9,200 words

Adam Cohen
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
New York: Penguin, 2016

The unfairly neglected American modernist composer Carl Ruggles once scolded an audience member who was loudly expressing his disapproval during a performance of a piece of music by Charles Ives by standing up, turning to him, and telling him to “shut up and listen like a man.”[1] (more…)

Charles West Cope, A Life Well Spent

675 words

Even though I believe in eugenics, I really have no idea how it should be implemented. It seems so complicated, and it could be abused. What would a model eugenics program even look like?

When we envision launching a new eugenics program in the West, we need to consider what is effective, what is morally right, and what will be accepted by the public. We can make great strides towards helping future generations with no Draconian measures whatsoever, just a combination of incentives and disincentives. (more…)

824 words

In the British Medical Journal (# 7108, September 6, 1997, p. 563) there’s an article entitled “Thousands of women sterilized in Sweden without consent.” The Swedish government is investigating why thousands of women were forcibly sterilized on eugenic grounds from the 1930s to the 1970s. (more…)

3,450 words

Question: What does the recent uproar in the controlled press about the sterilization of mental defectives in Virginia hospitals have to do with the behavior of the American hostages in Iran?

Answer: They both reflect the essentially infantile, arrested state of personality development which has become the norm for Americans and other Westerners. (more…)