this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Used Tesla prices tumble as embarrassed owners look to sell (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100-130299355/

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

Oof, that's a tough read.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It was a common view, especially among progressives, from the late 1890s to the start of WW2. The temperance movement embraced eugenics, so did the family-planning movement, and through it, early feminism.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I have read a number of comments from people with illnesses or other issues that are genetic, saying they don't want to pass their problems onto the next generation.

So, bizarrely enough, there is a certain amount of eugenics happening, it's just purely voluntary.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's the top-down nature of the eugenics movement that made it so morally repugnant. "We decide who's fit to have kids."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Fair enough.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Kind of me, I have a genetic heart defect I don't intent to pass on. Though realistically, it was unlikely to happen in the first place.