Elon Musk Tells The Oatmeal He’s “Happy To Help” Fund Tesla Museum

Post by drzaiusapelord » Wed, May 14, 2014, 4:46 PM UTC

npinguy wrote: post #27

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures. That's fine, but lets understand that this applies to Edison as well. Tesla fanatics judge him by modern business practices and regulations, but Tesla gets the hand-wringing reply of "but but at the time..." which seems unfair. Lets also get something straight, its one thing to have a positive view of eugenics and another to be a fervent sup…

Eugenics received widespread support pretty much until the truth came out about the treatment of the Jews in Germany, which is when the supporters suddenly woke up and understood what the realization of those ideas inevitably leads to. But that truth was not fully revealed until 1945 with the liberation of various concentration camps. Until then, most details and rumors about the camps was dismissed as idle propagand…

Post by pessimizer » Wed, May 14, 2014, 5:01 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #16

npinguy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While eugenics is indefensible, it was an extremely popular theory at the time with support from a large portion of the scientific community. I'm not saying we should whitewash history and avoid talking about this detail of his life at all costs, but it is not a huge black dot on his record either that is relevant to the narrative of his life. Plenty of worthwhile individuals in history were slave owners. Homophobia…

> You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures. That's fine, but lets understand that this applies to Edison as well. Tesla fanatics judge him by modern business practices and regulations, but Tesla gets the hand-wringing reply of "but but at the time..." which seems unfair. Lets also get something straight, its one thing to have a positive view of eugenics and another to be a fervent sup…

Post by spindritf » Wed, May 14, 2014, 5:08 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #28

cbeach wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admired Tesla's research. Now I've heard his words on eugenics, my admiration only grows. Eugenics is not about killing people. It's about ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed. Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work…

> Eugenics is not about killing people. It's about ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed. No, its not. Eugenics is about ensuring that only people with the "best possible" (from the point of view of its proponents, which is always subjective) genetic makeup live. Killing people with undesired genetic makeup, penalizing or preventing reproduction by those with undesired gene…

Post by drzaiusapelord » Wed, May 14, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #33

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures. That's fine, but lets understand that this applies to Edison as well. Tesla fanatics judge him by modern business practices and regulations, but Tesla gets the hand-wringing reply of "but but at the time..." which seems unfair. Lets also get something straight, its one thing to have a positive view of eugenics and another to be a fervent sup…

Antisemitism is different than eugenics in fact, if not in spirit. Eugenics is the conceit that elites amongst the population should pick the winners of this generation in order to 'improve' the next. Antisemitism is saying that there's something in the nature of Jewish people that is bad for society in general. One is about picking winners; the other is an opinion on how to pick them.

Post by ch4s3 » Wed, May 14, 2014, 7:58 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #38

ch4s3 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Just because Roosevelt et. al. were proponents doesn't make it a good idea. You hypothesis presupposes something about human nature that I think is fundamentally flawed, namely that people will be inclined to evenly disperse the benefits of such a program. Much like communism, or some sort of stateless libertarian utopia(what ever that's even called?) it sounds nice on paper if you squint and hand wave away the…

"stateless libertarian utopia(what ever that's even called?)" Anarchism. [1] "Stateless libertarian" is by most useful definitions an oxymoron. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism - the popular conception of the term and the totality of what is lumped under that term are quite dissimilar. Non-disclaimer, I'm not an anarchist, only a libertarian.