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the american decline started with the mad desirables..

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The last 30 years have been a persistent erosion of American power and prestige. The US is a nation in search of its soul and moral purpose.

It has been led by a succession of timid, or reckless or vapid or exploitative, and opportunist presidents.

International politics expert Jonathan Holslag calls them "polite cowards". Those leaders who talk up democracy while ignoring the people in their own countries whom democracy is failing.

Each leader has presided over the drift from the American Dream. Inequality has grown like a cancer.

Decades of decline

Research by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton reveals the wealth of someone in the top 1 per cent of society is 950 times greater than a member of the bottom 50 per cent.

Case and Deaton tell of an America of broken families, drug dependency, increasing suicide, declining wages or no work at all. To these people, they say, Washington politics "looks more like a racket".

But the unravelling began decades earlier. The heady days of Cold War victory obscured deeper cracks in the US.

 

By Stan Grant

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-27/war-on-ukraine-where-did-americas-great-power-go/100859774

 

 

A cautionary History of Eugenics

 

A century ago this week [article published in SCIENCE • 23 Sep 2021 • Vol 373, Issue 6562], 300 scientists, policy-makers, and campaigners gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to discuss their work about heredity and eugenics—the political ideology designed to sculpt societies through biological methods of population control (the meeting was highlighted in Science a week later). The aims of eugenics were to nurture the propagation of people deemed “desirable” and to reduce the number of “undesirable” or “defective” people, primarily through enforced sterilization. Although recognized as toxic now, back then, eugenics enjoyed popular and bipartisan support and would grow to be one of the defining ideas of the 20th century.

 

 

The meeting had been coordinated by the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, founded by the prominent eugenicist Charles Davenport, and by the office’s director, the equally zealous Harry Laughlin. Laughlin was the author of a “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” to standardize state legislation to prevent people with “undesirable” characteristics from having babies. It would eventually be translated and adopted by the Third Reich. The conference treasurer was Madison Grant, best known for his popular book The Passing of the Great Race — a treatise on white supremacy that was pivotal in developing the policies of racial hygiene in Nazi Germany. These zealots and other scientists carved out specious ideas of human population control, which would lead to the coerced sterilization of some 70,000 in the United States and to genocide in Nazi Germany.

 

It is sobering to look back from today’s perspective and see how mainstream such jarring ideas were only a century ago, and how integrated they were with the nascent science of human genetics. Eugenics policies emerged from racist, classist, and ableist beliefs and co-opted vague, nebulous definitions and pseudo-clinical categories—feebleminded, defective, imbecile. From its inception, eugenics was a political creed, but one that was wedded to a science that was immature and frequently wrong.

 

Ultimately, in the US, forced sterilization primarily targeted the poor and those with disabilities and was deployed against African Americans, Indigenous Americans, and other marginalized groups. These policies lasted late into the 20th century, but coercive sterilization still occurs in the US today. Globally, this practice continues as a strategy for oppression and population control.

 

After the atrocities of the Holocaust were exposed, popular support for eugenics waned, and it became a poisonous idea. Many eugenics offices around the world were shut or evolved into genetics research laboratories. The majority of scientists abandoned this now reviled ideology and applied their growing knowledge of heredity to better ends—techniques such as preimplantation diagnosis, which identifies possible genetic defects in embryos created through in vitro fertilization.

 

Our understanding of polygenic traits and diseases has skyrocketed in the past few years, revealing the complex relationship between nature and nurture—a phrase coined by Francis Galton, the man who also invented the term “eugenics.”

 

As science makes advances in reproductive biology, it is incumbent upon scientists and society to firmly grasp this cautionary history and to understand how a political idea transmogrified into policy for many countries. With modern genetic techniques, including precision gene editing, we are inventing unprecedented possibilities for control of human biology, and society should proceed with a clear understanding not just of the limitations of this science, but of its grim history. Today, we hear frequent discussions about ideas such as embryo selection — not just to reduce disease risk but to enhance traits — and indeed, companies are emerging in the US with this as a potential service offered by their future businesses. Before embracing such technologies, it’s critical to remember that these techniques are both scientifically dubious and share an ancestry with the racist history of eugenics.

 

Scientific ideas are easily marshalled into political ideologies, regardless of whether the science is well understood or not. Cultures change, and today, we strive to change the culture of science to be more inclusive and to center the voices of those who only a century ago were the targets of an ideology that enlisted an immature science into its arsenal. J. B. S. Haldane, a titan of 20th-century biology, wrote in 1938—in response to the eugenic policies of the US and Nazi Germany—words that nearly 85 years later, are still true: “…I do not believe that our present knowledge of human heredity justifies such steps.”

 

 

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business of incarceration, USA...

 

With almost 2 million people in confinement, the United States locks up more people per capita than any other nation. Understanding the reasons and then forging a path to reduce mass incarceration in America will require better research and analyses of the government policies and spending that sustain the US carceral system.

Can the largest prison population in the world be attributed to greater criminal behavior by Americans? Not likely—the US crime rate is comparable to those in many Western industrial nations. Although the national violent crime rate increased during the crack-cocaine epidemic, peaking in 1993, the rate has steadily declined to a low not seen since the 1970s. Yet the incarcerated population has increased by an estimated 700%.

In 2014, the National Research Council reported that this phenomenon is fueled by an increase in the likelihood of imprisonment and of longer prison sentences. This was stoked by the “get tough” policies enacted since the 1980s, such as mandatory minimum sentences, a reduction in early release from prison mandatory sentences for drug-related crimes, life sentences without the possibility of parole, and the “three-strikes” law that increases the prison sentences of persons convicted of a felony who have been previously convicted of two or more serious crimes. Since 1984, the number of people serving life sentences has nearly quintupled, even though serious violent crime has been declining for the past 20 years.

These government policies have led to only minor gains in crime reduction. Notably, the majority of incarcerated people in the United States are not charged with violent crimes. Every year, an estimated 13 million misdemeanor charges sweep masses of Americans into the criminal justice system for behaviors as benign as jaywalking, sitting on a sidewalk, or technical parole violations. Such low-level offenses account for over a quarter of the daily jail population nationally and even more in some US states and counties.

Misdemeanor arrrests may not sound like a big deal, but they carry serious personal, social, and financial costs, especially for defendants. The earnings lost each year by the roughly 14% of the US population with a misdemeanor criminal record is about $238 billion. There are also monetary costs to society for a “mass misdemeanor” system that pays for processing these court cases and the resulting incarceration. The US carceral system operates at the scale of billions of dollars and is financed mainly by the government and banks. To better understand this sustained investment, it is necessary to assess the economy that the carceral system upholds. The direct economic beneficiaries are largely the rural towns where prisons are built, those employed by these prisons, and the state-owned and private correctional industries that manage prisons and prisoner services. So stakeholders have a vested economic interest in building more jails and expanding the market for prisoner services.

The policies that have increased the “mass misdemeanor” system have also resulted in the “mass criminalization” of mostly Blacks, Latinos, and the poor for nonviolent misdemeanor violations and drug possession. Blacks make up 13% of US residents yet are 40% of the incarcerated population. Generally, criminal laws themselves in America are written to be color-blind and class-blind. Nevertheless, the way that policing is conducted and judicial decisions are made can result in the laws being unequally applied. For example, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report in 2013, even though Blacks and whites have comparable rates of marijuana use, Blacks were almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. Compounding the imbalance, minority communities are more routinely surveilled and minority individuals are more often unjustly stopped, arrested, and abused by police for what appear to be misdemeanor crimes.

There is no simple solution to these problems. A giant step forward would be to better understand how policy and spending sustain the US carceral economy. One would think that insights could be quickly gained given advances in digital technology and the wealth of critical data from many government agencies involved in the justice system. Unfortunately, the data are fragmented across these agencies, ripe with bias, and not designed to help policy-makers or the public understand what is going on. Future discussions on the criminal justice system must address these data problems so that evidence-based reforms can truly end mass incarceration.

 

 

READ MORE:

SCIENCE • 14 Oct 2021 • Vol 374, Issue 6565

 

 

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wrong eugenics…..

 

...

 

By 1900, eugenics was massively influential among Western elites. Conservatives, such as former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, perceived it as a means of creating a great people. Leftists regarded it as a means of reducing suffering, and some of the most vocal advocates of eugenics were committed leftists—George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells. Opposition came from conservative traditionalists, such as G.K. Chesterton, who felt that eugenicists were playing God. [Eugenics and the Left, by Diane Paul, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1984].

Laws were passed in various countries, some not revoked until the 1970s, allowing the sterilization of “mental defectives” and, in some cases, encouraging those considered of good “quality” to be more fecund.

It is at this point, however, that Rutherford’s historical scholarship starts to go awry. Rutherford asserts that “Winston Churchill was a key driver of eugenics policy in the UK in the first decades of the twentieth century.” There is something of reappraisal of Winston Churchill occurring in the UK, with Leftists increasingly attacking his “hero” status and arguing that he was “racist.” Rutherford appears to have been drawn into this emotional revulsion against the embodiment of the old, pre-Multiculturalism Britain and has, thus, lost his critical faculties on this point.

In fact, other than separating males and females in asylums to avoid pregnancy, Britain did not have a “eugenic policy.” No eugenics laws were passed in Britain (something which Rutherford concedes later in his book).

Worse still, Rutherford tells us: “The toxicity of the idea of eugenics no doubt emerged from our collective discovery of the horrors of the Second World War.” There is, indeed, a popular belief that the association between Nazism and eugenics is the reason why it is now taboo. However, this is simply inaccurate.

As Daylanne English [Email her]has argued in in her book Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; it was the Great Depression that started to make eugenics less popular. The reason: “it was clearly an external force” and “many middle—and even upper-class individuals were adversely affected.” It “forced many eugenics advocates to realize that unemployment did not necessarily signify ‘individual weakness’”

Then, as English psychologist Richard Lynn has argued in his book Eugenics: A Reassessment, the individualistic, egalitarian, pro-equality, harm-avoidance-focused culture that commenced in the 1960s made eugenics increasingly taboo.

“Nazi eugenics” is plainly a post hoc justification. For Rutherford to simply assume otherwise is less than impressive historical scholarship.

In terms of exploring the science of eugenics, Rutherford does make some good points. Gene editing, focusing on specific genes, may have unpredictable effects when lots of genes must work together to create certain desirable traits. Moreover, increasing one trait—for example, intelligence—may result in us becoming worse in another trait. As F. Roger Devlin has put it, in reviewing my book Sent Before Their Time: Genius, Charisma and Being Born Prematurely,

 

A person ignorant of viticulture would probably assume that the best wine would be produced by the best soils. In fact, when vines are planted in especially rich soil, the result is an enormous profusion of leaves and very few grapes. High-quality wine grapes are grown in relatively weak—but not too weak—soil: it is precisely the vine’s struggle against a suboptimal environment which brings out the best in grapes

[Premature Birth and Genius, Occidental Observer , February 9, 2022].

 

Similarly, the complex processes that have led to us reaching this stage of our evolution may go wrong, indeed likely will, if we attempt to make simplistic interventions.

But Rutherford’s definition of “eugenics” is extremely tendentious, seemingly to avoid the counterargument that eugenics-critics are just hypocritical virtue-signalers.

Eugenics is defined by the OED as “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.”

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/article/science-hack-adam-rutherford-himself-the-product-of-eugenics-gets-emotional-about-eugenics-a-symptom-of-our-new-dark-age/

 

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/36134

 

 

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