RSSMr. Alexis has written so long, numbing and stylistically flat an attack, and one so close to the appearance of Mr. Skrbina’s article that I seriously believe it to be the production of an AI chatbot. Moreover, the continual appeal to truckloads of ‘scholarly texts’ and shelves if not libraries of related books presents so massive a bulk of material that one would need twenty years to get through it all. I don’t think Mr. Alexis has, and I doubt anyone sane with an actual life will either. The point of it is not to make an argument, but to fake an intellectual victory by burying the opponent under a mountain of citations, while intimidating the reader into thinking that something so long and with so many scholarly citations must be true, or at least formidable. In fact, you can reduce his argument to a sentence: every life is valuable, so let’s not kill anyone, even if they’re crippled and retarded and cost society a lot to keep alive; let’s keep them alive even if they suffer, and others suffer to keep them alive.
That’s not an unreasonable suggestion, but it’s not an argument. It’s a suggestion. And it’s not about eugenics, either, which is a two-fold phenomenon. One aims at fostering healthy, intelligent offspring, and the other aims at discouraging the appearance of sick, crippled, mad offspring, You can have the first without the second, and you can make the second voluntary, through fiscal encouragement or pro-abortion policies. A genocidal, exterminatory eugenics is indeed something we should have doubts about, but you can have ‘kinder, gentler’ pro-eugenic policies that don’t go anything so far. Alexis’ comments, though, bury practical possibilities under a mountain of absractions. It kills reasonable consideration of eugenics.