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anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Inscrutable Exhortations
@anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
480 followers 390 following 750 posts
I like Eric Hobsbawm, sparkling water, and Bananagrams

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave

They/them
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anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
So much in that excellent formula
Picture of a minus sign helpfully labelled "minus"
November 11, 2025 at 3:01 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
1951: the state eugenic board of of North Carlina set a new record for sterilizations. About 1/5 were black and there was a single indigenous person
The State Eugenics Board set another record at its meeting last week when it authorized 42 sterilization operations, the largest number of eugenic sterilizations ever to be approved in any one month in this state. Of the 42 operations authorized, 31 were for women and 11 for men. Of this group 25 were mentally ill, 15 feebleminded, and two epileptic. Most of those approved for sterilization were white persons. Eight were Negroes and one was Indian. Only one of the operations, it was said, involved asexualization, the others being authorized only for the prevention of parenthood
November 10, 2025 at 4:12 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
1953: Odd to see a someone claim that the eugenic issues with sibling marriage are, in any way, overplayed
Diagnosis: Inbreeding is not hazardous if the ancestries are good! Biblical jacob married his first cousins, abraham married his half-sister. And moses was the offspring of an aunt and nephew marriage. But if deafness or feeblemindedness or diabetes or hemophilia or any other bad recessive traits appear in both ancestries, then the mating of closely related individuals will increase the likelihood that some of their afflicted children may be so afflicted. If the family ancestries even of brother and sister are sound for several generations back, then from the eugenic angle they could much more safely marry than could two total strangers whose respective ancestries both contained recessive defects.
November 10, 2025 at 4:06 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
1962: opposing universal healthcare because it might lead to elites enforcing their controversial eugenic decisions on the public
The AMA might well consider the "wolf-wolf" fable. The doctors properly fear socialized medicine and we're quire sure the general American publica has no desire for its high cost, inefficiency or its inherent danger that minority elements in control of a government bureaucracy might be able to force their standards of medical morality in the controverisal area of eugenics which include abortion, artificially induced sterilization, abnormally planned parenthood, human experimentation, artificial insemination, and so-called mercy killings But unfortunately the reactionary opposition of the extreme right might bring to pass the very eugenic fallacies of the extreme left which the average american fears
November 10, 2025 at 3:57 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
involved needs to have good reasons to practice Rhythm. The interesting thing is one of the "good reasons" is: eugenics. Catholics are supposed to be one of the main opposers of eugenics, and so the fact that they would endorse eugenics as a good reason to practice Rhythm is very interesting
"There must also be serious reasons before the practice of Rhythm is permitted. Pope Pius XII mentioned several that would justify its use: economic, medical, **eugenic**, and social. More specifically, these are: a danger of death to the mother or frequent miscarriages or stillbirths or the real probability of mentally defective children, severe illness on the part of the father, or sick children, poor housing or a lack of money to provide a frugal living for future children.
November 10, 2025 at 2:29 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
1962: a slightly ambiguous comment from Pius XII:
Q. Is the church changing her stand on birth-control with the new oral contraceptives? I read somewhere that Pope Pius XII said so! A. No. Contraception is a violation of the natural law, of the law of God as imbedded in human nature. It cannot be accepted, no matter what the reason or the method. Pope Pius XII did speak of medical advances which would help solve difficult situations based on "medical, eugenics, economic, and social" problems.
November 9, 2025 at 3:17 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
1962: Another anti-eugenic argument from the Catholics (specifically Pius XII)
Article titled "Belgian Bishop's Statement." It is opposed to the killing of an infant because of her "deformity." "Pope Pius XII said "There is no man, no authority, no medical, eugenic, social, economic, or mral reason that may be appealed to and which represents a valid juridical argument to dispose directly and deliberately of the life of an innocent person."
November 9, 2025 at 3:12 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
1954, first Nazi reference I've come across. But! It refers to what the nazis did as done "under 'eugenic' pretexts." I take this to mean that the Arizona Post does not take this to be "real eugenics" at least to some degree
"The compulsory sterilization and castrations ordered by the Nazi regime, often under 'eugenic' pretexts in the case of political opponents, were not illegal, according to a decision handed down by the Superior Court in Westphalian city of Hamm, Germany."
November 9, 2025 at 3:05 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
1954 article arguing that epileptics should not be included in eugenic sterilization laws
"States must correct laws on epileptics, neurologists declare" 3 recommendations: eugenic sterilization laws should be amended to render them inapplicable to epileptics, motor vehicle licenses should be considered for epileptics. and workman's comp should be amended
November 9, 2025 at 2:52 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
The Catholic Times in 1953 criticized eugenic bans on marriage. No reference to Nazism
"Pope tells geneticists: Some Hereditary Ills Do Not Bar Marriage." Except in a few cases, a ban on marriage for eugenic or genetic reasons is "unjust," his holiness Pope Pius XII told delegates to an International Symposium on Genetics
November 9, 2025 at 2:45 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Marital advice from 1951 that is explicitly eugenic
Article describing a woman, Sarah, 20, who is asking for marital advice. She is advised to keep in mind that her children will inherit her husband's characteristics
November 9, 2025 at 2:38 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
1951 article arguing that eugenic sterilizations are saving Virginia money
Article titled "advantages to virginia of sterilization cited," by Associated Press. The article points out the benefits of sterilizing feeble-minded children.
November 9, 2025 at 2:33 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Margaret Sanger in 1957 praising Japan's eugenic efforts
"Japan is the most advanced and practical nation of all," says Mrs. Sanger. "I insist that within 25 years she will be the most eugenic nation in the world. They are going right to the roots, with government-employed mid-wives going into every little village."
November 9, 2025 at 2:29 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Ah I was not hallucinating - I did read something about eugenics becoming central to nazism in the 80s/90s
Post-Nazi Politics and Historiographical Frames I began with Klee’s and others’ stinging rebukes to Singer—or rather, with what came to be called “the Singer affair”—for multiple reasons.20 One reason is that the Nazi doctor Stähle’s quote, which the historian Klee had uncovered as he was researching the Nazi murders of the disabled for his magnum opus on the topic (in English the title would be “Euthanasia” in the National Socialist State: The “Extermination of Life Unworthy of Life” [1983]), captures with unintentional transparency the intimate interconnections between antisemitism, on the one hand, and contempt for individuals with disabilities, on the other.21 One of the great and consequential dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, in scholarship internationally and in activism within Germany, would be the determined effort to elucidate the multiple links—in staffing, in gassing technology, but also in attitude toward “lives unworthy of life”—between the murder of individuals with disabilities and the Holocaust of European Jewry. Indeed the quote and Klee’s use of it bring into view just how very important the invocation of these two interrelated (or, as historian and survivor of Auschwitz Henry Friedlander put it, “intradependent”) mass murders in the nation’s past would be for advancing the cause of disability rights in the postwar then-present of the 1980s.22 It is hard to remember now but crucial to our understanding of the dynamics at the time that contempt for and cruelty toward the physically and cognitively disabled lasted well into the 1980s (and even beyond). The postwar years had seen a (in hindsight truly stunning, then simply devastating) breadth of popular support for the perpetrators and ongoing shaming of the victims and their families.23 Few of the perpetrators ever faced justice; instead; they had illustrious postwar careers.24 The very statements I asserted as facts in the opening paragraphs of this chapter— that the mass murder of the disabled was the precursor to and continued to be entangled with the Holocaust—were not generally obvious in the 1980s. Indeed initially, connections had been made more by intuitive emotional analogy than by specifying literal links (see figure 10).25 This was a connection that still needed to be solidified and concretized in the public mind; the Singer affair provided a major occasion for doing so.26 Singer himself, in his widely used textbook of 1979, Practical Ethics (translated into German in 1984), had argued strenuously—and in this he was in accord with the assumptions animating much late 1970s scholarship—that there was no connection: “If euthanasia somehow leads to the Nazi atrocities that would be a reason for condemning euthanasia. But is euthanasia—rather than, for example, racism—to be blamed for the mass murders the Nazis carried out?” Singer’s own answer to the question as he framed it was no. For him, hostile or lethal treatment of the disabled simply did not count as racism.27 It was precisely this presumption of a categorical gulf between the two major Nazi murder programs that, it was felt, needed to be challenged, and it was over the course of the 1980s, through sustained research and advocacy work, that the links were starting to be established. Increasingly, moreover, a second tie was forged: conceptual and empirical connections were elaborated between the four hundred thousand coercive “eugenic” sterilizations of individuals with disabilities enacted under the rubric of the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring and the twohundred-thousand-plus “euthanasia” murders.28 As it happened, the postwar government had continuously refused to acknowledge the harm done to victims of coercive sterilizations, rejecting their claims to be “persecutees of th… “personal eugenics” in the postwar years and instrumentally invoking their unabashed pride in having resisted, however ineffectually, the murders in order to advance their own advocacy for “voluntary” sterilizations, they worked hard—and successfully—to keep “eugenics” and “euthanasia” analytically distinct.30 It was against these trends of the first three postwar decades that a historiography arose, over the course of the 1980s, that reframed the Third Reich in such a way that both eugenics and euthanasia would come to be seen as central rather than marginal aspects of what was finally, by 1991, shorthanded (in historians Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann’s title) as “the racial state.”31 Burleigh and Wippermann, building on a decade of pioneering scholarship, expressly identified the Nazi goal as “the ‘purification of the body of the nation’ from ‘alien,’ ‘hereditarily ill,’ or ‘asocial’ ‘elements’” and thus focused their account on “all those whose lives or reproductive capacity were ended as a result of Nazi racial policy,” including “Jews, Sinti and Roma, and members of other ethnic minorities categorized as ‘alien,’ as well as the ‘hereditarily ill,’ ‘community aliens,’ and homosexuals.” Indeed, they said, “there is much evidence to suggest that race was meant to supplant class as the primary organizing principle in society.”32 The debates around Singer had finally made this kind of summary statement seem incontrovertible, as major news outlets had taken the critics’ cues and had begun in 1989, in text and in accompanying imagery, to center the murder of the disabled at the heart of the Third Reich and to register that “eugenic thinking” needed, on a regular basis, at least formally to be repudiated as immoral.33 (Only since the turn of the millennium has the newest research led to the prospect of once more decoupling eugenics from euthanasia and to the prospect of de biologizing the Third Reich more generally.34)
November 6, 2025 at 2:35 AM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Strange sacrificial ritual
Sacrifice is conducted after the following manner: Hoh asks the people which one among them wishes to give himself as a sacrifice to God for the sake of his fellows. He is then placed upon the fourth table, with ceremonies and the offering up of prayers: the table is hung up in a wonderful manner by means of four ropes passing through four cords attached to firm pulley-blocks in the small dome of the temple. This done they cry to the God of mercy, that he may accept the offering, not of a beast as among the heathen, but of a human being. Then Hoh orders the ropes to be drawn and the sacrifice is pulled up above to the centre of the small dome, and there it dedicates itself with the most fervent supplications. Food is. given to it through a window by the priests, who live around the dome, but it is allowed a very little to eat, until it has atoned for the sins of the State. There with prayer and fasting he cries to the God of heaven that he might accept its willing offering. And after twenty or thirty days, the anger of God being appeased, the sacrifice becomes a priest, or sometimes, though rarely, returns below by means of the outer way for the priests. Ever after, this man is treated with great benevolence and much honor, for the reason that he offered himself unto death for the sake of his country. But God does not require death.
November 1, 2025 at 10:33 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Lol
They very skilled in making dishes, and in them they put spice, honey, butter, and many highly strengthening spices, and they temper their richness with acids, so that they never vomit.
November 1, 2025 at 10:12 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
They have a very moderate and reasonable policy on alcohol: no wine for children until they are at least 10 years old
As regards drinking, they are extremely moderate. Wine is never given to young people until they are ten years old, unless the state of their health demands it. After their tenth year they take it diluted with water, and so do the women, but the old men of fifty and upward use little or no water. They eat the most healthy things, according to the time of the year.
November 1, 2025 at 10:03 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Turns out the "vegetarianism is bad because plants have feelings" meme is at least 400 years old
Capt. Their food consists of flesh, butter, honey, cheese, garden herbs, and vegetables of various kinds. They were unwilling at first to slay animals, because it seemed cruel; but thinking afterward that is was also cruel to destroy herbs which have a share of sensitive feeling, they saw that they would perish from hunger unless they did an unjustifiable action for the sake of justifiable ones, and so now they all eat meat.
November 1, 2025 at 9:57 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
The gender egalitarianism is very Spartan. Women are equal but only equal to the degree that they are masculinized. Being effeminate is still clearly objectionable
Capt. Wars might never occur, nevertheless they are exercised in military tactics and in hunting, lest perchance they should become effeminate and unprepared for any emergency.
November 1, 2025 at 5:52 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
This even though they have cured all disease!
There are also vessels built into the wall above the arches, and these are full of liquids from one to 300 years old, which cure all disease
November 1, 2025 at 5:29 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
This eugenic utopia still has disabled people
This thing, however, existing among them is excellent and worthy of imitation—viz., that no physical defect renders a man incapable of being serviceable except the decrepitude of old age, since even the deformed are useful for consultation. The lame serve as guards, watching with the eyes which they possess. The blind card wool with their hands, separating the down from the hairs, with which latter they stuff the couches and sofas; those who are without the use of eyes and hands give the use of their ears or their voice for the convenience of the State, and if one has only one sense he uses it in the farms. And these cripples are well treated, and some become spies, telling the officers of the State what they have heard.
November 1, 2025 at 5:24 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
For the last few months, I've mostly been reading about eugenics and disability. I recently came across an odd essay by Allen Roper written in the 1910s called "Ancient Eugenics," about proto eugenic ideas in classical antiquity (mostly in Sparta). He says this about Campanella:
In the " Utopia " of Sir Thomas More the mar- riage preliminaries, suggesting something of Plato's physical point of view, recall a passage in the Laws. But in Campanella's " City of the Sun " we find a closer approximation to the Platonic Eugenics. Marriage, recognized as an affair of the state rather than of the individual, because the interests of future generations are involved, is only to be performed in the light of scientific knowledge. The " great master," who is a physician, aided by the chief matrons, is to supervise marriage, which will be confined to the valorous and high-spirited. There is to be a system of state education, and the women are trained for the most part like men in warlike and other exercises. Campanella has been called the prophet of Modern Eugenics: he is the connecting-link between the crude Eugenics of the past and the scientific Eugenics of Galton.
November 1, 2025 at 4:47 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Parts of this book are surprisingly gender egalitarian, but then they also have a death penalty for wearing makeup (???). Although even that is apparently justified on quasi gender egalitarian lines
For with them deformity is unknown. When the women are exercised they get a clear complexion, and become strong of limb, tall and agile, and with them beauty consists in tallness and strength. Therefore, if any woman dyes her face, so that it may become beautiful, or uses high-heeled boots so that she may appear tall, or garments with trains to cover her wooden shoes, she is condemned to capital punishment. But if the women should even desire them they have no facility for doing these things. For who indeed would give them this facility? Further, they assert that among us abuses of this kind arise from the leisure and sloth of women. By these means they lose their color and have pale complexions, and become feeble and small. For this reason they are without proper complexions, use high sandals, and become beautiful not from strength, but from slothful tenderness. And thus they ruin their own tempers and natures, and consequently those of their offspring.
November 1, 2025 at 4:39 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
He connects his proto-eugenics to a sort of family abolition as well
Capt. Certainly not. For no one wants either necessaries or luxuries. Moreover, the race is not managed for the good of the commonwealth, and of private individuals, and _ the magistrates must be obeyed. They deny what we hold—viz., that it is natural to man to recognize his offspring and to educate them, and to use his wife and house and children as his own. For they say that children are bred for the preservation of the species and not for individual pleasure, as St. Thomas also asserts. Therefore the breeding of children has reference to the commonwealth, and not to individuals, except in so far as they are constituents of the commonwealth. And since individuals for the most part bring forth children wrongly and educate them wrongly, they consider that they remove destruction from the State, and therefore for this reason, with most sacred fear, they commit the education of the children, who, as it were, are the element of the republic, to the care of magistrates; for the safety of the community is not that of a few. And thus they distribute male and female breeders of the best natures according to philosophical rules.
November 1, 2025 at 4:32 PM
anorbicleofjasp.bsky.social
Wine drunk does not feel different than other kinds of drunk
Freedom of Speech painting by Norman Rockwell, like from the memes
October 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM