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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  4665 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: America's Deep, Dark Secret
The rabbit hole starts here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

The abyss leads you here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-4_Euthanasia_Program

And it just keeps going:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

Remember kids, we gave this guy immunity for war crimes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiro_Ishii

American eugenics isn't much of a secret. It's just that the people who know anything about it don't really bring it up.





mk  ·  4665 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Instead Ishii and his team managed to negotiate and receive immunity in 1946 from war-crimes prosecution before the Tokyo tribunal in exchange for their full disclosure of germ warfare data based on human experimentation.

This would be a nice inclusion in every US high school history book.

lessismore  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
It will be included immediately after the massacres of the native Indians are taught in the said history books.
dublinben  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I must have been taught on the Moon, because my textbooks included that.
lessismore  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Did it? They were not in my textbooks growing up. But that was a generation ago. What did your text books say about the massacres?
dublinben  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
They mentioned the Indian Wars (regional thing), the Trail of Tears, what Columbus and the Spaniards did, and the creation of reservations. I never got an impression that the native peoples were well treated beyond third or fourth grade.
thenewgreen  ·  4665 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care -This "sounds" like the type of institution I might consider donating to. Only to find out that they killed over 200,000 physically and mentally handicapped people in an effort to rid the world of their genetic deficiencies. -Disgusting shit.

Re Shiro Ishii, "tell us how we too can make effective biological weapons and you're free to go". -- this way we can use them against the soviets should the opportunity arise. No wonder the soviets were pissed.

I think mk asks a good question though, what's happening NOW that we will one day think "how the fuck could they let that happen"? As someone well versed in the history, any thoughts on the present?

kleinbl00  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I hosted the Reddit Jet Blue travellers. We went down to the Long Beach aquarium. A kid met us there, had driven up from San Diego 'cuz he had nothing better to do, no friends, and he thought meeting some "redditors" would be cool.

He was in the navy. About to be shipped out to train in interrogating enemy combatants. Nice kid. Maybe 20.

I kept in touch with him, after a fashion. He's on Diego Garcia now. Spends his days surfing and scuba diving, and his nights torturing muslims.

Whatever we're doing, we're doing it abroad. The stuff we do here we do with full disclosure and paid volunteers. It's kind of remarkable what stupid shit people will do if you give them a little money. Robert Rodriguez documented this somewhat; his first film "Il Mariachi" was paid for entirely by money he earned subjecting himself to inpatient medical experimentation.

thenewgreen  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
It's kind of remarkable what stupid shit people will do if you give them a little money. Wow, you just made me remember a long forgotten, heavily repressed memory. Remember the Ricky Lake show? When I was 18 I rented my first apartment with a girl named Lynne. We both worked at Pizza Hut, smoked retarded amounts of pot and lived day-to-day on the $25.00 tips we'd make. We were poor, but life was fun. The Ricky lake show advertised that they needed people to come on the show and talk about how their roommates drug habits annoyed them. They flew you out there (Chicago I think) put you up in a hotel and gave you a $100 per diem. This seemed like SO much money to us. We called the show and went through several rounds of interviews. Our story (completely fabricated) was that she smoked a lot of pot and would blow it in my ear at night while I slept in order to get me high.... and now I'm getting addicted. -I know, ridiculous stuff, but they bought it.

We were actually scheduled to go on the show and my parents found out. They were FURIOUS that their boy would even consider such a thing. They (thankfully) talked me out of it. But you are right "It's kind of remarkable what stupid shit people will do if you give them a little money".

Thanks for jostling the memory.

kleinbl00  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Don't make me dig up my match.com story. I'll do it.

I worked at a legendary bar in Seattle. The staff was thoroughly tribal. Incredible group of people - while most people formed relationships in college, mine were with a bunch of meth-addicted bartenders and musicians. Good people; most of them aren't even dead.

Anyway. One of the pastimes this crew would had was to get on the Jerry Springer show. No less than eight of them had been on it. They traded tips. It was almost a rite of passage. And just like pro wrestling, everybody involved knew it was fake.

As I recall, this account was written by rival bar staff. Amateurs. ;-)

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/jerry-rigged/Content?oid=...

thenewgreen  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Oh, by all means dig up the match.com story.
kleinbl00  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
thenewgreen  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
You may have taken out my first roommate Lynne. Funny stuff kb.

Sometime you'll have to get around to telling the tale of the other two you took out.

thenewgreen  ·  4664 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Holy shit I just laughed a lot. "Are you having an affair with an animal?" the recording asked. "Press one now.

some of them aren't even dead. -That shouldn't be as funny as it was.

b_b  ·  4665 days ago  ·  link  ·  
There's a book I would recommend to anyone interested in the history of the Eugenics movement called The Mismeasure of Man by Stephan Jay Gould. Its a boring and tedious read, so its not for everyone, but it is amazingly insightful in understanding why eugenics became so popular in the US. In the book, Gould recounts all the terrible science that was done in the immediate aftermath of slavery to "prove" the inferiority of blacks, and by extension any other non-whites (and of course females), although certainly blacks were the lowest rung on the ladder. One of the leaders of this brand of science was the Louis Agassiz, for whom, shamefully, the chair of zoology at Harvard is still named, which goes to show that good institutions do bad science all the time. But my point is that when Harvard says something forcefully, people often listen, especially when they're already inclined to believe (like blacks are sub-human). Gould, who before he died occupied the Agassiz chair, was obsessed by the idea that "truth" (accepted truth, not "actual" truth) is so often swayed by popular culture, and not data. I think he was right. Eugenics was Good for America, and that was the truth to those people. We need to always be careful of propositions that are social constructs that are cloaked as truth. That's why I wrote this post http://hubski.com/pub?id=15752. Because shit like eugenics was acceptable to people only a few decades ago. Its tough to look at one's self and ask what we are doing wrong, but well worth it, I think.
mk  ·  4665 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Gould, who before he died occupied the Agassiz chair, was obsessed by the idea that "truth" (accepted truth, not "actual" truth) is so often swayed by popular culture, and not data.

I just posted a pretty interesting examination of this:

http://hubski.com/pub?id=18386

We are all brainwashed to different degrees. IMO we need to teach the fault of belief. We need to raise consciousness of our fallibility. It's the only way we can avoid these types of things. Right and wrong will not help us.