Category Archives: Eugenics

By Simon Spichak, MSc | March 4th, 2022

In the last decade, medical institutions practicing within the field of neuroscience have begun to reckon with their racist past a necessary step for improving diagnostic cognitive tests for Alzheimers and related dementias. Many of these tests incorporate race-norming adjustments to test scores. The big problem is, race-norming adjustments arent based on evidence. They are based on historic prejudice.

Dr. Darshali Vyas, a clinical fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital researches the integration of racial biases in algorithms used to predict health outcomes and diagnose disease.

By embedding race into the basic data and decisions of health care, these algorithms propagate race-based medicine, Vyas and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020.

While age and years of education are commonly adjusted for in these cognitive tests, they cannot account for early-life segregation in education, quality of education or discrimination, according to Lisa Barnes, professor at Rush Medical College. That makes it difficult to untangle whether lower scores are a result of cognitive impairment or are simply artifacts of cultural forces related to racism or policies that promoted discrimination.

As a result, many of the cognitive tests that serve as the gold standard for diagnosing dementia are fundamentally flawed. And these problems arent new: According to historians and scholars, race-based adjustments originated as far back as the 15th and 16th centuries.

Since the 19th century, some psychologists and politicians have supported racist and eugenic policies through IQ tests, suggesting, for example, that enslaved people were less intelligent than their white owners. The underlying presence of these beliefs in cognitive science quietly strengthened the idea that there were genetically distinct races, and as a result, employment aptitude tests and cognitive tests were later adjusted based on race, under the assumption that Black people would score lower. This is called race-norming. Because of these inherently skewed designs, today, people with European ancestry who generally have increased access to resources and education still perform better than Black people on these gold-standard diagnostic tools.

As a result, Barnes says, researchers need to better contextualize these test scores and gather more data on race-based cognitive health biomarkers if they have any hope of accurately measuring cognitive health in Black individuals. Without taking these steps, the current set of diagnostic tests are not effective at setting objective cognitive health benchmarks to compare different racial groups to one another.

A prevailing notion in the field is that African American individuals have a two to three times higher incidence of [Alzheimers] than white individuals, she wrote. Although the burden of dementia is certainly high in the African American population, inconsistencies in the existing data and an important lack of data where it is most needed mean that we cannot be confident that the evidence supports this claim.

These adjustments were highlighted earlier last year when 20,000 former professional football players sued the National Football League (NFL) on the basis that race-norming impacted their cognitive diagnosis and treatment, allowing the NFL to withhold compensation.

Black former players are automatically assumed (through a statistical manipulation called race-norming) to have started with worse cognitive functioning than white former players, the lawsuit reads. As a result, if a Black former player and a white former player receive the exact same raw scores on a battery of tests designed to measure their current cognitive functioning, the Black player is presumed to have suffered less impairment, and he is therefore less likely to qualify for compensation.

There are steps researchers can take to help address these problems, Barnes told Being Patient. Those include better contextualizing a persons test score, and tailoring cognitive tests to race and ethnicity. Beyond neuropsychological testing, she added, biomarker studies with racially and ethnically diverse participant groups are essential to understanding how Alzheimers manifests in different populations.

While it isnt a welcome thought, it is important to consider the history of racism and eugenics which has shaped aspects of medicine, impacting the way cognitive function is measured.

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Cognitive Testing Is Still Racist, Researchers Explain - Being Patient

Photo: Richard Spencer, by Vas Panagiotopoulos [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Editors note: The following is excerpted from Chapter 8 of Richard Weikarts new book,How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.

The term alt-right has come to have a pretty elastic meaning, with the popular news media applying it to all sorts of groups. Here we focus on the core of those who originally called themselves the alt-right. Many of the leading personalities in this movement and Kevin MacDonald is one of them promote Darwinism as an integral element of their racist worldview. The alt-right is generally understood to be a movement of white Americans that embraces human inequality, especially racial inequality, while promoting the idea that one should identify with and promote the interests of ones own racial group.1In many respects the alt-right is simply a repackaging of neo-Nazism and white nationalism. From my survey of the most influential alt-right online periodicals, it is obvious that Darwinism serves the same ideological function for them that it did for Nazis, neo-Nazis, and earlier white nationalists. It plays a central role in justifying their views on racial inequality and eugenics.

In 201617 one of the most publicized figures in the alt-right movement was Richard Spencer, founder of the onlineRadix Journal. In his speeches Spencer sometimes quotes Nazi propaganda in the original German, and some members of his audience have been known to give Nazi salutes. In a 2017 essay co-authored with F. Roger Devlin, Spencer insisted that racial differences emerged because of evolutionary processes. He outlined the basic evolutionary story of humans originating in Africa and then migrating to Europe and Asia. He argued that group differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection and racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution. He also asserted, The preference for ones own race is a product of our evolutionary history. Thus, in Spencers view, white nationalism is hard-wired in our biology. Spencer also embraces the Darwinian explanation so prevalent among Nordic racists and in alt-right circles, stating, The higher intelligence and lower crime rates of Whites and East Asians as compared with Africans may be due in large part to the selective pressure of cold winters.2

SpencersRadix Journalalso publishes numerous articles promoting Darwinian evolution as the basis for their so-called racial realism. In explaining the fundamentals of the alt-right, Guilluame Durocher wrote, What is our reason? We believe in Darwin and evolutionary science. Man is, at bottom, a biological entity and, in particular, his potentialities are circumscribed by his genetic heritage. This must be recognized so life may continue its upward evolution, towards the stars, rather than back into the muck. Durocher then criticized liberals for inconsistency, because they say they believe in Darwinism, but then refuse to apply it to public policy.3

In a different white nationalist venue, theOccidental Observer, Durocher expressed sympathy with the Third Reich, noting, The National Socialists proposed a total reformation of society around biocentric norms. This was based on the revolutionary insights of Darwin (which Hitler himself compared to the Copernican revolution), which revealed the natural evolutionary forces which had shaped all life, including all human life. Durocher calls Nazism a self-conscious group evolutionary strategy (GES) designed to further the interests [of] a genetically-defined German people, and he seems to revel in Nazi atrocities. He states, The National Socialists observed that in Nature, violence is absolutely fundamental to the survival and development of life, and they sought to be in harmony with this cosmic reality. Durocher argues as I have in the earlier sections of this book that Darwinism is a central, defining feature of Nazi ideology.4

In 2016 an anonymous article in SpencersRadix Journalpromoted the Darwinian-inspired ideas of the early 20th-century racist ideologue Madison Grant. The author emphasized the social Darwinist underpinnings of Grants ideology and recommended his book,Conquest of a Continent, which is a grand vision of bio-cultural struggle and evolution, in which demography comes alive. The author also promotes Darwinism as the key to promoting white nationalism when he writes, Darwinism offers a compelling and rational justification for Whites to act on behalf of their ancestors and progeny and feel a shared sense of destiny with their extended kin group. Darwinism is seemingly more effective in rallying Whites, especially elite Whites, than religious feelings.5

Another prominent figure in the alt-right movement is Jared Taylor, who strongly influenced Spencer. Taylor has also published articles clearly expressing the centrality of Darwinism in his worldview. In 2019 the white nationalist websiteAmerican Renaissancerepublished a 1992 essay by Taylor, where he positively reviews Roger PearsonsRace, Intelligence and Bias in Academe. At the top of the article is a picture of Charles Darwin, and the essay begins:

The discovery of genetics and the development of the theory of evolution were two of the most potentially far-reaching scientific advances of all time. By the turn of the century, thanks to the work of Gregor Mendel (18221884) and Charles Darwin (18081882), man for the first time had the knowledge with which to direct his own biological destiny. Rather than leave his further development to the genetic accidents that had governed it for millions of years, he could consciously and deliberately improve his very nature.6

Taylor not only embraces a social Darwinist version of racism, but he also endorses Darwinian-inspired eugenics. Also, in 2019American Renaissancerepublished one of Taylors 2006 book reviews, where he endorses Richard LynnsRace Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis. According to Taylor, Prof. Lynn argues that it was the demands of colder, non-African environments that forced the pace of evolution in intelligence and gave rise to race differences.7As we have already seen, this is a standard theme of Nordic racist ideology, which underpins their mistaken view that blacks are intellectually inferior to white people. In 2009 Taylor approvingly reviewed the bookErectus Walks amongst Us, by Richard C. Fuerle. Taylor calls this book a primer on evolution and genetics, a catalog of how populations differ, an introduction to sociobiology and the concept of genetic interests, and a plea for white survival. Taylor endorsed Fuerles evolutionary analysis of Africans inherent biological tendency toward crime and sociopathy. For example, Taylor explains, In the tropics, where mother and child had a better chance of surviving, it would have been maladaptive not to rape. This may explain high rates of rape among African populations.7(This is another example of white nationalists cherry-picking data; it is true that a few African countries have high incidences of rape; however, some African countries, such as Kenya and Uganda, have significantly lower rates than Sweden or Germany or Norway.8)

Other alt-right figures, such as John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer, and many others, have published articles lauding Darwinism in alt-right websites and periodicals, such asVDARE,Takis Magazine, theOccidental Observer, andAmerican Renaissance. These carry titles such as Darwin on the Rise and Fall of the Human Races, The Evolution of Racial Differences in Morality, and Ed Dutton with an Evolutionary Perspective on the Rape of Finland.9The alt-right proponent Frank Hilliard has even published an essay entitled The Alternative Right Belongs to the Darwinians on the Council of European Canadians website.10Not all alt-right essays with Darwinian content have such obvious titles, but many articles on these websites recycle the evolutionary ideas I have already explained above.

The overlapping categories of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and alt-right proponents regularly invoke Darwinism to try to demonstrate that their case for racial inegalitarianism and white superiority is scientific. Indeed, by their own admission, Darwinism is central to their ideology, and they regularly ridicule creationists and intelligent design advocates as ignorant. They believe that racial differences have been shaped by natural selection in the struggle for existence. Just like early 20th-century Nordic racists, some of whom they still promote, they claim that the harsher environment in Europe and Asia provided selective pressure that caused Europeans and Asians to become more intelligent and more cooperative than black Africans. They want to promote further human evolution by practicing racial segregation and introducing eugenics policies. Many of them see nature as their god, and promoting evolution as their gods highest command. Darwinism is thus not only crucial to their explanation of how the world is today, but it is central to their vision of morality and public policy.

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Darwinian Influences on the Alt-Right - Discovery Institute

An operation taking place in 1941 on South Side of Chicago. Library of Congress

Alexandra Minna Stern, University of Michigan

In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board met to decide if a 20-year-old Black woman should be sterilized. Because her name was redacted from the records, we call her Bertha.

She was a single mother with one child who lived at the segregated O'Berry Center for African American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. According to the North Carolina Eugenics Board, Bertha had an IQ of 62 and exhibited aggressive behavior and sexual promiscuity. She had been orphaned as a child and had a limited education. Likely because of her low IQ score, the board determined she was not capable of rehabilitation.

Instead the board recommended the protection of sterilization for Bertha, because she was feebleminded and deemed unable to assume responsibility for herself or her child. Without her input, Berthas guardian signed the sterilization form.

Berthas story is one of the 35,000 sterilization stories we are reconstructing at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab. Our interdisciplinary team explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in the U.S. using data and stories. So far, we have captured historical records from North Carolina, California, Iowa and Michigan.

More than 60,000 people were sterilized in 32 states during the 20th century based on the bogus science of eugenics, a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883.

Eugenicists applied emerging theories of biology and genetics to human breeding. White elites with strong biases about who was fit and unfit embraced eugenics, believing American society would be improved by increased breeding of Anglo Saxons and Nordics, whom they assumed had high IQs. Anyone who did not fit this mold of racial perfection, which included most immigrants, Blacks, Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities, became targets of eugenics programs.

Indiana passed the worlds first sterilization law in 1907. Thirty-one states followed suit. State-sanctioned sterilizations reached their peak in the 1930s and 1940s but continued and, in some states, rose during the 1950s and 1960s.

The United States was an international leader in eugenics. Its sterilization laws actually informed Nazi Germany. The Third Reichs 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases was modeled on laws in Indiana and California. Under this law, the Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 children and adults, mostly Jews and other undesirables, labeled defective.

The team at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab has uncovered some remarkable trends in eugenic sterilization. At first, sterilization programs targeted white men, expanding by the 1920s to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like feeblemindedness and mental defective. Over time, though, women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism.

It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway. Until the 1950s, schools and hospitals in the U.S. were segregated by race, but integration threatened to break down Jim Crow apartheid. The backlash involved the reassertion of white supremacist control and racial hierarchies specifically through the control of Black reproduction and future Black lives by sterilization.

In North Carolina, which sterilized the third highest number of people in the United States 7,600 people from 1929 to 1973 women vastly outnumbered men and Black women were disproportionately sterilized. Preliminary analysis shows that from 1950 to 1966, Black women were sterilized at more than three times the rate of white women and more than 12 times the rate of white men. This pattern reflected the ideas that Black women were not capable of being good parents and poverty should be managed with reproductive constraint.

Berthas sterilization was ordered by a state eugenics board, but in the 1960s and 1970s, new federal programs like Medicaid also started funding nonconsensual sterilizations. More than 100,000 Black, Latino and Indigenous women were affected.

Many felt shame and shrouded these experiences in secrecy, not even telling their closest relatives and friends. Others took to the streets and filed law suits to protest forced sterilization. The powerful documentary No Ms Bebs tells the story of hundreds of Mexican American women coerced into tubal ligations at a county hospital in Los Angeles in the 1970s. One of them, who became a plaintiff in a case against the hospital, reflecting back decades later said her experience makes me want to cry.

In the years between 1997 and 2010, unwanted sterilizations were performed on approximately 1,400 women in California prisons. These operations were based on the same rationale of bad parenting and undesirable genes evident in North Carolina in 1964. The doctor performing the sterilizations told a reporter the operations were cost-saving measures.

Unfortunately, forced sterilization continues on. Romani women have been sterilized unwillingly in the Czech Republic as recently as 2007. In northern China, Uighurs, a religious and racial minority group, have been subjected to mass sterilization and other measures of extreme population control.

All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation. They merge perceptions of disability with racism, xenophobia and sexism resulting in the disproportionate sterilization of minority groups.

Alexandra Minna Stern, Professor of American Culture, History, and Women's Studies, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Forced sterilization policies in the US targeted ...

by Jacqueline Woodbridge, Communications Director for the VA Senate Democratic Caucus

With Governor Youngkins Department of Education issuing an interim report regarding inherently divisive concepts in Virginias schools and VDOE resources, the Governor has begun a trend of institutional inertia that weve seen before.

In the beginnings of other movements in the United States and around the world to relegate certain people to second-class status, education has been a crucial part of erasing the validity of different cultures, races, religious beliefs, and other factors.

For example, the Third Reich in Germany indoctrinated students as young as 5 years old in a brainwashing experiment to institutionalize the notion of a superior race and inferior races. Hitler believed the purpose of state education was to burn into the hearts of students the importance of race. He removed all instruction on religion, and any curriculum had to be approved by the Nazi Partyentirely removing materials that included topics on racial equity. Membership in the Nazi Party was required for all public school teachers.

This propaganda legitimized among its citizens Germanys instigation of World War II based on the concept of Lebensraum, and enunciated the superiority of the Arian race.

Turning to Virginias history, Black Codes and Jim Crow laws refused certain education to Black studentsremoving any opportunity for them to participate in any occupation other than farm work or domestic jobs.

Eugenic ideology was propagated in public schools beginning in the 1910s, playing a key role in teacher training, curriculum development, and school organization. Eugenics became a top-down model of education reform for college educators.

Now, Virginia is veering toward a similar path.

Late last month, Governor Youngkin established a teacher tip line to root out teachers who are teaching inherently divisive concepts, the complaints of which are being hidden from public view.

The Governors Department of Education issued an interim report on programs being rescinded from Virginias education policies and resources, which includes:

Within these few examples, along with the other eliminations outlined in State Superintendent Jillian Balows interim report, echo an eerie warning: if we dont talk about race, how might a student interpret the world around them?

History tells us: students will interpret the world around them based on their own cultural and racial upbringing. Students will inherit the views of their parents and grandparents without learning through the lens of others cultural backgrounds.

Cultural competence is not inherently divisive. On the contrary; cultural competence develops empathy, understanding, and a willingness to listen to one anothers experiences.

Elimination of cultural competence is inherently divisive. Prohibiting instruction and student input on diverse experiences and histories explicitly divides children, and indoctrinates them into a society that is silent on inequity and injustice.

As Ian Kershaw said, the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.

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Gov. Youngkin Has It Completely Backwards: In Fact, *Elimination* of Cultural Competence and Teaching About History Is What's Inherently Divisive -...

Photo: Hitler in 1941, via Wikicommons.

Editors note: The following is excerpted from Chapter 1 of Richard Weikarts new book,How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.

The official Nazi Party newspaper,Vlkischer Beobachter, focused mostly on politics and current events and only rarely mentioned scientific issues. Nonetheless, occasionally it featured articles that honored Charles Darwin or Ernst Haeckel for their contributions to evolutionary theory. In 1932 theVlkischer Beobachterpublished an article simply entitled Darwin, which claimed that Darwins theory was the theoretical foundation for eugenics and racial theory, which, of course, were central features of the Nazi worldview. The article, written by an anonymous professor, explained that evolution was a well-established scientific truth that was not debatable, and that Darwins theory of natural selection had triumphed over Lamarckian theory. It called on fellow Germans to honor the great scientist and scholar Charles Darwin.1

As we shall see in this chapter, official Nazi periodicals, science journals, and official Nazi propaganda pamphlets written to propagate Nazi racial ideology all concurred with this perspective. They honored Darwin and championed his theory of natural selection, rejecting the Lamarckian theory of evolution. Whenever they overtly discussed evolution, they proclaimed it as a scientific fact and rejected any attempts to question it. Further, they portrayed biological evolution as an important factor in their worldview.

TheVlkischer Beobachterwas just one of many Nazi periodicals to laud Darwin and his theory. Various Nazi periodicals featured articles positively discussing evolution, including human evolution and its relationship to racial theory. Some of these articles explicitly attacked anti-evolutionary thought. The anti-evolutionary ideas they opposed, moreover, were not being published by fellow Nazis, but instead were being promoted by religious periodicals, especially the Catholic periodicalNatur und Kultur. In the course of my research, I have surveyed quite a few Nazi periodicals, and I have never discovered a single article in them attacking or even calling into question evolutionary theory. Some articles argued over the details of evolutionary theory, and they might even criticize Darwinism as too individualistic. However, these articles always embraced the common descent of organisms, and the vast majority taught the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection through the struggle for existence. They also consistently espoused the ideas of human evolution and the evolution of races, which they believed buttressed their views on racial inequality and racial competition.

In 1934, on the occasion of the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckels hundredth birthday, theVlkischer Beobachterran a story about Haeckel by the evolutionary biologist Viktor Franz. While Franz expressed some criticisms of Haeckels combative anti-Christian stance, he lauded Haeckel for his contributions to evolutionary biology.2In 1939, on the twentieth anniversary of Haeckels death,Vlkischer Beobachtercarried an article even more laudatory toward Haeckel. It not only applauded his contribution toward evolutionary biology, but also highlighted Haeckels promotion of human evolution as a worthy achievement.3These articles fully supported evolutionary theory, including human evolution, and presented Darwinism as an important foundation for other elements of Nazi ideology, such as racial theory and eugenics. The view among some people today that human evolution is incompatible with Nazi racial ideology was apparently not a view shared by theVlkischer Beobachter.

Its undeniable, then, that the Nazis employed Darwinism widely in their propaganda efforts. But one might object that the Nazi use of Darwinism was purely a rhetorical strategy: That is, Hitler and other Nazis shrewdly co-opted a dominant scientific paradigm in the service of their insidious political goals. And if there had been another dominant scientific view of origins, they would have claimed that for their cause. There are multiple problems with this objection.

First, it seems to rest on the false assumption that the Nazi regime was primarily opportunistic. Most historians today recognize that Hitler and most leading Nazis were not primarily opportunists but, rather, fanatical ideologues. Sure, Hitler and his comrades were willing to lie to the public if it brought political advantage. However, those lies were always to try to advance their heartfelt ideology, not just to attain power for powers sake.

Second, we have considerable evidence that Hitler and leading Nazis did not just use Darwinism for public consumption, but promoted it in private conversations. It was not just a superficial add-on to gain support for unrelated ideas and policies.

Third, and probably most importantly, this objection fails to recognize that leading Darwinian biologists and anthropologists were promoting scientific racism in the pre-Nazi period. The Nazis were influenced by this scientific racism. Darwinism was an essential part of Nazi racial ideology from the start. It is not like Nazis had their racist ideology in place, and then added Darwinism to the mix to gain more public support. Racism and Darwinism were closely aligned long before the Nazis developed their ideology.

Not only science journals, but also the most important Nazi periodicals, along with pamphlets written to teach the Nazi worldview, all taught the importance of evolutionary biology in Nazi ideology. The authors considered human evolution especially important, because they believed it supported their vision of racial inequality and racial struggle, fundamental parts of the Nazi worldview. No Nazi journal or official Nazi publication (at least, of which I am aware) published articles or essays denying human evolution. However, some did publish essays bashing creationism and anti-evolutionary ideas. Though there was some debate about the exact way that evolution occurred, the version of evolutionary theory most Nazis preferred was the Darwinian theory of natural selection through the struggle for existence.

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Darwinism in Nazi Propaganda - Discovery Institute

One of the very best things about the Batman mythology (some might even arguethe best thing) is the wild cadre of baddies who populate Gotham City. From the gimmicky to the gruesome, Batmans villains all have something which sets them apart, and more than anything else, some distinctive visual element tied to them. Whether its a costume or some physical attribute, Batmans baddies truly stand out. But he wasnt the first to fight a whole host of weirdos. A decade before Bob Kane with Bill Finger gave us Batmans rascally rogues, Charles Goulds Dick Tracy kicked the trend off in strange and signature fashion.

Dick Tracy was a comic strip which first appeared in theDetroit Mirror in October of 1931. Originally given the not-catchy name of Plainclothes Tracy, Dick Tracy was a dashing and intelligent police detective character who would take on his citys seemingly endless supply of gangsters and lowlifes. And goons; mustnt forget the goons. Cartoonist Charles Gould wrote and drew the strip all the way until 1977 and created literally hundreds of foes for Tracy, some more memorable than others.

Goulds aim was for his strip to be unambiguous. The good guys were handsome, and the bad guys were grotesque. In the Depression era, this kind of ableism was pretty standard; 91 years removed we know this smacks of eugenics. Regardless, as Gould continued his strip, the villains, despite being violent murderers and thieves, became the draw. Lantern jawed Dick Tracy wasnt as interesting as the amoral criminals he fought. And without a tragic backstory or complex moral code like Batman, Tracy had nothing much to make him stand out against increasingly silly baddies.

The first Dick Tracy baddie was Big Boy, an imposing mafia-type. He was just a mob boss, nothing too gimmicky. But very quickly, Gould would introduce characters with some kind of pronounced facial feature. These included Dan The Sequealer Muscilli, who had very large lips on a wide, frog-like mouth; Confidence Dolan, who had a square-shaped head; Old Mike, who was, go figure, old; and Doc Hump who had a bald, pointy head and a large hunched back.

In 1936, Gould introduced Lips Manlis, another character with a wide and froggy mouth. This character ended up sticking around much longer than others, and would later reform and give up his life of crime. In 1937, Gould, perhaps tired of drawing a face, came up with The Blank, a gangster with no face. Just likeno face. This is a supremely silly, yet quite effective subversion of his usual style.

Then, the little known comic book character Batman debuted inDetective Comics #27 in November 1939. At first, he was just a riff on the Shadow, a costumed hero who used pistols and fought regular criminals. But beginning in 1940, Batman started to fight the more outlandish criminal element. Catwoman, the Joker, and Clayface all debuted in 1940; the Penguin and Scarecrow in 1941.

This seemingly rubbed off on Gould and Dick Tracys villains got even sillier and the comics tone more darkly humorous. Little Face Finny, who had an enormous head but tiny little face, debuted in 1941; Pruneface Boche hit the pages in 1942, with a face that resembled a waterlogged finger. The rest of the 40s saw characters who would prove immensely popular with readers. The Brow, with his forehead ridges; Itchy Oliver who was constantly scratching at skin irritations; there was a guy named Shoulders and I urge you to guess what his deal was.

Perhaps the closest thing theDick Tracy comics had to a Joker-esque character was the enforcer Flattop Jones, a skinny, ruthless murderer with a pale white face and a completely flat head with black hair cascading off. Gould drew him with sleepy eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a constantly puckered mouth. He looked a bit like a clown, and was the most feared hitman in the city. After his debut in December, 1943, and a series of violent capers, Tracy killed Flattop in May of 1944. However, so popular was he with readers that many more members of the Jones family, each with their own physical characteristic, would pop up. Flattops son, Flattop Jr., would even become a major Dick Tracy villain years later.

While Charles Gould surely created the concept of the gimmick villain, it wasnt until after the popularity of Batman and his nascent rogues gallery that Goulds characters seemed to follow suit. Whether this was a direct inspiration, an attempt to cash in, or simply Gould poking fun at the absurdity of Kane and Fingers creations, the result is a roster of baddies that made the most of the visual storytelling medium of comic strips.

Its really no surprise that following the success of Tim BurtonsBatman in 1989, Warren Beatty would chooseDick Tracy comics to bring to the big screen. But unlike theBatman movies, which would maybe give us a couple of villains at a shot, the 1990Dick Tracy film packed it so full of memorable, absurd and grotesque villains that they completely overshadowed the hero. Exactly as it should be.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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DICK TRACY and the Birth of the Wild Rogues Gallery - Nerdist

In a hearing last week about racism in public school curriculum, Arizona state Rep. Walt Blackman said any honest conversation about Americas past of slavery and discrimination must also acknowledge the genocide of our present age: abortion.

There are more black babies aborted than born every day, he said.

White leftist activists constantly talk about racism, but they conveniently ignore that their sacred cow of abortion is racist to its core.

Abortion should never have become a political football. It used to be something every American, Democrat and Republican, agreed was wrong.

Democrat politician and activist Jesse Jackson is a good example. In 1975, he compared the Roe v. Wade decision to slavery: There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life That was the premise of slavery. But after Jackson ran for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1988, he conformed to the pro-choice party line.

Since then, a tragic dissonance has ensued in the black community over party affiliation and abortion. While most black Americans (54 percent) think abortion is morally unacceptable, they are still more closely associated with the Democratic Party and its abortion-friendly platform. Many black voters find themselves out of step with Democrat candidates seeking their votes, especially on social issues, similar to blue-collar voters who feel Democrat policies have left them behind.

Democrats can easily reconcile with their voter base on this issue. Restoring respect for all life would win the hearts of many in the black community.

A recently released report from an organization we work with, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), shows the devastating effects of abortion on generations of black Americans. The report details the abortion industrys predatory practices how abortion providers seek out minority women, advertise directly to them, and sometimes perform illegal procedures, like the infamous late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell. This multi-billion dollar industry isnt trying to protect anyones rights; its trying to profit off desperate women, especially black women.

In 2012, the Life Issues Institute reported that 79% of Planned Parenthoods surgical abortion facilities are strategically located within walking distance of African-American and/or Hispanic communities. In 2017, they updated these numbers to include 25 new abortion mega centers, 100 percent of which were within walking distance of minority neighborhoods. With each abortion bringing in hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on whether they are early- or late-term abortions, its clear that abortion providers are engaging in a grisly sort of supply-side economics.

Worse still, abortion has always been a tool of racial eugenics, the ideology that seeks to limit undesirable black births. Star Parker, the founder of CURE and author of the report, argues that From its inception, the abortion industry has sought to control and hinder the growth of the Black population, a core objective of the movements founders.

This is a historical fact. Margaret Sanger, the founder of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, was a racial eugenicist who was concerned that the mass of Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, and hired black pastors lest word go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. Many other early abortion activists, such as Hugh Moore and Edward Ross, sought to expand abortion to prevent non-white population growth. Today, there are still abortion activists who behave like the black community needs more abortions.

The politicization of abortion an issue that is moral to its core is a wound in our national fabric that we feel deeply and personally. One of us was born to a single mother and later adopted, but many others in the exact same situation were aborted. We work with CURE to support policies that help mothers with unplanned pregnancies avoid the grievous act of abortion. Black mothers especially face intense manipulation and pressure because of the politics of abortion.

We must restore bipartisan moral common sense and offer hope to these women. There is no hope without justice, and theres no justice without truth. We cant talk about racism without talking about the dark stain on our society that abortion represents. Black Americans, who suffer disproportionately from abortion, deserve equal rights, including the right to life. The unborn deserve racial justice too.

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Race-Mad Leftists Don't Want To Talk About Abortions Of Black Babies - The Federalist

When the coronavirus pandemic began, Emily Landon thought about her own risk only in rare quiet moments. An infectious-disease doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, she was cramming months of work into days, preparing her institution for the viruss arrival in the United States. But Landon had also recently developed rheumatoid arthritisa disease in which a persons immune system attacks their own jointsand was taking two drugs that, by suppressing said immune system, made her more vulnerable to pathogens. Normally, shed be confident about avoiding infections, even in a hospital setting. This felt different. We didnt have enough tests, it was probably around us everywhere, and Im walking around every day with insufficient antibodies and hamstrung T-cells, she told me. And she knew exactly what was happening to people who got infected. One night, she found that in the fog of an earlier day, she had written on her to-do list: Make a will. And I realized, Oh my God, I could die, she said. I just cried and cried.

Two years later, COVID-19 is still all around us, everywhere, and millions of people like Landon are walking around with a compromised immune system. A significant proportion of them dont respond to COVID vaccines, so despite being vaccinated, many are still unsure whether theyre actually protectedand some know that they arent. Much of the United States dropped COVID restrictions long ago; many more cities and states are now following. That means policies that protected Landon and other immunocompromised people, including mask mandates and vaccination requirements, are disappearing, while accommodations that benefited them, such as flexible working options, are being rolled back.

This isnt a small group. Close to 3 percent of U.S. adults take immunosuppressive drugs, either to treat cancers or autoimmune disorders or to stop their body from rejecting transplanted organs or stem cells. That makes at least 7 million immunocompromised peoplea number thats already larger than the populations of 36 states, without even including the millions more who have diseases that also hamper immunity, such as AIDS and at least 450 genetic disorders.

In the past, immunocompromised people lived with their higher risk of infection, but COVID represents a new threat that, for many, has further jeopardized their ability to be part of the world. From the very start of the pandemic, some commentators have floated the idea that we can protect the vulnerable and everyone else can go on with their lives, Seth Trueger, who is on immunosuppressants for an autoimmune complication of cancer, told me. Hows that supposed to work? He is an emergency doctor at Northwestern Medicine; he can neither work from home nor protect himself by avoiding public spaces. How am I supposed to provide for my family or live my life if theres a pandemic raging? he said. Contrary to popular misconceptions, most immunocompromised people are neither visibly sick nor secluded. I know very few people who are immunocompromised and get to live in a bubble, says Maggie Levantovskaya, a writer and literature professor who has lupus, an autoimmune disorder that can cause debilitating inflammation across the entire body.

As the coronavirus moves from a furious boil to a gentle simmer, many immunocompromised people (like everyone else) hope to slowly expand their life again. But right now, its like asking someone who cannot swim to jump into the ocean instead of trying a pool, Vivian Cheung, a biologist at the University of Michigan who has a genetic autoimmune disorder, told me. I feel this pressure of jumping into the Pacific and not knowing if I can survive or not.

Whether that changes depends on the accommodations society is willing to make. Ramps, accessibility buttons, screen readers, and many other measures have made life easier for disabled people, and a new wave of similar accommodations is now necessary to make immunosuppression less of a disability in the COVID era. Exactly none of the people I talked with wants a permanent lockdown. Its not like immunocompromised people are enjoying any of this, Levantovskaya told me. What they do wantwork flexibility, better ways of controlling infectious diseases, and more equitable medical treatmentswould also benefit everyone, not just now but for the rest of our lives.

For more than three decades, Julia Irzyk has lived with lupus symptoms. She also has rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative spinal condition, and heart problems. When she gets colds, they tend to progress to full-blown pneumonia, so even before the pandemic she was mindful about infections. Shed avoid big events and rarely ate out. When she flew, which she did infrequently, shed wear a mask. For this story, I spoke with 21 people who are either immunocompromised or care for those who are; others were similarly fastidious pre-pandemic about washing their hands, getting their flu vaccines, and avoiding people who were clearly sick. Landon wouldnt go to parties at the height of flu season. Cheung wore masks on flights and wiped down the surfaces around her. But none of them was living in seclusion. All of them had rich social lives.

COVID changed that. The new coronavirus forced them to go beyond their previous precautions, because it is deadlier than normal respiratory pathogens, can spread from people who arent obviously sick, and did so at breakneck speed. Compared with others, when immunocompromised people get COVID-19, they tend to be sicker for longer. Irzyks rheumatologist told her not to go out: If you get this, your heart and lungs wont be able to take it. So she went seven months without leaving her home, and still spends most of her time there. She missed both her grandmothers funerals. She delayed important medical procedures, even as her lupus symptoms got worse because one of her treatmentshydroxychloroquineran out of stock after Donald Trump falsely touted it as a COVID cure.

COVID has also defined Harper Corrigans life. She was born in September 2019nine weeks early, and with a rare brain malformation called lissencephaly. She has never played with another child even though, being sassy and funny, she really wants to. A week before the U.S. shut down in March 2020, Harper had to have a tracheostomy, leaving her even more vulnerable to respiratory viruses and, in turn, potentially deadly seizures. The Corrigans spent 11 months with her in the hospital. Even after her health had stabilized, they couldnt find any nurses to help with home care, and the hospital wouldnt discharge her. When they finally got home, they went into strict lockdown. Children with Harpers condition arent expected to live to adulthood, so her mother, Corey, told me that her priority is to squeeze a full life into an unknown amount of time. But that requires the spread of the virus to slow, and vaccines to be authorized for children under 5.

The danger of the pandemics first fearful year still hangs over the heads of many immunocompromised people, even as those around them relax into the security of vaccination. Vaccines should substantially slash the risk of infection and severe illness, but many immunocompromised people barely respond to the COVID shots. At one extreme, about half of organ-transplant recipients produce no antibodies at all after two vaccine doses. Compared with the general vaccinated public, they are 82 times more likely to get breakthrough infections and 485 times more likely to be severely ill. Should they get infected, their risk of hospitalization is a coin flip. Their risk of death is one in 10. Imagine walking around and being in society and thinking, If you give me COVID, I might have a 10 percent risk of dying, Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told me. His patients are better off than unvaccinated people, but not by much, despite all weve done.

Other groups of immunocompromised people fare better after vaccination, but Segev estimates that a quarter are still insufficiently protected. And some people with autoimmune disorders cannot be fully vaccinated, because their initial doses led to severe flare-ups of their normal symptoms. Alfred Kim, a rheumatologist at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in lupus, told me that 5 to 10 percent of his patients experienced these problems; so did two of the people I interviewed, both of whom declined further shots.

Many immunocompromised people are now stuck in limbounsure about how safe they really are, even after getting three shots and a booster, as the CDC advises. Scientific studies can hint at the average risks across large groups but offer little certainty for individuals. Sometimes, no studies exist at all, as is the case for Cheung, whose genetic disorder is so rare that it doesnt even have a name. As a doctor, Im trained to parse scientific data, but I cant parse my way to answers that dont exist, says Lindsay Ryan, a physician at UC San Francisco who has a neurological autoimmune disorder. Could I actually define my risk of death if I got COVID? No, I really cant. And thats a hard thing to make peace with.

Each individual infection is its own high-stakes gamble. Ive spoken with immunocompromised people who got COVID and were fine. Others had mild initial illness, but then developed more severe long-COVID symptoms. Yet others are certain theyd fare badly: Chloe Atkins, a political scientist who works on disability and employment issues, has an autoimmune disease called myasthenia gravis, and colds can immediately make it difficult for me to breathe, see, move, walk, or talk, she told me. She knew two people with the same condition, both of whom died from COVID. She and others are facing the same arduous risk assessments that everyone else contends withbut heightened because of the greater possible costs of choosing wrongly. And while they wrestle with those uncertainties, the gulf between them and the rest of society is widening.

Over the past year, as many Americans reveled in their restored freedoms, many immunocompromised people felt theirs shrinking. When the CDC announced that fully vaccinated Americans no longer needed to mask indoors, simple activities such as grocery shopping became more dangerous for immunocompromised people, who were offered no advice from the nations top public-health agency. When Joe Biden said in a speech that unvaccinated Americans were looking at a winter of severe illness and death, I felt like he was talking to me, Cheung said. And when commentators bemoaned irrational liberals who refused to abandon pandemic restrictions, many of the people I spoke with felt they were being mocked for trying to protect themselves and their loved ones. I already feel different from other people because of this situation, Colleen Boyce told me; she donated a kidney to her husband, Mark, who is now immunosuppressed. The thought that when I mask up, others might look at me like theres something wrong with me is hard to handle.

These changes were especially hard to take because, for a time, immunocompromised people caught a glimpse of something better. Beth Wallace, a rheumatologist at the University of Michigan, told me that many of her patients once accepted that viruses would regularly flatten them but have now realized that they dont have to live that way. Cautious behaviors and flexibility around work meant that the flu practically vanished, and many immunocompromised people were actually less sick during the COVID era than before. And while they dont want lockdowns to persist, they had hoped that the flexibility might. Sung Yun Pai of the National Institutes of Health told me that in the past, her patientschildren who receive stem-cell transplants to treat genetic immune disorderswould simply have had to miss school. In some ways, the whole world going virtual gave them better access to education, she said. But remote options are now disappearing, and not just in schooling. Several immunocompromised people told me that their social world is shrinking, as friends who earlier in the pandemic hung out with them virtually are now interested only in face-to-face gatherings.

Work is becoming less flexible too. Finding and keeping jobs can be very hard for people with chronic illnesses such as lupus, which can leave them feeling powerless to advocate for themselves. With close to no say about your working conditions, you can only do so much to protect yourself, Levantovskaya, the literature professor, said. Several immunocompromised people have been told that theyre holding the rest of society back. In fact, it is the opposite: Theyre being forced to reintegrate with no regard for their residual risk.

And perhaps worst of all, immunocompromised people began to be outright dismissed by their friends, relatives, and colleagues because of the misleading narrative that Omicron is mild. The variant bypassed some of the defenses that even immunocompetent people had built up, rendered several antibody treatments ineffective, and swamped the health-care system that immunocompromised people rely on. And yet one of Wallaces patients was told by their sister that no one is dying anymore. In fact, people are still dying, and immunocompromised people disproportionately so. Ignoring that sends an implicit message: Your lives dont matter.

Sometimes, the message becomes explicit. Several of the immunocompromised people I talked with have been toldsometimes by family members or former partnersthat they are a burden on society, that they dont deserve a relationship, that their dying would be natural selection. When Corey Corrigan was trying to decide whether to put Harper through another surgery, a medical provider said, Well, shes not going to live very long, so it doesnt really matter, she told me.

When Atkins, the political scientist, first heard that the other coronaviruses that cause common colds may have started as worse pathogens, she immediately thought about what that trajectory means for COVID. Oh, people like me die off and the ones for whom its not a big impact carry on, and COVID becomes a cold, she told me. Part of me still feels that way, like theres a sort of natural eugenics happening. Eugenicsthe concept of improving humanity by encouraging the fittest people to have children while preventing the unfit from doing sois most commonly associated with the Holocaust, Aparna Nair, an anthropologist and historian of disability at the University of Oklahoma, told me. But in the 20th century, the concept had broad support from physicians and public-health practitioners, who saw it as a scientific way of solving problems such as poverty and poor health; it influenced the development of IQ tests, marriage counseling, and immigration laws. Eugenics is often framed as part of a past that is over, Nair said. I think the pandemic has demonstrated that thats not entirely the case. Most Americans today would probably think the concept reprehensible and few are actively pursuing it. But when a society acts as if the deaths of vulnerable people are unavoidable, and does little to lessen their risks, it is still implicitly assigning lower value to certain lives.

COVID isnt going away. With eradication long off the table, the disease will become a permanent part of our livesanother serious infectious threat added to a ledger already full of them. Everyone whos immunocompromised will have to figure out what their normal looks likeand it isnt going to look like the normal for other people, Ryan, of UC San Francisco, told me.

New treatments could help. Paxlovid, an antiviral drug from Pfizer, can reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID by 88 percent, as long as patients are treated within five days of their first symptoms (although the NIH notes that the drug shouldnt be given alongside certain immunosuppressants). Evusheld, a two-antibody cocktail from AstraZeneca, can reduce the risk of developing COVID, and though less effective against Omicron, it is still protective; the FDA issued an emergency-use authorization for the cocktail to prevent infections in immunocompromised people.

But these drugs are in short supply. The government has ordered only 1.7 million doses of Evusheld and distributed 400,000, which is woefully inadequate given that the U.S. has at least 7 million immunocompromised adults. Many institutions have only enough for their most severely immunosuppressed patients, and theres people like me who dont even come close to meeting the cut, UChicago Medicines Landon told me. Even patients who clear the high bar of medical need might not be able to get a dose quickly; some hospitals have had to run lotteries to decide who gets the drugs. Its truly not acceptable, said Cheung, who got Evusheld only by pestering every medical contact she hada route not available to people without connections, time, or privilege. For her and others, this problem compounds their sense that their government deems them dispensable, especially considering the far-greater effort put into producing and distributing vaccines. Theres a drug that could prevent immunocompromised people who arent protected from vaccines from dying, Ryan said. Shouldnt they have access to it before we decide that COVID belongs in the same category as the flu?

Beyond equitable access to treatments, the people I spoke with mostly want structural changesbetter ventilation standards, widespread availability of tests, paid sick leave, and measures to improve vaccination rates. Above all else, they want flexibility, in both private and public spaces. That means remote-work and remote-school options, but also mask mandates for essential spaces such as grocery stores and pharmacies, which could be toggled on or off depending on a communitys caseload. Without better, more available treatments or more structural changes, immunocompromised people will still depend on measures that prevent infections. Maintaining them would require, at times, that others make some allowance for their heightened risk. But in terms of what individual people can do for them, the most common request I heard was: Just have a heart. Regardless of your own choices, dont jeer at us for being mindful of our higher risks, and definitely dont tell us that our lives are worth less.

All of these measures would protect society as a whole from infectious diseases in general. They would also require some upfront investment in deciding how, exactly, they would workshould companies be required to offer remote work, when possible, for some duration? Whats the threshold for switching on mask requirements? These policies represent added expense and effort for our institutions, but this is the question that the U.S. now faces: COVID has added burdens to our society; who will bear their weight? Immunocompromised people often hear that the world didnt make accommodations for them before the pandemic and shouldnt be expected to do so after. But in the past, infectious diseases did prompt big social changes. A massive infrastructure was created to meet the yearly onslaught of influenza, including antivirals, annual vaccines, and a global surveillance system that tracks new strains. After the polio epidemics of the 1940s, there was a wave of interest in remote schooling and an increasing number of people who used phones and other technologies to finish school and go to university, Nair, the historian of disability, told me.

And in the late 20th century, the notion of disability itself began to shift. It used to be seen as an entirely medical problemsomething that emerges from a persons biology and can be fixed, Nair said. But the disability-rights movement ushered in a more social model, in which disability is as much about a persons environment as it is about their body. People who use wheelchairs are more enabled in spaces with ramps and accessibility buttons on doors. Similarly, equitable access to Evusheld and flexible working policies would make immunocompromised people less disabled in an era where COVID is here to stay.

COVID will eventually become endemica term with so many definitions that it means almost nothing at all, as my colleagues Katherine J. Wu and Jacob Stern wrote. The error I hear so often now is to use the notion of an endemic virus as a reason for abdicationto drop precautions quickly and not do the more important and difficult work of putting in place the societal measures that would make living with coronavirus more tolerable, Ryan said. We need to earn the ability to switch from emergency to endemic. Fashioning a world in which being immunocompromised requires fewer compromises is possible and is not too onerous. And even if people reject the moral argument for creating such a world, there are two good, selfish reasons to build it nonetheless.

First, the coronavirus evolves rapidly in people with weakened immune systems, who also suffer longer infections and are contagious for more time. The Alpha variant of the first pandemic winter likely evolved in this way, and Omicron may have too. Its quite possible that a new variant that harms someone with a normal immune system could come from an immunocompromised person who they failed to protect, Kim, the Washington University rheumatologist, told me.

Second, the immune system weakens with age, so while most people will never be as vulnerable as an organ-transplant recipient, their immunity will still become partly compromised. Respecting the needs of immunocompromised people isnt about disproportionately accommodating some tiny minority; its really about empathizing with your future self. Everyones going to deal with illness at some point in their life, Levantovskaya said. Dont you want a better world for yourself when that time comes?

Read more from the original source:

The Pandemic Isn't Over for Immunocompromised People - The Atlantic

Early this year, two mysterious billboards rose above the city.

The boards, at Northeast Killingsworth Street and Interstate 205 and Southeast Division and 106th Avenue, went up Jan. 3 and 12, respectively. Both blare the same terse message: Stop Having Kids, in white text on a black background.

The billboards say they are paid for by a little-known organization called Stop Having Kids. That same advocacy group, which got its start in Portland, according to a spokeswoman, put up a third billboard along Interstate 5 near Salem: A Lot of Humans Wish They Had Never Been Born.

Oregonians pride themselves on free speechour state constitution provides broader protections than does the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Animal rights groups, environmental extremists, and white supremacists have long taken advantage of the states say anything attitude. Even the police buy billboards to get their message out.

But advocating against procreation? Thats a new message for this city.

So we set out to figure out whos behind it.

First things first: By all accounts, the billboards are not somebodys idea of a sick joke.

Stop Having Kids spokeswoman Ashley Riddle says the group started informally in Portland a few months before March 2021 and identifies itself as a collective liberation movement. Its website makes the groups platform clear: The organization is antinatalist, meaning its against all human reproduction.

Lamar Advertising, a billboard company based in Baton Rouge, La., owns the billboards in question, part of the companys portfolio of 400 billboards in the Portland area.

Richard Smith, Lamars Portland manager, says headquarters reviews prospective advertisers. Once [the vice president of governmental affairs] vets it with his people, then we dont worry about it because its been done at the highest level of our company, Smith says. You sign a contract, you pay for it, your billboard goes up.

Smith declined to disclose the duration of Stop Having Kids contract or how much the group is paying, but he says medium-sized bulletins on the eastside of Portland cost between $800 and $1,200 a month.

Riddle says money for the billboards came from an anonymous donor, and actually getting them put up was a long process: There was some difficulty in finding a company that would follow through. [Companies] would seem all for it, and then they stopped responding.

She declined to identify the founder of Stop Having Kids by his full name, saying she knows him only as Dietz.

State records show, however, that Stop Having Kids was incorporated in January 2021 by Eric Goldberg, a Portland photographer whose middle name is Dietz.

Riddle says Dietz creates almost all of the content on the organizations website, most of which is information on antinatalism.

Information about Goldberg isnt readily available. The owner of stophavingkids.org is cloaked by an internet proxy, and the website lists no staff or contact information aside from the email address info@stophavingkids.org.

Goldberg did not respond to WWs requests for comment. That makes it a little harder to unpack what hes seeking.

After all, Oregons birth rates are already low. According to the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, the states birth rate stands at 40th in the nation. And in 2020, state figures show, deaths here outnumbered births for the first time ever.

Stop Having Kids defines antinatalism as a philosophical and ethical stance against human reproduction and says antinatalists consider human reproduction to be an irreversible, unnecessary, indefensible, and enduring form of harm, regardless of circumstances, situations, or consciousness in living.

The group says it wants to inspire and provoke critical thinking about reproductive choices and is against forcing individuals to do anything either way.

The site lists a myriad of reasons for being antinatalist, including Birth Defects, Life Is Suffering and Enough People Already.

Stop Having Kids also links antinatalism to veganism, coining the term vegantinatalism. The site says the two ideologies are one and the same since both are rooted in harm reduction and compassion.

Goldbergs activism apparently isnt reserved for antinatalism.

2020 news reports from Minnesota say an Oregonian named Eric Goldberg, the same age as the Stop Having Kids founder (now 34), used a $1,900 drone to surveil a chicken farming operation there when a truck driver for the chicken processing plant blasted the drone from the sky with his shotgun. The shooter was arrested.

In addition to billboards and its website, Stop Having Kids does advocacy work through sidewalk demonstrations that Riddle calls street outreach.

A small group stations itself on a sidewalk with signs that say things like Normalize Antinatalism and Parenthood Regret Is a Silent Epidemic.

Riddle says the goal of street outreach is to have as many conversations as possible. People share their stories about being child-free or wishing they were never born or their parents saying that they regret having them.

On the flipside, sidewalk pop-ups often spark confrontation, which is documented and posted on Stop Having Kids YouTube channel.

In a clip taken on Southwest 5th Avenue in Portland and uploaded to YouTube on Jan. 17, a man on a bike rides by the demonstrators and says, Not down with eugenics. The unseen camera operator recording the interaction responds, Where do you see anything about eugenics? The biker says, I think you know exactly what Im talking about. To this, the recorder says, This has nothing to do with eugenics.We are totally against human procreation all across the board.

The Portland clip isnt the only time the groups messaging has been likened to eugenics, controlling reproduction to increase desired heritable characteristics. In a video uploaded Jan. 25, 2021, a woman, after filming and yelling at demonstrators, says, I dont like Nazis who pretend to help others and try to make minorities not have children.

Riddle says despite such incidents, responses from passersby have been overwhelmingly positive. (Riddles Minneapolis chapter of Stop Having Kids also prepares food and hands it out to individuals experiencing homelessness and does garbage cleanups.) But increasing the fold has been difficult. Theres a lot of people who will reach out and say they would love to join, Riddle says, but then a day comes and they dont show.

Stop Having Kids raises money through donations and merchandise sales. Every month, a portion of proceeds goes to a different organization.

For February 2022, its sending money to React19, an organization working to increase our understanding in the role of COVID-19 in those who experience systemic and prolonged symptoms, after acute infection or after vaccination.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), one of the most ardent anti-vaxxers in Congress, hosted an expert panel on vaccine dangers in November, including a React19 co-founder as one of his experts. React19 did not respond to a request for comment.

Riddle says shes unaware of any particular reason Stop Having Kids chose to support React19. Its just whatever pops up on Dietzs radar.

Read the original post:

Who's Behind the Portland Billboards Demanding People Stop Having Kids? - Willamette Week

Andrew Marr, writing about possible successors to Boris Johnson (Is Boris Johnsons luck finally running out?, 4 February), says of Jeremy Hunt: [He] has done his best to make his peace with Brexit, arguing that if he knew then what he knows now, he would have voted to leave.

That seems an extreme form of peace-making, especially if you believe that not all our woes are due to the pandemic. The queues of lorries in Kent are seldom reported outside that county but they will inevitably lead to a hike in prices, exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis. Brexit has created a skills shortage and hence job vacancies. But that is offset by the economic damage and lost livelihoods among smaller enterprises strangled by Brexit-generated red tape. Opportunities to work and study in the EU and for performing artists to tour have been cut off. All that, and the risk to the hard-won peace in Northern Ireland.

I, for one, cannot respect any politician who panders to those who still claim that this monumental act of national self-harm was a good thing.Vera Lustig, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey

It is a great boon that Andrew Marr has joined the NS but can we do away with the florid language? One paragraph alone (Is Boris Johnsons luck finally running out?, 4 February) is full of adjectives: choked, misty, vivid and strange. Great political commentator Marr may be, but poet he is not.Dan Rovira, English teacher, via email

After 50 years working in psychiatry and community mental health, there is hardly a word I disagree with in Sophie McBains overview of psychiatric diagnosis (The end of mental illness, 11 February). I would only add that the fixation on the medical model is not simply the product of the diagnostic establishment. The law, the social security systems and the media are also now perpetuating this exhausted account. The diagnostic mission creep that McBains article depicts was driven not by medical overreach but by the US health insurance system, which demands a diagnosis before it will fund treatment.Robin Johnson, Falmouth, Cornwall

In the history of psychiatry the consensus on cause has often swung between biological and social. Descartes mind-body dualism had a tragic effect on Western medicine. The impact of physical illness on the mental state, and vice versa, is often not considered. In many other systems, such as Ayurveda, there is a recognised relationship between the mind and body. As Leon Eisenberg outlined nearly 50 years ago, disease concerns pathology while its impact on social functioning is what should be called illness. Patients are interested in illnesses; clinicians in diseases. There is anecdotal evidence that many patients can live with their symptoms as long as they have housing, employment and economic independence and are able to form relationships. Diagnoses are important for several reasons, but patients often do not fit into neat diagnostic categories.Dinesh Bhugra CBE, Emeritus Professor of mental health and cultural diversity, Kings College London

John Gray (A better kind of being?, 11 February) parades his preferences in his take on eugenics and 20th-century British intellectuals: While Christians were divided on eugenics, progressive thinkers were at one in supporting it. Not so. Lancelot Hogben, scientific humanist, NS contributor and one of the three foremost biologists of the interwar period, led the moral and technical excoriating of eugenics.Professor Callum G Brown, Doune, Stirlingshire

I was very taken with Stephen Bushs account of showing children around parliament (Bursting the Bubble, 4 February). In fact, I wonder if Mr Bush might consider extending his services to a different audience? As an OAP, I could easily cope with tales of gore and violence. I would promise to behave, and would enjoy the chocolate!Jane Eagland, via email

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This article appears in the 16 Feb 2022 issue of the New Statesman, The Edge of War

Excerpt from:

Letter of the week: The Brexit burden - The New Statesman