQ testing is done by human beings, and not all scholars do things in even a remotely plausible way ‘when you are not looking’.
And psychology is one of the really annoying scholarly fields.
Anyway, that people choose to believe that the psychologists have all these instruments lined up is maybe them wanting to believe that.
My bias is that I must have had a mental break, or something, with how intensely I started being convinced that the scholarly fields do not combine to produce correct answers, but instead garbage.
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Healthcare is not a right.
Government is not supposed to administer charity, especially at the expense of others.
Which means parents are responsible for providing or paying for healthcare for their children.
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Every child a wanted child, is the catch phrase.
Wanted by whom, and for what?
Certainly not for the child’s good or benefit.
In other words, make yourself useful, or we’ll use you for scrap.
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When I was an adult, Mom told me that I had been born prematurely. By a few years… Still wanted, still loved.
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Some of my favorite people are unplanned pregnancies; two sisters, one niece, and one nephew.
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Comment further up stream (I think, could be yesterday’s post).
Son was a surprise. Kind of. More like we gave up after over 9 years. Birth control was inexpensive (not using). We were looking into adoption. Had done preliminary meetings with local open adoption, meet & greet events with adoptive families, had paperwork filled out. Then I got “sick” … Not catching sick. Surprise!
Interestingly enough, never got pregnant again after he was born. Not one miscarriage.
So far the nieces with children on my side have had problems getting pregnant, just like my sisters and I. Difference now? IVF is now available on demand. So far two great-nieces and two great-nephews by IVF, and at least one or two more coming. Three other nieces yet to try.
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Should also add my middle sister’s youngest three, plus two entopic pregnancies they had to terminate, were surprises too. Her tubes were blocked/adhered due to severe endometriosis. She was not supposed to be able to have children naturally (IVF or else, which didn’t work). Note, oldest is adopted at < 48 hours old.
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I have just spent an entire day, while sick and feverish with flu and barely able to feed myself, fighting at Instapundit and PJ Media with clowns who think in exactly the twisted and evil way you describe.
I expect people to hate my guts; after all (as ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan said on M*A*S*H) my guts are not here to be loved. At this point, I do not expect to perform any useful function in society except to be a Socratic gadfly – which is much more like a form of blood combat in the age of institutionalized online rudeness.
It means my purpose is, as you said, Ma’am, in a recent post, to point out that things are wrong merely because they are wrong, and have the tribal apes interpret that as an attack on their authority or their group identity. Or, as I realized just now, to stab and bite and claw at the bullshit until it bleeds truth, because so few people care enough for truth to take any trouble at all to find it – they would rather have what Vonnegut called the foma, the comforting lie.
But Lord, I am getting tired of it. The world rejects everything I have ever had to offer, then puts me down for not ‘contributing’. I am sick to death of it.
I am sorry to interrupt you all with this rant. But I have absolutely no one else to talk to about it, and I know that you are at least familiar with the phenomenon – you wrote about it here today, and I could not keep quiet. I apologize, and I shall go now.
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Don’t apologize; it’s a good rant. 😁
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My spousoid passed a report to me last night that some dim bulb in the current DoJ promulgated an opinion that, Americans in general, but especially those receiving public benefits – which she indicated INCLUDED Social Security and Medicaid – had no right to own their own homes, even if paid for, nor to receive Home Health Care or other publicly supported benefits to keep them in those same homes.
Begging the question of “Where are we supposed to go after the government steals our paid for homesteads?”
even borderline (by my standards, and having worked in several, and cared for many more patients in such facilities, those standards are admittedly high) group homes, assisted living facilities, and extended care facilities are horrendously expensive – approaching $5,000 per month just for the basics, including room and board.
Obviously, keeping folks in their own homes, especially if the only costs are running costs and not mortgage payments, is far less expensive, and, often results in not only a longer life, but more life in those additional years.
I’ll add more later if I can find a reference to the ‘hostage puppy’ quality statement when I get back up in a couple of hours.
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The thing about the Institutions fucking up to the degree Trump is put into power as a remedy, and that in the third term he understands that he is expected to be a remedy, is that there are a lot of mediocre almost rote thinkers outside the institutions, who can imitate with changes the more solid non-institutional thinking, but not avoid fucking it up.
It is disappointing that they are recruited, but I should not be surprised. I am a bit appalled, still.
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There is something going around on FB that individuals in congress (can guess as to the suspects), that because social nets are considered parasites, then ALL government payments (social security and medicare included) is to be considered parasites. Interestingly the comments from across the board, including TDS inflicted liberals (very), is “I, and my employer, PAID for this for X years. Not the working public’s fault congress borrowed with an interestless IOU they keep raiding.”
Seeing looks reserved for public *food aid users at the grocery store too. We get an annual benefit through our insurance (never know what it’ll pay) for following through with stuff like the annual “wellness”, and other medical stuff (used to get $45/quarter, but that went away 2026). Used it yesterday, commented “don’t know what it’ll do”. Heard a mumble behind me. Turned and said to the air “Retirement benefit. We earned this.”
Son ran into this with his unemployment. State does not send out checks, or does direct deposit to bank accounts, anymore. Now you get a debit Visa based credit card. You can (usually) then take it to your bank and “debit” the entire amount to a banking account. Son didn’t.
Personally I hate tracking balances on those things, so anytime I get a kickback in the form of “use anywhere debit card”, I do dump the balance in our bank account, if I can (the medicare advantage is one that cannot be dumped into system, but then you can’t “overdraw it either”). The store kickback cards, the store system tracks the balance.
Regarding the dim bulb DoJ? The only response is “sorry you are an idiot”.
(*) Part of the problem is to get cash for alcohol/drugs there are instances of people buying water, dumping the water to get the bottles to take back for cash.
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Considering they force you into Medicare at 65, they can gaze on my middle fingers.
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I went to set up my annual gynecologist appointment and was told the practice would no longer see me because they weren’t accepting Medicare. Note I’ve been going to them every year for five years on Medicare.
I asked them if I could pay cash. They refused to accept cash. So, no appointment for me unless/until I call the hospital and see what they have to offer.
(grrrrrr).
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In other news, WPDE was ‘improved’ again recently. For several months, I have been unable to post comments on Sarah’s web page. I have to go through the WPDE Reader page. For the past few weeks, the Reader page has put a limit on how many comments it shows. When a post hits about 100 comments, the earliest ones start getting cut off. Right now this post has 114 comments (this one will make 115) but I can only see, and reply to, the 72 latest ones.
At first view, there is a link at the bottom ‘Load more comments (showing 9 of 114)’ Clicking it shows more comments, and the link changes to ‘Load more comments (showing 72 of 114)’ but if I click on that one, it just disappears without showing any more comments.
This is a pain in the ass because Sarah’s posts routinely collect more than 100 comments, often 200, 300 or even more. I can only reply to the most recent top-level comments, and the sub-comments under them.
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Oh. Joy.
Haven’t been running into this.
OTOH I get everything via emails, postings, and subsequent comments (always have). Does clutter email unless your email can be setup to automatically sort by categories. I have AccordingtoHoyt, and other blogs, going into the “social” (would use “blogs”, but I can’t label the categories; nothing is perfect, especially “free”).
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just wait for the virus the whole world catches that modifies the genome of humans….. or…. has that happened already?
I know for a fact that there have been a lot of, at least to us citizen level critters, unidentified virus going around. They are weird ones to. Cold, influenza types of a sort but don’t give traditional symptoms. We have been to the dr to get dr’s excuses for school at least a dozen times in the last 18 months for our daughters. They test the kids to see if its COVID or the flue and it doesn’t test as any of the known viruses. I talk with them and they say they are almost overwhelmed with cases but that they have no clue what it is and it presents strange as far as symptoms go, also that they have called around in their dr networks and asked if others are seeing the same thing. Yet we get nothing from CDC about new viruses etc… 20% of students and teachers out at one time at our school and nothing. Just an odd thing… I have caught whatever it is at least 3 times and it is very weird, no sinus, or lung involvement, joints stiff, achy, tired, very tired, low low fever. Youngest daughter always runs hi! fevers with cold, flue etc… 102 to 104 every time…. 99.5 with this stuff.
So I think a lot…. not worth much, but I note when stuff is odd. We have a lot of people messing around with viruses around the world.. dozens if not hundreds of labs funded by us. Plus all the ones from other countries. A lot of crazy’s that want to change the world.. Right now we have weird tick stuff happening that the are supposedly gene engineered/infected ticks that people are smuggling around the country/world and releasing. If people are bit by these ticks they will pass on something that makes you sick if you eat meat. Supposedly designed by people that are terrorist vegans? sigh… I’m getting to old for this shit.
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I’ve heard of the tick bites causing the “sick if you eat meat” syndrome. Bite and, whatever infection, doesn’t guaranty you will get the syndrome. But still concerning. Tick bites aren’t good regardless, for you or your pet. Lyme disease is bad enough (by report).
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It’s something we worry about. We live in the country and between us and daughters, we poke around in a lot of trees and bushes and tall grass or weeds a lot. Found a tick on blanket daughter was using on couch a few days ago. she didn’t get bit but still.. might have come in on her, or one of us or the dog. They are there. We are also in the deep south, so prime tick territory.
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West coast here. Worse in the forests, farms, and grasses. But you can encounter them even suburbs, and city parks. If it isn’t concrete all around you, they are there.
The dog’s and the cats flea treatment will kill ticks, if ticks bite them. Unlike the fleas it won’t kill ticks just from being on them. Cats really don’t go out, so don’t spray them. Do have a tick replant I use on the dog anytime we go into areas where ticks will happen.
Ticks are bad enough locally, but apparently not as bad as south US or east coast. In addition, Lyme disease, is not a problem. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and other tick born diseases, however, are a possibility.
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I would say, the problems with the Supergirl movie are not an inherent quality of the character Supergirl as established in other DC media.
It certainly is not because she is a girl or woman.
The issue is that when feminist ‘mean girls’ try to write a female character as successful in male-male styles of interaction, their ideal of success is a bit psychopathic by any sex’s standards.
Which in fiction is maybe described as unlikeable.
And, maybe the movie is fine, but the ads have not sold me an impression that is anything but ‘feminists write spoiled girl’.
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Who needs to wash her hair.
I keep pointing out on X that Supergirl first appeared as a positive, cheerful girl ready to make a place for herself on Earth.
The actress is not helping.
The meme showing Sydney Sweeney in the Supergirl costume looks so much better.
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