Category Archives: Eugenics

L-R: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Tucker Carlson, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY)Image: Getty Images (Getty Images)

Republican lawmakers, activists, and Supreme Court Justices love to shout that anyone who supports abortion access is sanctioning eugenics, but that complaintlike so many things they sayis pure projection. We need only look at the events of the last few days, which include a horrific white supremacist mass shooting, to understand exactly whats going on here.

Theres currently a nationwide baby formula shortage, and Republicans are mad that Border Patrol is following legal requirements to feed the migrant children that it locks up. Going by statements from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Troy Nehls (R-TX), it seems theyd prefer that the Biden administration let brown children starve to death.

Abbott said: Our children deserve a president who puts their needs and survival firstnot one who gives critical supplies to illegal immigrants before the very people he took an oath to serve.

Then on Saturday, a white supremacist targeted a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, and murdered at least 10 people, wounding several more. The shooter allegedly published a 180-page document that repeatedly cited the racist great replacement theory, the false notion that normal demographic change is actually due to a grand conspiracy to replace white people with nonwhite people.

Republicans like Stefanik and Fox News host Tucker Carlson love this lie, and so do a lot of anti-abortion activists (white supremacists routinely join pro-life protests). In fact, the 19th-century push to restrict abortion in the U.S. came around during the Civil War when white people were terrified of falling birth rates among white people amid increases in immigration from non-European countries.

The tragic shooting and infuriating baby formula shortage are happening in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court opinion suggesting that the justices are ready to fully overturn Roe v. Wade and let states ban abortion early in pregnancy. And for all the bleating from conservatives that abortion is somehow eugenicsas if anyones individual choice whether to continue or end a pregnancy could possibly be eugenicstheir years-long goal of overturning Roe will kill, maim, and lock up Black and brown women of reproductive age much more than white women. It is Republican politics that will have a eugenic effect.

Several hundred women and pregnant people die in the US every year from pregnancy and childbirth and more than 50,000 come close to dying. Due to systemic racism, Black women are two to three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy. When dozens of states ban abortion, more women and pregnant people will dieand the racial health disparities will worsen.

Some people post-Roe will die from unsafe abortions but the availability of safe and effective abortion pills should limit the health risks of illegal abortions. Though legal risks will remain. Gwen Snyder recently wrote an insightful Jezebel piece on the connections between abortion and white supremacy, and noted that criminalization of abortion will also limit the ability of women of color to reproduce:

Had authorities successfully prosecuted Herrera, her case would have advanced both the anti-abortion movement and the white natalist movement: Such imprisonment would potentially discourage women of all races from seeking medication-assisted abortion to circumvent the Heartbeat Act, but it would also have put a brown woman behind bars, potentially for the rest of the reproductive period of her life. A successful murder prosecution wouldnt have restored Herreras lost fetus, but it would most certainly have prevented her from bringing children to term at any time in the near future.

Just today, Jezebel writer Kylie Cheung outlined why its no longer surprising to learn that many Republicans who are pro-life are also pro-death penalty. While Black people make up between 12 to 14 percent of the U.S. population, about 40 percent of people on death row are Black.

Restrict healthcare, prevent paid family leave, ban abortion, over-police Black and brown people, lock them up and throw away the keyor worse. Dont ever let a conservative tell you that abortion is eugenics ever again.

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Republicans Are the Real Eugenicists - Jezebel

In May 1891, the London Vegetarian Society held a meeting in Portsmouth. Present were not just English, but also two Indian members, TT Majumdar and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, both students of law in London.

For Gandhi, later one of the leading figures in the Indian Independence movement, membership in the London Vegetarian Society was a formative experience. It allowed him to discover vegetarianism as an ethically motivated choice and integrate it into a philosophy of non-violence. The encounter was not a singular instance. It was part of a larger entanglement between European vegetarianism and India.

In order to buttress what was then a fringe lifestyle, vegetarians in Europe made frequent reference to meat abstention in other parts of the world. Particularly the figure of the merciful Hindoo, as John Oswald, author of one of the first tracts on vegetarianism, put it in 1791, loomed large in the vegetarian imagination.

In India, by contrast, interest in European vegetarianism only developed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Vegetarianism itself could look back on a far longer tradition. In Hinduism, many animals were revered as divine, most of all cows, whose meat was anathema to any pious Hindu, while the use of their products, including their excreta, was enjoined for human use and purification.

Vegetarianism, which excluded meat and eggs and sometimes garlic and onion, but included dairy products and occasionally fish, was influential in the Brahmin elite, the Jain and Parsi communities. Widows and students were likewise expected to embrace it. Muslims, lower caste individuals, and people without caste affiliation were rarely vegetarians. Because of their consumption of meat, they were considered morally and physically impure.

But vegetarianism also changed over time. During the colonial era, the consumption of meat became a symbol of muscular nationalism for parts of the Western-oriented Indian elite. Some castes striving for upward social mobility turned to vegetarianism. Moreover, vegetarianism and militant cow protection assumed centre stage in an emerging Hindu nationalist movement.

In the context of these developments, vegetarianism acquired new meanings and new rationales. In part, these came into effect through personal encounters and networks. Again, the example of Gandhi in London is instructive. One of the sources through which Gandhi acquired knowledge about Western vegetarianism was the Theosophical Society, an esoteric community whose belief system merged aspects of Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and other faiths.

While Gandhi encountered their teachings in London, they had established themselves in India in the late 1870s, where they also attracted some Brahmins and Parsis. Many theosophists practiced vegetarianism, and some founded vegetarian associations with Indians in the late 1880s, a time that also saw the formation of a Hindu nationalist movement.

Despite their divergent traditions, British and Indian vegetarians active in these organisations found common ground on a number of issues. Many of them were critical of colonial rule, advocated sexual restraint and abstention from alcohol. Apart from these personal encounters, vegetarian organisations in India and in England entered into contact via correspondence, affiliations, and exchange of literature.

Thus European and Indian vegetarianism came to be entangled not just on a personal, but also on a discursive level, most obviously by the use of the term vegetarianism by Indian authors. Writings on vegetarianism, whether European or Indian, drew on a variety of sources both religious and scientific.

Apart from the Bible and the teachings of Buddhism, European authors referred to the traditions of Hinduism, which had often been conferred to them either through Theosophical sources or through the very specific perspectives of members of the Brahmin elite. Indian authors, too, often drew on Western interpretations of Hindu religious writings, including Theosophical ones. They also made occasional reference to the Bible and the Quran, attempting to show that Hindu religious norms were applicable to all religions.

But even in India, religion alone was no longer considered a sufficient basis for vegetarianism. Thus Indian authors resorted to Western sources to emphasise similarities in the anatomy of human beings and vegetarian animals. They made reference to Western medicine to argue that the consumption of meat caused illnesses such as cancer. They quoted research from the new science of nutrition to show that human beings needed less protein than assumed.

At times these appropriations were rather inventive, as when Justus von Liebig, inventor of beef extract, was turned into an ardent advocate of vegetarianism. At their most creative, Indian authors insisted that the ideas of Western science had already been propagated by the anonymous authors of the Indian vedas. Most notably, this was asserted for two branches of science central to vegetarian discourse in both Western and Indian writings: evolutionary and racial theory.

Although vegetarianism in India was not a matter of choice to the same extent as in Europe, both European and Indian authors harboured utopian visions. The consumption of meat was thought to increase individual and collective propensity towards alcohol, sex, and aggressiveness, weaken a nations collective body, and, ultimately, give rise to wars and colonialism.

Abstaining from meat, on the other hand, would bring about a peaceful and healthy society. It would help create a new race, a better version of humankind. Some European authors even referred to this new branch of humankind as a higher caste.

Hence parts of vegetarian discourse were related to the new field of eugenics, and more specifically positive eugenics: improving humankind, or parts of it, through changes in lifestyle. This would automatically render obsolete and inferior those who did not embrace this reformed lifestyle.

Who, then, were these groups? Hardly surprising, those who indulged in meat, and particularly those who practiced apparently more cruel forms of slaughter. Indian authors tended to point towards Muslims, European authors towards Jews. Both availed themselves of the same form of ritual slaughter: cutting animals aortae in order to fully bleed them before slaughter, a practice actually meant to lessen animals pain.

Muslims and Jews, therefore, were rarely extolled as models when authors on vegetarianism pointed towards foodways in other parts of the world. In India, Muslims were actively campaigned against by parts of the cow protection movement, some of whose adherents did not hesitate to attack and even kill Muslims or Dalits suspected of consuming or selling beef.

It was thus not as coincidental as it might seem at first that a young Indian student of law in Britain entered the London Vegetarian Society, that he successfully shaped vegetarianism as a symbol of the Indian independence movement, and that he became a central figure to vegetarians worldwide. European vegetarians conflation of India with Brahmin values was not all that surprising, either. Brahmin elites were among the most powerful cultural intermediaries in colonial knowledge production in India.

Although Western vegetarians were often critics of social hierarchies, advocating womens rights, democracy (rather than monarchy), and social reform in terms up uplifting working-class people, they clearly saw themselves as a moral elite. They would form the core of a new humankind; they would be the ones to wean members of the working class off their alleged immoral lifestyle. At the same time, Western vegetarians embraced positions often ridiculed by the majority of society.

No wonder some of them approved of the caste system in which, according to Brahmin views, vegetarians were at the top while meat eaters appeared to be at the very bottom. Despite these exchanges, vegetarianism in Europe and in India continued to be embedded in different contexts.

The exchange of knowledge between actors in both parts of the world did not lead to a congruent or coherent body of knowledge. Exchange was not the only aspect of this encounter. Misunderstandings occurred. Certain parts of knowledge did not travel. Nonetheless, actors continued to be in contact. When the International Vegetarian Union finally organised its first congress outside Europe in 1957, it took place in India.

Julia Hauser is a professor at the University of Kassel, Germany.

This is a lightly edited version of an article that first appeared on Food, Fatness and Fitness: Critical Perspectives.

Link:

Race, spirituality and eugenics: The tangled past of vegetarianism in India and Europe - Scroll.in

When Naomi Judd was found dead the media immediately said she died of mental illness. This was a lie. The truth then came outshe shot herself.

Why didnt the media say that Payton Gendron, the serial Buffalo killer, shot his victims because he was suffering from mental illness? It happens to be truehe had recently been taken in for a mental health evaluationafter threatening to kill his high school class (he had previously stabbed and beheaded a cat).

The media saw a bigger story here. Who cares about his mental stateit was a white kid who shot black people. Had Gendron been black, it would have been a one-day story.

The pundits and politicians were not content to blame one deranged white high school studentthey had to cast their net high and wide, looking for a wholesale indictment of America.

It is true that the killer said some nutty thingshe is a nutty kid. Some of what he said is patently racist. This gave the Left the opportunity to pouncehe was motivated by a radical desire to replace non-white people with white people. Hence, he was an exponent of the great replacement theory, whether he knew it or not.

On May 16, two days after the shooting, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explained that what Gendron did was the fulfillment of the great replacement theory. The next day President Biden repeated this accusation. Now the chattering class cant shut up about it.

If these progressive members of the ruling class were better educated, they would know that the origins of replacement theory can be traced to the ruling class members of the Progressive Era, people just like themselves, not with right-wing nuts.

Madison Grant was the originator of replacement theory. He was a product of Yale College (1887) and Columbia Law School. He came from a blue-blooded background, or what Biden and Schumer would call the beneficiary of white privilege. He was one of the most prominent environmentalists of his timehe was an ally of Teddy Rooseveltand a wildlife zoologist. Indeed, he contributed to the founding of the Bronx Zoo.

Grant not only wanted more human control over the environment, he wanted more human control over the human race. He was a eugenicist.

His 1916 book,The Passing of the Great Race, made him the intellectual godfather of the great replacement theory. He wrote that indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often result in serious injury to the raceMistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and sentimental belief in the sanctity of life tend to prevent the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.

According to Daniel Okrent, who wrote a history of eugenics, Hitler was a big fan of Grant. Hitler studiedThe Passingenthusiastically, cited it in speeches, and other writings and at the time of his suicide, in the Berlin bunker in 1945, still owned a copy of the original German edition, warmly inscribed to him by the German publisher.

Grants ideas were behind the 1924 Immigration Act. It was aimed at curtailing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, many of whom were Italian or Polish. The ruling WASP elites not only wanted to maintain Nordic hegemony, they wanted to stop the migration of Catholics.

Grant was not alone in his fondness to control the human race. Princeton University professor Thomas C. Leonard, who wroteIlliberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era, notes that Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Progressive Era scholars and scientists proudly called themselves eugenicists.

One of the leaders of the eugenics movement during the Progressive Erawas Richard T. Ely, co-founder of the American Economic Association. He wrote that Negroes, are for the most part grownup children, and should be treated as such. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, agreed with his racist views.

The Catholic Church has a proud record of resisting the eugenics movement. They called it inhumane. Bioethicist and priest, John C. Berry, writes that Catholics appreciated the Churchs response. This was heartfelt, since Catholics, with many of their numbers among the Irish and other immigrant groups in the lower social strata in both the United Kingdom and the United States, were routinely castigated as a dysgenic presence in society. Catholics often found themselves the target of eugenic enthusiasts in other churches.

If Schumer and Biden, and all of those on the Left who are enthralled with replacement theory, want to learn more about those who saw this kind of thinking as having disastrous consequences, let them read Pope Pius XIs 1930 encyclicalCasti Connubii(On Christian Marriage). It is a brilliant takedown of the eugenic laws that inspired replacement theory.

The truth is that todays ruling class progressives share a philosophical pedigree with the ruling class members of the Progressive Era. Replacement theory would not exist without them.

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Progressive Origins Of 'Replacement Theory' OpEd Eurasia Review - Eurasia Review

Replacement theory in America has domestic antecedents much older than Renaud Camus and Jean Raspail. Henry Ford, among other Americans, promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which through an entirely fictional depiction of a powerful Jewish conspiracy that controlled world events has influenced racist theories and beliefs from its initial publication in the early 20th century.

Worries about the body politic and threats to the racial composition of the nation inspired eugenics campaigns, anti-immigration activists and other progressives, including Theodore Roosevelt. These ideas have been braided with environmentalism not only by ecofascists in the recent past, but also by late-19th- and early-20th-century environmentalists who worried about population burdens and wondered how to preserve nature for white people.

When neo-Nazis, Klansmen, militiamen and skinheads came together in the 1980s and 1990s, they worried about the Zionist Occupational Government or the New World Order. They also clarified that their nation was not the United States, but a transnational body politic of white people that had to be defended from these conspiratorial enemies and from racial threats defended through violence and race war. That current still runs through the writings of those associated with the Charleston, Christchurch, Oslo, El Paso, Pittsburgh and Buffalo attacks.

It is impossible to separate replacement theory from its violent implications, as decades of terrorism by its adherents shows us. The mainstreaming of replacement theory, whether through Tucker Carlsons show or in Elise Stefaniks campaign ads, will continue to have disastrous consequences.

The long game of white-power activists isnt just to terrorize and intimidate nonwhites: As The Camp of the Saints shows, these activists fear apocalyptic extinction if they dont take up arms. The American equivalent, The Turner Diaries, imagines what it would be like to establish a white-dominated world through race war and genocide.

Why wouldnt people immediately condemn such an idea? Thoughts and prayers are never enough after a mass shooting, but even these messages seem sparser than usual. Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator and member of the far-right extralegal Oath Keepers militia that was involved in the storming of the Capitol, suggested online that the shooting had been a false flag operation perpetrated by a federal agent.

Clearly this is not a fringe idea anymore. Decades of violence at the hands of extremists tell us that such ideas will lead to further violence. Mainstreaming of the idea means that the window for action is closing.

Continued here:

Opinion | The Buffalo Shooting and the Danger of White Replacement Theory - The New York Times

Pro-abortion sign held up in front of the Supreme Court in early May 2022. (Image: Gayatri Malhotra/Unsplash.com)

In the uproar over the leak of an early draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, the rhetoric of editorialists and commentators friendly to abortion has been short on light but long on heat. Even the conclusion of the New York Times editorialIf you thought Roe v. Wade itself led to discord and division, just wait until its goneleft you wondering: Is that a prediction or a threat?

At this time of unbridled passions it makes sense to recall T.S. Eliots wise saying, The end is where you start from, and reflect on what the founders of the abortion movement really saw as ultimate ends. And on that question no source speaks with more authority than Lawrence Lader.

Probably few people today remember Lader, but feminist writer Betty Friedan admiringly declared him the father of the abortion movement. Among other things, he wrote the most influential abortion advocacy book before Roe, and his handiwork was cited nine times by the majority opinion in that case. He remained a stalwart of the pro-abortion crusade up to his death in 2006 at the age of 86.

Lader was a journalist who wrote for magazines in the years after World War II. His eleven books included a biography of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and a volume arguing the case for the abortion drug RU-486. As a leader in the abortion movement, he was a co-founder of a group called the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Lawsnow, NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Among the targets of Laders zealotry was the Catholic Church. In his book Politics, Power, and the Church he argued that on divorce, school prayer, abortion, and other issues the Church sought to legalize its moral codes. In 1988-89 he brought suit against the Internal Revenue Service demanding an end to the Churchs tax-exempt status, but that effort went nowhere.

The high point of his abortion advocacy unquestionably was Abortion. Published by Bobbs-Merrill, the book came out in 1966 shortly after the Supreme Courts decision in Griswold v. Connecticut overturned an antique Connecticut anti-contraception statute. Griswold was notable for asserting a constitutionally protected right to privacy, something Lader correctly recognized as the pathway to legalized abortion. A followup volume, Abortion II, was even more upfront in acknowledging its authors radical goals.

So what exactly did Lader have in mind? Let him speak for himself.

Abortion, he declared, was the final freedom for women. But freedom for what? Abortion would be the prime weapon against sexism and the biological imperativethe prison of unwanted childbearing. But that wasnt all. Once sex had been detached from pregnancy, Womens Liberation could construct its own ethics on the ash-heap of puritan morality. And ultimately the most radical feminist (and, it would seem, Lawrence Lader himself) wants an even more sweeping revoltthe end of the nuclear family.

Worth noting is the tinge of eugenics in Laders writing. Usually its cloaked in high-sounding language (every child a wanted child), but here and there it breaks through, as in this: Above all, society must grasp the grim relationship between unwanted children and the violent rebellion of minority groups.

Abortion, eugenics, destroying the nuclear family, stamping out sexual morality, silencing the Catholic Church. These were among the ends pursued by the father of the abortion movement in a long, notably successful, and highly destructive career. If the movement Lawrence Lader launched has disavowed them, Im sorry to say I missed it.

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The forgotten father of the abortion movement Catholic World Report - Catholic World Report

On Saturday, a gunman murdered ten people and wounded three others at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The suspect, who is eighteen, used a weapon painted with a white-supremacist slogan and live-streamed his attack. Prior to the shooting, he also allegedly posted a manifesto, which relies heavily on the so-called great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy that has become increasingly mainstream in a number of Western countries, from France to the United States. To help understand that theory, and the dangers of white-supremacist violence more broadly, I spoke by phone with Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the alleged shooters influences, why the notion of a great replacement has gained a foothold in the United States and elsewhere, and how the media and political actors have used the theory to their benefit.

This theory seems to be useful for people in many different countries, and to target many different groups. Can you describe what it is, how it has changed over time, and how its become so useful to people such as this alleged shooter?

We can get into the textual background of the term if you want to, but its basically a new language for the same set of ideas that have worked to connect many different kinds of social threats into one broadly motivating, violent, and frightening world view for people in the white-power movement and on the militant right. The idea is simply that many different kinds of social change are connected to a plot by a cabal of lites to eradicate the white race, which people in this movement believe is their nation. It connects things such as abortion, immigration, gay rights, feminism, residential integrationall of these are seen as part of a series of threats to the white birth rate. One thing youll notice in the manifestos and in the talking points, really going back through the twentieth century, is this focus on the reproductive capacity of white women in maintaining the white race as a nation.

You mean the manifestos generally, or the manifesto last night?

Generally, and also the manifesto last night. The manifesto last night is also, broadly, copied from the Christchurch manifesto. [In March, 2019, a white gunman killed fifty-one people during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.] Were dealing with a genre of writing in which these threats are brought up to paint a picture of a race under siege. It changes the logic for some of the issues that we think of as capital-C conservative. So opposition to immigration is not simply about national security. Its about the reproductive capacity of immigrants and the fear that the white race will be overwhelmed and eradicated by intermixing. It is seen as an apocalyptic threat to their race.

The great replacement comes about relatively recently from The Camp of the Saints, a novel that depicts a surge of migrants that usurps European culture. But its really the same ideology as the New World Order conspiracy, the idea of the Zionist occupational governmentwhich is how people talked about this in the nineteen-eighties and early nineties. We see versions of this going all the way back to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, the writings of Madison Grant, and things such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. All of these are the same set of beliefs packaged with the cultural context at the time.

The French origins interest me, because it seems like you can plug in these different enemy groups in different places, right?

Absolutely.

It can be Muslims in France, and it can be Mexican Americans in the United States, or African Americans. Can you talk a little bit about that?

It allows an opportunism in selecting enemies so that you can tack to the scapegoat of a particular time and place, but it also follows the central motivating logic, which is to protect the thing on the inside, regardless of the enemy on the outside. Its about the fundamental importance of the preservation and birth rate of the white race. So the elements that are consistent across time are the idea that the white race can be threatened by intermixing and the idea that there is some kind of evil, lite force interested in eradicating it.

Its not just about passive demographic change, and the news stories we see pretty often about when a county or a city or the nation will no longer be majority white. Its about an apocalyptic threat perpetrated by what these conspiracists think of as a cabal. They see, for instance, abortion as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see residential integration as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see feminism as a scheme to keep white women out of the home and lower the white birth rate.

Who do they think is running this cabal? Is there any intellectual interest to that, or is it irrelevant?

The evil lites are typically rendered as Jewish, and I use that word cabal knowing that it tends to invoke an idea of Jewish lites. But this movement is also generally distrustful of all kinds of lites. Sometimes its about the United Nations as the lites trying to wage this war on the white birth rate. Sometimes its about global outsiders. But there is a heavy current of anti-Semitism that links the idea of the manipulative lite with Jewish conspirators.

When people such as Tucker Carlson try to do the respectable version of this, they often say, Oh, were worried about illegal immigration, and they pretend that theyre not saying something quite as bad as what they mean. Its almost always about immigrants, not African Americans. I assumed that was because it would be hard to pretend that African Americans havent been here for a long time. Is this shooters focus on African Americans notable in any way?

The great replacement comes from that novel, The Camp of the Saints, which is specifically about the threat of immigration. So it comes up a lot in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter, who was focussed on immigrants as his victims. This document that has been circulated that we believe to be the manifesto of the shooter in Buffalo is largely drawn from the Christchurch manifesto. The anti-immigration rhetoric is sort of being used as the frame for an act on African Americans.

In the past few years, weve had a series of mass attacks employing this ideology on different kinds of victim groups: the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the El Paso shooting of Latino folks at a Walmart. The Christchurch shooting targeted Muslim congregations in New Zealand. The Charleston shooting by Dylann Roof targeted African Americans in a church. All of those gunmen share an ideology. They are using the same framing language in their manifestos. Theyre all identifiable as white-power gunmen. This is a movement with a long history.

When you say movement, does that imply a structure or something with leadership?

When I say movement, what Im talking about is a set of groups and actors who are working with a common ideology and with interpersonal connections toward the same end. As a historian, I dont think well be able to see the interconnections for at least another ten years. But theres good reason to think that they are there because this movement works the same way now as it has since the late nineteen-seventies, and theres been no decisive change in how weve prosecuted or surveilled the movement. Theres no reason for it to change its method of organizing.

What weve seen in the earlier period is broad-based interconnection of money; weapons; exchange of ideas; travel between groups; people with multiple memberships; people changing memberships; and social connections such as marriages, churches, counselling services, picking each other up from the airport, staying with each other when they come through town. Its a deeply networked social movement. Its been using the Internet in one way or another since the nineteen-eighties. Its the same movement that has perpetrated a long string of racially motivated attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing. And weve never had a moment of coming to terms with it or of dedicating sufficient resources to stopping its activity.

Original post:

Making Sense of the Racist Mass Shooting in Buffalo - The New Yorker

Today Activision Blizzard made public a tool that it plans to deploy across its teams in the coming months. It's called the "Diversity Space Tool," and unlike other game development tools, it's not directly used to generate game content, but rather to evaluate the diversity of game characters and quantify that diversity in numbers and spider charts.

The tool was apparently created by the team atCandy Crush developer King, and tested on games likeCall of Duty: Vanguard, which featured an international cast of diverse characters fighting Nazis in World War II. It's also been tested by theOverwatch 2team, who expressed "optimistic first impressions.

There's plenty of good intent behind this new tool.King Globalization Project Manager Jacqueline Chomatas explained in Activision Blizzard's blog post that the intent of the tool was to evaluate game characters while they're being iterated on, to help show their creators there might be stereotypical patterns being expressed that reinforce classic ideas of sexism, racism, or other biases.

Calling it a "measurement device,"Chomatas explained that the tool is meant to "identify how diverse a set of character traits are and in turn how diverse that character and casts are when compared to the norm."

King employees also apparently spent time developing this tool in their off-hours as a "volunteer" effort, which does not bode well for a company claiming this as an effort to prioritize diversity.

Again, there's a lot of good intent here. But game developers on social media are mostly expressing negativity in the wake ofActivision Blizzard's announcement. If you dig into how the tool works, things get very uncomfortable very quickly.

Chomatas' explanation of how the tool works highlights a core complaint many game developers have: All of the characters run through the tool are being judged against a "norm," and that "norm" seems to be an able-bodied, white, cisgender straight man. Characters' diversity scores are increased when they deviate from that description.

A screenshot ofOverwatch Egyptian medical sniper Ana highlights how uncomfortable this gets. She's rated on a number of axes that are collated into a spider chart, and given ratings on them. Being Egyptian gets her a "culture" score of 7, as does being Arabic. Her age (60 years old) also lands her a 7, and her physical ability (only having one eye) is rated at a 4.

Her "cognitive ability" is rated at a 0, indicating that whatever Ana's cognitive ability is, it's part ofthe "baseline" that other characters might be judged against.

I cannot express enough how deeply uncomfortable that paragraph was to write. I have tried to writethree paragraphshighlighting how even Ana's normative "cognitive ability" shows the dangers establishing such a norm and deleted each one because of how gross they all sounded.

Michael Yichao, a narrative designer at Phoenix Labs, neatly called out how weird it was to create such a system that judges characters against a norm. "This tool assumes white male as the baseline against which 'points' are earned via deviation, which is in itself reinforcing rather than reimagining currently non-inclusive paradigms," he pointed out.

It doesn't help that many of the metrics picked by King and Activision Blizzard uncomfortably mirror real-world beliefs of racists and bigots.The eugenics movement of the early 20th century took particular enjoyment with the 19th century study of phrenology; a practice where one's intelligence (or cognitive ability) supposedly correlated to the size and shape of one's skull.

By some coincidence (it wasn't coincidence), phrenology experts would deem the skulls of non-white groups like Native Americans or Black Americans as being deviant, which was often used to justify atrocities like genocide or slavery against said groups.

It's likely that whoever added "cognitive ability" to this list wasn't attempting to make the same connection. But treating those with cognitive impairments (or simply different, varying scales of cognitive ability) as aberrant still has consequences for people today.

Given that many, many game developers have talked about the fights they've had with company executives to diversity their game casts, this tool seems like an uncomfortable natural extension of the game industry's toxic logic about non-white, non-male characters.

Just this week, developers from Respawn Entertainment spoke up about the pushback they allegedly received when they advocated casting a black woman asthe hero ofStar Wars Jedi:Fallen Order. In 2020, a former BioWare writer described complaints from her creative director about the addition of another Asian character to the game's cast.

Activision Blizzard says that the Diversity Space Tool can "clearly delineate between token characters and true representation," but it might in fact, do just the opposite.

This tool's revelation also becomesdeeply uncomfortable when you weigh it against Activision Blizzard's yearlong reckoning with a battery of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, abuse, and discrimination against the company.

Update: Activision Blizzard has updated its blog promoting King's "diversity tool" with a response to backlash the company experienced on social media. The company clarified that the tool has been used "as an optional supplement" by the company's developers. "Decisions regarding in-game content have been and will always be driven by development teams," it noted.

It's also removed images of the tool in action from the blog post.

The tool was apparently not used "in isolation,"and would be part of meetings with diversity-focused staff members to discuss "existing norms" and how game characters can exceed them. "Itis not a substitute for any other essential effort by our teams in this regard, nor will it alter our companys diversity hiring goals," the company added.

It's worth noting that after Activision Blizzard published its blog, multiple employees were spotted on Twitter expressing outward frustration about how it described the company's approach to diversity. "Overwatch doesn't even use this creepy distopian [sic] chart," character artist Melissa Kelly wrote on Twitter."Our writers have eyes. The artists: have eyes. Producers, directors, etc, as far as I know also all have eyes."

"We have people who work on the game from these cultures. That's it! That's literally it."

Kelly also shared a meme tweet stating "it has been 0 days since last our studio ruining our reputation."

Link:

Activision Blizzard's new "diversity space tool" gets frosty reception from devs - Game Developer

Yesterday 02:15 PM (GMT+8) EqualOcean

Since the implementation of the three child policy, many places have intensively issued birth support policies. Among them, the support of medical insurance for childbirth is an important content. According to the recently released notice of Zhejiang Medical Security Bureau on supporting "Zhejiang has good education" to promote eugenics and good parenthood (Draft for comments), it is proposed to increase the proportion of medical insurance reimbursement for infants aged 0-6 years. The proportion of basic medical insurance reimbursement for infants aged 0-6 years is about 10 percentage points higher than that of ordinary urban and rural residents. In recent years, with the increasing number of infertile people, there is a great voice to include assisted reproductive technology, including IVF, into medical insurance reimbursement. The notice issued by Zhejiang this time proposed to formulate the price of assisted reproductive technology and medical services for the treatment of infertility such as artificial insemination and test tube baby, and timely include them into the payment scope of maternity insurance in accordance with relevant national regulations.

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Many places plan to include IVF expenses into medical insurance, and Zhejiang will increase the proportion of medical insurance reimbursement for...

In nearly 700 pages of writings on the Discord messaging app, a person who identified himself as Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old suspect in Saturdays mass shooting in a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store, described his motivations. He expressed a reluctance to kill people: What I want right now is something to pass or someone to do something so I dont have to kill these people. The attack killed 10 people and injured three; 11 of the victims were Black.

The writer on Discord, according to transcripts of the messages that I reviewed, had been radicalized to believe that white peoples survival depended on eliminating people of color, whom he called replacers. He planned to try to shoot victims twice in the head to minimize their pain.

Mental illness didnt cause his monstrous actions. Mass bloodshed is the logical conclusion of embracing replacement theory, a white supremacist and antisemitic fiction espoused by some leading Republicans.

Opinion Columnist

Jean Guerrero

Jean Guerrero is the author, most recently, of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.

The GOP has been deflecting all week. On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the killer deranged while sidestepping questions about his partys promotion of his worldview. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has done more than anyone to mainstream replacement theory, attributed Gendrons ideology to a diseased mind.

But Gendrons beliefs arent uncommon among conservatives or Republicans. Carlson has used his most-watched show hundreds of times to popularize the lie that Democrats are trying to replace the current electorate [with] more obedient voters from the Third World. An Associated Press and University of Chicago poll this month found one-third of U.S. adults now believe a version of this propaganda. Call it Tucker Carlson Syndrome.

What varies in different versions of it are the imagined puppeteers. Carlson and politicians such as Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, blame Democrats. Gendron and other users of 4chan, digital sewers where Carlsons spewed vitriol gathers, blame Jews.

How did replacement theory become so normalized? Yes, it has been legitimized and used politically by Carlson and other grifters. But its important to understand what makes people vulnerable to the lie. Gendrons alleged Discord logs offer clues. Theyre far more detailed than his 180-page manifesto, which was partly copied from another white terrorists writings.

The foundation of his thinking lies in the belief that demographic change means death. Diversity is white genocide, he wrote.

This fallacy, increasingly common among conservatives, confuses population growth and change with population erasure and cultural decay. We have allowed the weak to interbreed with the strong, and this is dangerous, wrote the alleged shooter. He was obsessed with declining white birthrates and wrote of photos of biracial children: Dont racemix guys come on.

The myth of demographic change as doom for whites has a long history here dating back to anti-miscegenation laws in the 1600s, laws which continued to exist in the 1960s. Such laws gave the Nazis a template for the persecution of Jews. In 1946, a U.S. senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo, warned in a speech that mongrelization would destroy the white race.

Obsession with racial purity gained a scientific gloss in the early 20th century, when Francis Galton, an anthropologist, spearheaded the eugenics movement by promoting the idea that you could perfect the human species through selective breeding. Galton was inspired by his half cousin Charles Darwin, whose theory of natural selection he misunderstood. In The Origin of Species, Darwin writes: the more diversified the descendants become, the better will be their chance of success in the battle for life.

The quest for racial purity led to policies limiting immigration from nonwhite countries as well as the legalization of sterilization of those categorized as unfit, such as those perceived as idiots or insane. Black and brown women were disproportionately sterilized through the 1970s.

The horrors of Nazism led these ideas to lose some mainstream allure after World War II. But they were resurrected in the 1990s when the white supremacist and nativist John Tanton republished an English translation of the French dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints to influence the immigration debate. Depicting the destruction of the white world by brown refugees, the book inspired President Trumps immigration policy architect, Stephen Miller, and French writer Renaud Camus influential book The Great Replacement, another key text for replacement paranoia.

These ideas have spread with the accelerant of the internet and will take root in many more people like Gendron, who in his alleged Discord messages called himself a supporter of eugenics. He was self-radicalized during the pandemic by racist disinformation online casting Black people as genetically inferior to whites. Though that lie isnt new, it gains new currency with each new evangelist, among them Jared Taylor, another prominent U.S. white nationalist who has influenced leading Republicans, including the Republican front-runner in the 2021 California gubernatorial recall race, the talk show host Larry Elder.

The Buffalo shooter, inspired by the livestream of a replacement believer who massacred 51 Muslims in New Zealand, livestreamed his attack to encourage copycats. He idolized the anti-Mexican terrorist who murdered 23 people in El Paso. What these men have in common is not mental illness, but a Western cultural pathology: the creed of white supremacy, which demands white racial purity and sees our diversity as a declaration of war.

@jeanguerre

Continued here:

Guerrero: White terrorists have 'Tucker Carlson Syndrome.' Millions are vulnerable to it - Los Angeles Times

The federal judge who just ruled that Donald Trump and his attorney John Eastman more likely than not attempted to illegally obstruct Congress by concocting legal schemes to subvert the election of President Joseph Biden is the same judge hearing a homeless rights case filed against the City of Santa Barbaras no-parking rules for oversize vehicles.

Federal Judge David O. Carter, a retired Marine and ferociously outspoken from the bench, opined that Trump and Eastman, an Orange County lawyer, conspired to overturn last Novembers presidential election results. Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history, wrote Carter. This campaign was not confined to the ivory tower it was a coup in search of a legal theory. In this case, Eastman had hatched a scheme to delay certification of the election as part of a broader effort to give the final say to former Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence famously refused to go along. Carters opinion was part of the order compelling Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman College, to turn over emails between him and Trump. Eastman had argued such communications were privileged as attorney-client communications.

Judge Carter is also overseeing a case brought against the City of Santa Barbaras oversize-vehicle ordinance brought by Los Angeles civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman, who argued the ordinance is part of a campaign of negative eugenics waged against poor and homeless people by City Hall. The horror of a rich person having to endure seeing a poor persons camper or RV or indeed the actual poor person, Yagman argued, is not a legitimate reason for enforcement of the subject ordinance. It is an ugly neighborhood beautification project.

City Attorney Ariel Calonne had filed a motion to dismiss Yagmans complaint. The matter had been initially scheduled to be heard in December but was delayed at the last minute. In 2021, Judge Carter famously ordered the City of Los Angeles to find housing for its Skid Row residents within 180 days or face sanctions of $1 billion. That ruling was reversed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Judge Carter to Decide If the City of Santa Barbara Is Committing Eugenics - Santa Barbara Independent