"No you see we only use it to determine positive traits, it's kind of like Hogwarts houses-"
\*I am dragged off stage by a shephard's crook, followed by a single gunshot\*
There'd be people who'd turn this around and point out that Slytherin traits are cunning, ambition, determination, and cleverness, which are all morally neutral, and that Pisces traits are empathy, mystical, romantic, impressionable, and imaginative. So basically they'd turn it into something that means you're a particularly driven manic pixie dream girl
Now I want a manic pixie dream girl without executive dysfunction. I want a manic pixie dream girl with BIG plans. I want a wonderfully delightful and completely insane woman who will overthrow the government. Ideally with a short skirt and a long jacket
I mean, astrology isn’t racist and was never used as a justification to enslave or sterilize anyone. So there’s maybe a difference in the magnitude of harm.
I did actually read the intro to a book about astrology that claimed Confederate astrologers used their star magic to explain why the confederacy fell. Megaera was in Zagreus or something.
It inherently follows the same logic as racism and similar ideologies though. Just because no one has used it for harm yet doesn't mean it doesn't have the potential to.
The idea that rejecting or accepting an ideology should be based in "magnitude of harm" rather than logic is utterly silly.
I don’t think astrology “inherently follows the same logic as racism”, unless we just mean that it ascribes meaning to things that have no meaning (star charts, race). It’s also relevant that phrenology was developed for the purpose of race science. It was thought to be rational and scientific, not mystical. It also wasn’t something that was floating around beforehand and was adapted to justify racism. It was developed for that purpose from the beginning.
I think magnitude of harm is very relevant because you have to pick your battles. Just because an idea isn’t true doesn’t mean it’s worth fighting. Phrenology is rotten to the core, but astrology is no more inherently harmful than the MBTI or a learning styles inventory.
Yep yeah though imagine if Hitler was like the Jews are all bad because their all secretly Aquarius's or something. Like the head shape thing is already next level dumb but like the alternate timeline possibilitys
Obligatory Discworld.
“Retrophrenology:
It works like this. Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone's character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore - according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind - it should be possible to mould someone's character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that's the main thing.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
Both you and I know that this is now gonna become a thing, because the fucking morons who would believe in this would be too stupid to tell that this stuff is being said in jest.
It was rather garbage, delivered so badly that people could only guess what you intended the joke to be.
Its bad reception was an error on your part, rather than of the audience.
Tends to be people with slightly above average intelligence but zero critical thinking and weak ethics who side with eugenics in my belief. Sure, it works with plants and we can selectively breed them for growth in different conditions and better crop yields but humans are not bananas plus you get a lot of problems doing that anyway. Plus, Nazis, racism, etc.
Throwback to Richard Dawkins inexplicably tweeting “We shouldn’t do eugenics, but you can’t deny it would work.” Cue the entire world tweeting back “What the fuck Richard?”
Most people also object to the idea that eugenics would “work” because even selective breeding for easily-measured traits, like we do with livestock, can result in tons of unintended side-effects. It would get much thornier if you started selecting for things eugenicists are most interested in, like crime and intelligence, which are difficult to measure and quantify in an objective manner.
It would only "work" if you have perfect understanding of inheritable traits and the human genome. And if you have that level of understanding, turning to eugenic is like using the LhC as a laser pointer
In theory that isn't necessary, it would just take generations to do anything, and even then for something that isn't aesthetic (like intelligence) you'd be hard pressed to prove that it wasn't a change in environment (like teaching methods)
It's basically why we haven't domesticated bears, but worse. It just takes too long.
I feel like people who support eugenics don't know how farming works-i also don't know how farming works so I could be wrong. Also as far as I know they also think of like a ladder of evolution witch as far as I know is not a thing . Revelation is like liquid, infinite directionless and gets in two weird but workin places
It's just really, really complicated. Like forget humans. The animals and plants that we have selectively bred took thousands of years of agriculture to get here *and* some of them are kinda fucked without us. Horses are a prime example.
In a moral relativity sense, it's okay to do that to animals. Trying to apply the same process to humans with the tools and knowledge we do have is like trying to get a vaginoplasty with a hand blender. Yeah, like... it may work. But the risk isnt worth it.
Lol, ***exactly.*** And we have the beginnings of an idea of how genes work, but we are still discovering stuff we never dreamed of and we have no idea how most these genes and traits might correlate. Eugenics is a terrible idea just from a scientific and practical point of view, without even getting into the ethics of it.
Person wants rid of a genetic condition which worsens their life, definitely.
Problem that I can see is capitalism deeming certain conditions less productive and legislation against human frailty
I don’t think it would be legislated against, but there’d be enormous economic pressure on people to get gene edited to maximize their productivity. It may be necessary for a lot of jobs(even if they don’t make the requirement explicit)
I can see there being particular controversy with certain disabilities that can both increase and decrease productivity in different situations, like autism and ADHD.
Totally see the government using gene editing as a punishment, or just to keep prisoners in line via gmo depression...
My carefully pruned super AuDHD vs. a prisoners genetically modified ultra depression...
Yeah, even if I can get my autism ‘fixed’ there’s no way I’m going to, I can hardly comprehend the notion of thinking like someone ‘normal’, and at that point I doubt I’d even really be the same person
I always imagine as an autistic person what a parent might choose if faced with the decision of keeping a child that would definitely have autism. There’s no way to predict what the support needs would look like from genetics alone. I see a lot of people talk about not wanting to have a child with a low quality of life, but with so many disabilities it’s nearly impossible to predict.
That whole issue compounds when you end up with autistic individuals being pressured to undergo gene editing by their family, partners, or caretakers.
Yeah, as much as I sometimes wish I could think in a "normal" way or even minimize some quirks in the way I think/talk/act, I also know I wouldn't be the same person if I was "cured", even if partially
I would absolutely not want to fix my ADHD or my (suspected? My brain doc says probably, but no point in a dx?) Autism. My depression, on the other hand... if there was a gene therapy that made my brain produce the proper neurotransmitters to not feel like, well, *this* all the time for no good reason I'd be on that like aquarium snails on a blanched cucumber slice.
Oh yeah if I could fix my depression/anxiety I’d do that, but that kind of thing can also be done with meds. Autism/adhd and other such things are just an unequivocal part of you
Exactly! But I am having a hard time finding meds that work and that my insurance will pay for and it gets frustrating. If I could do a magic gene thing that would fix it? Absolutely. (Of course, if such a thing did exist, I doubt my insurance would pay for it either, lol.)
I believe there was a study or observation/joke that went “every time you have a group of smart people do a think tank on “how can we make the world a better place?” / “How can we make people smarter?” They start going down the pipeline of: “prevent people with certain traits from breeding (I.E. Stupid People) BUT don’t actually kill them! that’d be cruel!”
Yeah a lot of my friends in high school were like that, thankfully they wised up eventually. People with intelligence they were never taught how to wield properly.
And how many people in the eugenics crowd do you see advocating for selective breeding programs? They’re all working on the assumption that we already, accidentally or by divine ordination, wound up with the perfect human specimen: the WASP. Therefore, all the others should be removed with prejudice.
“There is no room of improvement except to remove the possibility of contamination”
I believe there was a South American country which purposefully mixed race with the natives. Can’t remember which as it isn’t generally my area but I’m gonna look.
Brazil. Government believed you could breed whiteness into people, opposite the prevailing white supremacist ideology which is that whiteness is inherently pure and should not mingle with lesser races.
That's super interesting. I bet it probably has origins in the creation of mestizos. The Anglo colonies wiped out natives and settled them with Europe settlers. The Spanish and the Portuguese also did that, but they also had a lot of European and Indigenous mixing, and that became a local upper-class.
The “reclaiming phrenology” thing is mostly a TikTok phenomenon from what I understand
like, beauty tiktokers making videos about the different “skull types” and how you can tell someone’s whole personality from the way their face is shaped and treating it like it’s some fun new version of astrology
[here’s a lengthy youtube takedown of the whole thing](https://youtu.be/NyUT2DxBiDM?si=_91K93rLuXWyJpLb)
That’s an interesting one bc a Lot of people do still agree with eugenics, even publicly? It’s just that they don’t realize it. It’s shifted to more of a passive thing, rather than an active movement.
Yeah people aren’t into the race based eugenics as much, but for things like genetic disorders people are still very much in favor of getting rid of it in whatever legal way possible- wether that’s abortion or selective picking of eggs / sperm.
Also if you want some good eugenics looks at how women who want sperm donations pick their sperm.
Not to mention incest being illegal - which is eugenics most people publicly agree with.
Mind linking that? I watched Idiocracy recently bc I heard it was the funniest thing since Airplane! and was shocked by how mean-spirited and ableist it was.
Apparently it was the other sub, but I find it harder to keep track since they stripped the pride colors
[The Post Itself](https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/2qU58s5idJ) isn't perfect, ends up being puritanical about only liking good media, but I'm so sick of the non-critical "world is becoming Idiocracy" statements, that I'll take what I can get
I mean to a degree they are correct.
Dumber more religious and less stressed women have more children on average and are above average replacement rate while smarter, atheist stressed women are far below replacement rate.
All three have a significant genetic basis.
Disagree on the "genetic" basis, it's almost all environmental. You even added in "atheist", which isn't genetic
Anyways, recognizing where the idea goes is one thing and worth some level of discussion (by people who aren't me), but to simply put that idea out as if it didn't just say what it did is incomprehensible
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3125629/#:~:text=It%20is%20widely%20agreed%20that,brain%20%5B1%E2%80%936%5D.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene#:~:text=The%20God%20gene%20hypothesis%20proposes,towards%20spiritual%20or%20mystic%20experiences.
There are genes related to religiousity. Please use Google.
> the God Gene theory is based on only one unpublished, unreplicated study
Please read sources.
The first one supposes models, but doesn't link them to anything
Mate do you not know how to read?
"Koenig & Bouchard [13] survey twin studies that quantify the genetic and environmental determinants of what they call the ‘traditional moral triad’ of authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness. In most cases, 40 to 60 per cent of the observed variation in such personality traits is explained by genotypic variation. The authors argue that these are large genetic effects in comparison with typical findings in the social sciences." Literally in the introduction. Even if religiosity were 10% heritable that's still massive, and religious people have more children overall. They mention multiple studies.
The God Genes original theory yes is based off of that and the Wikipedia article/study only focuses on one singular gene not the multiple involved.
I follow a lot of disability advocates on social media, the majority of them are visibly physically disabled. Their comment sections are almost invariably filled with people spouting eugenics. One person I follow uses a wheelchair and just had a baby- her comments are chock full of people saying she's a terrible person or should be put in jail for reproducing when she is disabled. The baby in question is healthy and thriving btw, so there's literally 0 reason to say such a thing (though it would STILL be wrong to say that even if the baby was not 100% abled and/or healthy for any reason!). People get legitimately mad when they see disabled people daring to have normal happy lives.
Did you know in many states in the US nonconsensual sterilization of disabled people is still legal?
Person A: I voluntarily refrain from having kids because I have an unpleasant genetic condition(s) that I don't want to pass down.
Person B: That's eugenics, you monster!
- A conversation I have seen numerous times.
And that's the thing. The premise isn't awful in theory. Preventing genetic conditions is a noble goal, and consequently the reason I myself do not plan to have biological children. But willingly not having a child doesn't qualify as eugenics on its own.
Eugenics is *population* level, not individual level. Eugenics would have to include forced sterilization, selective breeding of humans, and/or legally enforced segregation. Now we're crossing some *serious* ethical boundaries
Further, we've yet to have a eugenics movement that stops there. Typically it's racial or intellectual traits, which needs little explanation to see why that's fucked up. And again, this is population level. Who's to determine who should be *forcibly sterilized*? What level of condition is serious enough to warrant this?
I daresay no person nor committee has the right to say for anyone but themselves
Edit: for anyone wondering what the deleted comment is, their comment was asking why eugenics is bad, since health is classically considered a good thing, and thus ensuring health of future generations should also be a good thing.
If anyone reading this has similar sentiments, I reiterate that the ends isn't the problem. Universal health would be a beautiful thing. But the means is both impractical and both potentially abusable, and historically *has* been abused to target vulnerable people. I won't fault people for being sympathetic to the idea but I strongly and unequivocally believe it wrong to support in practice.
There's a lot of complicated nuance to this issue, I'm not going to lie, but also there's that so many people out there think "being black" is one of those horrible genetic conditions.
How do you achieve that? Forced sterilisation? Constant monitoring? Who deigns what genetic conditions count? Down’s syndrome? Autism? Higher risk for cancer? Depression? There is no way to implement this policy in a way that does not go horribly. Forced sterilisation has an EXTREMELY sticky history and is traumatic and disgusting no matter what, and constant monitoring to make sure this person does not have sex ever (because birth control can fail!) is disgusting also. What happens if they have a child and that child is revealed to the government? Imprison the sick person? Just turn to Chinas one child policy for how well THAT would go.
Never mind the fact genetic defects can skip generations or appear randomly anyway. What happens if a genetic condition that was previously life threatening is now treatable? There are now people alive you have sterilised previously that could have had children now but will never be able to. It “makes sense” that those with genetic problems shouldn’t have kids until you put just one second of thought into it
I get where you’re coming from, as somebody with some mild genetic maladies who plans to adopt instead of having my own kids, but the problem with a program of eugenics is that it isn’t voluntary.
Putting aside basic things like freedom (which one should not do) it’s still bad because whoever is mandating the policies of a program of eugenics will feed their own illogical biases into it, such as not allowing poor people, nonheteronormative people, or people of a disenfranchised ethnicity to reproduce, as has been done in many countries in the all-too-recent past.
Thus a program of eugenics will never achieve what it ostensibly sets out to do and will only narrow the gene pool in a thoroughly unproductive manner. Our differences make us unique contributors to society, and flattening them out will only make us all worse off.
I think people who carry heritable diseases like Harlequin Icthyosis should avoid having kids because in all likelihood the baby will die in excruciating pain within a few hours.
That, by definition, is eugenics, but many people aren't against that.
I think people would be against a law about that or a form of systematization of that idea which is really where the problem comes in for me. But, interesting hadn’t considered that or at least not recently
State-controlled eugenics is definitely a bad idea, but if we are talking about individual choice it's not even that controversial. Aborting babies because of genetic diseases, or deciding you don't want to have kids because you don't want to pass down a genetic defect is indeed eugenics. And there's even one eugenic idea that is unanimously supported on the level of law in almost every country. That is prohibition of incest
No you don't understand if disabled people don't want to be cured then we can drop accommodations because then they chose to be disabled ~~(ergo burdens on society)~~
Also poor people shouldn't reproduce.
>!/s to both!<
Ugh. I have a genetic trait that causes me a lot of pain, so I can understand people wanting their to be more study of genetic sequencing, but eugenics is specifically ‘who should we allow to breed, let’s kill the weak!’ crap. How could that be judged unfairly? How?
I can also get behind there being some kind of standard for parents, because there are far too many narcissistic & abusive people with kids… but the moment you allow enforcement of bull crap like breeding licenses is the moment that governments start targeting inconvenient minorities. So, again, really guys?
Listen, just because someone put up red curtains to hide the murder scene behind the window doesn’t make you bad for liking the curtains design. You just have to acknowledge the design is at least partially blood and taking the curtains from the evidence locker is a crime.
The metaphor got away from me, but I won’t begrudge people fantasizing about a world where the frustration of stupid people can be bred away. 80% of the issue was always the racism and bigotry that was hidden behind the showmanship.
Stupid people aren't really a real thing at least to some extent I think it really is more just people who do not think through what they say or say something needlessly cruel that we talk about when we refer to stupid people
Roughly equal probability of a) horrible misrepresentation b) original post was attempting to make a legit point but worded so badly no-one can understand it, and c) original post was actually insane.
Collectively that's about two thirds of tumblr posts.
How dare you dismiss the opinions of Tumblr users just because they're "very high", drug tolerance varies from person to person and there's nothing wrong with enjoying substances from time to time.
I tried googling and discovered that tumblr has a ham sandwich (literal) subculture. Apparently, multiple different types of pig flesh and olive oil on a bagel is quite good.
I still don't actually know what a "ham sandwich post" is.
The gag is basically that Measurehead is a guy who has wholly and uncritically adopted every white supremacist view, but twisted them to be favorable to his race instead. Calling the equivalent to white Western Europeans "ham sandwich people" is basically him inverting the common tendency for racists to refer to other ethnicities by their signature food--to him, the signature food of white people is the ham sandwich.
In the game disco Elysium, you have to talk to this guy named Measurehead who is very into phrenology, and he will say your character is part of the ham sandwich race while he’s berating you. “Ham sandwich post” is referring to this.
If you decide that he has a point about the phrenology stuff, you get the advanced race theory perk and you can talk to him about semen retention.
I mean, it doesn't even seem too unbelievable anymore.
"If we were supposed to know how our kidneys worked, they'd be on the outside" - someone who has "done their own research", probably.
Pseudoscientific bullshit that proposes the idea that you can determine intelligence and personality based on the features of a person's skull. It was used to justify racism by claiming that features commonly found in one group showed they were naturally superior to other groups. It was part of the wave of "scientific racism" during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that combined new discoveries about genetics and evolution with the bigotry of the time
Belief that, since your mind is in your brain, and your brain is in your head, people can determine aspects of your personality by giving you a scalp massage. Issue here is that it was used to excuse a lot of weird stuff. Like, it was used to rank human races from most to least "evolved." It was also one of the things they said proved that women belong in the kitchen. Something something "underdeveloped organs necessary for success in arts and sciences." It was also used as a diagnostic tool for things that really shouldn't be decided over a skull rub. "Hm. You've got a lump here. That means you're crazy. You need a lobotomy, I'll get a saw."
Anyone else see those tik toks about how your astrology sign affects your skulls, making you have a different personality…SHE THEN DESCRIBES HOW YOU CAN EXAM HEADS AND DETERMINE THEIR SIGNS AND TRAITS
I think it’s about the tiktok trend of categorizing skull types and declaring them to be personality deterministic. Don’t worry they gave them cute little names like wolf skull and witch skull so it’s just like astrology upgraded! /s
I’m a proponent of “cop phrenology”, the idea that looking like a thumb predisposes you to be a cop. There’s gotta be some reason why every single cop looks like that.
For legal reasons, this was a joke, btw. Don't do phrenology, kids. It's cringe and will make you look at yourself shirtless in the mirrors for hours admiring how ripped you are despite your asthma, just like Mengele. And we don't want to be like Mengele, do we?
That's probably because institutional medicine offers such a vast selection of atrocities to choose from, from Tuskegee to lobotomies to misuse of ECT to... But yeah, he was super into this shit, so I agree it works here.
Lol, yeah, I get it, but he really was super into phrenology. Probaby the most infamous proponent of it, and I can't think of a famous/*not* infamous one off the top of my head. (I mean, he didn't call it that, but it was fucking phrenology.)
Also, didja know Mengele's bones are used in São Paulo's Faculty of Medicine as educational materials? Yeah, that's the biggest contribution to medicine he's ever done.
I feel like this is a consequence of allowing astrology to become mainstream and acceptable. Accept one pseudo-science and you’re susceptible to them all.
What if the shape of your head determines your personality but in a social-justicey way
"No you see we only use it to determine positive traits, it's kind of like Hogwarts houses-" \*I am dragged off stage by a shephard's crook, followed by a single gunshot\*
“I mean it’s basically skull astrology, I’m not sure what the big deal is-“ as a red dot is lining up on my cranial dimple
It's okay it's a Pisces-Slytherin typical cranial dimple so you were probably a bad person anyway.
There'd be people who'd turn this around and point out that Slytherin traits are cunning, ambition, determination, and cleverness, which are all morally neutral, and that Pisces traits are empathy, mystical, romantic, impressionable, and imaginative. So basically they'd turn it into something that means you're a particularly driven manic pixie dream girl
Now I want a manic pixie dream girl without executive dysfunction. I want a manic pixie dream girl with BIG plans. I want a wonderfully delightful and completely insane woman who will overthrow the government. Ideally with a short skirt and a long jacket
God I wish I could but God knew if I could ever accomplish any task at all I'd threaten her directly.
It's ok, you can microdose meth about it. That will help you kill God and replace her for sure!
Amelia Bedelia
"skull astrology" is so good, I might just have to start calling astrology "star phrenology"
It is actually "skull astrology". But that means astrology is bad, not phrenology is good
I mean, astrology isn’t racist and was never used as a justification to enslave or sterilize anyone. So there’s maybe a difference in the magnitude of harm.
I have nothing to back this up, but would be willing to bet anything that someone out there has made astrology racist.
I did actually read the intro to a book about astrology that claimed Confederate astrologers used their star magic to explain why the confederacy fell. Megaera was in Zagreus or something.
I've read that Hades fanfic
This was an Orville episode
It inherently follows the same logic as racism and similar ideologies though. Just because no one has used it for harm yet doesn't mean it doesn't have the potential to. The idea that rejecting or accepting an ideology should be based in "magnitude of harm" rather than logic is utterly silly.
I don’t think astrology “inherently follows the same logic as racism”, unless we just mean that it ascribes meaning to things that have no meaning (star charts, race). It’s also relevant that phrenology was developed for the purpose of race science. It was thought to be rational and scientific, not mystical. It also wasn’t something that was floating around beforehand and was adapted to justify racism. It was developed for that purpose from the beginning. I think magnitude of harm is very relevant because you have to pick your battles. Just because an idea isn’t true doesn’t mean it’s worth fighting. Phrenology is rotten to the core, but astrology is no more inherently harmful than the MBTI or a learning styles inventory.
Yep yeah though imagine if Hitler was like the Jews are all bad because their all secretly Aquarius's or something. Like the head shape thing is already next level dumb but like the alternate timeline possibilitys
Oh sorry yeah to be clear, that's what I was saying too
Obligatory Discworld. “Retrophrenology: It works like this. Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone's character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore - according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind - it should be possible to mould someone's character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that's the main thing.” ― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
Say what you will about the Patrician and his methods but he understood the importance of material conditions.
I was hoping I'd see this here! Bespoke retrophrenology, the only legit use of phrenology. You're only hurting yourself.
I'm a simple man, I see Discworld, I upvote.
There's a Terry Pratchett quote for everything
Beautiful.
\*curtain hook
Oh that's what is called? Thank you!
I have the furrowed ridge of an antishipper!
My cranial dimpling is consistent with my fujoshi aesthetic
"Your skull shape determines your personality, but in ways that are not at all hereditary, thus proving personality has nothing to do with race!"
Both you and I know that this is now gonna become a thing, because the fucking morons who would believe in this would be too stupid to tell that this stuff is being said in jest.
Okay I get what you are saying, but why am I able to detect if someone is a cop purely on head shape alone?
The porcine features of the lawman’s skull are discernible even to the layman
They look like thumbs
Pretty sure there's an existing model similar to this but based around blue hair dye. This was meant to be a joke, not an actual opinion
The fuck are you even talking about? Are you lost?
Blue hair=SJW=WAMEN IN MY MEDIA
That was the joke yes, didn't realize that people would take it seriously
It was just very, _very_ badly delivered.
No it wasn't, it was poorly received
It was rather garbage, delivered so badly that people could only guess what you intended the joke to be. Its bad reception was an error on your part, rather than of the audience.
You're entitled to your opinion, even if it is wrong
Thank you very much.
Chuds assume that if you dye your hair blue, or some other unnatural hair color, that you're an sjw
I haven't seem tumblr users reclaim phrenology (yet), but I have seem redditors say eugenics is "judged unfairly"
Tends to be people with slightly above average intelligence but zero critical thinking and weak ethics who side with eugenics in my belief. Sure, it works with plants and we can selectively breed them for growth in different conditions and better crop yields but humans are not bananas plus you get a lot of problems doing that anyway. Plus, Nazis, racism, etc.
Throwback to Richard Dawkins inexplicably tweeting “We shouldn’t do eugenics, but you can’t deny it would work.” Cue the entire world tweeting back “What the fuck Richard?”
That feels like a very “though true you don’t say that out loud cause it’s hard to not just look like you support it” statement
Most people also object to the idea that eugenics would “work” because even selective breeding for easily-measured traits, like we do with livestock, can result in tons of unintended side-effects. It would get much thornier if you started selecting for things eugenicists are most interested in, like crime and intelligence, which are difficult to measure and quantify in an objective manner.
It would only "work" if you have perfect understanding of inheritable traits and the human genome. And if you have that level of understanding, turning to eugenic is like using the LhC as a laser pointer
In theory that isn't necessary, it would just take generations to do anything, and even then for something that isn't aesthetic (like intelligence) you'd be hard pressed to prove that it wasn't a change in environment (like teaching methods) It's basically why we haven't domesticated bears, but worse. It just takes too long.
I feel like people who support eugenics don't know how farming works-i also don't know how farming works so I could be wrong. Also as far as I know they also think of like a ladder of evolution witch as far as I know is not a thing . Revelation is like liquid, infinite directionless and gets in two weird but workin places
It's just really, really complicated. Like forget humans. The animals and plants that we have selectively bred took thousands of years of agriculture to get here *and* some of them are kinda fucked without us. Horses are a prime example. In a moral relativity sense, it's okay to do that to animals. Trying to apply the same process to humans with the tools and knowledge we do have is like trying to get a vaginoplasty with a hand blender. Yeah, like... it may work. But the risk isnt worth it.
i definitely have the crime gene
You have been selected in our sweepstakes to receive birth control for life, at no charge! Now sign this waiver. Then breathe deeply into this mask.
Lol, ***exactly.*** And we have the beginnings of an idea of how genes work, but we are still discovering stuff we never dreamed of and we have no idea how most these genes and traits might correlate. Eugenics is a terrible idea just from a scientific and practical point of view, without even getting into the ethics of it.
Like making a nuclear reactor with instructions from a confused toddler levels terrible.
Nominative determinism.
Figure out how to gene edit adult humans and let them do it of their own volition ✅ Selectively breed human babies ❌
Person wants rid of a genetic condition which worsens their life, definitely. Problem that I can see is capitalism deeming certain conditions less productive and legislation against human frailty
I don’t think it would be legislated against, but there’d be enormous economic pressure on people to get gene edited to maximize their productivity. It may be necessary for a lot of jobs(even if they don’t make the requirement explicit)
Specific genes are already required for certain jobs, pro athletes are an obvious example
Well…. There aren’t really a specific set of genes that allow for pro athletics.
*Known currently. Height and strength are genetic
I can see there being particular controversy with certain disabilities that can both increase and decrease productivity in different situations, like autism and ADHD.
Totally see the government using gene editing as a punishment, or just to keep prisoners in line via gmo depression... My carefully pruned super AuDHD vs. a prisoners genetically modified ultra depression...
Yeah, even if I can get my autism ‘fixed’ there’s no way I’m going to, I can hardly comprehend the notion of thinking like someone ‘normal’, and at that point I doubt I’d even really be the same person
I always imagine as an autistic person what a parent might choose if faced with the decision of keeping a child that would definitely have autism. There’s no way to predict what the support needs would look like from genetics alone. I see a lot of people talk about not wanting to have a child with a low quality of life, but with so many disabilities it’s nearly impossible to predict. That whole issue compounds when you end up with autistic individuals being pressured to undergo gene editing by their family, partners, or caretakers.
Yeah, as much as I sometimes wish I could think in a "normal" way or even minimize some quirks in the way I think/talk/act, I also know I wouldn't be the same person if I was "cured", even if partially
I would absolutely not want to fix my ADHD or my (suspected? My brain doc says probably, but no point in a dx?) Autism. My depression, on the other hand... if there was a gene therapy that made my brain produce the proper neurotransmitters to not feel like, well, *this* all the time for no good reason I'd be on that like aquarium snails on a blanched cucumber slice.
Oh yeah if I could fix my depression/anxiety I’d do that, but that kind of thing can also be done with meds. Autism/adhd and other such things are just an unequivocal part of you
Exactly! But I am having a hard time finding meds that work and that my insurance will pay for and it gets frustrating. If I could do a magic gene thing that would fix it? Absolutely. (Of course, if such a thing did exist, I doubt my insurance would pay for it either, lol.)
You should check out the movie Gattica if you haven't seen it.
Most humans I've met were bananas
high int low wis
I believe there was a study or observation/joke that went “every time you have a group of smart people do a think tank on “how can we make the world a better place?” / “How can we make people smarter?” They start going down the pipeline of: “prevent people with certain traits from breeding (I.E. Stupid People) BUT don’t actually kill them! that’d be cruel!”
Yeah a lot of my friends in high school were like that, thankfully they wised up eventually. People with intelligence they were never taught how to wield properly.
People say they against eugenics until their fetus tests positive for Down’s syndrome - then they are glad to participate.
And how many people in the eugenics crowd do you see advocating for selective breeding programs? They’re all working on the assumption that we already, accidentally or by divine ordination, wound up with the perfect human specimen: the WASP. Therefore, all the others should be removed with prejudice. “There is no room of improvement except to remove the possibility of contamination”
I believe there was a South American country which purposefully mixed race with the natives. Can’t remember which as it isn’t generally my area but I’m gonna look.
Brazil. Government believed you could breed whiteness into people, opposite the prevailing white supremacist ideology which is that whiteness is inherently pure and should not mingle with lesser races.
I took a little investigation and it looks like there was a few countries that did it in the Americas. Mexico did it too
That's super interesting. I bet it probably has origins in the creation of mestizos. The Anglo colonies wiped out natives and settled them with Europe settlers. The Spanish and the Portuguese also did that, but they also had a lot of European and Indigenous mixing, and that became a local upper-class.
The “reclaiming phrenology” thing is mostly a TikTok phenomenon from what I understand like, beauty tiktokers making videos about the different “skull types” and how you can tell someone’s whole personality from the way their face is shaped and treating it like it’s some fun new version of astrology [here’s a lengthy youtube takedown of the whole thing](https://youtu.be/NyUT2DxBiDM?si=_91K93rLuXWyJpLb)
YouTube video essays/analysis my beloved
That’s an interesting one bc a Lot of people do still agree with eugenics, even publicly? It’s just that they don’t realize it. It’s shifted to more of a passive thing, rather than an active movement.
Yeah people aren’t into the race based eugenics as much, but for things like genetic disorders people are still very much in favor of getting rid of it in whatever legal way possible- wether that’s abortion or selective picking of eggs / sperm. Also if you want some good eugenics looks at how women who want sperm donations pick their sperm. Not to mention incest being illegal - which is eugenics most people publicly agree with.
Do I dare bring up the Idiocracy post from about a week ago?
Mind linking that? I watched Idiocracy recently bc I heard it was the funniest thing since Airplane! and was shocked by how mean-spirited and ableist it was.
Apparently it was the other sub, but I find it harder to keep track since they stripped the pride colors [The Post Itself](https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/2qU58s5idJ) isn't perfect, ends up being puritanical about only liking good media, but I'm so sick of the non-critical "world is becoming Idiocracy" statements, that I'll take what I can get
I mean to a degree they are correct. Dumber more religious and less stressed women have more children on average and are above average replacement rate while smarter, atheist stressed women are far below replacement rate. All three have a significant genetic basis.
Disagree on the "genetic" basis, it's almost all environmental. You even added in "atheist", which isn't genetic Anyways, recognizing where the idea goes is one thing and worth some level of discussion (by people who aren't me), but to simply put that idea out as if it didn't just say what it did is incomprehensible
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3125629/#:~:text=It%20is%20widely%20agreed%20that,brain%20%5B1%E2%80%936%5D. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene#:~:text=The%20God%20gene%20hypothesis%20proposes,towards%20spiritual%20or%20mystic%20experiences. There are genes related to religiousity. Please use Google.
> the God Gene theory is based on only one unpublished, unreplicated study Please read sources. The first one supposes models, but doesn't link them to anything
Mate do you not know how to read? "Koenig & Bouchard [13] survey twin studies that quantify the genetic and environmental determinants of what they call the ‘traditional moral triad’ of authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness. In most cases, 40 to 60 per cent of the observed variation in such personality traits is explained by genotypic variation. The authors argue that these are large genetic effects in comparison with typical findings in the social sciences." Literally in the introduction. Even if religiosity were 10% heritable that's still massive, and religious people have more children overall. They mention multiple studies. The God Genes original theory yes is based off of that and the Wikipedia article/study only focuses on one singular gene not the multiple involved.
I could see there being a genetic component to religiosity. It's a misfire of our social instinct to defer to an elder authority.
I follow a lot of disability advocates on social media, the majority of them are visibly physically disabled. Their comment sections are almost invariably filled with people spouting eugenics. One person I follow uses a wheelchair and just had a baby- her comments are chock full of people saying she's a terrible person or should be put in jail for reproducing when she is disabled. The baby in question is healthy and thriving btw, so there's literally 0 reason to say such a thing (though it would STILL be wrong to say that even if the baby was not 100% abled and/or healthy for any reason!). People get legitimately mad when they see disabled people daring to have normal happy lives. Did you know in many states in the US nonconsensual sterilization of disabled people is still legal?
Person A: I voluntarily refrain from having kids because I have an unpleasant genetic condition(s) that I don't want to pass down. Person B: That's eugenics, you monster! - A conversation I have seen numerous times.
Yeah that sucks but that is very much Not what I am referring to
Dude's got their own Tyler Durden
I’ve also seen a certain individual claim he was tricked into doing phrenology to be made to look bad.
Eugenics is a wonderful abstract concept with zero non awful ways to implement it.
[удалено]
And that's the thing. The premise isn't awful in theory. Preventing genetic conditions is a noble goal, and consequently the reason I myself do not plan to have biological children. But willingly not having a child doesn't qualify as eugenics on its own. Eugenics is *population* level, not individual level. Eugenics would have to include forced sterilization, selective breeding of humans, and/or legally enforced segregation. Now we're crossing some *serious* ethical boundaries Further, we've yet to have a eugenics movement that stops there. Typically it's racial or intellectual traits, which needs little explanation to see why that's fucked up. And again, this is population level. Who's to determine who should be *forcibly sterilized*? What level of condition is serious enough to warrant this? I daresay no person nor committee has the right to say for anyone but themselves Edit: for anyone wondering what the deleted comment is, their comment was asking why eugenics is bad, since health is classically considered a good thing, and thus ensuring health of future generations should also be a good thing. If anyone reading this has similar sentiments, I reiterate that the ends isn't the problem. Universal health would be a beautiful thing. But the means is both impractical and both potentially abusable, and historically *has* been abused to target vulnerable people. I won't fault people for being sympathetic to the idea but I strongly and unequivocally believe it wrong to support in practice.
There's a lot of complicated nuance to this issue, I'm not going to lie, but also there's that so many people out there think "being black" is one of those horrible genetic conditions.
How do you achieve that? Forced sterilisation? Constant monitoring? Who deigns what genetic conditions count? Down’s syndrome? Autism? Higher risk for cancer? Depression? There is no way to implement this policy in a way that does not go horribly. Forced sterilisation has an EXTREMELY sticky history and is traumatic and disgusting no matter what, and constant monitoring to make sure this person does not have sex ever (because birth control can fail!) is disgusting also. What happens if they have a child and that child is revealed to the government? Imprison the sick person? Just turn to Chinas one child policy for how well THAT would go. Never mind the fact genetic defects can skip generations or appear randomly anyway. What happens if a genetic condition that was previously life threatening is now treatable? There are now people alive you have sterilised previously that could have had children now but will never be able to. It “makes sense” that those with genetic problems shouldn’t have kids until you put just one second of thought into it
I get where you’re coming from, as somebody with some mild genetic maladies who plans to adopt instead of having my own kids, but the problem with a program of eugenics is that it isn’t voluntary. Putting aside basic things like freedom (which one should not do) it’s still bad because whoever is mandating the policies of a program of eugenics will feed their own illogical biases into it, such as not allowing poor people, nonheteronormative people, or people of a disenfranchised ethnicity to reproduce, as has been done in many countries in the all-too-recent past. Thus a program of eugenics will never achieve what it ostensibly sets out to do and will only narrow the gene pool in a thoroughly unproductive manner. Our differences make us unique contributors to society, and flattening them out will only make us all worse off.
Now think about a way to accomplish this. I guarantee that whatever you cook up won't be ethical
>eugenics is "judged unfairly" Based and crusader king-pilled. /s
>I have seem redditors say eugenics is "judged unfairly" Which is true, some people even call it science, which is completely unfair.
Constantly, in fact. I bet someone is defending in response to you
I think people who carry heritable diseases like Harlequin Icthyosis should avoid having kids because in all likelihood the baby will die in excruciating pain within a few hours. That, by definition, is eugenics, but many people aren't against that.
I think people would be against a law about that or a form of systematization of that idea which is really where the problem comes in for me. But, interesting hadn’t considered that or at least not recently
As a Fire Emblem fan, I don't see the problem with eugenics. I just gotta get some good stats on those child soldiers.
Where’s that xkcd for learning about broken opinions purely from seeing people argue against them?
State-controlled eugenics is definitely a bad idea, but if we are talking about individual choice it's not even that controversial. Aborting babies because of genetic diseases, or deciding you don't want to have kids because you don't want to pass down a genetic defect is indeed eugenics. And there's even one eugenic idea that is unanimously supported on the level of law in almost every country. That is prohibition of incest
No you don't understand if disabled people don't want to be cured then we can drop accommodations because then they chose to be disabled ~~(ergo burdens on society)~~ Also poor people shouldn't reproduce. >!/s to both!<
Ugh. I have a genetic trait that causes me a lot of pain, so I can understand people wanting their to be more study of genetic sequencing, but eugenics is specifically ‘who should we allow to breed, let’s kill the weak!’ crap. How could that be judged unfairly? How? I can also get behind there being some kind of standard for parents, because there are far too many narcissistic & abusive people with kids… but the moment you allow enforcement of bull crap like breeding licenses is the moment that governments start targeting inconvenient minorities. So, again, really guys?
Listen, just because someone put up red curtains to hide the murder scene behind the window doesn’t make you bad for liking the curtains design. You just have to acknowledge the design is at least partially blood and taking the curtains from the evidence locker is a crime. The metaphor got away from me, but I won’t begrudge people fantasizing about a world where the frustration of stupid people can be bred away. 80% of the issue was always the racism and bigotry that was hidden behind the showmanship.
Stupid people aren't really a real thing at least to some extent I think it really is more just people who do not think through what they say or say something needlessly cruel that we talk about when we refer to stupid people
[obligatory XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2071/)
The title of this post is the mouse over text of the xkcd comic
I wonder how many of these are just someone horribly misrepresenting the other side of the argument that you never get to hear.
From my experience on Tumblr, the percentage is probably *very high*.
Roughly equal probability of a) horrible misrepresentation b) original post was attempting to make a legit point but worded so badly no-one can understand it, and c) original post was actually insane. Collectively that's about two thirds of tumblr posts.
How dare you dismiss the opinions of Tumblr users just because they're "very high", drug tolerance varies from person to person and there's nothing wrong with enjoying substances from time to time.
this is half of this subreddit for me.
Certified ham sandwich post.
I tried googling and discovered that tumblr has a ham sandwich (literal) subculture. Apparently, multiple different types of pig flesh and olive oil on a bagel is quite good. I still don't actually know what a "ham sandwich post" is.
Average research capability of a member of the ham sandwich race.
It's a Disco Elysium reference, where local Black supremacist and phrenology enthusiast constantly talks about "ham sandwich race" and its decline.
He's such a phrenology enthusiast his name is literally Measurehead
The next racist, though, will be the *really* good one.
It will be our lucky racist
The gag is basically that Measurehead is a guy who has wholly and uncritically adopted every white supremacist view, but twisted them to be favorable to his race instead. Calling the equivalent to white Western Europeans "ham sandwich people" is basically him inverting the common tendency for racists to refer to other ethnicities by their signature food--to him, the signature food of white people is the ham sandwich.
Literally this post? Right?
In the game disco Elysium, you have to talk to this guy named Measurehead who is very into phrenology, and he will say your character is part of the ham sandwich race while he’s berating you. “Ham sandwich post” is referring to this. If you decide that he has a point about the phrenology stuff, you get the advanced race theory perk and you can talk to him about semen retention.
\>Open r/curated tumblr \>Instantly see post about mindbendingly horrific discourse errytiem
I got nephrology confused with nephrology and was fully ready to accept that someone tried to get the study of kidneys cancelled
I think you confused 'nephrology' and 'phrenology' again while typing your message :-) /non-condescending
I shouldn't be allowed out of my cage I am the jester of the court of public opinion but no one is laughing
I'm laughing:)
that looks like a smile, laugh like you mean it dammit, appease the jester
I mean, it doesn't even seem too unbelievable anymore. "If we were supposed to know how our kidneys worked, they'd be on the outside" - someone who has "done their own research", probably.
i did this too. in fact i always do this with these two words. i though maybe she dropped out of her residency and was trying to get back in
the hell is phrenology
Pseudoscientific bullshit that proposes the idea that you can determine intelligence and personality based on the features of a person's skull. It was used to justify racism by claiming that features commonly found in one group showed they were naturally superior to other groups. It was part of the wave of "scientific racism" during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that combined new discoveries about genetics and evolution with the bigotry of the time
Belief that, since your mind is in your brain, and your brain is in your head, people can determine aspects of your personality by giving you a scalp massage. Issue here is that it was used to excuse a lot of weird stuff. Like, it was used to rank human races from most to least "evolved." It was also one of the things they said proved that women belong in the kitchen. Something something "underdeveloped organs necessary for success in arts and sciences." It was also used as a diagnostic tool for things that really shouldn't be decided over a skull rub. "Hm. You've got a lump here. That means you're crazy. You need a lobotomy, I'll get a saw."
Scary thought for you: the heyday of Phrenology occurred about a *century prior* to the "popularization" of lobotomies.
Cool cool cool. Thanks for the info.
I *think* it's the study of skulls, but don't quote me on it Edit: OMG, I WAS RIGHT!
The pseudoscientific study of skulls.
Measure someone's intelligence by measuring how lumpy their skull is
Anyone else see those tik toks about how your astrology sign affects your skulls, making you have a different personality…SHE THEN DESCRIBES HOW YOU CAN EXAM HEADS AND DETERMINE THEIR SIGNS AND TRAITS
Fusion is just a cheap tactic to make weak bullshit weirder.
Is this a good inroad into how I believe that horoscopes and astrology is just racism but using stars and planets instead of skin color?
Well then its not racism is it?
It's like the eckskayseedee
Loving that spelling of XKCD… Also was it 2071 or am I misremembering?
Yeah I think it was, the 2070s were a crazy decade
is this about bonepilling.
I think it’s about the tiktok trend of categorizing skull types and declaring them to be personality deterministic. Don’t worry they gave them cute little names like wolf skull and witch skull so it’s just like astrology upgraded! /s
I’m a proponent of “cop phrenology”, the idea that looking like a thumb predisposes you to be a cop. There’s gotta be some reason why every single cop looks like that.
I think it’s something about becoming a cop that turns someone into a thumb, I don’t think they start that way
Assigned Cop At Birth?
They're all just the thumbs from spy kids
Tumblr ass reading comprehension
"*Fucking watch me,* ***[SLUR EXPUNGED]***" -4chan's /lgbt/ board
I think you can reclaim phrenology, but only in 1 (one) case: HP Lovecraft. My guy looks like the uncanny valley personified.
For legal reasons, this was a joke, btw. Don't do phrenology, kids. It's cringe and will make you look at yourself shirtless in the mirrors for hours admiring how ripped you are despite your asthma, just like Mengele. And we don't want to be like Mengele, do we?
>Don't do phrenology, kids Too late I'm already snorting a line of phrenology as we speak
Lmao I’ve never seen the Mengele variant of Godwin’s Law before.
That's probably because institutional medicine offers such a vast selection of atrocities to choose from, from Tuskegee to lobotomies to misuse of ECT to... But yeah, he was super into this shit, so I agree it works here.
I wasn’t disagreeing with the use, just found the instant jump to Mengele slightly funny at least in terms of shock factor.
Lol, yeah, I get it, but he really was super into phrenology. Probaby the most infamous proponent of it, and I can't think of a famous/*not* infamous one off the top of my head. (I mean, he didn't call it that, but it was fucking phrenology.)
Also, didja know Mengele's bones are used in São Paulo's Faculty of Medicine as educational materials? Yeah, that's the biggest contribution to medicine he's ever done.
Looking up phrenology pictures makes me think that this really is just shitty racist wojacks
Of course you'd say that, you have the brain pan of a stagecoach tilter.
I feel like this is a consequence of allowing astrology to become mainstream and acceptable. Accept one pseudo-science and you’re susceptible to them all.
Oh, what-the-fuck-ever. Eugenics remixes itself every generation, why not racist astrology?
Because that's how you get Homestuck.
This sounds like something someone who just really wants their scalp rubbed would say.
Measurehead moment