weeding out criminals

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Doug to Martin Schiller:
>>Improving the
>>population is in my mind equivalent with improving society.
>
>"Improving the population" can be a very scary concept. If it means
>feeding, clothing, and housing people who are already alive, I'm all
>for it. If it means using some sort of social or genetic criteria to
>control reproduction, you really are on the road to Auschwitz. Don't
>forget that the American eugenecists - who practiced their craft on
>black Americans and inferior sorts of Europeans - were a great
>inspiration to the Nazis. A phrase like Barro's "weeding out" is
>extremely revealing, and rhetorically very similar (though milder)
>than the language of Mein Kampf. But it has a long pedigree, going
>back at least to Margaret Sanger, who called for the removal of the
>"weeds...overrunning the human garden"  and for the sterilization of
>"genetically inferior races," among whom she included the Chinese,
>who were "spread[ing] like a plague."

I've already commented extensively on the reason why 'population control'
discourse should be opposed by leftists, feminist and non-feminist alike.
I recommend here again Mark Pittenger's _American Socialists and
Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920_, so listers may see the pitfalls &
disastrous effects of social-Darwinist/neo-Malthusian perspectives (even
when they're advanced from the left).

Yoshie