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Eugenics Remains Ascendant September 29, 2019

Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism.
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19th-century eugenicists: Radicals, suffragists, & leftists of all stripes are atavistic & degenerate. Their triumph would return us to primordial collectivist savagery.

21st-century radicals: Conservatives & company are mouth-breathing troglodytes destined for extinction.

🤔

The ableist/eugenicist mentality remains ascendant & nearly all political thought & rhetoric operate within it. Eugenics at its height in the first half of the 20th century was but a formalization & intensification of venerable ableist beliefs & practices.

Even eugenics in the narrow sense of centralized & coercive selective breeding stretches back to antiquity or earlier. Plato recommended such a scheme. Various groups winnowed the young via trials of fitness. Masters controlled the reproduction of enslaved folks. Etc.

When most people say they’re against eugenics, they mean “scientific” racism & obviously coercive policies like forced sterilization. They’re fine with decentralized eugenics & with innumerable status-quo ableist selection dynamics such as competition in education & the market.

Folks imagine eugenics lost with the Nazis in WWII, but only that particular brand of eugenics lost & not completely. (The USA practiced forced sterilization into the 1980s.) The liberal, decentralized eugenics of meritocracy won.

Anarchism Has Never Taken Ableism Seriously March 22, 2019

Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Despair, Transhumanism.
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Woman no longer wants to be a party to the production of a race of sickly, feeble, decrepit, wretched human beings, who have neither the strength nor moral courage to throw off the yoke of poverty and slavery. (Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love”)

 

🏴Like so many educated people of eir time, Goldman was a strident eugenicist who worried runaway reproduction under poor conditions was creating a breed of inferior beings. 🏴
 

Today’s anarchists follow in Goldman’s footsteps, despite whatever superficial nods to disability radicalism they might make. From fash to libertarians, the entire political spectrum can agree on ableism, on mocking & despising the unfit. Freak. Loser. Failure. Hardy a soul refrains from slinging such epithets against their personal & political opponents.

 

Even the best anarchists, at least the prominent ones, are ultimately still eugenicist bigots like everyone else. They hold nothing but contempt for suffering & marginalized folks. They insist on conformity to establish norms of social value like intelligence. Their interests & goals can never truly align with mine, with those of people on the wrong side of the genetic hierarchy, with those of any person who finds eirself on unsuited to eir environment.

 

Transhumanist anarchism holds the potential to break with custom & center the project of creating accessible & enabling environments for all feeling beings. To date, that potential remains utterly unrealized.

 

We can & must do so much better.

 

Facts Don’t Care about Your Feelings! December 10, 2018

Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Epistemology, Transhumanism.
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Success in current society comes from DNA, structural advantage, & sheer chance. The same for failure by dominant norms.

Fascists, open eugenicists, many centrists, many liberals, etc. embrace this because they support the existing cistem of genetic sorting (even if some want to tweak it to be even more nightmarish).

Other centrists & liberals as well as most radicals prefer to mystify this reality, whether because they’re part of the genetic elite & defending their position or because they wish the world operated differently.

I recommend accepting the truth & striving to maximize freedom & pleasure as well as to minimize suffering for all sentient beings. We can create ever more accessible & enabling physical & social environments.

“The Specter of Eugenics” Up at IEET June 5, 2013

Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Anti-imperialism, Decolonization, Epistemology, Evo psych, Transhumanism.
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The recent controversy surrounding Jason Richwine’s Havard dissertation “IQ and Immigration Policy” serves as an opportune point of departure for reflecting on biological determinism in transhumanist thought. Are transhumanists, as Michael Anissimov says, eugenicists without the coercion? What does channeling eugenics in a white-supremacist society mean and do? Why the obsession with IQ among various transhumanists, particularly AI enthusiasts? I argue that the scientific racism of Richwine and company, with all its elaborate statistical wizardry, functions first and foremost as rationalization of inequality and privilege. I call on transhumanists to reject to biological determinism and struggle for social justice in social terms.

Read it here.