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	<title>Southern Bread &#187; eugenics</title>
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	<description>Southern History, American Freedom, Christian Liberty</description>
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		<title>Relativism As a Rhetorical Tactic</title>
		<link>http://www.southernbread.org/relativism-as-a-rhetorical-tactic/</link>
		<comments>http://www.southernbread.org/relativism-as-a-rhetorical-tactic/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:59:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dave</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environmentalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eugenics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[overpopulation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[relativism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.southernbread.org/?p=2854</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I was reading a blog post just now and got linked over to an article on a site called grist.org where this lady is talking about her decision not to have children. Evidently, grist.org is primarily an environmentalism website just judging from the headlines I skimmed through. So, her angle in the article was that [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I was reading a blog post just now and got linked over to an article on a site called <a href="http://grist.org/">grist.org</a> where this lady is talking about her decision not to have children.  Evidently, grist.org is primarily an environmentalism website just judging from the headlines I skimmed through.  So, her angle in the article was that not having kids is the environmentally friendly thing to do.  In fact, she goes further, and calls being childless the most &#8220;humane&#8221; thing to do:</p>
<blockquote><p>
I come here before you today to make the same proclamation—with a twist. I am thoroughly delighted by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all.</p>
<p><cite><a href="http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-30-gink-manifesto-say-it-loud-im-childfree-and-im-proud/pall">&#8211;Lisa Hymas, Grist.org</a></cite>
</p></blockquote>
<p>The most interesting thing to me in this quote is not the analysis of her environmentalism, but how her argument doesn&#8217;t mesh with her rhetoric.  They are in conflict.  She says, &#8220;&#8230;the most humane thing <b>for me</b> to do is to have no children at all.&#8221;  I see this type of language all of the time.  If you think about what she&#8217;s saying, it&#8217;s completely dishonest.  There is an implied &#8220;given this condition&#8221; that is missing from her statement.  It should read like this:</p>
<ul>
<li>The most humane thing for me to do, given the current toll that overpopulation is taking on our environment, is to have no children at all.</li>
</ul>
<p>That&#8217;s what she&#8217;s actually saying.  Now, the problem is that if there really is world-wide destructive overpopulation going on in the world, how can it be only morally binding on one person?  Put another way:  if the conditions she describes are real enough to be morally binding on her, then they are, by definition, morally binding on the rest of us also.  But, of course, she goes to great lengths at the very beginning of the article to make it known that if you do indeed choose to participate in more world destruction by having children then she is just fine with that.  Huh?!</p>
<p>She puts it this way:</p>
<blockquote><p>
Let me get this out of the way up front: I like kids—many of them, anyway.  Some of my best friends, as they say, are parents.  I bear no ill will to procreators, past, present, and prospective.  I claim no moral or ethical high ground.</p>
<p><cite><a href="http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-30-gink-manifesto-say-it-loud-im-childfree-and-im-proud/pall">&#8211;Lisa Hymas, Grist.org</a></cite>
</p></blockquote>
<p>Then I have to ask, why the crap did she write a 2000 word article on the humane obligation of being childless if she actually doesn&#8217;t care about being childless.  That&#8217;s relativism language.  But, not in the formal sense.  Instead, it&#8217;s relativism being employed as it most commonly is:  as a simple linguistic tactic, to enable the writer to smuggle morality in the back door in a non-offensive way.  She&#8217;s not a relativist any more than anyone else is.  Real, formal relativism is self-refuting and, as such, has been mostly discarded from the public discussion.  Instead, it&#8217;s been replaced by this type of rhetorical relativism, that let&#8217;s the game continue to be played by hiding some of the premises.  But it&#8217;s still just as self-refuting.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s her use of the word &#8220;humane&#8221; that makes the whole phrase turn.  The word &#8220;humane&#8221; defines what is morally acceptable treatment of our fellow man.  Therefore, when she says that childlessness is the only &#8220;humane&#8221; thing for her to do, it&#8217;s the same thing as saying that having kids would be <em>inhumane</em>.  Thus, immoral.  And, an action that is inhumane is always inhumane, no matter who does it.  It&#8217;s a concrete condition.  If it&#8217;s true that it&#8217;s inhumane for her to have children because it contributes to overpopulation, then the same conditions apply to me.  My children are an inhumane treatment to my fellow man.  There is no difference, since the conditions she gives are true for all people.  </p>
<p>The relativism becomes obvious when you reformulate her thesis into an easier to follow syllogism.  Like this:</p>
<ol style="list-style-type: upper-alpha;">
<li>Overpopulation is destroying the environment.</li>
<li>Having children is the cause of overpopulation.</li>
<li>Therefore, it&#8217;s only immoral when I have children.</li>
</ol>
<p>Of course, this is an absurd argument.  If premise A and premise B are valid, then in order for the argument to be sound, the conclusion(C) should be something like:  &#8220;Therefore, it&#8217;s immoral for people to have more children than is required for a stable, low population rate.&#8221;  But, of course, a statement like that has all sorts of problems.  It implies an Orwellian procreation management authority that I&#8217;m sure she would rather avoid getting in to.  Not to mention the fact that it&#8217;s simply impossible to achieve something like that without horrible human rights abuses, such as forced abortions and such.  Thus, she employs a little relativism to soften the blow of what she&#8217;s saying, yet still get across an air of moral imperative.</p>
<p>I am seeing this all the time lately.  I&#8217;ll give you another example of it next time.</p>
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		<title>Dave&#8217;s Rule #1 &#8211; Progressive Eugenics: Exhibit B</title>
		<link>http://www.southernbread.org/daves-rule-1-progressive-eugenics-exhibit-b/</link>
		<comments>http://www.southernbread.org/daves-rule-1-progressive-eugenics-exhibit-b/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:59:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dave</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abortion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eugenics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ginsburg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[progressivism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.southernbread.org/dave/daves_rule1_exhibit-b.html</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I really hate to keep harping on this same issue, but each day I see more and more information that steadily confirms my thought. This particular story was in fact broken last week, but I didn&#8217;t realize what was truly said just by reading the headline. It seems that the shortest of the black robed [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I really hate to keep harping on this same issue, but each day I see more and more information that steadily confirms my thought.  This particular story was in fact broken last week, but I didn&#8217;t realize what was truly said just by reading the headline.  It seems that the shortest of the black robed deities had a little slip of the tongue in an interview.  Justice Ginsburg admitted that this whole time she thought Roe vs. Wade was really about population control and design(i.e. eugenics).  The quote:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p><img align="left" src="/images/ginsburg.jpg" alt="Ruth Bader Ginsburg"/></p>
<p>Here&#8217;s what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday&#8217;s New York Times Magazine: &#8220;Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe vs. Wade] was decided,&#8221; Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, &#8220;there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don&#8217;t want to have too many of.&#8221;</p>
<p>The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon or any further coverage from the New York Times &#8212; or any other major news outlet &#8212; was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion. Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer support for abortions for poor women. After all, if poverty partly described the population you had &#8220;too many&#8221; of, you would want to subsidize it in order to expedite the reduction of unwanted populations.</p>
<p><cite><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg14-2009jul14,1,7388484.column">&#8211;Jonah Goldberg, LA Times</a></cite></p>
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<p>I hope you appreciate the magnitude of Ginsburg&#8217;s admission.  She just confessed what we have all known for decades.  The end game for abortion is not women&#8217;s rights.  It&#8217;s eugenics.  Sure, at a very local level you&#8217;re going to have any number of so-called useful idiots that carry out the actual abortions under the illusion of women&#8217;s choice.  But at the top of the movement, where the elites control the purse strings and set the agenda, it&#8217;s all about population control.  To them, the poor are not to be helped.  They are to be extinguished.  Abortion has been the weapon of choice ever since forced sterilization got a bad rap under Hitler.  Before the Nazi&#8217;s were so blatant about it there were many influential people that were vocal supporters of sterilization.  I listed some of them in my first post on this subject.  Woodrow Wilson was one.  As well as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.  Jonah Goldberg talks about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who&#8217;m I had been unaware of in this regard:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>In 1927, he wrote a letter to his friend, Harold Laski, telling him, &#8220;I &#8230; delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day &#8212; and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform.&#8221; That was the year he wrote the majority opinion in Buck vs. Bell (joined by Louis Brandeis) holding that forcibly sterilizing lower-class women was constitutional. In recent years, openly discussing the notion of eugenic aspects of abortion has become taboo. But as Ginsburg&#8217;s comments suggest, the taboo hasn&#8217;t eliminated the idea; it&#8217;s merely sent it underground.</p>
<p><cite><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg14-2009jul14,1,7388484.column">&#8211;Jonah Goldberg, LA Times</a></cite></p>
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<p>I&#8217;ll try to move on to a different subject tommorrow I promise.  But, in the mean time please just stop falling for the standard media line about all this stuff.  Modern liberalism is just a tamed version of Progressivism, and progressivism has always been about eugenics.  Is it so hard to accept the fact that some people are evil enough to want power over the life and death of others on a grand scale?  I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s hard to believe at all.  In fact, I think that when we look at history it&#8217;s pretty darn obvious.</p>
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