I honestly don’t. I’ve watched a couple of family members go from reasonable to wacko-koch-lunatics over the course of time…time during which Fox “news” and talk radio were on all day every day. As the old commercial used to tell us: you’ve got to be carefully taught.
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I’m over fifty too.
I was reading about something heinous about women or race that an older politician had said, on Gawker or similar and one of the commenters said, “I’m waiting for the olds to just die, because you can’t change their minds.”
I hoped that wasn’t her only strategy as it didn’t work for me. When I was a teen, polls consistently put younger people as more left-wing economically and more liberal socially than older folks, so I thought things might take care of themselves. But here we are forty years later and it hasn’t died away. Spontaneous generation of hate-and-fear-filled people must be some sort of quantum event that’s just going to continue unless we can find a way to calm them down.
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The irony of this guy being in charge of education…
I’m sure his goal is to eliminate public education, because it’s a socialist mind control program that encourages government dependence and poverty, because kids aren’t allowed to go out and get a job.
I honestly think they were born this way.
I honestly don’t. I’ve watched a couple of family members go from reasonable to wacko-koch-lunatics over the course of time…time during which Fox “news” and talk radio were on all day every day. As the old commercial used to tell us: you’ve got to be carefully taught.
I’ve certainly known people that are that way as well and I also certainly won’t deny there’s a very concerted, corporatist effort to basically brainwash them.
Related:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jensenko/the-brainwashing-of-my-dad-documentary
But, I still contend some are more ingrained to be susceptible to that kind of right wing drivel than others. And, I’ve met more than a few that didn’t need Fox “news” nor right wing radio to enable them in the first place. Hence, born that way.
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Yep. As I said, evolution is a passive activity, not aimed at achieving a specific goal. Evolution is not equivalent to breeding.
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It’s inexplicable, isn’t it? As far as I can tell, you start off with utter nonsense like this: http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number13/number13.html
and then you filter that through idiots who don’t understand what they’re reading and warp it further in their own minds. It’s totally crazy - they start off with the misapprehension that Darwin’s notions are somehow responsible for Social Darwinism (which actually came from Calvinism and related Christian schools of thought) and then they make some tenuous connection between, say, Darwin and eugenics (some guy that Darwin knew was into eugenics!) and then, quite blithely, attribute those beliefs to Darwin himself. I suppose once you start saying, “Darwin believed X,” when you’ve not only failed to demonstrate that Darwin believed such a thing (and was, in fact, the opposite of what he stated he believed), the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can attribute to him.
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“I’ve probably had hundreds of thousands of interactions with women, and 30 of them are getting me in trouble.” – Ted Bundy
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There are two kinds of people in the world: administrators and everyone else.
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There is a sound-effect. Use your own lips, cheeks, armpits, anuses etc.
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No, I haven’t. But I have heard that Hitler’s “moustache” was actually just untrimmed nose hairs.
Thanks for that video, looks like it’s going to be a fantastic movie. Good to see also that she’s surpassed her funding goal by so much!
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My great-aunt, who is Native American, also thanks people for a kindness by saying, “That’s mighty white of you.” The person’s white or non-whiteness doesn’t stop her from using the phrase. And then she laughs and laughs and laughs…
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I feel like it’s worth noting that Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood really were for racist eugenics. That’s quite possibly the only valid complaint he has, but he’s also certainly worse for African Arizonans than modern Planned Parenthood is.
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Much of the time these aren’t elected, but appointed positions. This is how it is in many big education “markets” (ahem…) This how you get a bunch of anti-union, neoliberal, charter, Gates-foundation types running school districts. The goal is privatization of course. This goes all the way to the top with Arne Duncan, Obama etc…
You’re great aunt sounds like a delight and we should all go hang out with her…
I had a great-aunt Gladys, who had an eye-patch like a pirate.
To be fair, I think eugenics was a mainstream mode of thought, and many people bought into the validity of it - even some anti-racists were into eugenic thought. Part of the reason for embracing eugenics was in part to show how relevant they were. That doesn’t excuse it, but sometimes it’s hard to step outside one’s historical period.
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Sanger, in part, probably jumped on to negative eugenics (a popular science of the time) in order to give birth control (an unpopular idea) some extra weight and public support. She did suggest an exclusionary immigration policy, and compulsory segregation or sterilization for the profoundly retarded (that was commonplace in that time).
That said, she didn’t pursue negative eugenics as a function of race. In fact, she worked with black doctors, church leaders and community leaders when setting up a clinic in Harlem. Her work there was later praised by Martin Luther King, Jr. She also set up clinics in the South, at a time when Jim Crow law still reigned, and sterilization threats were quite real.
Here’s a fact check on some of Herman Cain’s 2011 arguments against Sanger.
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This needs to be said far more often, and people need to stop trying to excuse their historical heroes from all the bigotries and bad ideas of their times. Eugenics was a mainstream darling in all English-speaking countries until well after the Germans actually implemented it and showed what horrors it leads to.
We can understand this, and condemn it, without discarding or denigrating any good things that were done by people who held mistaken or even noxious eugenic beliefs. Unequivocally good and righteous people rarely exist in the physical world, and that’s why it’s so important to try to be one of them.
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Perfect! Couldn’t agree more!
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