Given that the America that Farhad writes about was built on the land taken in an extermination of those who had it previously, are you sure that America has never committed a genocide?

Perhaps it was closer to fratricide; we have killed our brothers.

A large population of morons are essential to the the workings of late-stage capitalism. Who else is going to buy all the worthless crap churned out by the corporations? Who else is going to keep the price of oil rising every year? Who else is going to pay to eat all those disgusting, rotting hamburger patties that wise people wouldn't touch? The real reason the rich didn't carry out full-scale eugenics in this country is that they learned how to put morons to profitable use. They even appointed a moron President and gave him a little rubber stamp to play with.

There has been something on the level of genocide in this country, and that would be the 40 million unborn humans murdered by abortion since Roe v. Wade made it legal for a mother to kill her child.

The arguments used to support abortion are IDENTICAL to the eugenics movement --- ie, it is better for certain people never to be born. Whether due to disability, "bad circumstances" for the mother, or simple convenience, it is the same mentality when someone says that it is a "right" to be able to abort a baby.

Note how it is always the liberals who are in favor of some people dying for the "public good." Those crazy religious fundamentalists who opposed eugenics 100 years ago did so because they were backward enough to value human life above and beyond someone's intelligence or societal contribution. Once one claims that some lives are disposable because they cannot defend themselves or they are undesirable for society, you have slid to the very bottom of that famed slippery slope --- one then has NO moral or ethical basis for opposing any other kind of murder of innocents. It is this "crazy" belief in the sacred value of life that compels religious people of conscience today to oppose legalized abortion.

I'd be fascinated to hear how people can denounce eugenics as evil and yet passionately support abortion, which is the ideological descendent of people like Margaret Sanger. After all, it was she who wanted to sterilize blacks and was gung-ho about contraception largely because it would reduce the undesirables in the population.

>Lippmann pointed out the obvious problem with calling people morons, imbeciles, idiots or whatever else: "Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and width; it is an exceedingly complicated notion which nobody has as yet succeeded in defining."

Still true today. It is absolutely ludicrous that so many people still believe that a one day test back in grade school can tell you how smart a person is for the rest of his or her life.

We all understand that you have to practice and work hard to star in the Olympics, but we think having brains is just something you're either born with or not born with.

In Puerto Rico alone more than 10,000 were sterilized, and in Southern states, thousands of poor black women were sterilized without consent while in the "twilight sleep" of the heavy pain drugs used during delivery in the 1900-1950s. There were documented cases in Alabama and Puerto Rico into the 1970s. In Alabama, there is a lawsuit over it.

We stepped away not because of democracy, but because of the herioc work of Franz Boaz and other scientists who undermined the psuedo science of the time. The birth control advocates like Margaret Sanger, who embraced the rhetoric of eugenics in latter life, hurt the movement in certain quarters for ever after.

Manjoo is far too optimistic about American elites. His comment that "who hasn't thought America would be a better place if everyone was like me is quickly rejected as elitist" is not entirely true. The coerscive tactics used by extremists on the left and right to try to force people to act as they want are well documented. From speech codes to refusing to fill birth control prescriptions, from heckling people (Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh in recent events) to trying to interfere in marital decisions (Schiavo case), there are plenty of people who are elitist and believe their beliefs are more important than the COnstitution. We must be vigilant against these people. Often, they would be better served by minding their own business. Still, they try to mind ours in louder and more forceful ways.

There are some logical arguments against abortion, but apparently Tatyana doesn't know any of them. Instead, this is the rant of someone who wants to convert every commentary into a diatribe on abortion. One thing's for sure: She should stick to the topic.

Having said that, Joshstrike's comment was spot-on.

Eugenics spread ugly tendrils throughout medicine. For example, John Nash (of "A Beautiful Mind"), was spared a lobotomy because his brain was considered to be very important. People who did menial work, like housewives, were more readily lobotomized because it was believed that they would hardly even miss the destroyed parts of their brains.

We need to ask ourselves why America embraced eugenics. The theory came out of the UK, but the British never passed any eugenics laws. In the US the robber barons funded Charles Davenport's eugenics project at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in New York and it spread like wildfire from there right into Germany where the Nazis embraced it too.

In our case I'm pretty sure eugenics wasn't motivated by altruism. I think the real reasons are much darker given our national history of racial, ethnic, and gender problems.

leading advocate of eugenics and also charles darwins cousin worked out most of statistics to deal with the eugenics "problem."

Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather, and George Herbert Walker, the president's great-grandfather, were ardent proponents of eugenics. They backed up their support for eugenics by selling Nazi war bonds thru the Thyssen Bank, a Nazi-owned bank they helped manage.

A Bush related steel company used concentration camp labor from Auschwitz, as the Germans practiced their own brand of extreme eugenics.

Not the proudest moment in American history.