Katganistan wrote:Bolivarian Amerikwa wrote:I haven't read the book, but when you think about it a justice system doing this is unironically a good thing.In Northwest Europe, Between 1500 and 1750, court-ordered executions removed 0.5 to 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. The upper classes also had higher fertility than the lower classes and created a surplus that flooded into the lower class and outcompeted it for land. Preventing somebody whose parents (whose genes they carry) were unable to procure bread for whatever reason from getting bread (removing them from the gene pool), along with harsh penalties for crimes committed by low-trust people (such as stealing) are both things which would ultimately go towards creating a society in Northwestern Europe in which the vast majority of children would no longer be threatened by starvation thanks to industrialisation, and in which a functioning welfare state contributed to by a large majority of the working-age population would protect the downtrodden and needy from starvation. Considering the entire world was like a giant Africa at the time and most people were farmhands sleeping in filthy hovels, from our perspective you cannot say an extremely harsh judicial system in early modern Europe was a bad thing. In my opinion they were not harsh enough. Early modern absolutism was not necessarily a bad thing either, the House of Bourbon were just incompetent degenerates by the end of it and Louis XVI was a simp who got lead around by his wife, plus the first actually long-lasting democracies that weren't the result of violent starvation-fuelled revolutionary chimpouts were very classist at first when choosing who to give suffrage. None of this is a bad thing and you can argue that in the context of developing the western world into what it is today, many of the people who railed against change back then had a point.
The French Revolution would ultimately be spearheaded by the rising star nouveau riche bourgeoisie, who were an upper crust of the third estate that no doubt IQmogged the peasants of France into oblivion for both genetic and environmental reasons.
Why do I get the feeling the people arguing so strenuously for eugenics would never be part of the elite it benefited?
Probably because very few people would benefit from such a system.
And yet people campaign for harsher penalties ("Twenty years for stealing a packet of crisps! The death penalty for jaywalkers!") and cry for eugenic policies (like cutting all welfare and mandating abortion) in the same way people who live paycheque-to-paycheque vote for parties that want to reduce minimum wage and gut workers' rights.
Quite possibly, some people don't believe the things they support will ever bite them.



