and they're certainly not vegetarian environmentalists.
H
Posted on 10/15/2007 1:15:45 PM PDT by Bon mots
bflr
Wow! Good read. Highly recommended. Bump
I wonder what Crichton thinks about Gore winning the Peace Prize.
Think of posts on FR, Buchannan, Brimelow, and others. Now, is Eugenics really discredited and dead, or just temporarily out of fashion. It has never been scientifically valid but it is and idea that will never die as long as tribalism, nativeism and isolationism are are part of the political and social universe.
Note: There are good reasons to oppose groups of people based on political, religious and cultural beliefs and practices. That is not what Crichton or I are describing as eugenics.
He started out writing a book about global warming, but the more he researched it the more he found out what a crock of *&^% it was, and he decided to write about the people who wanted to further their own agenda. Good book if you want your eyes opened.
I doubt we’re going to see “State of Fear” made into a movie any time soon.
and they're certainly not vegetarian environmentalists.
H
I'd love to see Crichton finance and direct it himself; it's not like he doesn't have the money or experience to do it.
His claim is that eugenics was never tested using rigorous definitions.
So instead of swinging over to the other side and denouncing it as unscientific, with about as much evidence, why not test it rigorously to see if less intelligent people tend to have less intelligent offspring?
If they are, and they reproduce at a higher rate than the more intelligent, then the worst fears of the eugenicists of 1900 are likely to come true eventually.
I agree with most of what Mike says, but a lot of his criticism of eugenics is guilt by association. “The Nazis were eugenicists, so the very concept of eugenics must be evil.”
Bon, is there a Crichton ping list, and if not, you should start one. The dude is a certified genius.
But they do like lawyers!!!
Bump for later...
Excellent. I learned a lot about important subjects of the past and present.
His portrayal of union workers as dangerous thugs pretty much guaranties it will never be made into a major motion picture.
But as Alston Chase put it, "when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power."
There is great elegance in simplicity and this sentence seems to meet that criterion.
I remember when I was a kid, my parents got a pamphlet in the mail with all sorts of eugenic clap-trap. The upshot was that, as trained scientists and PhDs, it was their duty to humanity to produce many children in order to dilute the hoards of idiots being produced by the uneducated classes.
Since I was their fifth child in three and a half years, I thought they were doing pretty well in this regard, but they reacted to the pamphlet in a very hostile way. They, apparently, had a better understanding and memory of the eugenic horrors of the early 20th Century than we have today.
H
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