eigenrobot Profile picture
Aug 22, 2023 24 tweets 10 min read Read on X
how it started / how its going
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everyone was just like this in the early 20C incidentally

ppl pretend that hitler was weird but naw

fact is, pretty much all of the Leading Thinkers of the age were outright tumescent at the idea of mass murder

check out what DH Lawrence said downthread

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my pet theory is that we have to hyperfocus on hitler not just because he was the worst about this shit, although he absolutely was and by a wide margin, but mostly because it takes the heat off of the entire progressive movent which we all hold so dear
the progressives of course owned and ran the universities, most of which put their names and reputations on the popular eugenics programs of the united states

today most historians are employed by those same universities

so anyway you can imagine how this usually plays out
to this day i have no idea how the entire progressive establishment managed to avoid perpetual shame because im pretty sure everyone at the time remembered all those court opinions and laws and essays about sterilizing and murdering undersirables Image
even wikipedia, today!!

you guys it was the Bad Racist Movement

but wait

i wonder who these Racists were
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_…
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"actually it was the jews" uh huh

lets see

i wonder what organizations were behind this!!



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in fact these were the most prominent heirs of Lyman Beecher, of the Social Gospel, of the great Yankee Benevolent Societies

for another view of the cultural valence of eugenics, check out this map from 1926

the states in white?

didnt pass sterilization laws

makes u think
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"oops" Image
". . ."

". . ."

" . . . oops"

any comment @RockefellerFdn

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fortunately historians after 1945 corrected the record

you see, american eugenics was DIFFERENT

@JonEntine sets the record straight here, and i think none of us can argue with his lucid framing Image
contemplate this on the tree of woe
appendix

"ok fine we did forced sterilization but the murder was all nazi brain worms" Image
this is a depressing thread so i offer one consolation in closing

eugenic euthenasia occurred in the United States, but was only carried out (unsurprisingly) by doctors, and only covertly

they thought normal americans would be outraged, and i think they were correct.

because,
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we have another study of a contemporary culture, one that had extensive exchanges with the united states, as described above

hitler DID carry out a widespread euthenasia program of physically and mentally ill people Image
as with most nazi programs it was a fucking cockup and normal germans were quick to figure out what was going on when hair and ash started raining down from the sky in their own cities

i imagine this may have influenced the distant placement of later death camps for (eg) jews
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the people of germany did not like this one bit when they found out

families frequently did all they could to save their relatives and _crowds_ protested

i find this incredibly brave. let me reiterate that they were openly opposing

- adolf hitler
- in nazi germany
- in wartime
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notably, the vatican condemned the killings when they became something like public knowledge

the church did not wholly cover itself in glory--many german clergy were supportive--but some bishops were incredibly outspoken, and apparently commanded popular support

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I'm not a scholar and won't claim certain causality, but I suspect that the lesson was taken from Akton T4 that "actually normal people don't generally support industrial murder, it fucking horrifies them in fact," and as evidence i shall provide a map in the following tweet
this is the best map i could find; in polish or smth

what you need to know is

1. concentration camps (where jews et al were *held*) were different than death camps (where they were murdered en masse)

2. circles are concentration camps

3. squares are death camps Image
i direct you to notice that though germany is full of concentration camps, the death camps--auschwitz, treblinka, sobibor--were built far from germany, in areas of poland and belarus controlled by the wehrmact

i suggest this was not entirely for reasons of homicidal efficiency
wow

i had actually read this (year ago?) but forgot it almost immediately

*kristallnacht* also scared the normies

not even randos either: a majority of NAZI PARTY MEMBERS condemned it (survey data, small sample, fine; just, gosh)




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tonight i say a prayer for the normies

when it comes down to it, as a group they often just dont care for mass violence and systematic murder of their neighbors

this makes them better than us. fact of the matter is, the bigbrains are not as a class the heroes of history
food for thought, girl

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More from @eigenrobot

Sep 13
its been a long week so tonight please relax as i relate to you the tale of a great episode in american autism Image
our third president, thomas jefferson, was immensely autistic

he spent much of his time inventing questionably useful devices, getting hung up on and beefing over irrelevant abstractions, pursuing unwise relationships w subordinates, and recording data for no particular reason Image
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he combined several of these hobbies in an extended incident in the court of france where he was serving as america's ambassador ("minister plenipotentiary") in the mid 1780s, succeeding a real scientist and charmer, benjamin franklin

big shoes to fill! and he tried. awkwardly Image
Read 23 tweets
Aug 30
pulled the entire 10 volume set of a 1964 children's reading collection from a used bookstore for $18

i regard this as a colossal win

the introduction is worth reading as a contrast to contemporary pedagogical philosophy. implicit here is a colossal cultural loss Image
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i went to the bookstore to kill time between helping out with a medical emergency but found myself moved to buy these after recalling a trip to the library yesterday with my 4yo, when i noticed the entire children's section was Feelings slop

meanwhile, in 1964: Image
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after my first find i wandered to my favorite bookstore in Minneapolis and found another children's anthology, this one first published in the 1920s (unfortunately incomplete)

~$15, BOGO

as with the other collection, the prefaces contain much ancient wisdom lost to our time Image
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Read 4 tweets
Aug 29
this explains a lot about what's going on, for those of you paying attention
additional context

america probably has the most productive agricultural land on earth not regularly subjected to wars of extermination Image
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"why are these soils good" because theyre basically steppes but with rain Image
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Read 4 tweets
Aug 26
fyi trump ppl

the reason that nerds are unhappy about trump firing federal reserve people isnt because they particularly like those specific people

issue is that it makes the fed look beholden to the executive and this is a very bad outcome for economic stability
the fed hasnt covered itself in glory lately for sure but the counterfactual where its progressively and openly politicized is pretty much just a world of hyperinflation and impoverishment because thats a side effect of how unstable governments use politicized central banks
i think a steelman for "end the fed" is that we've left this absurdly powerful yet nigh defenseless institution sitting in plain sight like a loaded gun during a period of immensely high trust and as that period comes to a close someone is gonna make a first grab at the pistol
Read 5 tweets
Aug 24
ok finally discovered a kind of lore i want to know about in a non clickbait way:

what one-shotted you?

eg for me it was 90s movies about how having a career and a house in the burbs is the worst thing that can ever happen to someone

i didn't realize i'd been Had until my 30s
everyone will give boomers and millennials shit about the social justice and narcissism, and rightly so. but the motherfuckers who tricked me into nearly ruining my life are genx
for those of you not familiar getting one shotted is getting wrecked on first contact with something. classic deployment attached Image
Read 4 tweets
Aug 22
"everyone is the same and nations are fake" is the core dogma of the mid-late 20C liberalism that grew out of the war era. in the years since it's become a mostly-unstated and broadly-unassailable assumption of imperial policy

regrettably it is also disastrously incorrect Image
the history of this idea is worth studying. you can see the modern notion start to emerge in the progressive era and out of socialist thought, and gain some traction with (eg) the league of nations

ideologues might say that league failed bc it wasn't REAL world government
among socialism-inclined intellectuals, which is to say nearly all intellectuals until molotov-ribbentrop broke some out of their reveries, ww1 was understood to be a failure _caused by_ national identity Image
Read 19 tweets

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