roseweird posted:

what kind of evidence are you looking for? should i reference some pop science, outdated political philosophy, or maybe some research abstracts that no one here is equipped to understand? please. just think about it yourself,

Uh, No? You're making claims about biology that go beyond simple observation and reasoning, and since biology is, yknow, a Science, I do expect you to be able to cite some kind of evidence. We don't have to be biologists to get the gist of a peer-reviewed article, for example. But controversial claims about matters of "hard" science surely deserve to be supported by some kind of evidence, especially when those claims are being made in service of something like eugenics.

roseweird posted:

Petrol posted:

roseweird claimed that "biological material and cultural expression define each other in a tightly coupled feedback loop". It's a huge leap from the kinds of observable interactions between society and the body that you describe, and the biological determinism roseweird supports.

the coupling of biology and culture is not the same thing as biological determinism... how can this phrase represent biological determinism when it plainly says biology is determined by culture?

That in itself would be a contentious claim if unqualified, but it's not quite what you said. You said each determines the other. I'm sorry, but this is horrible logic, fuzzy and reductive, unsupported by fact.

I am quite happy to be challenged with evidence if you have any. But it's absurd to make the sort of claims you're making and then simply throw your hands up in exasperation when asked to support your position.

You're acting very much like this is simply something you choose to believe about how the world works, and you don't want to be challenged about it. Which is ironic, considering this conversation started when you claimed that nobody wants to talk about eugenics because everyone believes in it but would feel uncomfortable trying to justify it.

c_man posted:

im not really trying to support any biological determinism, or any sort of complicated point. i just think its absurd to think of say that material bodies and what happens to them are independent of social contexts just as its absurd to think of our social identities as independent of the physical materiality of the body. like, i dont see why it's problematic at all to talk about the way that e.g. calorie quotas in palestine have a concrete effect on the livelihoods of the people there.

edit:
availability of medicine or birth control, or things like this discovery of a crop that has certain effects on people (a drug or a particularly healthy food) can have huge effects on a society. its distribution and production will still be mediated by society so the effects that it will have are not determined by its presence alone, but by the labor time invested in it and the relations of production. but an important property of labor (maybe you can define labor this way? i dunno) is that it reshapes the environment it takes place in. so labor mediated socially partially determines the envrionment in which it takes place, and the options available to a society are partially (not totally! im not even sure if there's a useful way to compare the "degree" of relative dependence) determined by the environment. this is what i mean when i say i don't see why it's so strange to say that biology/the environment/etc and society partially determine each other in turn.

I think we need to establish what we mean when we talk about biology, because I don't disagree with the points you're making.

This discussion about the relationship between biology and society started with a statement roseweird made in response to my question, "what do you mean when you say you support eugenics?" Now, in that context, 'biology' was clearly meant to denote not just health and the functioning of the body, but heredity.

Now, to take one of your examples - calorie quotas in Palestine - it's one thing to say that this will affect society in a number of ways. Obviously this is true. But to support a eugenicist position (and to be clear, I'm not saying this is your position), there'd need to be evidence that the calorie quotas imposed on one generation create specific, hereditary biological effects in later generations.

Moreover, the eugenicist will claim that these matters of breeding are important for improving not only the overall physical, but also the moral condition of the people; this was also implicit in roseweird's claim about biology and society defining each other. I hope it's obvious why I think this sort of claim is extremely dangerous.

Petrol posted:

I think we need to establish what we mean when we talk about biology, because I don't disagree with the points you're making.

This discussion about the relationship between biology and society started with a statement roseweird made in response to my question, "what do you mean when you say you support eugenics?" Now, in that context, 'biology' was clearly meant to denote not just health and the functioning of the body, but heredity.

Now, to take one of your examples - calorie quotas in Palestine - it's one thing to say that this will affect society in a number of ways. Obviously this is true. But to support a eugenicist position (and to be clear, I'm not saying this is your position), there'd need to be evidence that the calorie quotas imposed on one generation create specific, hereditary biological effects in later generations.

Moreover, the eugenicist will claim that these matters of breeding are important for improving not only the overall physical, but also the moral condition of the people; this was also implicit in roseweird's claim about biology and society defining each other. I hope it's obvious why I think this sort of claim is extremely dangerous.

yeah i didnt think i was saying anything particularly contentious, but i don't think heredity is somehow exempt from this, a good example is the hunt for a "gay gene". what we call genetics is a closely related family of mechanisms that exist for intervening in biology, and today they are increasingly open for direct intervention and people are already doing so, the easy one is the old zizek saw about wealthy people being able to make very specific genetic choices about what sort of offspring they will have. whether or not you think people should be doing it, the fact that the technology exists and is being commodified means it's going to be happening, and if it does it's going to be mediated by the mode of production/distribution. i dont think these interventions are necessary by any means, and are probably actually Real Bad since we're Under Capitalism

c_man posted:

yeah i didnt think i was saying anything particularly contentious, but i don't think heredity is somehow exempt from this, a good example is the hunt for a "gay gene". what we call genetics is a closely related family of mechanisms that exist for intervening in biology, and today they are increasingly open for direct intervention and people are already doing so, the easy one is the old zizek saw about wealthy people being able to make very specific genetic choices about what sort of offspring they will have. whether or not you think people should be doing it, the fact that the technology exists and is being commodified means it's going to be happening, and if it does it's going to be mediated by the mode of production/distribution. i dont think these interventions are necessary by any means, and are probably actually Real Bad since we're Under Capitalism

This is absolutely an important matter. Indeed, one thing roseweird and I agreed about early on is that liberals seem to believe in eugenics without calling it that or even recognising it as such. Not to suggest that only liberals engage in these practices, but I suspect they are at least as common if not more so than among conservatives. Anyway, if we're going to talk about genetics and ideology, yes, that is in fact the essence of eugenics.

roseweird posted:

no definition of eugenics involves genetic reductionism or biological determinism. eugenics is not a theory of biological determinism, and is generally not restricted to any specific theory about heredity, but rather analyzes theories of heredity in the service of subjective aims. it is the set of explicit and implicit practices by which selective human breeding is accomplished.

I'm baffled. Nobody ever said that eugenics was a monolithic discipline with a single theoretical and practical approach.

What I'm saying is that eugenics is not eugenics without a core component of belief in a significant degree of biological determinism. I mean, why bother with any kind of selective breeding practices otherwise?

The question then is precisely what you think is hereditary and needs to be selected for or against. A straight answer would be great if you can manage it.

roseweird posted:

but i really have answered these questions, and i gave you a straight answer, read my post history..

Okay, fine.

roseweird posted:

i'm a gay fascist jew,

roseweird posted:

it is morally acceptable to painlessly terminate human lives that have not yet differentiated themselves by acquiring self-identity or desires. it would be morally acceptable to terminate infants at birth if not for our enormous (biologically based) empathic response to them.

roseweird posted:

all cheese is rape

roseweird posted:

also, i support straight spines and perfect teeth

Tokyo_Sexwale posted:

jesus i come back to this thread to see it go from defending russian inperialism to defending eugenics, if i check it in a month its prolly gonna be posts like hitler had some good ideas lmao

bump

euroskeptic parties endorse putin and pledge to forge ties with russia should they achieve power, both le penn and farage have spoken of their admiration for putin and his distinct "style" of rule. it is clearly the perogative of the russian state to see the dismantlement of the european union, of that there can be no doubt. this conflict in its global connotations is american political hegemony against russian, but the end of the european union would mean once again the rise of nationalism and fascism (as we are seeing)

fleights posted:

a gay fascist jew?!

If that's what you see atm try turning your monitor on.

TheIneff posted:

.custom252373{}NoFreeWill posted:.custom252355{}c_man postedh idk why i thought you were then. and any books that describe the things we are talking about, there are lots of books on marxist theory

marxist theory ain't philosophy and Hegel sucks.

you haven't really qualified yourself as anything except a man with opinions on stuff you don't even want to investigate superficially. iconoclasm can be helpful to interrogate your surroundings sure but that isn't really what you're doing so don't attempt to replace genuine understanding with posturing (marxist "philosophy"/Hegel's "dumb") otherwise embarrassing things like what Crow just did to you will continue to happen for like, a long time.

i've read a lot fo books

getfiscal posted:

over the last year or so i've only really been thinking in althusserian terms i guess, which i'm trying to get away from somewhat, and therefore i didn't care about soviet newman stuff because it seemed like it was a weird hegelian idea. like, the idea of a sort of proletarian culture where humanity is fully realized, seems more like lukacs than anything else.

if there really is a sort of moral culture that needs to be cultivated i'm not sure that would bode well for marxism-leninism as practiced by stalin or mao. which is explicitly what khrushchev came up with when he had them say that the only end for socialism was man. if socialism is a sort of development of human species-being then that probably implies that you can't have things like gulags and secret trials and such. also as an aside i'm not sure being ruthless is even smart.

yeah its too bad that the reason to practice communism is a moral one but there doesn't seem to be a coherent moral philosophy, as well as a difficult cultural proposition (change our entire way of life)(eugenics might help_).