Tag: eugenics

A healthcare algorithm started cutting care, and no one knew why

entitledrichpeople:

doctordisaster:

entitledrichpeople:

Highlights of this article include the people who made the algorithm suggesting that denial of essential care is no big deal because they are “not going to live that long, probably”, says that cuts to essential care are “rational” and not cutting is “irrational”, and compares suggesting medicaid should not guarantee care to not dusting under the bed, and defending denial of essential care as a cost cutting measure.

This is eugenics.  Flat out transparently eugenics.

This is unbelievable. Not only don’t the people running these systems know how they work, but they’re too short-sighted to have built in mechanisms for appeals or reviewing specific cases. This episode from the courtroom is bad enough:

[President of the group that designed the algorithm] Fries was called in to answer questions about the algorithm and patiently explained to [ACLU attorney] De Liban how the system works. After some back-and-forth, De Liban offered a suggestion: “Would you be able to take somebody’s assessment report and then sort them into a category?”

Fries said he could, although it would take a little time. He looked over the numbers for Ethel Jacobs. After a break, a lawyer for the state came back and sheepishly admitted to the court: there was a mistake. Somehow, the wrong calculation was being used. They said they would restore Jacobs’ hours.

“Of course we’re gratified that DHS has reported the error and certainly happy that it’s been found, but that almost proves the point of the case,” De Liban said in court. “There’s this immensely complex system around which no standards have been published, so that no one in their agency caught it until we initiated federal litigation and spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to get here today. That’s the problem.”

But it gets worse when the same dipshit who realized his system was broken while on the witness stand tells the reporter, presumably after that debacle, “you’re going to have to trust me that a bunch of smart people determined this is the smart way to do it.”

Please, you contemptuous asshole, point me to those smart people. I’ll wait.

Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that this guy is a eugenicist, and that the goal is to cut healthcare from disabled people deemed “too expensive”.  I wonder at what point abled people will admit that what is being done to disabled people is oppressive violence, and that it’s exactly the result you would expect from this sort of views and behavior.

Eugenics is still the norm among wealthy white people in the US, they may not publicly call their eugenics based programs by that name as much these days, but they never stopped enacting them.

A healthcare algorithm started cutting care, and no one knew why

aegipan-omnicorn:

kipplekipple:

Look, if a person finds out they’re carrying a foetus who may or will be disabled, and they get pressured into aborting, that isn’t freedom of choice.

If that person is pushed towards information that ignores the lived experiences of people with those disabilities, that isn’t freedom of choice.

I am pro-choice. I believe that person should have the choice to abort. But I also believe their choice should be based on accurate, relevant information rather than the ableist bias of our society.

Stop acting like pro-choice ends at allowing abortions. Stop acting like eugenics are fine “because pro-choice.” If you’re pro-choice you need to remember that informed consent is a thing, and to acknowledge that the way abortion is pushed on parents of disabled foetuses is extremely problematic in its current incarnation.

Thank you.

As someone who is congenitally disabled (disabled from birth), I hate having my existence used as club by one side of the “debate” to beat up on the other side.

(I’m pro-choice, too, by the way).

The anti-choice people try to shame me out of my pro-choice position, by saying: If your mother had known ahead of time, and could have aborted, she would have! How do you feel about that?*

The pro-choice people (most of them  – OP excepted), paint my existence as nothing but a punishment and a burden, that anti-choice people are forcing mothers to face.

Both “sides” of this argument are Ableist A.F. Both are hateful and bigoted.

*My answer to that question is two-fold:

a) if she had aborted me, I wouldn’t have any feelings at all, because I wouldn’t exist, but I’d rather not exist at all than to be born to a mother who didn’t want me – especially since disabled children are much more likely to suffer abuse and neglect, and

b) You never knew my mother – decades after her death, I learned she had had a passel of family in the neighborhood where I grew up, and I’d never even heard her mention their names. And looking back on her last encounters with the few cousins I did know about, and how ugly and sour that turned out, I can only conclude that they tried to  pressure her into putting me in an institution (this was in the 1960s). And she wanted to protect me from their ableism.

My mother never saw me as a burden, and how dare you.

5 Odd Facts About the Difficult, Tortured History of Virginia Indians – Indian Country Media Network

Featuring Carrie Buck, yeah. (Why the State of Virginia Sterilized Carrie Buck — The Eugenics Movement and Buck vs. Bell)

My great-grandmother knew her when she was in a “foster care” placement in our town. (Read: farming out poor kids as domestic servants.) Not sure if it was the same placement where she got pregnant by rape, or not.

They were about the same age, and Granny Lu was lucky she didn’t end up as the big eugenics test case herself after my Papaw was born when she was 14. (Also from rape.) Having family backup and no state involvement was the big difference there, AFAICT. But, this hits pretty close to home in multiple ways.

(More on Virginia’s history of eugenics, with laws on the books up into the ‘70s. )

5 Odd Facts About the Difficult, Tortured History of Virginia Indians – Indian Country Media Network

myautisticpov:

t3trahedron:

revivalish:

This is all I’m gonna say on the matter, but:

I hope all my allistic followers are aware that books like To Siri With Love are the sort of thing that get autistic people killed. We die in real life because we’re seen as creepy, unsettling, yet still somehow laughable caricatures of humanity, and we are medicated to death, driven to death by family members and medical professionals who treat us worse than how they’d treat animals, and there are people who advocate to stop us from being born if there are “signs of autism” in an otherwise perfectly healthy (and wanted) fetus, because they think our lives are a fate worse than death.

This book is like a cross-section of that culture. 

The person who wrote this book is actively and knowingly – I don’t believe for a second that she’s just a well-meaning but misguided parent – contributing to a culture that wants her son dead. I hope he gets away from her quickly and never has to see her again. I hope he meets people who treat him like the worthy individual he is and help him heal from the trauma she’s caused. I’m so fucking sorry he has to cope with this book being out.

I don’t usually say things like “please unfollow me if”, but if you believe that autistic people should be medicated and sterilized against their will, or that cruelly and invasively mocking an already vulnerable 13-year-old in a bestselling book is acceptable, unfollow me.

(Actually, you know what, edit: allistic people are encouraged to reblog this.)

https://twitter.com/A_Pregel/status/936644273004597255

^ Super disturbing source for the whole ‘I want to sterilise my child against his will’ thing. She talks about eugenics and, again, wanting to sterilise her son against his will, so if you don’t want to read about that don’t click the link. Click on the pics to enlarge them (or am I the only idiot who didn’t know to do that?)

Also, the author’s response to the criticism: http://observer.com/2017/12/autism-to-siri-with-love-book-criticism/. Spoiler: it’s not a good response. If anyone’s going to write a book ‘not intended for an autistic audience’ but about autism, it should be an autistic person, not one’s mother. It does elaborate that she isn’t planning on sterilising her child, but does want ‘medical power of attorney for her son’. To be honest, though, deciding not to forcefully sterilise your child is the the bare minimum of human decency, so I’m not exactly enthusiastically celebrating her.

I’m at the point now where I’m just telling every allistic who reads To Siri With Love that they’re now also obligated to read Justice for Laughing Boy.

If you must listen to parents over us, fine, listen to this one and listen to what the views perpetuated by books like To Siri With Love actually do.

all-states-are-abstractions:

Please take the time to read the quote, and understand why the #ActuallyAustistic community is calling for a #BoycottToSiri

And the open endorsement of eugenics is nowhere close to all of the problems there.

Excellent Twitter thread from @neurowonderful, including interactions with the author which really help illustrate some attitudes 😨

Well worth checking out the hashtag (and the rest of Amythest’s feed the past couple of days) over there too. Lots of other hair-raising excerpts.

Source: all-states-are-abstractions

How the Carnegie Corporation contributed to NC’s shameful past | Philanthropy Daily

Why did eugenics have such an appeal to our first major modern philanthropists?

Because, as Carnegie famously argued, they believed that most previous giving had been “indiscriminate charity … spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy,” without addressing the underlying circumstances that produced such conditions.

The new philanthropies, by contrast, were animated by “a search for cause, an attempt to cure evils at their source,” according to the words of John D. Rockefeller.

The eugenics movement spoke directly to this yearning. Charles Davenport, perhaps the most prominent American eugenicist, wondered in 1910 why “tens of millions have been given to bolster up the weak and alleviate the suffering of the sick,” while “no important means have been provided to enable us to learn how the stream of weak and susceptible protoplasm may be checked.”

This made eminent sense to the Carnegie Institution of Washington. It paid for Mr. Davenport’s search for the protoplasm that caused sloth, drunkenness, unworthiness, and other social ills from 1904 until 1939. Frederick Osborn championed similar causes at the Carnegie Corporation for 26 years.

Philanthropy today still aspires to move beyond treating mere symptoms of problems by getting to their causes.

How the Carnegie Corporation contributed to NC’s shameful past | Philanthropy Daily

compostpile:

compostpile:

when it comes to consciousness raising you can spend time telling someone “crazy” is a slur or you can spend time explaining that what looks like “care” or “cure” or “mercy” to them is actually eugenics or abuse. one of these projects has to precede the other and i bet you can guess which one i would prioritize

you’re either going to build a base of clueless liberals who learn by rote to nitpick their language for anything with the remotest connection to ability, or you’re going to help them develop the alertness and critical eye necessary to recognize eugenics and abuse. i don’t think those things are mutually compatible in an immediate timeframe, because one locates both the root and branch of oppression in a disembodied cloud of language and thought, and the other locates it in the real material structures that we need to confront immediately in order to save actual lives. not saying “crazy” isn’t going to get anyone out of forced institutionalization

whatshername89:

jamaicanblackcastoroil:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

trans-goddess-janus:

normanbates:

ani-bester:

marauders4evr:

trilllizard420:

moontouched-moogle:

felweed:

normanbates:

david rockefeller finally died this year i had no idea

Is this the same dude who had something like 10 heart transplants

6. but yeah.

you can’t hang up on the reaper forever.

THIS MOTHERFUCKER!

God my crippled ass never gets a chance to rant about how much I hate this asshole and his family because apparently it’s not common practice to sit in the line at Dunkin Donuts only to start ranting about him. So thank you for this opportunity.

It’s 9:00 AM, I’m half-asleep, but here we go.

This asshole’s entire family are almost single-handedly responsible for literally the entire modern eugenics movement! See back in the early 1900s, it was the Rockefellers who were so proud of their white able-bodied elitism that they got it into their heads that anyone who wasn’t white or able-bodied needed to die. They usually publicly focused more on the disabled Americans. Frankly, I think we were easier targets but I digress. 

The Rockefellers, Carnegies, Davenports, and other super rich families chipped in to create the Eugenics Records Office on Long Island which began cataloging the genetic makeups of every single family in the nation. I’m dead serious. There was a building out there that housed all of your ancestors’ breeding information. Legally. Funded by millionaires. Only a century ago.

Now this asshole was only a kid at the time so he escapes most of the initial blame but here’s the thing. Like any good pioneering millionaires, these guys didn’t just talk about wanting to get rid of the disabled population. They actually started putting it in action. We’re talking doctors injecting milk with TB to give to disabled babies. Disabled women (and black women and Native women, it’s also important to remember that too, I’m just disabled so this is the demographic I’m focusing on more here) were forcibly sterilized against their will. Scientists began talking about gas chambers that could be used to kill disabled adults. Yep. That’s right. Gas chambers. And all of these projects were funded by families like the Rockefellers. That’s why I can say with a straight face that the Rockefellers were worse than Hitler. Why? Because Hitler saw them as his heroes! He sent these scientists/families fan letters gushing about how he wanted to be just like them. And guess what? A few years later, he happened to get some power (just a smidge) and started Aktion T4 – a Germanwide eugenics movement that killed half a million disabled individuals. Half a decade later, he would use the killing methods to start the Holocaust.

All because of this guy up here and his family.

Who continued to fund Nazi experiments.

And even up to his death, David Rockefeller talked publicly about eugenics and what a great idea it was. The same guy who had six heart transplants went up onto stages to talk about how we need to kill everyone else who he deemed unworthy to live.

Here’s a bunch of sources because you can’t make this shit up:

http://truthstreammedia.com/2014/12/13/a-century-ago-rockefellers-funded-eugenics-initiative-to-sterilize-15-million-americans/

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796

http://www.wnd.com/2009/05/99105/

tl;dr: David Rockefeller and his family singlehandedly led to millions of people dying and if they had gotten their way, would have led to millions more. And as far as I’m concerned, he can rot in hell.

Does that answer your question?

ARR WE RANTING ABOUT ROCKERFELLERS??

Because if so olease let me share this quote about there thoughts on education:

“We shall not try to make these people [poor peoole getting free education] or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poetd, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, or statesmen” -Rockerfeller’s general education board.

Literally the funded and promoted public education to make sute the poor were smart enkugh to work for them, but not s.art enough to rise above them.

The Rockerfellers are part of why public education is as bad as it is.

i never thought i’d get the let me learn you a thing stuff on one of my posts but yeah i’m cool with it

I don’t believe in hell, but people like the Rockefellers make it seem like not such a bad concept

I sincerely fucking hope that he was in absolute agony and full of fear and misery when he died

And if I worked at the funeral home that got his body, I’d stuff the coffin full of rocks and then toss his actual corpse in the trash

Henry Kissinger called him his friend that should tell you everything right there.

And this doesn’t even touch on how their family knew about the coming collapse of the stock market in ‘29 and, along with their rich friends, removed their money and accelerated the oncoming crash. Then, in the absence of public funds since you know, the economy collapsed, they “donated” a bunch of money and put their names on everything, making themselves seem like heroes. It’s part of why I loathe the lauding of the 1% for their “charity” when they’re the ones crippling our public entities through tax evasion and oligarchical manipulation of our economy and government.

Oh! Or how the Rockefeller Laws in the 70s and 80s devistated people of color and hippies in New York and assisted in the mass incarceration boom of the drug wars.

Fuck the Rockefellers. May they all rot.