"We never
did any eugenics."
I always hate, in argumentation, to approach the realm of personalities -- but you strain credulity, not to mention Hanlon's Razor, far beyond bearing. Did you read the article I linked in the comment to which you replied? Have you ever read anything on the subject of the American eugenics movement? Or do you argue from this blatantly false premise in support of some ulterior motive? Perhaps you are ignorant; perhaps you are malicious; perhaps you are both. The facts of the matter being what they are, you cannot possibly be neither.
"We never did any eugenics."
Your third paragraph beggars belief even further. Perhaps you aren't aware that in California, the eugenic sterilization of prisoners was not made illegal until 1979 -- and the practice itself continued until three years ago.[1] And there's far worse in the history of American eugenics -- circa twenty thousand free men and women sterilized, at the order of eugenics boards which judged them unfit to reproduce, in the state of California alone. Twenty thousand! Are they not enough for you to acknowledge this atrocity for what it is? How many more do you require?
"We never did any eugenics."
The most generous assumption I can make is that your argument originates in a combination of dewy-eyed optimism regarding the advancement of human knowledge, and abysmal ignorance regarding history so recent it's barely left the category of current events. Even then, your argument remains morally repugnant in the extreme -- you argue, in essence, that the American eugenics movement was and remains utterly blameless, pure and innocent of any wrongdoing, because after all it was the Third Reich, not the United States, who in accord with the soundest eugenic theory committed enormities hideous enough to rate among the very foulest blemishes of our species' far from stainless history.
Had the Nazi eugenics programs arisen de novo, had they been the entire invention of Nazi theorists working from Nazi first principles without any relation to the eugenic theories then in American vogue, you would have a point. But they did not; ignore it though you may, it remains established and incontrovertible fact that Nazi eugenics were in every sense an outgrowth from, and a development of, American eugenics -- and not merely in the realm of pure theory; the early Nazi eugenics programs received not merely intellectual support, but actual funding, from such luminaries as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.
American eugenicists trained Nazi eugenicists, collaborated with them, supplied them with funds, encouraged and abetted them in every possible fashion on their way to enormities such as "Action T4" -- a bloodless name for the eugenic murder of a third of a million unfortunates, that of course being only the figure known with certainty and very probably short of the real number of victims -- and even the scourging of the Jewish race itself.
On an individual level, such behavior might be called complicity to murder, perhaps conspiracy to murder, perhaps accessory before the fact of murder -- among the very gravest of crimes, even on that small scale. The same, scaled up to the level of whole societies, beggars description. And there you stand, bright-eyed and smiling, and blithely insisting that American eugenicists, American progressives, are pure as the driven snow, smirched by not the tiniest drop of the lakes and rivers and oceans of blood spilled in the name of their abominable theories. Our forebears, in their foolishness, unleashed horror beyond description and beyond compare. When they saw the enormities that resulted, it made them wise, and they laid down the tool which had turned so disastrously in their hands. Yet there you stand, smiling, ready to pick that tool up again. Tell me, how many millions will it take this time, to make you as wise as those who've gone before?
Oh, but of course, you cry, it won't happen that way this time! After all, we're so much better and smarter now than anyone before, and we will be ever so careful not to repeat the Nazi horror! And I have no doubt that's true. After all, we're so much better and smarter now than anyone before! And so, too, will be the new horror you unleash, and always with the most unimpeachable of good intentions:
"We never did any eugenics."
---
Precisely what you mean by "Reactionism" I am not sure. I am no longer young enough to love chaos, and I am reasonably familiar with recent history; I suppose this might make me look reactionary on some subjects and from a certain point of view, but I have never since childhood dreamt of dignifying any opinion I might hold with a name involving either a majuscule or an "-ism".
Your links, I'm afraid, shed little light on the matter. The comic strip, while well executed in a technical sense, had no obvious point; I did get a little way into the Slate Star Codex page, but found myself unable to continue past the point where its author, for the sake of narrative convenience, defined "violent dispute" in such fashion as to exclude the American Civil War.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/08/califor...