Daily Archives: December 23, 2021

BMJ. 1999 Aug 14; 319(7207): 435438.

Division of Humanities, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA

During the Nazi era in Germany, eugenics prompted the sterilisation of several hundred thousand people then helped lead to antisemitic programmes of euthanasia and ultimately, of course, to the death camps. The association of eugenics with the Nazis is so strong that many people were surprised at the news several years ago that Sweden had sterilised around 60000 people (mostly women) between the 1930s and 1970s. The intention was to reduce the number of children born with genetic diseases and disorders. After the turn of the century, eugenics movementsincluding demands for sterilisation of people considered unfithad, in fact, blossomed in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia, not to mention elsewhere in Europe and in parts of Latin America and Asia. Eugenics was not therefore unique to the Nazis. It could, and did, happen everywhere.

Although eugenics programmes are usually associated with Nazi Germany, they could, and did, happen everywhere

They focused on manipulating heredity or breeding to produce better people and on eliminating those considered biologically inferior

In the 1920s and 1930s eugenic sterilisation laws were passed in 24 of the American states, in Canada, and in Sweden

Eugenics was criticised increasingly between the wars and was attacked widely when its role in the holocaust was revealed

Many people believed that individual human rights mattered far more than those sanctioned by science, law, and social needs

Modern eugenics was rooted in the social darwinism of the late 19th century, with all its metaphors of fitness, competition, and rationalisations of inequality. Indeed, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and an accomplished scientist in his own right, coined the word eugenics. Galton promoted the ideal of improving the human race by getting rid of the undesirables and multiplying the desirables. Eugenics began to flourish after the rediscovery, in 1900, of Mendels theory that the biological make up of organisms is determined by certain factors, later identified with genes. The application of mendelism to human beings reinforced the idea that we are determined almost entirely by our germ plasm.

Eugenic doctrines were articulated by physicians, mental health professionals, and scientistsnotably biologists who were pursuing the new discipline of geneticsand were widely popularised in books, lectures, and articles for the educated public of the day. Publications were bolstered by the research pouring out of institutes for the study of eugenics or race biology. These had been established in several countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Britain, and the United States. The experts raised the spectre of social degeneration, insisting that feebleminded people (the term then commonly applied to people believed to be mentally retarded) were responsible for a wide range of social problems and were proliferating at a rate that threatened social resources and stability. Feebleminded women were held to be driven by a heedless sexuality, the product of biologically grounded flaws in their moral character that led them to prostitution and producing illegitimate children. Hereditarian biology attributed poverty and criminality to bad genes rather than to flaws in the social corpus.

Much of eugenics belonged to the wave of progressive social reform that swept through western Europe and North America during the early decades of the century. For progressives, eugenics was a branch of the drive for social improvement or perfection that many reformers of the day thought might be achieved through the deployment of science to good social ends. Eugenics, of course, also drew appreciable support from social conservatives, concerned to prevent the proliferation of lower income groups and save on the cost of caring for them. The progressives and the conservatives found common ground in attributing phenomena such as crime, slums, prostitution, and alcoholism primarily to biology and in believing that biology might be used to eliminate these discordances of modern, urban, industrial society.

Race was a minor subtext in Scandinavian and British eugenics, but it played a major part in the American and Canadian versions of the creed. North American eugenicists were particularly disturbed by the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who had been flooding into their countries since the late 19th century. They considered these people not only racially different from but inferior to the Anglo-Saxon majority, partly because their representation among the criminals, prostitutes, slum dwellers, and feebleminded in many cities was disproportionately high. Anglo-American eugenicists fastened on British data indicating that half of each generation was produced by no more than a quarter of married people in the preceding generation, and that the prolific quarter was disproportionately located among the dregs of society. Eugenic reasoning in the United States had it that if deficiencies in immigrants were hereditary and eastern European immigrants out-reproduced natives of Anglo-Saxon stock, then inevitably the quality of the American population would decline.

Eugenicists on both sides of the Atlantic argued for a two pronged programme that would increase the frequency of socially good genes in the population and decrease that of bad genes. One prong was positive eugenics, which meant manipulating human heredity or breeding, or both, to produce superior people; the other was negative eugenics, which meant improving the quality of the human race by eliminating or excluding biologically inferior people from the population.

In Britain between the wars, positive eugenic thinking led to proposals (unsuccessful ones) for family allowances that would be proportional to income. In the United States, it fostered fitter family competitions. These became a standard feature at a number of state fairs and were held in the human stock sections. At the 1924 Kansas Free Fair, winning families in the three categoriessmall, average, and largewere awarded a governors fitter family trophy. Grade A individuals received a medal that portrayed two diaphanously garbed parents, their arms outstretched toward their (presumably) eugenically meritorious infant. It is hard to know exactly what made these families and individuals stand out as fit, but the fact that all entrants had to take an IQ test and the Wasserman test for syphilis says something about the organisers views of necessary qualities.

Much more was urged for negative eugenics, notably the passage of eugenic sterilisation laws. By the late 1920s, sterilisation laws had been enacted in two dozen American states, largely in the middle Atlantic region, the Midwest, and California. By 1933, California had subjected more people to eugenic sterilisation than had all other states of the union combined. Similar measures were passed in Canada, in the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. Almost everywhere they were passed, however, the laws reached only as far as the inmates of state institutions for the mentally handicapped or mentally ill. People in private care or in the care of their families escaped them. Thus, the laws tended to discriminate against poorer people and minority groups. In California, for example, the sterilisation rates of blacks and foreign immigrants were twice as high as would be expected from their representation in the general population.

The sterilisation laws rode roughshod over private human rights, holding them subordinate to an allegedly greater public good. This reasoning figured explicitly in the US Supreme Courts eight to one decision, in 1927, in the case of Buck versus Bell, which upheld Virginias eugenic sterilisation law. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, averred: We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.1

In Alberta, the premier called sterilisation far more effective than segregation and, perhaps taking a leaf from Holmess book, insisted that the argument of freedom or right of the individual can no longer hold good where the welfare of the state and society is concerned.2,3

Sterilisation rates climbed with the onset of the worldwide economic depression in 1929. In parts of Canada, in the deep south of the United States, and throughout Scandinavia, sterilisation acquired broad support. This was not primarily on eugenic grounds (though some hereditarian-minded mental health professionals continued to urge it for that purpose) but on economic ones. Sterilisation raised the prospect of reducing the cost of institutional care and of poor relief. Even geneticists who disparaged sterilisation as the remedy for degeneration held that sterilising mentally disabled people would yield a social benefit because it would prevent children being born to parents who could not care for them.

In Scandinavia, sterilisation was broadly endorsed by Social Democrats as part of the scientifically oriented planning of the new welfare state. Alva Myrdal spoke for her husband, Gunnar, and for numerous liberals like themselves when in 1941 she wrote, In our day of highly accelerated social reforms the need for sterilization on social grounds gains new momentum. Generous social reforms may facilitate home-making and childbearing more than before among the groups of less desirable as well as more desirable parents. [Such a trend] demands some corresponding corrective.4On such foundations among others, sterilisation programmes continued in several American states, in Alberta, and in Scandinavia well into the 1970s.

During the interwar years, however, eugenic doctrines were increasingly criticised on scientific grounds and for their class and racial bias. It was shown that many mental disabilities have nothing to do with genes; that those which do are not simple products of genetic make up; and that most human behaviours (including deviant ones) are shaped by environment at least as much as by biological heredity, if they are fashioned by genes at all. Science aside, eugenics became malodorous precisely because of its connection with Hitlers regime, especially after the second world war, when its complicity in the Nazi death camps was revealed.

All along, many people on both sides of the Atlantic had ethical reservations about sterilisation and were squeamish about forcibly subjecting people to the knife. Attempts to authorise eugenic sterilisation in Britain had reached their high water mark in the debates over the Mental Deficiency Act in 1913. They failed not least because of powerful objections from civil libertarians insistent on defending individual human rights. More than a third of the American states declined to pass sterilisation laws, and so did the eastern provinces of Canada. Most of the American states which passed the laws declined to enforce them, and British Columbias law was enforced very little.

The opposition comprised coalitions that varied in composition. It came from mental health professionals who doubted the scientific underpinnings of eugenics and from civil libertarians, some of whom warned that compulsory sterilisation constituted Hitlerisation. Sterilisation was also vigorously resisted by Roman Catholicspartly because it was contrary to church doctrine and partly because many recent immigrants to the United States were Catholics and thus disproportionately placed in jeopardy of the knife. For many people before the second world war, individual human rights mattered far more than those sanctioned by the science, law, and perceived social needs of the era.

The revelations of the holocaust strengthened the moral objections to eugenics and sterilisation, and so did the increasing worldwide discussion of human rights, a foundation for which was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed in 1948. Since then, the movement for womens rights and reproductive freedom has further transformed moral sensibilities about eugenics, so that we recoil at the majoritys ruling in Buck versus Bell. History at the least has taught us that concern for individual rights belongs at the heart of whatever stratagems we may devise for deploying our rapidly growing knowledge of human and medical genetics.

Competing interests: None declared.

Charts illustrating the inheritance of socially deleterious traits, and the imperative importance of getting rid of them, were often displayed at the eugenics exhibits at American state fairs

The family of AB Rollins, winner in the large family class at the Texas state fair, 1925

1. Buck v Bell [1927] 274 US 201-7.

2. Christian T. The mentally ill and human rights in Alberta: a study of the Alberta Sexual Sterilisation Act. Edmonton: Faculty of Law, University of Alberta, nd: 27.

View original post here:

Eugenics and human rights - PubMed Central (PMC)

Cambridge University fails to answer questions raised by staff and students after Byline Times revelation that racist pseudoscience is being promoted on campus under the guise of freedom of speech

Staff and students at the University of Cambridge have launched multiple campaigns demanding that the university conduct a formal inquiry into the influence of Peter Thiel and the far-right on a network of academics at the institution, following a series of special investigations by Byline Times.

However, it appears that their demands have fallen on deaf ears.

This newspapers investigations revealed the role of the chief of staff of Thiel Capital, Charles Vaughan, in cultivating an anti-liberal network of academics who have hosted alt-right figure Jordan Peterson and white nationalist extremist Charles Murray in the name of free speech.

Murray is a pioneer of scientific racism and eugenics who argues that black people have lower IQs than white people for genetic and environmental reasons. The bulk of the research he cites on race and IQ was funded by the Pioneer Fund, a Nazi eugenics foundation.

Peterson is a supporter of Murrays work and has openly expressed his sympathies for scientific racism on the podcast show of another white nationalist extremist, Stefan Molyneux.

In both cases, the ideas being discussed have been largely discredited across scientific literature and shown to be based on a dishonest approach to research as, for instance, one expert in the American Behavioral Scientist journal observed about Murrays 1994 book, The Bell Curve.

I believe this book is a fraud, that its authors must have known it was a fraud when they were writing it, and that Charles Murray must still know its a fraud as he goes around defending it, observed anthropologist Professor Michael Nunley. By fraud, I mean a deliberate, self-conscious misrepresentation of the evidence. After careful reading, I cannot believe its authors were not acutely aware of what they were including and what they were leaving out, and of how they were distorting the material they did include.

On 3 December, staff and students at Cambridge Universitys Faculty of Divinity published an open letter, signed by more than 200 people, accusing the department of failing to abide by its commitment to stand in solidarity with our BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) students and with our BAME colleagues. The letter noted that the department had released a statement in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in the US promising that we are challenging ourselves both staff and students to think more deeply about race and to learn from those who have been marginalised.

The open letter expressed urgent concerns based on Byline Times first report that Faculty of Divinity scholar Dr James Orr had extended a (presumably personal) invitation to Charles Murray, notorious author ofThe Bell Curve. It went on to state that Murrays positions on genetics, intelligence and thealleged dysgenic pressure of immigration are patently adjacent to eugenicist pseudoscience The threat to students of colour and other minorities, represented by Murrays invitation, once again stands completely at odds with the facultys explicit commitment to its minority students. As with Petersons invitation, the facultys silence concerning Dr Orrs hosting of Charles Murray cannot be reconciled with its purportedlyactivesolidarity.

The open letter also referred to Dr Orrs involvement in the Free Speech Union, citing a previous Byline Times investigation that confirmed its involvement in promoting scientific racism and white identity politics.

It said: In the case of both these invitations, we are tending toward a freedom of speech that is nothing other than a freedom to promote racist views, as well as to deny the viability of racism as both theoretical concept and lived reality. As the same recent reporting has shown, this affiliation of free speech activism and racism is indeed institutional. In particular, the Free Speech Union (of whose advisory council Dr Orr is a member)enjoys an uncomfortable association with racism and eugenics.

On 14 December, following Byline Times revelations about Peter Thiels involvement in CambridgeUniversitys hosting of Jordan Peterson and Charles Murray, staff and students escalated their demands calling for a formal investigation by the university into far-right influence on campus.

The invitations to Peterson and Murray were not isolated events, said a new petition signed by 185 people. The investigation reveals how James Orr, together with other members of the faculty and wider university, are part of an organised network, formed with the direct involvement of Peter Thiels chief of staff, Charles Vaughan.

The open letter noted that these individuals are working with a network of institutions, such as the Free Speech Union, to influence UK higher education policy. They are seeding an ideology that is fundamentally, indeed deliberately hostile, to the universitys aims and values, as expressedinter aliain itsequality and diversitypolicy, it stated. The repercussions of the work of this fifth column affect the entire university environment and even the whole of higher education in the UK.

The open letter concluded: In addition to our original call for action from the Divinity Faculty, we are calling for a university investigation (with the assistance of any relevant third parties) into the revelations of theByline Timesarticle.

The new petition by Cambridge University staff and students highlighted safeguarding concerns over the risk of students being groomed into far-right ideology and demanded that the university look into whether Trinity Forum Europe a Christian charity which was hosted, through both Peterson and Murray, for Cambridge staff and students is a centre for radicalisation activity within Cambridge.

It also called for the university to find out whether academics had received funding from Peter Thiel and how this might have made Cambridge University a more suitable home for far-right ideology.

A separate open letter signed by 65 students was sent to Cambridge Universitys Faculty of English. It noted that conversations in the Thiel network had increasingly focused on the need to push back against classic culture war issues such as abortion and transgender rights.

Transphobia has no place anywhere, and those with transphobic views should never be given a platform, the letter concluded, reiterating a call for a formal investigation into far-right influence at the university. We stand in solidarity with all those targets of this network, particularly our trans colleagues and peers, and recognise that the agenda of this network will disproportionately affect students of marginalised genders.

But Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Post-Colonial Studies at Cambridges Faculty of English, tweeted: A powerful, wealthy, foreign entity not connected to academia or research, mired in political power-brokering and lobbying is seeking to shape what is happening on a university campus. To do so, it has brought together academics (apparently all-male) disaffected with what they see as woke influence on students and campus culture into a network that extends to other universities Among the groups activities are sponsoring race scientists, as well as controversialists known for endorsing such race science (positing that black people are less intelligent, for instance) and attacking gender equality and transgender rights. The network also seems to include people making the case for colonialism.

Cambridge Universitys oldest student newspaper Varsity also covered the story, noting that staff and students at the Faculties of Divinity and English were now asking about the role of this network in using free speech to protect race science and other pseudoscientific views.

A letter from the Head of the Faculty of Divinity circulated to staff and students in mid-December had reiterated the universitys commitment to upholding freedom of thought and expression and said that all members of the faculty are against every form of intolerance, and we seek to instil an inclusive and supportive environment for all.

However, it failed to address the allegations about the role of Peter Thiel in attempting to foster sympathies with the far-right at the university.Indeed, while promoting racist pseudoscience endorsed by white nationalists might well be an act of free speech, it is unclear how this fits with the priorities of an arts and humanities department dedicated to teaching theology or literature.

Just as concerning is the fact that Cambridge University refused to reply to questions about these issues despite multiple enquiries by Byline Times.

Instead, at one of the worlds most sought-after universities, where academic and educational standards must be at their highest, ideologues are being brought in with a track record of trying to rehabilitate Nazi-inspired pseudoscience of the poorest quality. It it is difficult to understand how this, in any way, elevates critical thinking skills or peoples ability to engage in scientific thinking. Nor does it allow theology students to engage with the wonders of the latest discoveries in biology.

While freedom of speech must be protected at higher educational institutions, it is accompanied by a question: how should this right be exercised? In a way that uncritically promotes far-right propaganda as if it is sound science when it is precisely the opposite? And, if that is what Cambridge University is now seemingly standing for, what sort of lobbying has pushed it down that road?

Byline Times is funded by its subscribers. Receive our monthly print edition and help to support fearless, independent journalism.

New to Byline Times? Find out more about us

A new type of newspaper independent, fearless, outside the system. Fund a better media.

Dont miss a story

Our leading investigations include Brexit, Empire & the culture war, Russian interference, Coronavirus, cronyism and far right radicalisation. We also introduce new voices of colour in Our Lives Matter.

See the rest here:

Cambridge Faculty of Divinity Ignores Demands for Inquiry into Peter Thiel's Far-Right Influence Byline Times - Byline Times

Its hard to believe how much time has passed since Vogue dubiously ushered in the Era of the Big Booty in 2014 (and even more so since the peach emoji became shorthand for a desirably peachy bum in 2010). In the years gone by, the number of Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs) globally performed has grown by 77.6%, propelled in no small part by an army of uber-famous women with ever-growing, metamorphosing behinds.

That celebrity effect has inevitably trickled down to our own social media feeds too. A casual scroll through Instagram will often present you with endless examples of the BBL influencer aesthetic; posts of women posing with a perfectly round bottom that takes centre-stage like an object in its own right, matched with an impossibly cinched waist and small breasts. Sponsored ads for seemingly easily accessible BBL surgeries are common on both Instagram and TikTok, while #BBL on the latter platform has 3.9 billion views and is proliferated with videos selling faja body shapers (padded shapewear for women that gives the illusion of a small waist and larger behind).

But all eras eventually come to an end, and the BBLs retirement is being helped in no small part thanks to TikTokers celebrating that, women especially, no longer need to feel inadequate about their lack of voluptuous behinds, especially since a series of recent pictures of Kim and Khloe Kardashian have cropped up with what appears to be a dramatic reduction to their famous bums.

The BBL Effect is one of TikToks biggest trends this year with the hashtag having 202 million views. Started by @antonibumba, the trend pokes fun at the BBL-influencer aesthetic, portraying those who get the cosmetic surgery as having a ludicrously self-important, main character energy. Theres also been a decry of BBL fashion in the form of growing discontent over cut-out style garments that are practically impossible to pull off on a non-surgically enhanced body. But theres also been a recognition of how out of hand the invasive trend has become. Earlier this year, a clip went viral of a flight to Atlanta allegedly being delayed by two hours because 24 Black women had to board the plane in wheelchairs due to the after-effects of recent BBLs in the Caribbean.

Plastic surgery itself has roots partially in the racist and classist ideology of eugenics, a belief that the genetic quality of the human race can be improved by discouraging or stopping those deemed inferior from reproducing. Dr Renato Kehl, who founded the Eugenics Society of So Paulo in Brazil in 1918, approved plastic surgery to facilitate the extinction of the black and the rainforest-dwelling races. Historically, beautification went hand in hand with prizing whiteness as the most desirable aesthetic. BBLs seemed to flip the script, with typically non-white phenotypes like big bums being celebrated. However, that celebration of curves was predominantly on the bodies of wealthy white women. As a result, the BBL has become an asset that generates racialised capital.

BBL surgery is also known for being very dangerous. Assessments are supposed to be undertaken prior to surgery for risk factors like being overweight, blood clotting disorders or any cardiovascular issues. During the procedure, patients run the risk of fat, which has been removed from other areas of the body, being injected into one of the deep blood vessels connected to the heart or lungs, resulting in cardiopulmonary collapse, which can cause infection, strokes or even death. Surgeon Samuel Lin told Harpers Bazaar: the mortality rate from BBL is estimated to be as high as 1 in 3,000; this is greater than any other cosmetic surgery. Viral plastic surgeon Emily Long has highlighted some of the dangers on TikTok. In some states in the US, doctors can take a weekend course to be qualified to administer BBLs. Inevitably, the cheapest surgeons are also likely those less reputable, increasing the chances of medical complications or botched results for the less wealthy.

However, for some marginalised communities, BBLs are a mechanism of survival. In the 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure, trans actor Jen Richards made incisive points about one womans armour becoming another womans adornment, arguing that celebrities such as the Kardashians are often styled by gay men who are influenced by street queens in queer spaces, who in turn are influenced by sex workers, many of whom hyper-feminise their bodies to secure work. Those women, especially trans women, are often unfairly accused of reinforcing the worst patriarchal standards of beauty when all they are doing is trying to survive and minimise the physical and emotional violence they face, not monetise their bodies to accrue unconscionable amounts of wealth.

It is, of course, impossible to dissect the BBL narrative without doing a deep dive of the Kardashian-Jenners, who are often considered the figureheads of the trend. Speaking to MJ the creator of @kardashian_kolloquium, a TikTok account that demystifies the Kardashians through an academic lens they speculate why the BBL trendsetters might also be bringing big butts to a close. We dont know yet if it really is the end. We dont have enough data yet, she disclaims, but they are ageing and will commodify themselves in different ways. MJ acknowledges that even super-influencers remain vulnerable to patriarchal ideas of female expiration dates.

MJ further argues thatextreme plastic surgery is inherently a gesture of economic power and for celebrities their newly enlarged butts became the perfect display of excess. But it seems, as conversations around cultural appropriation and privilege grow, their financial asset loses its capital value and ceases to be useful. The titillation and conversation it used to create is now skewing very negative, she adds.

Whitney Roberts is a writer, podcaster and educator who regularly covers issues around race, and argues the BBL trend means the expectation is now even higher to have a big butt if youre a Black woman, even if you already sort of have one. Theres something intensely weird about Black womens features being, as Whitney describes, cherry-picked like a buffet, and then hyperbolised and repackaged to be sold back to Black women as a beauty standard. She argues that since the BLM movements resurgence, influencers cant continue to behave in the same way. Its easier for them to distance themselves from now less palatable appropriation by reducing their bodies.

Another theory floated by those in the comments under #BBL TikToks is that the proliferation of the surgery in celebrity and social media culture means they are becoming normalised and perhaps are just too common now to provoke the speculation and astonishment that translates into income. If, as the stats illustrate, its the fastest growing cosmetic surgery globally and can be done as cheaply as $3,000 in some parts of the world, then its simply becoming more accessible.

What exactly does it say about society when wealthy white influencers impact the body expectations held against Black women and then simply discard the BBL aesthetic when its no longer profitable? It sends a message of disposability, says MJ. Theres a long history in America of that kind of treatment of Black culture and aesthetics as capital. Whitney agrees: In my teens I had the BBL body type andwas vilified for it. There's a judgment that comes from that body being on a Black girl rather than a white woman.

Theres also a paradox here. For many women, the idea the BBL era might be ending is cause for both celebration and anxiety. For those of us with curvier bodies, the rise of the BBL aesthetic initially came with a relief at not having to live up to the stick-thin body championed in the 2000s. A trend that for many created a dysmorphic view of teen girls bodies and a perpetual drive to lose weight that continued into adulthood. While the BBL style was in itself still out of reach, it paved the way for a self-acceptance of natural curves, no doubt at the expense of other women then feeling more inadequate about their bodies. Ultimately, liberation from these trends requires a dismantling of the notion of body standards completely.

Whilst we dont yet know whether the sun is finally setting on the BBL era, there is one thing we can be sure of: we are very far off from living in a world where race, class, and gender dynamics dont heavily influence who can profit and who loses in the marketplace of beauty standards, and even further away from living in a world where female body types are not commodified at all.

Follow i-D onInstagramandTikTokfor more on beauty and body standards.

Excerpt from:

Are we witnessing the end of the BBL era? - i-D

Twenty-five years ago this week, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America made its debut. Creator Mike Judge had resisted previous attempts to make a movie about these two quintessentially American characters the manic, tweaked-out, and perpetually horny Beavis and the disaffected, bored, and also perpetually horny Butt-Head but MTV finally dangled a big enough check in front of him that he agreed to sign off on Do America. The result was a box-office smash that is being commemorated with a big media celebration, a Blu-ray release, and talk of a sequel.

All this is pretty standard media hype cycle stuff, but that shouldnt obscure whats really worth discussing: Beavis and Butt-Head Do America is the greatest satire of the twenty-first-century American security state. And whats even more impressive is that it was made in the twentieth century, five years before 9/11.

Want a movie where the antagonists are agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, at that time pre-ICE, pre-TSA the most prominent target of right-wingers obsessed with violent government overreach and obsession? Do America is it. Want a movie that weirdly predicts the invasion of Washington, DC, by ill-mannered louts? Do America is it. Want a movie where the protagonists are two white, middle-class teenage incels whose entire worldview is based on misinformation and brain-rotting broadcast content? Do America is it. And thats not to mention that it provides us with a tantalizing glimpse of an alternate reality in which a young Chelsea Clinton falls in love with a slack-jawed adolescent called Butt-Head. (Given the fact that, in our world, she ended up with a Wall Street vulture whos worked for some of the countrys worst hedge fund outfits, things are probably better in that alternate timeline.)

Judge may seem an unlikely candidate to be named the preeminent satirist of late-capitalist American decline since Terry Southern. But the farther you pull back, the more sense it makes. Judge is a stocky, square Texan whos been going bald since he was a teenager and has a background in science. Hes often identified as a conservative or a libertarian at worst, though he goes to great pains not to discuss his actual political leanings explicitly.

Certainly, Judge is no Marxist. Office Space starts out as a blistering workplace critique but ends with an iteration of the goofy, persistent idea that manual labor is pristine and empowering. Idiocracy captures the anti-intellectual nature of American society but muddles it with a lot of quasi-eugenics. And he did make The Goode Family, a satire of liberal do-goodery so heavy-handed it could have been greenlit by Fox News instead of ABC.

But for all that, he remains the most insightful, most accurate satirist of American archetypes we have. The reason King of the Hill still shows up in contemporary memes is because the main characters are such precise and recognizable types. Judge may not detest big tech companies because of their capitalist nature, but he absolutely understands why theyre so worthy of parody, and why the lies they tell us and each other are such bad jokes that they make for good jokes.

And then theres Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.

It was a smart decision to use the picaresque format for the film. As Fredric Jameson put it in his discussion of Raymond Chandler, this literary form, usually featuring the passage of a roguish wise fool through a variety of places and situations, is valuable because it allows for the crossing of class lines. Well, there are no fools like Beavis and Butt-Head, and no fictional characters less respectful of class distinctions or security-state shibboleths; for them, there are things that suck and things that rule, and never the twain shall meet.

For a movie made just a few years after the end of history, Do America does America with incredible prescience, from the militarization of the police state to the presentation of the government, not just as incompetent and corrupt, but a joke at its very foundation. A scene where Beavis literally uses the Declaration of Independence to wipe his ass never made it to the final cut, but its entirely in keeping with a movie that mocks both our sacred cows and our willingness to laugh at those sacred cows.

The film has so many virtues that its flaws are much easier to overlook than those of any other Mike Judge product. The animation is both crude (by modern standards of computer-aided, soulless perfection) and hypnotic, never more so than in a scene where Beavis eats a magic mushroom and has a memorably freaky hallucination. The music hits the sweet spot of mid-90s n-metal just before it started to curdle. Its of its time, but not so stuck in its time that anything feels dated, right down to its 90s version of 70s nostalgia and its celebrity voice cameos (Demi Moore when she was the hottest actress in Hollywood and Bruce Willis before his first comeback).

Even its pre-credit sequences, teasing Beavis and Butt-Head as cool, stylish Shaft-like detectives and giant movie monsters, send up audience expectations of needing every blockbuster to be bigger and costlier.

And we wouldnt be talking about the film at all today if it wasnt still painfully funny, with a distinctly 2020s nervous energy and a rowdy, bubbling pace that never slows down. South Park would debut the following year, and has been on continuously since then, but its jokes seem rancid after a decade of treading water, while Do America seems far fresher today than anything Matt Stone and Trey Parker have done this century.

Its hard to remember now, but Beavis and Butt-Head were once extremely polarizing figures, presiding over a moral panic that blamed them two cartoon characters! for everything from the death of children to a general societal decline. Nowadays, they would probably produce a slightly more muted level of outrage, and of a different character, but certainly a lot of the jokes wouldnt hit the same way today. One of the running gags in Do America involves Agent Flemming constantly ordering cavity searches on everyone involved in the search for the Highland Two. The propriety of the joke aside, everything thats happened in reality since from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay to police sexual assault scandals has rendered it mild in comparison.

Judge has been remarkably consistent in this. Of course we laugh at Beavis and Butt-Head being subzero morons who are obsessed with boobs and fire. But were laughing right there with them, and its not just because were so much more sophisticated. Their America is our America, and we just keep on doing it with them, over and over again. Getting mad at the duo that US Senator Fritz Hollings infamously referred to as Buffcoat and Beaver doesnt make them look stupid, because they already look stupid, all the time. It makes us look stupid.

As we look back on the greatest satire of the waning days of American empire a quarter century later, we should ask: Did the security state win because Beavis and Butt-Head won? Or was it the other way around?

Continued here:

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America Stands the Test of Time - Jacobin magazine

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Editors note: Welcome to anEvolution Newstradition: a countdown of our Top 10 favorite stories of the past year, concluding on New Years Day. Our staff are enjoying the holidays, as we hope that you are, too!Help keep the daily voice of intelligent design going strong. Please give whatever you can to support the Center for Science & Culture before the end of the year!

The following wasoriginallypublished on July 8, 2021.

Given evolutions racist baggage, you might think the theorys proponents would be somewhat abashed to accuse the critics of Darwin of white supremacy.Apparently not. Writing inScientific American, Allison Hopper goes there: Denial ofEvolution Is a Form of White Supremacy. Who isAllison Hopper? She is a white lady, a filmmaker and designer with a masters degree in educational design from New York University. Early in her career, she workedon PBS documentaries. Ms. Hopper has presented on evolution at the Big History Conference in Amsterdam and Chautauqua, among other places. Having been handed a platform by Americas foremost popularscience publication, she writes:

I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.

White people like this always talk about Black bodies instead of Black (or black) people. The idea here is that our human ancestors, who created the first cultures, came out of Africa and were dark-skinned. Supposedly evolution skeptics wish to deny this history, holding that a continuous line of white descendants segregates white heritage from Black bodies. In the real world, this mythology translates into lethal effects on people who are Black. Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible are part of the fake news epidemic that feeds the racial divide in our country.

She concludes,

As we move forward to undo systemic racism in every aspect of business, society, academia and life, lets be sure to do so in science education as well.

Of course there have been, and still are, religious people who doubted evolution for religious rather than scientific reasons while at the same time holding racist views. The idea, though, that racism can be logically supported from the Bible is ludicrous. As the biblical story goes, writes Ms. Hopper, the curse or mark of Cain for killing his brother was a darkening of his descendants skin. Theres nothing whatsoever in the biblical story to that effect. Handed a copy of the Bible, no reasonable person would come away with a conclusion of white supremacy.

A person who absorbed the history of evolutionary thinking from Charles Darwin to today, and took it all as inerrant, would be an entirely different story. If you had nothing more to go on than Darwins legacy, a conclusion of white supremacy would follow as a matter of course.

Ms. Hopper is concerned about children and their education, but, in concealing Darwinisms foul past, her version of history is wildly inaccurate. From not long after the theory of evolution by natural selection was first proposed by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, evolution took two different paths. That of Wallace, who split with Darwin over human exceptionalism and came to espouse a proto-intelligent design view, supported equal human dignity regardless of skin color.

That of Darwin followed the pseudo-logic of the purposelessly branching tree. Humanity did not advance all as one, equally, Darwin taught. Instead, as he explained in theDescent of Man, Africans were caught somewhere between ape and human, destined to be liquidated by the more advanced peoples: The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world. Darwin did not celebrate this, but he recognized it as what he saw to be a fact.

His cousin Francis Galton drew from Darwins work the pseudo-scientific idea that races could be improved through eugenics. That became mainstream science right up until it was embraced and put into practice by the Nazis, who justified a Final Solution with scientific evolutionary arguments. Eugenic solutions put into place in the United States against African-Americans, and others, including mass forced sterilizations, provided a warm-up and education for the Nazis.

In the U.S. from the start of the 20th century, respectable scientists at top universities, echoed by theNew York Times, supported caging and displaying Africans and others to educate the public about the truths of Darwinism. Before Hitler, Germans committed genocide in Africa, citing Darwinian theory as their justification. Political scientist John West tells these stories in a pair of widely viewed and critically recognized documentaries,Human ZoosandDarwin, Africa, and Genocide. Speaking of racism and eugenics, West has also traced The Line Running from Charles Darwin through Margaret Sanger to Planned Parenthood. As to education, the biology textbook at the center of the 1925 Scopes trial taught both Darwinism and white supremacy.

Todays actual white supremacists, represented by the Alt-Right and various neo-Nazi groups, are warmly disposed to Darwinism, as a glance at their websites will show. Like Hitler before them, they see in evolutionary theory a justification for racial hatred. Allison Hopper leaves ALL OF THIS OUT, both from herScientific Americanarticle and from a simplistic video on YouTube, aimed at kids, Human Evolution and YOU! And she has the nerve to smear skepticism about Darwinian theory as white supremacist.

I am only skimming through a few points of the relevant history. There is much more. Ms. Hopper is either deeply ignorant or deeply dishonest. Ill assume the former. Her concern for Black bodies is well and good. What about a concern for the truth, which matters, or should matter, to people of all skin colors?

This is important. In coming days atEvolution News, we will be sharing some of our past coverage of evolution and its racist past and present. The phrase white supremacy has already been weaponized in politics. Now it is going to war in science education. The aim is to feed children their minds, not their bodies a massive falsehood. This must be resisted.

Originally posted here:

#10 Story of 2021: A War Against the Truth - Discovery Institute

Though HBO Maxs Station Eleven is about a deadly pandemic, its also a heartwarming exploration of humanitys strength. We see these themes played out in the episodes set 20 years in the future after the cataclysmic event, in which we follow a Shakespeare troupe called the Traveling Symphony as they go from outpost to outpost in the post-apocalyptic Great Lakes region, keeping history and human connection alive through art.

At the end of episode four, which aired today, young Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) in the first year of the pandemic is watching The Conscience of the King, a Season 1 episode of Star Trek The Original Series. Its an episode that largely takes place on board the Enterprise, but it also discusses heavy topics like famine, eugenics, and the plight of humanity; like Station Eleven, it uses Shakespeare as a vehicle to explore the tragedy and complexity of humanity.

Advertisement

In The Conscience of the King, Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) discovers that a dictator from an old planet colony he lived on as a kid has been hiding from authorities under an assumed name, Anton Karidian (Arnold Moss), and masquerading as an actor in a traveling Shakespeare troupe. Karidians real name is General Kodos, and 20 years prior, he killed 4,000 people when a famine struck the colony planet Tarsus IV. Only nine people who witnessed the killings made it off the planet, two of which we meet in this episode, and one we already knowDr. Thomas Leighton (William Sargent), Lieutenant Kevin Riley (Bruce Hyde), and Jim Kirk.

The scene in which Kirk confronts Karidian about his identity as the man who sentenced 4,000 people to die is the strongest connection to the themes found in Station Eleven. Star Trek is a show about humanitys scientific advancements that take us out to the stars, discovering new worlds and civilizations. Even though the characters in Station Eleven have lost connection to our modern day privileges such as the internet and phones, they are traveling through an entirely new world, attempting to find a connection to what they once knew.

Karidians troupe of Shakespearan actors is a hold over of life before, and seems in direct opposition of where life exists now; the old-fashioned gowns and clothes the actors wear while acting out scenes from Macbeth and Hamlet look out of place amongst the Enterprises boxy and hard interior. Even while not performing, the actors wear their costumes, making them stand out even more. Karidian tells Kirk todays society is too technologically-focused and lacking humanity.

Ironically, a few scenes before Karidian makes this statement, Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) sings a song in a moment that is reminiscent of the Traveling Symphonys purpose in Station Eleven; Lt. Riley, stuck in Engineering, complains about how the department is dead, making him feel like the last person in existence. His complaint leads to Uhura performing her song over the intercom, while other crew members in the mess hall listen in. Kirk keeps emphasizing that Karidian is stuck in a performance, too in denial and weighed down by guilt to come out of it.

In Station Eleven, Shakespeare is the connection to the past that is keeping hope alive. The communities at the outposts look forward to the annual arrival of the Traveling Symphony. In one particularly moving scene, an older Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) delivers her lines from Hamlet; the show uses this moment and the emotion Kirsten is exhibiting in her performance during the play to flashback to Year 1 of the pandemic when she learns her parents have died. By using Shakespeare to understand an older Kirsten, one we dont know very well yet, Station Eleven elevates its nostalgic hook to universal themes of loss and grief.

However, Kirks point about Karidian hiding in a performance also rings true for Kirsten. When we catch up with Kirsten 20 years into the pandemic, shes no longer with Jeevan (Himesh Patel), her friend from episode one when she was eight-years-old, and who got her through the first couple years of the pandemic. Kirsten doesnt open up about her past much; she may love her family in the Traveling Sympathy, but she keeps the events of the first two years of the pandemic close to her chest.

Alex (Philippine Velge), the only post-pan person of the group (meaning she was born shortly after the flu struck), grows resentful of the Sympathys older members, including Kirsten, who cling to the past through their obsession with Shakespeare. She refers to them as liars, only focused on what happened before instead of forging a new future.

Both Kirsten and Kodos hide in their performances, and they each suffer the consequences of it. Alex leaves the Traveling Symphony to join The Prophet, a man whos entire philosophy hinges on the idea that there is no before. Kodos, in his effort to run away from his terrible past, leads his own daughter to murder, and subsequently, his death.

The Conscience of the King is not the only reference to space in Station Eleven. The comic book young Kirsten keeps with her, also called Station Eleven, is about a lonely astronaut who, even in or maybe due to- the vastness of space, feels disconnected from the larger world and the people in it.

Station Eleven is half way through its season; so far, we still dont know what happened to Jeevan and his brother. Before Kirsten can get really far into The Conscience of the King, she realizes Jeevan never came back to their cabin in their woods. He could still be out there, wandering this near wasteland searching for Kirsten. If thats the case, then that makes Station Elevens reference to Star Trek even more profound. After all, the grand idea of Star Trek is that no matter how far we go, well always find something new in our path that might bring us together with those we left behind.

Station Eleven airs new episodes every Thursday on HBO Max.

Advertisement

Originally posted here:

'Station Eleven's reference to an old 'Star Trek' episode, explained - The Young Folks

By Derek Hunter

Progressives love rewriting history. From the 1619 Project to renaming roads and melting of statues, if they can protect their party by wiping clean or reassigning their past, theyre all for it. But underneath it all, below what they let the world see, is one simple truth: The Democratic Party was, is, and will always be, the party of racism.

Progressives publicly renounced their openly racist past as fellow progressive Adolf Hitler exposed what was always the endgame for eugenics, but their beliefs remained the same.

The party of slavery and Jim Crow never changed their goal, they only changed their tactics.

It was the hate that mattered, not the direction in which it flowed. Monkey kidneys are the perfect medium in which to grow viruses in labs, racial hatred is the monkey kidneys of progressive politics it creates the environment where left-wing policies can be advanced.

The average, rationally thinking person would not embrace progressive policies if they were thinking clearly. Each requires more of your liberty, and no logical person would trade any of that away for anything. But through the lens of fear and hatred, normal people will do things they otherwise never would.

Think about this: when was the last time you apologized for something you did in a calm moment? Its probably been a while. Most apology-worthy events in our lives are in the heat of the moment, when youre angry or afraid. Emotion, especially those two emotions, override logic with regularity.

Now think of how the political left operates. They do all they can to keep their voters in a constant state of fear think about the way they talk about COVID or hatred the politics of envy over how much people make, who deserves what, etc. For the Democratic Party, these are their bread and butter.

And the most convenient, more frequently used avenue for that hatred is race.

If you stray from their preconceived notions of how someone with non-white skin should think, you become their enemy and no holds are barred in pursuit of your destruction. (Ask Clarence Thomas or Condi Rice how tolerant Democrats are toward black people who refuse to conform to the progressives pre-conceived notions.)

Two events this week exemplify this division in ways no hypotheticals could.

First is this story out of Colorado, where a school district instituted people of color only playground time. George Wallace wasnt the last of the Democrat segregationists, he was ahead of his time. The school, rather than change direction once exposed, doubled down on justifying segregation.

A spokesmantold Fox News,

"Some of these families shared with us that, since the only time many of them see one another is at drop-off and pick-up times, we host some events where Black families can meet one another, connect with one another and share their experiences about the school with one another.

"We are honoring their request.

It should have been met with scorn and dismissed out of handInstead, a racist request was met with a racist response.

If something is wrong it is wrong, regardless of what the person doing it looks like or what experience people who look like that person went through long before anyone alive today was born. There is no race of human who hasnt engaged in enslaving others, or been enslaved by others. Africa was not Utopia before evil whitey showed up, tribes were enslaving each other the whole time. And it was Africans who were selling black slaves to the overseas slave trade, for example.

If that reality, or anything, plays a role in upsetting parents of color, tough. Get over it. You arent a victim, youre being the perp.

Entitled, I know my parents love me, but they dont love my people, this vile piece of progressive propaganda finds good leftist kids willing to stab the only parents theyve ever known in the back in order to serve their political masters.

Now, in the name of diversity and tolerance, leftists would rather non-white children remain wards of the state or live in orphanages than be raised by loving parents who are white.

They arent bothered by it because that is not a divide that aids Democrats, at least not yet. As Hispanics become a larger minority than blacks in this country, and they continue to vote in ways that displease Democrats, it will come. If Democrats cant control someone they need to destroy them.

The simple fact is progressive leadership is made up of bad people. Thats it, full stop. Bad people will do anything they have to in order to get their way. Destroy lives, damage people, lie, cheat, you name it and they will do it.

As colleges host racially segregated graduation ceremonies and social events, know that while it disgusts you because its racist, there is an entire industry thriving off of it; thriving because of it.

In fact, causing it. When the President of the United States cantell a bunch of graduating college kids at a historically black college that black entrepreneurs arent smart enough to hire lawyers or accountantsand there is no pushback at all, it shows you how deeply embedded in the progressive culture this racist attitude is.And its not going anywhere, because they need it too badly.

Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show onWCBM in Maryland, and author of the book,Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses.Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.

Read the original here:

HUNTER: Democrats Return to Their Hatred-Based Mantra of Segregation & Race | texasinsider - Texas Insider