Old Trapper
Verified User
Is there a difference?
"You don’t have to know much political history to become deeply unsettled by the recent public muttering by selected conservative voices that the benefits of reopening the economy might justify the otherwise avoidable deaths of a lot of unproductive old and sick folk who could succumb to the coronavirus pandemic. As my colleague Sarah Jones argued compellingly:
The views expressed by [Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan] Patrick and [First Things editor Rusty] Reno and [Trump adviser Stephen] Moore … separate human life into categories. In one box, there are people worth saving. In the other, there are people we ought to let die … What they contemplate is not quite mass murder, but a sort of planned negligent homicide. Patrick doesn’t want to build gas chambers. He just wants to let nature take its course. The fit will survive the cull.
And here history is instructive. Eugenics, as a form of human culling, was a pseudoscientific movement that gained lethal strength in the early 20th century and became official state doctrine in various regimes where murdering or starving “useless eaters” was regarded as essential to the public welfare or even to the health and welfare of the human species. Horror of human culling was deeply bred into the generations of Americans and Europeans who sought to identify civilization itself with the rejection of mass homicide. That this horror might be fading is disturbing enough. But that the idea is posting a comeback among American conservatives is particularly shocking, since not that very long ago that political tribe habitually accused liberals of an openness to euthanasia as a byproduct of legalized abortion."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/remember-when-the-gop-was-the-party-of-terry-schiavo.html
"You don’t have to know much political history to become deeply unsettled by the recent public muttering by selected conservative voices that the benefits of reopening the economy might justify the otherwise avoidable deaths of a lot of unproductive old and sick folk who could succumb to the coronavirus pandemic. As my colleague Sarah Jones argued compellingly:
The views expressed by [Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan] Patrick and [First Things editor Rusty] Reno and [Trump adviser Stephen] Moore … separate human life into categories. In one box, there are people worth saving. In the other, there are people we ought to let die … What they contemplate is not quite mass murder, but a sort of planned negligent homicide. Patrick doesn’t want to build gas chambers. He just wants to let nature take its course. The fit will survive the cull.
And here history is instructive. Eugenics, as a form of human culling, was a pseudoscientific movement that gained lethal strength in the early 20th century and became official state doctrine in various regimes where murdering or starving “useless eaters” was regarded as essential to the public welfare or even to the health and welfare of the human species. Horror of human culling was deeply bred into the generations of Americans and Europeans who sought to identify civilization itself with the rejection of mass homicide. That this horror might be fading is disturbing enough. But that the idea is posting a comeback among American conservatives is particularly shocking, since not that very long ago that political tribe habitually accused liberals of an openness to euthanasia as a byproduct of legalized abortion."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/remember-when-the-gop-was-the-party-of-terry-schiavo.html