Planetary resources are due to be strained in the coming decades and it is now time to limit acces to procreation to those only who will produce healthy, intelligent, viable offspring. Imagine a world where everyone has an IQ over 140?/

Heaven.

Nazi nazi [Nazi

The fundamenta myth of Eugenics is that man, in the universal sense, is solely and only a genetic blueprint - an animated hunk of meat.

From this false premise, more in a moment, you can therefore derive the belief that the prettier the hunk of meat the more valuable it is, the better it is. That is the fundamental premise of Eugenics - you are meat and only the pretty meat deserves life.

Of course the counter to this is the belief that there is a spiritual side of existence - that there is more to you than the hunk of meat you happen to currently be inhabiting.

The life force, you the individual who is self aware, is independent of and transcends the coarse existence physicality. In simple word you are you - a spitual being independent of your body. You are not your body - you have a body but you the thinking being have existence independent of that body.

This is, and has been, not new information. Buddha was well aware of it 2500 years ago. Other Religious and Spiritual thinkers have acknowledged this at many times and places.

The belief, in our culture, that there is no existence beyond the physical is an invention of rather recent vintage. It was born in the materialistic 19th century and has nothing to back it up. That we are Spiritual Beings is something most of us are aware of instinctively - and thus the resistence to materialist philosophies that reduce us to nothing more than meat. You are a Spiritual Being. You have worth as a person. Don't let the small minded beat you down into believing you are something pitiable and malleable for the "Master Race" to control.

Idiot.

You may well imagine a planet with only people of IQ 140 and higher, as it clearly wouldn't contain you.

Idiot.

And who would enforce your little nazi wet dream? Who would get to choose who's an alpha and who's a delta? You?

Idiot.

I have an IQ of 155. I'm sick of walking around in a world full of morons. Do you have any idea how tedious this is for people like me?

eugene, the intelligence quotient is defined in such a way that the median value is 100 -- that is, no matter how many people you slaughter in your well-thought out eugenics scheme, 50 percent of the population will always be at or below 100, and 50 percent above.

when you drive, it's easy to see stupidity. They're everywhere.

I wish my IQ was able to be measured without exponential positive integers in quotation marks.

Sheepdog's eugenic plan:

Before being allowed to procreate, one must be able to pass a physical/mental trial in which 50+% fails.

The rest will sort itself out.

The first to go should be people who have high opinions of themselves without cause (See above posting).

It's just my humble nature not to mention the actual number.

There is enough despair in the world already. Opps, I guess you're on the loosing 50+%. Sorry.

I would say there would be despair if you were considered to be among the brightest.

HAHAHAHAHA

Get better EV or move somewhere else. You know your job here.

These are some scattered thoughts on racism, Eugenics, and conservative ideology. An earlier posting of mine (see link below) discussed Christian right anti-Semitism, and may be read in tandem with this VERY LONG piece, if you're interested. Comments are welcome, of course. And if you are able to provide additional verifiable documentation on this subject, please post it here.

I'd also like to thank the troll Dotboy/Kevin/Jacksback for causing me to reflect on the central role of IQ-based pseudoscience in the conservatives' neo-Malthusian worldview, and its similarity to Plato's ideas on Eugenics. You get ideas from the strangest places sometimes!

THE PIONEER FUND AND NAZI GERMANY

In 1937, William E. Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote "A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there."

The U.S. industrialists to whom Dodds referred survived the war with their fortunes more or less intact, and their reputations only slightly tarnished. In the succeeding decades, they won ever-increasing respect from and influence on the American Right. When they died, their children and grandchildren continued to work towards their utopian dream of a society based on the dictates of white supremacy.

One of the most important tools of these industrialists was the Pioneer Fund. Its first president was, essentially, the author of Nazi Germany's Eugenics policy. The Pioneer Fund still exists today--its eugenical mandate virtually unchanged--so it's worthwhile to discuss its origins.

By the early 1900s, the social Darwinist myth--expressed in Herbert Spencer's meaningless (but ever so memorable) tautology "Survival of the Fittest"--was firmly established among American industrialists.

Many readers will know that social Darwinism and the free-trade movement arose together in England, while the industrial American North remained largely protectionist. What's important to note, though, is that the agrarian American South was firmly committed to free trade at a time when Washington was imposing tariffs on imports. The Civil War was in many ways a war for the principles of free trade (the right to use slave labor being a central one), and there was at all times a serious chance that laissez-faire Britain would enter the war on behalf of its ideological allies in the South. The mere possibility is said to have kept Lincoln awake nights.

(This is an interesting topic, but it's too complex to discuss here. Suffice it to say that the confluence in the Antebellum South of laissez-faire economics and white-supremacist racism is worth bearing in mind while reading what follows. For a more thorough discussion of how the current conservative anger at government regulation of business can be traced in part to Southern anger at the loss of the plantation system, see Michael Lind's Made In Texas.)

Andrew Carnegie was particularly enthralled with the social Darwinist worldview, and it was his own Carnegie Institution that founded the Center for Genetic Research at Cold Spring Harbor (current home of the Human Genome Project) in 1904. In 1910, with the financial support of the Harriman family (whom the astute reader will recognize as Prescott Bush's co-conspirators in the "Trading with the Enemy" scandals of 1942), Charles Davenport, the director of the Cold Spring Harbor center, established the Eugenics Record Office, and appointed a former high-school teacher and amateur eugenicist named Harry H. Laughlin as its superintendent.

The fact that Laughlin had no qualifications seems not to have bothered Davenport...possibly because Davenport was a fellow eugenicist with strong anti-Semitic leanings.

Laughlin used his newfound scientific respectability to push for eugenic programs across the country and around the world. As Paul Lombardo, historian at the University of Virginia, says, "Advocacy in favor of sterilization was one of Harry Laughlin? first major projects at the Eugenics Record Office. In 1914, he published a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that proposed to authorize sterilization of the 'socially inadequate'....Borrowing from Laughlin? Model Law, the German Nazi government adopted a law in 1933 that provided the legal basis for sterilizing more than 350,000 people. Laughlin proudly published a translation of the German Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny in The Eugenical News."

In May 1936, Laughlin was awarded an honorary Medical degree from the University of Heidelberg, in recognition of his work in 'the science of racial cleansing.'" This touching tribute was bestowed upon him by Dr. Carl Schneider, a "scientific adviser" to the murderers of Germany's handicapped population. According to Holocaust research Dr. William E. Seidelman, "Schneider conducted psychological assessments of children he knew were doomed to die, and had their brains collected and dissected after they were murdered." Schneider later committed suicide after being interviewed by war-crimes prosecutors.

With Wickliffe Draper, Laughlin established the Pioneer Fund as a charitable trust on February 27, 1937 in New York City. Draper, the heir to a substantial Massachusetts textile fortune, was a passionate admirer of the Hitler's' racialist ideology, and hoped to send American blacks back to Africa.

Fortified by the moral support of Nazi Germany's medical community, and the deep pockets of Wickliffe Draper, Laughlin giddily made plans for the dawning of a bright new eugenical day. One of his first schemes was a system of cash bonuses for U.S. air-force members who procreated copiously (the racial and the hereditary qualities of both partners were to be carefully considered, of course). Another goal was "the eugenical education of the American people by moving picture films on eugenical subjects." To this end, Draper acquired a subtitled Nazi propaganda film in hopes that they could "lend the film to high schools, colleges, clubs, churches...." In this, as in so many other reprehensible endeavors, they were successful. A letter from Laughlin to Draper, dated December 9, 1938, says "You will be interested to know that the moving picture film "Eugenics in Germany" has proven very popular with senior high school students. Up to date the film has been loaned 28 times."

Laughlin also lobbied Congress vigorously to change U.S. immigration law. Largely as a result of his efforts, the Johnson Act set quotas on immigration; Nordic races were given high quotas; other races--including the Jews--were given low ones.

The website Eugenics-Watch.com says, "The Johnson Act turned out to be one of the most lethal bills ever passed. Fifteen years after its passage, Jews trying to escape from Nazi Germany were refused asylum in America. It is not possible to know how many Jews would have fled to the United States if they had been welcome. Of the six million Jews who died under Hitler, would 10,000 have been saved by a more hospitable policy? Would half a million people have been saved?

"The annual immigration quota for Germany was 25,957. That is, 25,957 German people were allowed to move into the United States each year, but no more. The number of people who applied for visas during one year under Hitler was six times the quota. That is, well over 100,000 people applied for visas and failed to get them. Further, besides the people who applied, there must have been others who knew they were not welcome and did not even bother to try."

The Anti-Defamation League website states, more bluntly, that Harry Laughlin "was active in efforts to block Jews fleeing persecution prior to World War II."

Laughlin retired from the Pioneer Fund in 1941, and died in 1943. At the time of his death, he was neither disgraced, nor discredited.

Wickliffe Draper, sad to say, was still very much alive, and very busy. Among other projects, he found time to fund the American Mercury, house organ of The Liberty Lobby. When it came to racists, Draper was a very generous man. His funding of William Shockley and Phillippe Rushton, for instance, is well known. Shockley's main claim to fame--after the invention of the transistor--is a proposed government policy under which blacks would be paid to undergo sterilization. One of Rushton's more comical theories is that blacks are the result of an evolutionary strategy that jettisoned intellectual capabilities in favor of large penises; thus, the smaller your penis is, the smarter you are. (Where women fit into this equation is anybody's guess.)

In a 1977 article, The New York Times reported that "In the 1950's and 1960's Mr. Draper supported two now-defunct committees that gave grants for genetics research....The committee members included Representative Francis E. Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC]; Henry E. Garrett, an educator known for his belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks, and Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi."

When he wasn't arguing against trying Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, Senator James O. Eastland (R-Miss) was an unabashed and overwrought racist who rather poetically objected to the idea of sharing "his" country with "black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers.... African flesh-eaters."

He also publicly regaled his supporters with a travesty of the Declaration of Independence, which ran "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives.... All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers."

You might want to read that quote again before continuing.

I don't think anyone will be surprised to learn that U.S. Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss) got his start in politics as an aide to and protege of this charming fellow, who retired a mere 25 years ago, in 1978. Lott's senatorial website (entitled "Mississippi First!") recounts his "pleasure" at delivering some remarks at the recent unveiling of Eastland's portrait. Perhaps wisely, he declines to quote these remarks.

The Times continues, "Mr. Draper also gave money to right-wing political candidates, including the late Representative Donald Bruce [Republican] of Indiana...as well as to conservative lobbying organizations such as the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies."

Perhaps the most interesting latter-day director of the Pioneer Fund was Thomas Ellis, manager of Jesse Helm's 1972 senate campaign, and an advisor to Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign. (We'll meet him again before long.)

More recently, the Pioneer Fund was the primary financial sponsor of California's anti-immigration bill Proposition 187.

A couple of background notes, before we continue. The central "scientifc" ideology behind Eugenics is the concept of biological, or genetic, determinism, which remains wildly compelling today in many circles. Eugenics, having been discredited after Hitler, evolved into sociobiology, and sociobiology, having been found politically unsavory, morphed into today's "evolutionary psychology." Regardless of their names, each of these disciplines postulates a purely genetic basis for alleged behavioral differences between races and sexes. I find all of these disciplines to be deeply flawed, and the politics of their leading adherents to be deeply suspect. I agree with population geneticist Richard Lewontin's assertion that "biological determinism is the conjunction of political necessity with an ideologically formed view of nature," and his opinion that the current obsession with genes is merely a pseudoscientific update of nineteenth-century theories on "tainted blood." I'd go a bit further and say that some of this research bears a great similarity to the pseudoscience of phrenology, which formerly did so much to explain why whites were "superior" to other races.

I'm often troubled by an unquestioning acceptance of crude sociobiological and even social Darwinist arguments on the Left. In some people, this may partially be a function of materialist hostility to religion or metaphysics, and an embracing of a scientific "truth" that seems to destroy these supposed exemplars of human irrationality. However, it's not a scientifically supported view, in that the truth of biological determinism is undecided (and probably undecidable) in scientific terms. (Steven Rose's Alas Poor Darwin is a good collection of essays by various experts on evolutionary psychology, and is well worth reading if you're interested.) Also, far from being incompatible, the combination of social Darwinism and triumphalist religion leads directly to the concept of Manifest Destiny: Not only are the "darkies" genetically inferior, but God put the White Man on earth to rule over them...converting them if possible, killing them if necessary.

Whatever the dangers of social Darwinist assumptions on the Left, the German historian Stephen Kuhl has sobering words for those on the Right who accept at face value the conclusions of researchers and theorists involved with the Pioneer Fund. The Fund was, he says, "founded by supporters of Hitler's policies against ethnic minorities and handicapped people and provided money for introducing Nazi propaganda into the United States; it still sponsors research (and projects) that have striking similarities to the work that provided the scientific basis for Nazi measures."

In the next sections, we'll see who some of those supporters were, and are.

The Bush Family, Eugenics, and the Pioneer Fund

As stated earlier, Harry Laughlin's Eugenics Office at Cold Spring Harbor was funded in part by the Harriman family, which campaigned tirelessly for the mass sterilization of "undesirables" during the 1920s. As part of this campaign, the Harrimans helped organize a series of international Eugenics conferences. At the 1932 conference, held at the Museum of Natural History in New York, the guest of honor was Dr. Ernst Rudin, head of the German Society for Racial Hygiene and formulator of the Nazi anti-miscegenation laws. Rudin was put in charge of the Institute for Mental Health and Racial Hygiene in 1933.

A "supporting member" of the Eugenics Congress was William H. Draper Jr., a New York investment banker. William Draper was a cousin of Wickliffe, and a close personal friend of the avid eugenicist Prescott Bush. Like Bush, Draper was deeply involved with Fritz Thyssen and the Nazi front Union Banking account, which was seized by the US government in 1942.

At this point, the waters become muddy. Draper's close involvement with the Bush family is clear, as is his fascination with Eugenics. There are many resources on the Web that explain the connections between the Bush family, Draper, the Nazi eugenicists, and the Pioneer Fund. While I don't reject these claims out of hand, they need to be fully documented, and there's an unfortunate circularity in the citations these sites offer. It can be difficult to sort out facts from left- and right-wing conspiracy theories. (For example, the overtly anti-Black racism of Planned Parenthood, and its early support by far-right eugenicists, has been thoroughly researched by Christian anti-abortion activists; however, their other speculations--about the role of Satan in the UN, for instance--make them a treacherous source to cite except when they provide footnotes from more responsible sources. Similar problems obtain with many researchers on the Left.)

Draper's ongoing involvement with Ernst Rudin, and George H.W. Bush's convening of the white-supremacist scientists Shockley and Arthur Jensen as key speakers at a 1969 Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population, are particularly interesting subjects for discussion...but research online and trips to the library have not yet turned up the hard documentation (i.e., dates, places, and verbatim quotes) I'm looking for. If anyone has this documentation, please post it here!

It is interesting, however, to note the Bush family's close ties with William H. Draper III, who describes himself as "one of America's first venture capitalists," and who was co-chairman for finance of Bush I's 1980 presidential campaign. From 1981 to 1986, he served as President and Chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. He is currently on the board of Population Action International PAI, an organization dedicated to lowering the birth rate in the Third World. PAI works closely with the World Bank. It may be a harmless organization, and Draper's interest in the breeding habits of the Third World may be a humanitarian concern lacking the fanaticism of his forebears. Either way, the apparent passing-down of reproductive alarmism through generations of the Draper family seems to me to be worthy of mention.

The question of GOP connections to the Pioneer Fund will be addressed in more detail below. For now, what is clear is that Nazism had a large number of American sympathizers, many of whom were wealthy and powerful people with backgrounds in business, politics, and science. When Hitler was defeated, these people sought a more discreet way of bringing about the eugenical utopia they'd been denied. At the center of this strategy was the issue of genetic determinism, and the question of IQ tests, and this is where the Pioneer Fund concentrated its efforts.

THE PIONEER FUND, MANKIND QUARTERLY, AND THE BELL CURVE

Many readers will remember the controversial book The Bell Curve. This white-supremacist manifesto--which masqueraded as dispassionate science--was written by the late Harvard professor Richard J. Herrnstein and the current American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray. The thesis of this book is that blacks are genetically inferior to whites in the matter of intelligence, and that educational and social programs designed to help blacks learn are therefore doomed to failure.

The book uses IQ testing as the basis for most of its claims, despite the inability of IQ testing to measure intelligence accurately, and its proven racial and cultural biases, and the contempt the author of the test had for genetic determinism. Not content, however, with a hopelessly flawed, inherently racist, and willfully misused testing regime, the authors use poor trigonometry test scores among blacks as evidence of inferiority--despite the fact that trigonometry is clearly an acquired rather than an innate skill--thus penalizing blacks for a failure that could more reasonably be blamed on a disinterested or underfunded school system, low self-esteem, or poor environmental conditions.

According to the Bethune Institute, Richard Hernnstein's earlier writings on race and intelligence were distributed by the Pioneer Fund to thousands of university admissions offices in the early seventies, in an attempt to influence them against admitting African American students.

Charles Murray, for his part, admits to having burned a cross in his high-school days, but claims that he "didn't realize the act had racial significance."

A confession of ignorance--or an outright lie--this monumental is more understandable when one reads Murray's writings. Not surprisingly, The Bell Curve relies heavily on suspect research conducted by figures associated with the Pioneer Fund and its associated organ The Mankind Quarterly. THE MANKIND QUARTERLY was founded in 1960. Its racial views are extreme, and dovetail nicely with those of Nazi Germany. (In fact, the Nazi racial theorist Ottmar von Verschuer, who was a profound influence on Josef Mengele, served on its editorial board for a time.) THE MANKIND QUARTERLY articles have praised the racial policies of Hitler and Mussolini, fiercely defended apartheid, and supported white colonial rule for the whole of Africa.

(1) Since 1978, the editor of THE MANKIND QUARTERLY has been Roger Pearson of the white-supremacist Northern League, a neo-Nazi group based in the UK. Pearson, who advocates the eugenic extermination of "inferiors," founded the Northern League in 1958, in collaboration with Hans F.K. Gunther, who was an influential figure in early Nazi circles (Gunther’s Race-science of the German People was strident in its description of the dangers of "Jewish contamination") and a handful of former SS officers. Pearson’s neo-Nazi notions didn't disqualify him from membership in American conservative groups, however; in fact, he was formerly a member of the editorial board of Policy Review, the house organ of the Heritage Foundation.

In 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to Roger Pearson that said: "you are performing a valuable service in bringing to a wide audience the work of leading scholars who are supportive of a free enterprise economy, a firm and consistent foreign policy and a strong national defense. Your substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad are greatly appreciated. I hope that your efforts continue to receive broad interest and support and wish you every success in your future endeavors."

Almost every substantial finding reported in The Bell Curve is credited to researchers funded by the Pioneer Fund and/or published in THE MANKIND QUARTERLY. Nevertheless, the National Review issued a spirited defense of The Bell Curve and its authors, under the disagreeably messianic title "How to Think About Race." This is not too surprising, since they had several months earlier published a rave review of Phillipe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior, which was published by Rushton's own "Charles Darwin Research Institute," with the help of the Pioneer Fund. (Rushton, by the way, acceded to the leadership of the Pioneer Fund in January 2003).

Pioneer Fund historian William H. Tucker says, "Rushton has not only contributed to American Renaissance publications [see below] and graced their conferences with his presence but also offered praise and support for the 'scholarly' work on racial differences of Henry Garrett, who spent the last two decades of his life opposing the extension of the Constitution to blacks on the basis that the 'normal' black resembled a European after frontal lobotomy." Doubtless, NR was pleased to see that Herrnstein and Murray dedicated a full two pages of their appendix to defending Rushton. Whether it's logically possible for a non-racist to defend Rushton is a question I leave open; most scientists, however, would categorize him as an exponent of racialist pseudoscience. Of course, this leaves his supporters free to see him as a purveyor of unpleasant truths to a blinkered, ossified scientific establishment. There have been such figures in the history of science, so it's a powerful image. But the fact remains that most of the people who have cast themselves in this role have been charlatans or maniacs. I personally would class Rushton as both: he's a racist maniac who labors under a drooling obsession with the sexuality and genitalia of black men, and this mania has led directly to the charlatanism of his "science."

IQ, WELFARE SPENDING, AND THE CASTE SOCIETY

The conservative fixation on IQ leads me inexorably to a couple of long-winded digressions. First, the concept of IQ on which Herrnstein and Murray rely is spurious. What we're dealing with is an unjustifiable reification of a mental construct--the so-called Intelligence Quotient--into a hereditable, tangible thing with an independent existence in the world of facts. More accurately, as Richard Lewontin has pointed out, IQ involves a double reification: a number arrived at through arbitrary calculations is reified first as a true qualitative measurement of an abstract thing, and then as the "measured" (but still abstract) thing itself.

Thus Bell and Herrnstein can speak blithely about "inheriting" IQ, without noticing that they're talking about inheriting a number assigned to an abstract quality that has been measured to an arbitrary extent by means of an arbitrary process. In reality, "intelligence" remains something wholly aloof from these calculations. One does not have intelligence the way one has a fever. You might just as well invent tests to arrive at a Love Quotient or an Anger Quotient as an Intelligence Quotient. It's commonly said, only half in jest, that under the terms of an IQ test, "intelligence" can be defined as "that which is measured by IQ testing."

IQ measurement is a central concept in conservative circles, especially those concerned with welfare and education. Superficially, conservatives argue in favor of an American "meritocracy." However, believers in genetic determinism have loaded the dice, so that those who "merit" success are delimited in advance on the basis of race, sex, class, or some combination thereof.

This is a convenient form of attack, because it's once removed from its actual target. The problem is no longer that blacks are subhuman "flesh-eaters"; we now have recourse to the "scientifically neutral" matter of IQ. Thus, dissenters who ignore the Eternal Truths of science in favor of a delusional attachment to egalitarianism sin against science through irrationalism, and sin against blacks by forcing them into a "civilized" role they're not evolutionarily prepared for, and sin against society by imposing an unjustifiable financial burden on it (i.e., by trying to give blacks more education than their genetically inferior brains can handle).

I want to be perfectly clear about this. The findings of Pioneer Fund researchers argue that the IQ of blacks can't be raised appreciably by state or private intervention; this implies clearly that public schools and welfare programs and various forms of minority outreach are a waste of time and money...it's the proverbial case of trying to teach a pig to sing. Whether some inherent racism makes these scientifically unfounded findings appealing to conservatives, or whether it's simply a case of each group finding the other useful, "facts" derived from Pioneer Fund research have found their way into the consciousness of mainstream and moderate conservatives; many of them have no idea of the pedigree of these ideas, and I'm optimistic enough to believe that some of them would surely be horrified to find out.

The current debate over Bush's attempted gutting of the Head Start program is very suggestive, in that the Pioneer Fund recipient Arthur Jensen furiously attacked Head Start in the Harvard Education Review way back in 1969. This article was extremely influential in mainstream conservative circles, and is still making the rounds on every neoeugenic and white-supremacist website out there, always with the obligatory attacks on people who let their racial sensitivities stand in the way of Cold Hard Science.

IQ is an idea that won't go away, despite the fact that it's a rather shallow form of statistical inference. It's not just a matter of its intangibility, either. A shadow, for instance, can provide perfectly valid information about the body that casts it. But in the case of IQ, both the "body" and its shadow are illusory. They simply don't exist as real qualities of a real thing.

Though IQ testing is mildly useful as a predictive tool, it's predictive merely of how well a given student will negotiate an arbitrarily delimited set of tests and problems; such a test regime is necessarily constrained not only by its own limited terms and definitions, but also by culture and language.

IQ testing is by no means predictive of scholastic or financial success (high-IQ children often do poorly in mainstream schools, which is why they're classed with the developmentally disabled as "special-needs" children), and certainly can't be correlated with moral excellence or psychological stability or human happiness or any other classical virtue. It doesn't measure creativity or artistic skill, either. The test is quite humble, in fact, offering few valid predictions, and no valid explanations. (In fact, Binet, the test's originator, presciently worried that his test would be perverted by biological determinists in order to stigmatize certain children as "unteachable.") It's only as a social concept that IQ has real power, and that power is primarily ideological. As such, it belongs more to rhetoric than to the sciences.

Eugenics, IQ, and the belief in genetic determinism that lies behind conservative appeals to them, all tie in nicely with the Platonic idea of a republic based on rigidly defined social classes, which has been extremely influential in conservative circles from the Straussians to Michael Savage. Plato suggests a division of society into various groupings based on hereditary castes that would be kept pure through eugenic practices. The ruling military class alone receives an education, and is alone endowed with full social and political rights. One of the most important rights self-granted by this ruling caste, is the right to limit the numbers of the socially inferior "sheep," so that they cannot become a danger (through sheer numbers) to the elite.

In his remarkable attention to issues of breeding, and his assumption that the ruling class must exercise careful control over the breeding habits of "inferiors," Plato can deservedly be called the father of Eugenics. Read The Republic, and you'll be confronted with endless warnings about the degeneration of the Master Race through miscegenation and other "improper" breeding practices. Go to any white-supremacist website you please, and you'll find Plato's opinions offered as scientific truth. I believe that the conservative approach to issues of education and social well-being is either derived from or perfectly consistent with this aspect of Platonism, and that the doctrines of genetic determinism and social Darwinism are part of an attempt to put a "scientific" face on this age-old utopian pipe-dream of the self-styled aristocratic class.

As a personal example - my father was tested upon entrance into the military. He was a poor country kid who grew up on an Indian Reservation in a rural State.

His IQ score was 36. He was classified as an Imbecile.

He went on to become a Commercial Pilot and Flight Instructor.

The point is that many IQ tests are culturally biased toward a particular background and upbringing. A test which might be accurate for a Kid who grew up in an Urban setting might give a wildly inaccurate score to someone whose life background was at variance with the ASSUMED NORM. IQ tests are not necessarily Objective. Not to toot my own horn but, if IQ tests are accurate, and intelligence is an "inheritable" trait, how come I scored in the gifted category (above 140) when I was tested in school? The point is not that I have a high IQ but that if my father's score of 36 was accurate (laughably not true - based on his demonstrated abilities) then how would Eugenics account for a score of a child in excess of 100 points above the parent? It doesn't. Eugenics is flawed, it is unscientific, it is dogma used to justify the twisted political and social agenda of some really sick puppies.

P.S. Thanks to "Enlighten the Truth" for a great article.

How would Eugenics account for the Tuskegee Airmen? The most decorated Fighter Unit in the European Theater in WWII. They were the best - no qualifications. They were all BLACK. They weren't allowed to associate with decent White folks. They distinguished themselves as NEVER losing a Bomber under their Protection. Bomber Pilots were known to fight to have them as their escort. Did I mention they were the best?

So, how does the cud chewing, KKK, Eugenics crowd account for this?

If you don't make the cut you get the snip, no exceptions. Everyone takes 3 tests, the best of 3 is taken. What is culturally biased about rotating a cube???

In the second generation, who are a lot smarter, we just trim off the tail end of the Bell curve, bottom 1%.

Hell, it could just be something we do every 500 years, a cleanng out of the gene pool. In the old days war and disease took care of things and now the planets dangerously overcrowded. Since we reproduce exponentially we're in real danger right now. I say, let's weed out the population.

Sheepdog's Eugenics culling trials come in. Say a walk of about 100 miles in a wilderness terrain to a specific point only with the food and water you can carry.

Then you get to apply for a breeding partner.

Such a silly an immature discussion. Is this from the same people who claim that it would be wrong for Israel to perform genocide on the Palestinians? Wouldn't that be the stronger killing the weaker?

We are animals but we are not the same as other animals. We have the ability to reason beyond food and shelter. Killing people is not the answer.

No

this is only the demonstration of power supplied from someone else.

Old stuff. Kills the wrong people.

Use my method.

Eugenic without violence.

...I take it you support the forced sterilization of professional welfare mothers and crack whores?

No such animal. People will not willingly be lead to the slaughter by Nazi types like you.

No such animal. People will not willingly be lead to the slaughter by Nazi types like you.

A word without liberals and anarchists. Yeah, this Eugenics things might just be the answer.

but that's right. You don't need much of a figleaf for that tiny program of yours.

All supporters of Eugenics see themselves as superior examples of humanity.

Think about it.

You want to sterilize those who cannot make a 100 walk through the woods, and say it's for the betterement of mankind.

Yet calls for the sterilization of professional welfare mothers and crack whores are "genocode"?

Let me sum up your logic:

Sheepdog's ideas = good.

Conservative ideas = bad.

Gee...you really ARE an idiot.

The whole problem with eugenics (and Enquiring Mind nailed it perfectly) is that someone has to set standards that will ultimately spell doom for a large fraction of humanity.

Do you think you're qualified to set that standard, Lambie Pie? I know I'm not...and neither are you. No one is. Don't pretend otherwise, or you wind up looking like an intellectual, and we all know how irritating that is.

How about feeding the people we have? Nix the gov't paying farmers not to produce. Get every acre of arable land planted. Have the UN (spit) buy everything we can't use here (at fair maket prices), making sure all our folks are fed first, and then distribute what's left where it's needed. Militarily if necessary, to eliminate the "local warlords hoarding" problem.

Gee, I'd have thought a good, caring Liberal such as yourself would rather do that than kill off a third (or more) of humanity.

BTW: Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and other environmental groups wouldn't like you using wilderness for your marches. The marchers would probably leave PowerBar wrappers all over the place, and we can't have that, can we?

nature, and ones own ability will provide the selection.

Not the amount one has in their bank account.

Sheepdog's idea = good

What's the matter, wouldn't make it?

What a completely stupid thread. Everyone with IQ's over 140, huh. Well, that

pretty much wipes out the working class of the world. Set a match to the Continents

of Africa and South America, and Central America. Lots of Oriental people would

make it. Of course they make up a quarter of the world's population anyway

but they consistantly outperform other races in school.

Kill people who aren't a certain IQ. This is one of the nuttier one's to come along in a while.

This thread may not be worth saving. We'll see if any more stupid comments come along. Then I'll decide.

So in your elite analysis, the working class is automaticly lower I'Q'

well, that just goes to show you that someone needs to pull their head into the light from the dark warm and stinky place it is residing. Circumstances, not intelligence determines social position in a vast amount of cases. Look at our pResident.

Now there is an example of indolent stupidity.

IQ tests are based upon book knowledge, not street smarts. The working class would die under your scenerio. But it's not like this thing is ever gonna happen anyway, so why invest so much time in it?

Like I said, I'll perform my own brand of Eugenics if comments, including your last one, doesn't get any better. Let's see if your IQ can do anything about it.

you wouldn't make it either.

Humans have evolved into 'intelligence' due to the fact that the ones who could solve problems and survive the riggors of their enviornment, procreated. Your scewed book knowledge has little to do with anything but the ability to take tests, sitting at a desk.

The intelligent always find a way to survive. Book knowledge is just another

way of testing intelligence. The same people who excel in book knowledge

would excel if they were farmers or fishermen. It has everything to do with having

a can-do attitude. That's who make up the body of survivors.

Somebody sitting there going "IMHO you wouldn't make it", who cares what

anybody thinks that's says crap like that? What, someone else comes back

and say "Well, I don't think YOU would make it." Big Whoop-De-Fuck!! Jeez, how childish.

Besides, it doesn't matter anyway. This eugenics thing isn't gonna happen.

You know that. Let it die.

Especially the stupid people who wrote on this thread that Euegenics is about slaughter.

Those people must not be allowed to reproduce. Same goes for anarchists, communists and Green issues people - they're de facto too stupid to transmit their stupidity genes.

i.q. tests don't test the higher faculties AND the questions, sometimes rely on redundant logic; like if A,B,C are wrong then D. Someone could do extremely well on the science&math part , and fail miserably in the word interpretation/grammar(fuck)/geography, etc..

It shows you are adept in a lot of areas, on the surface-- fields require a concentrated effort, you know

I recall a young man who ran the Freight Elevator in the Warehouse my Mother worked in. In fact I played Chess against him. He was the Third Ranked Player in the State - I was ecstatic that I was able to take a game off of him. Oh, and by the way, he belonged to Mensa.

I recall another young man of my acquantaince. He came from the "wrong side of the tracks" and dressed like a bum. As a Freshman in College he began playing with Mathematics - Abstract Geometry to be exact - it was a fun game to him. His Math Professor "asked his permission" to share his work with his colleagues. To anyone who didn't know him he looked just like any other kid from a rather bad background.

The point of these stories is: Stereotypes.

The presumption made by elitists is that you have to come from the "Upper Classes" to have exceptional abilities. You know those morons from over in "that" neighborhood can never amount to anything. They are all "Trailer Trash".

The Great Bard of Stratford on Avon came of humble beginnings.

(This has constantly driven the elitists nuts because they just cannot accept that this great genius came of humble beginnings. They keep trying to prove he was someone else.)

Ludwig Von Beethoven was born of a Syphyletic Slut.

The examples go on. Anytime someone has to try and put someone else down because of their origins, or assumes them stupid because they run a Freight Elevator, is revealing themselves to be a petty, shallow, non-thinker.

Class Labels are Stereotypes. They are used by both Left and Right and both are wrong.

Someone is not virtuous or exceptional merely because their parents had a lot of dough.

Someone is not downtrodden or put upon merely because they choose not to pursue wealth or public accolades nor are they virtuous for doing so.

Contrary to earlier comments I think this thread worthwhile because it presents an opportunity to examine our own viewpoint and to either change it or be reconfirmed in it.

Dare to be great if only in your own mind. Dare to achieve because achievement is it's own reward.

And remember:

It is the nature of the truly great to make others believe that they too can be great. - Anon.