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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Basically, leftists have a cognitohazard blind spot on this topic because if they allow themselves to even consider biological inequality then the superstructure of their belief system goes right back to the stuff of nightmares.

Hmm? I don't mean to accuse you of burying the lede, but the most prominent example of eugenics in living memory would be the Nazis. They were European, they were less than left wing, and they practiced both positive and negative eugenics. More Aryan Uber-babies with three blue eyes (more is better), fewer gypsies and schizophrenics.

The Right is hardly over its own hangups in that department.

Hmm? I don't mean to accuse you of burying the lede, but the most prominent example of eugenics in living memory would be the Nazis.

Yes, that's literally the example I was talking about. Progressives in charge of American Eugenics organizations in the early 30's had very kind words to say about the "fine Mr. Hitler" for finally being willing to try to implement "sterilize all the bad people" on a national level. Then of course, things went a little off the rails, to put it lightly. The right/left divide was... weirder back then. A couple years after that, leftist propogandists were all but begging the US to not get involved in Europe and just let the Nazis and Soviets conquer the place, please bro, remember how much the trenches in WW1 sucked, just stay out. And then Hitler betrayed Stalin, broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and those same propogandists literally had their anti-war books and records recalled to be replaced with paeans to the glory of battle.

But for the overall point, imagine if you believed in HBD and that it was scientifically possible to selectively breed humans just like any other animal and also had a powerful technocratic impulse to run roughshod over democracy and liberty in favor of expert-driven perfection of the masses.

My thesis is that if many progressives allowed themselves to really accept that dumb, violent people have dumb, violent kids, then the same impulse that drives them to ban plastic straws would drive them to support mass sterilization campaigns - rather like it did the last time they considered HBD fit for consideration.

OTOH, they might actually support killing criminals again, so there'd possibly be some upside.

the most prominent example of eugenics in living memory would be the Nazis.

They're also the primary reason the left distanced itself from eugenics.

The US left still loves Planned Parenthood and Harvard-educated experts; they just like to ignore why Planned Parenthood was started and what Harvard-educated experts said on the topic before the Nazis made the concept verboten.

One problem with the Nazis is that they were very, very, very bad with eugenics.

Like about as backwards in their biggest focus as you can be. Total unforced error, and extremely ironic given the manpower of the Manhattan Project.

You kinda skipped that detail.

The Holocaust was just plain old ethnic hatred, not eugenics. It was never presented as eugenics. The Jews were not dumb, or inferior, they were the enemy. Secretly controlling the banks and puppeteering the Allies against the Germans. They had to be removed from society in order to safeguard the German people. That was the story the Nazis told. (For a long while they were even pretending to be resettling them, rather than admitting they were killing them.)

Aktion T4 was the eugenics program, it focused on killing the disabled.

Sterilization programs went on after the war, in places like Sweden and Switzerland, until the 1970s.

Man, imagine if the Nazis actually had a categorization scheme by race that informed their views on eugenics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_racial_theories

Like about as backwards in their biggest focus as you can be. Total unforced error, and extremely ironic given the manpower of the Manhattan Project.

It's interesting to imagine an alternate history where the Nazis had been mildly pro-Jewish. Like, instead of trying to slaughter Jews, they had recruited Jews to help with the war effort.

Didn’t they get rid of the Jews because they were too clever and people started to think they did societal harm? Good at inventing tech, but would also financially swindle you or push bad pathologies like Sigmund Freud. It seems like every American pop star (or black rapper) had a Jew managing them and pushing their sexuality at a young age. Onlyfans created by a Jew. Something about Jewishness they seem to excel at those roles.

We can’t help but watch and follow along, but 90% of the time it seems like it’s a Jew that created it. My gut says they were also doing things like creating onlyfans back then.

The irony there is that the vast majority of Jews who were exterminated were not the integrated, typically pretty secular, educated urban elites.

It was the rural devout Jews. They had neither the means to flee or escape easy detection.

We can’t help but watch and follow along, but 90% of the time it seems like it’s a Jew that created it. My gut says they were also doing things like creating onlyfans back then.

Now do Nobel Prizes.

Jews aren't magically pathological for a society. That's just brain worms.

For instance, lots of prominent leftist/communist thinkers were Jews. But so were Hayek and Friedman, among others.

Hayek too?? Wow. I knew Mises, Rothbard and Friedman, yes.

I feel like one of the pitfalls of eugenics (then and now) is an assumption about what good genes even means (beyond Sydney Sweeney, apparently). There seems to be a lot more agreement about bad genes: see general consent on the borderline-eugenics of genetic counseling for various diseases, or the general acceptance of anti-incest rules.

You're probably right that Nazis lost out by dismissing a bunch of human capital and (over?)valuing blond hair and blue eyes, but I can't avoid thinking that statement is smuggling in some value judgements about what we should consider the ideal human form. Sure, intelligence is generally valued, but I see a rather open-ended question about the relative merit of maximizing paperclips chess scores, baseball ability, or height that I'd personally prefer to defer answering.

I'm not advocating for anything other than not exterminating a particular segment of the population having certain talents.

Height is a funny one because of just how tall many European countries are now without any specific program.

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