Boys From Brazil, Now From China and More Obnoxious Than Ever

New York Post, December 2020, denouncing teh way "The Middle Kingdom is launching 'unethical' military experiments that sound fit for the superhero flick 'Captain America,' John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed." And FRANCE TOO! which "gave the go-ahead for augmented soldiers, and some fear the super troopers could be the new norm in the recent future", with "drugs to keep troops awake for long periods of time and combat stress, and even surgery to improve hearing." “There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power,” Ratcliffe proclaims, citing US intelligence. “People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today.”

I could understand, conceivably even subscribe to efforts to set up a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 over human rights issues, but the General Jack D. Ripper batshittery of Senator Tom Cotton's issue is another matter:

The senator wrote that "the CCP... considers DNA collection a vital intelligence-gathering objective" and that the Chinese government "has reportedly conducted tests to develop biologically-enhanced soldiers and intends to use DNA data to catapult Chinese biotechnology companies to global market dominance."

"In 2022, thousands of world-class athletes will gather to compete in China. Their DNA will present an irresistible target for the CCP," he warned. "Thus, we should expect that the Chinese government will attempt to collect genetic samples of Olympians at the Games, perhaps disguised as testing for illegal drugs or COVID-19."

There are actually a couple of facts embedded in there. One is that a Chinese company, the Beijing Genomics Institute, now just called BGI, is the world's the biggest genome sequence provider, after the US-based Illumina. Like others in the business, they grew up in basic research with the Human Genome Project, doing bulk sequencing and the construction of a representative genome for everybody, but sequencing individual human genomes has become more significant in recent years in a number of different ways, for medical research, patient diagnosis and care, and now also consumer use, as the price goes radically lower, with companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA, which don't do the sequencing themselves but send saliva samples to companies like Illumina and BGI for processing.

Annals of Derp: The Paul Popenoe Story

The early ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ columns have an unpleasant chiding tone. Popenoe, along with his organisation’s marriage counsellors, thought of female clients as unrealistic babies: immature, and expecting too much glitz from their marriages. There was a strong element of intergenerational critique in their counsel – a sense that young women were seduced by popular culture, and hopelessly unable to ‘keep house’ and make sacrifices. ‘Don’t expect too much romance,’ Popenoe’s counsellors said over and over again. In treating ‘Ralph’ and ‘Alice’ (February 1953), a young couple who had four children in the space of five years, the counsellor wrote that Alice needed to be convinced to stop ‘nagging’ her husband for affection: ‘Ralph’s way of pronouncing his love was not in extravagant speech but in coming home to her and the children, and displaying his willingness – indeed, his determination – to support them.’ The happy ending was for her to provide: ‘When Alice recognised this fact and acknowledged that the language of courtship and juvenile dreams is seldom the language of marriage, she started keeping household accounts and padlocking her tongue.’ (via Aeon, illustration from Redbook.)

I was kind of thinking I'd take a bye on Dinesh D'Souza's newly emitted project, The Big Lie (from Regnery, already getting remaindered at $4.95 five days after publication!), aimed at persuading us that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism was too mild, because Jonah left out the important bit about how liberals are also Nazis, which isn't how I remembered it, but this tweet kind of called out to me to find out what it was about.

Progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe--associate of Margaret Sanger--gave Nazis the idea for "lethal chambers" to kill the disabled & unwanted pic.twitter.com/iAjfVrOFvH

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 12, 2017

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that the progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe, an associate of the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, gave the German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei the idea of "lethal chambers" for killing the disabled and unwanted?

Answer: It's incredible how much wrong D'Souza can pack into 21 words.

Exchange: Liberal Fascism Watch, eugenics section

The embodiment of Liberal Fascism (well, he said he was a Liberal, from 1904 to 1924, Jonah, rather more than Hitler said National Socialists were socialists): Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty sharing a moment with Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1913. Via MaritimeQuest.

From a comment thread at Crooked Timber:

ZM 11.23.15 at 1:37 am

Thinking about re-appraisals, Woodrow Wilson was a fan of the children’s author Jean Webster who wrote Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy. I read these when I was in mid primary school, re-reading them a few years ago as an adult was weird (apart from just due to me reading one backwards from end to start — this is as they are epistolary novels so I read the last letter, then I read the second last letter, and so on back to the first letter of the book — I didn’t mean to do this, I was just flicking through the end but I got hooked and read to the beginning to see how it started) — because the former was more socialist than I remembered, and the latter was disturbingly in favour of eugenics, which I didn’t remember at all:

“The Fabian Society in the early 1900s advocated the ideal of a scientifically planned society and supported eugenics by way of sterilisation.

If you’d like to see the charming side of Fabian Socialism, you should read Jean Webster’s two delightful books: Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy. Both are epistolary novels written in the 1910s. One is set at a women’s college (Vassar-ish) and the other is set in an orphanage. The former presents a pretty picture of Fabian Socialism and the latter sweetly and ardently advocates eugenics.

Eugenics, I genics

Shorter Ross Douthat:

Is the reproductive selection by some parents today entirely different from the eugenics of an earlier era?

This is another one of those cases where the Times copy department has strangely written their own Shorter. But you can't find it online, it's only on the page 3 teaser section in the paper paper.

The answer to the question, needless to say, is probably no for the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, but yes for the rest of us.

It is entirely different. The eugenics of the early 20th century was fascist in character, even if many persons of an otherwise progressive bent (Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger) favored it.  That "otherwise progressive", by the way, doesn't mean they weren't racists, because they were. It was concerned with what the state ought to do about other people's children—not ours!

Blastocysts, closed and open. From Stem Cell Bioethics.

The folks now planning to bless their heirs with longer legs and a tighter brain than they have themselves as soon as the science permits are working out a private-enterprise program to do something about their own children—not anybody else's. Except to the extent that one of the benefits they hope to score from it is the admiration of everybody else of their blonde, straight-nosed, Yale-alumnus scions, alongside that of an amusement for their early adult years and a staff of support for their old age.

You could say it is boboist in character, since it is the behavior of people imagined by Ross's partner-in-pandritry David Brooks. Supposing there are any such folks, at any rate.

In the real world as we currently know it, there are basically two legitimate reasons for choosing or rejecting to have a baby based on its genes: parents-to-be practicing in vitro fertilization may use genetic information to decide which of their blastocysts they should toss out, assuming they don't want sextuplets; and some women may choose to have an abortion rather than keep a fetus doomed to intense suffering and an early death.

Oh! Did you say "abortion"? Alternative shorter Ross Douthat:

Nazis practiced forced abortion, so anybody who gets an abortion is a Nazi.

 It's just the same old column after all.

N.B. I was able to write the foregoing virtually without looking at the column itself, on the basis of the teaser alone. Having read it, I need to make only a couple of further remarks.

First, the opening paragraph is an appeal to an article from the Yale Alumni Magazine. I initially assumed it was there to remind us that Ross went to Yale—to let us know, as it were, that when he finally mates with that chunky Reese Witherspoon, nobody needs to worry about how smart the baby will be. But Wikipedia tells us he went to Harvard, raising an irrelevant but fascinating question: What kind of person not a Yale alumnus could possibly find time to read the Yale Alumni Magazine? (I know: he only looks at it for the nude pictures.)

Second, in the sentence on which the teaser was based, he gets part of the point about the difference between the fascist state and the hopeful mother:

Is this sort of “liberal eugenics,” in which the agents of reproductive selection are parents rather than the state, entirely different from the eugenics of Fisher’s era, which forced sterilization on unwilling men and women?

But he misses the rest of it: the all-important difference between their kids and our kids, allowing him to move straight into his false equivalency through an idiotic strawman—

From a rigorously pro-choice perspective, the in utero phase is a space in human development where disease and disability can be eradicated, and our impulse toward perfection given ever-freer rein, without necessarily doing any violence to human dignity and human rights

—to the metaphysical peroration on what makes us just like Nazis:

First, a relentless desire for mastery and control, not only over our own lives but over the very marrow and sinew of generations yet unborn. And second, a belief in our own fundamental goodness, no matter to what ends our mastery is turned.

(Failing to distinguish the liberal belief that people are fundamentally good from the conservative belief that I'm fundamentally good and frack you...)