Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjgreen | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

The west is reflecting on its own actions, but (lacking a central ideological authority!) that doesn't make every person and institution flip their position on this. It gets acknowledged piecewise, and the quantity of culture war fought over it is considerable.

This 26th January we heard about the conflict between the people who call that day "Australia Day" and the people who call it "Invasion Day".

Judge de current situation by ethical standards of the present and judge historic ones with the eyes of those days. Eugenics was, once upon a time, seen like "good stuff" all around the globo, not anymore.

Indeed it was. I once had occasion to study a 1930s paper on the mathematics of population growth by R.A. Fisher, it gave me no pleasure to leaf through the "Annals of Eugenics" to find it.

But we have an essential difference I think between the genocide that China stands accused of, which you yourself see as a "temporally relative evil" (yes the US did it, but it was a while ago), and the genocide of the German attempt to destroy European Jewry (which was also a while ago) that I think we would all agree is an "absolute evil". So perhaps the Economist have a point here.

It sounds unfair. It's OK for these other countries to keep enjoying the benefits of eugenics they did in the past, but China can't join in? (same argument can be used for pollution)

What benefits?

Increased unity, no need to consider minority demands. e.g. consider the Keystone XL pipeline. Would it be easier and quicker to build without the Native population being there to protest? Or consider the recent race riots in the USA, would such a thing even be possible in places without such diversity?

Sounds like they aren't enjoying benefits from past eugenics after all.

Well, one of them happened quite a while ago, and both govts have acknowledged and in some cases apologized for their actions.

And the other one is happening right now and the govt is denying it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com