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Plato on Eugenics and Euthinasia:
"Plato specifically endorsed murdering "weak" children in favor of the "strong". Similarly, he advocated that only men and women with superior characteristics be allowed to mate and bear children. Plato's student Aristotle made similar arguments."
A very small group are chosen from the world's most elite families to participate in the discipline most commonly known by the general term "higher education". A larger group, although still a small percentage, participate in primary education but few of these ever reach the status given to those who are chosen to receive sophisticated knowledge.
From the group of the highly educated people, there are academics and theorists that use their knowledge to create new variations for social designs. The exaggerated status and isolation these students experience has prevented much in the way of creativity for their hypothesis within the last several centuries.
Although it seems we are advancing very quickly within the realm of technology the attitudes which stem from the propaganda of social designers has severely retarded our growth for becoming more civilized.
The ways we are taught to idolize unattainable and commercial illusions of what we should be along with the way that contributes to false perceptions about the paths which are claimed to liberate us, causes stagnation, frustration, and self-destruction.
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Since our appetites are now seen by so many who are in the roles of leadership as our primary purpose in life, having control of our lives is often increasingly difficult to attain. With everyone frantic to find the most convenient route to the gratification of our senses, we become more impaired and more dependent on the leaders who are unworthy of our trust.
Rather than encouraging an environment of trust, our leaders keep us disenfranchised by promoting games that create unhealthy competition and identity politics.
This very design is woven into the fabric of our educational system. The laws that have protected compulsory schooling for children have created the fundamental building blocks of unlimited numbers of biased evaluations.
When cultural experiences can be homogenized each person can be ranked according to the perception that everyone (if found competent) is interested in the same goals. This is the theory that drives the United States to institutionalize, in one form or another, so many of its citizens.
Wikipedia speaks of the concept of rankism when describing bullying.
"Rankism is a term coined by physicist, educator, and citizen diplomat Robert W. Fuller. Fuller has defined rankism as: "abusive, discriminatory, or exploitative behavior towards people who have less power because of their lower rank in a particular hierarchy"[1]. Fuller claims that rankism also describes the abuse of the power inherent in superior rank, with the view that rank-based abuse underlies many other phenomena such as bullying, racism, sexism, and homophobia."
Bullying is expressed clearly in many of the clubs in our sophisticated institutions (that many of our national leaders join) as an initiation. This is an example of how our culture views of the role of authority and the rights it provides.It's given a sophisticated name. It's called hazing.
"Hazing is a term used to describe various ritual and other activities involving harassment, abuse or humiliation used as a way of initiating a person into a group.
Hazing is seen in many different types of groups, including in gangs, clubs, sports teams, military units, and workplaces. In the United States and Canada, hazing is often associated with Greek-letter organizations (fraternities and sororities). Hazing is often prohibited by law and may be either physical (possibly violent) or mental (possibly degrading) practices. It may also include nudity or sexually oriented activities."
Since the industrial revolution when most jobs required for more physical labor we have moved toward being more dependent on the technological industry where intellect is more important. With the new advances in technology our educational facilities have become much more sophisticated and yet much more exclusive. This means that today's bullies are more likely to be of the intellectual variety than the physical.
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The education industry has provided for the registering and ranking of people due to an even more nebulous standard of intellect, which has provided for an even bigger percentage of elites, stricter class divisions, and more promotions of the claim that intelligence is the scale which determines a moral character.
Two of the main influences on the institutional oppression in the United States from the political organizations of psychiatry, psychology, and higher education were the ideals of the Eugenics movement and Moral Treatment movement.The eugenics movement based their survival-of-the-fittest social aspirations on the theories of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton .Moral treatment was most heavily influenced by Benjamin Rush and Dorothea Dix.
Eugenic ideals are used in the United States for the registering and ranking of people with the least financial resources. The tools used were naturalization laws, intelligence quotient (I.Q.) test, and SAT scores. These determined a person's value to the government based on their ability to integrate and the typical nature of their neurology.
In this aricle :The Roots of the I.Q. Debate Eugenics and Social Control By Margaret Quigley, she says:
"To revisit the eugenics movement of the early 20th-century is to be reminded of the harm the movement intended toward those members of society least able to defend themselves. History, in this case, may help to provide an antidote to contemporary manifestations of eugenicist arguments--the I. Q. debate and the right's anti-immigrant campaign.
Any historical appraisal of the eugenics movement needs to step carefully to avoid imposing the values of the late 20th-century upon eugenicists, especially concerning the question of motivation. The legitimate, scientific framework of the eugenics movement, a mainstream view at the beginning of the century, has been for the most part abandoned by scientists in the years since then.
Similarly, to a great extent, racialist thinking, and in particular white supremacy, was neither questioned nor challenged among the white-dominated intelligentsia of the time. At the same time, the fact that white supremacist views were more acceptable in white society at the turn of the century still allows for gradations of focus and virulence; the question of the extent to which hereditarian arguments may have functioned as a pretext for a movement primarily concerned with the continuation of social and political dominance by upper-class, Protestant men of Anglo-Saxon background is unavoidable."
Of the practical uses for I.Q. tests she says:
"When the World War I-era IQ testing of all soldiers indicated that almost half of all white recruits were morons according to the newly developed Stanford Binet test, as were 89 percent of all black recruits, the eugenics movement seemed more important and believable."
The object was to reinstate and/or preserve the mentality of the peroiod of slavery when southern plantations made the biggest contribtions to the US economy. This mentality included humiliation in order to encourage servitude and control of avoiding the responsibility associated with trust.
"One American eugenicist said harshly:
http://www.cvtc.dbhds.virginia.gov/mastin-minor%20bldg.jpg"The economic conservatism of the movement was very clear. Faced with a social problem, the eugenicist leapt to the conclusion that it was the individual who must change to accommodate society (which is one reason why conservative commentators frequently argued that eugenics was a liberal movement committed to the supremacy of the community over the individual)."
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I was born in a Lynchburg Virginia hospital and lived in a very poor rural town nearby. I was described as mentally defective at birth due to injury, denied even an elementary school education, and was committed to Western State mental hospital as well as other such facilities (totaling several years) for the inability to care for myself as an adult.
During the time the following book excerpt was written one appropriate term used for my condition was "feeble-minded". My grandfather is from the place mentioned in the book .One of my aunts was employed at The Lynchburg Colony around the time I was born.
This is from The War Against the Weak by Edwin Black
"A single day in the 1930s was typical. The Montgomery County sheriff drove up unannounced onto Brush Mountain and began one of his many raids against the hill families considered socially inadequate. More precisely, these hill families were deemed “unfit,” that is, unfit to exist in nature. On this day the Montgomery County sheriff grabbed six brothers from one family, bundled them into several vehicles and then disappeared down the road. Earlier, the sheriff had come for the boys’ sister. Another time, deputies snared two cousins.Much of what is typically referenced as contributing to the progress made in mental institutions and for the mentally ill and developmental disabled in the United States is the result of the Moral Treatment movement.
“I don’t know how many others they took, but they were after a lot of them,” recalled Howard Hale, a former Montgomery County supervisor, as he relived the period for a local Virginia newspaper reporter a half century later. From Brush Mountain, the sheriff’s human catch was trucked to a variety of special destinations, such as Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia. Western State Hospital, formerly known as the Western Lunatic Asylum, loomed as a tall-columned colonial edifice near a hill at the edge of town. The asylum was once known for its so-called “moral therapy,” devised by Director Dr. Francis T. Stribling, who later became one of the thirteen founding members of the American Psychiatric Association. By the time Brush Mountain hillbillies were transported there, Western housed not only those deemed insane, but also the so-called “feebleminded.”
No one was quite sure how “feebleminded” was defined. No matter. The county authorities were certain that the hill folk swept up in their raids were indeed mentally—and genetically—defective. As such, they would not be permitted to breed more of their kind.
How? These simple mountain people were systematically sterilized under a Virginia law compelling such operations for those ruled unfit. Often, the teenage boys and girls placed under the surgeon’s knife did not really comprehend the ramifications. Sometimes they were told they were undergoing an appendectomy or some other unspecified procedure. Generally, they were released after the operation. Many of the victims did not discover why they could not bear children until decades later when the truth was finally revealed to them by local Virginia investigative reporters and government reformers.
Western State Hospital in Staunton was not Virginia’s only sterilization mill. Others dotted the state’s map, including the Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded near Lynchburg, the nation’s largest facility of its kind and the state’s greatest center of sterilization. Lynchburg and Western were augmented by hospitals at Petersburg, Williamsburg and Marion. Lower-class white boys and girls from the mountains, from the outskirts of small towns and big city slums were sterilized in assembly line fashion. So were American Indians, Blacks, epileptics and those suffering from certain maladies—day after day, thousands of them as though orchestrated by some giant machine.
Retired Montgomery County Welfare Director Kate Bolton recalled with pride, “The children were legally committed by the court for being feebleminded, and there was a waiting list from here to Lynchburg.” She added, “If you’ve seen as much suffering and depravity as I have, you can only hope and pray no one else goes through something like that. We had to stop it at the root.”
Benjamin Rush's contribution was involved in medicalizing the black race as a condition which was seen to have retarded black people's development to even the point of being less than human. This contributed to the idea that the white race had evolved further and was therefor more sophisticated and civil.
Dorothy Dix contribution was to encourage institutionalization from the proposals outlined in the Kirkbride Plan.
The United States has always been a corporate experiment which uses institutionalization and trans-institutionalization as a way of hiding, ignoring, and torturing inconvenient public enemies.
This is taken from how Wikipedia defines institutionalization:
"The term "institutionalisation" is widely used in social theory to refer to the process of embedding something (for example a concept, a social role, a particular value or mode of behaviour) within an organisation, social system, or society as a whole. The term may also be used to refer to committing a particular individual to an institution, such as a mental institution. To this extent, "institutionalisation" may carry negative connotations regarding the treatment of, and damage caused to, vulnerable human beings by the oppressive or corrupt application of inflexible systems of social, medical, or legal controls by publicly owned, private or not-for-profit organisations.
The term "institutionalisation" may also be used in a political sense to apply to the creation or organisation of governmental institutions or particular bodies responsible for overseeing or implementing policy, for example in welfare or development."
The mental institutions in the United States are now used to incarcerate and contain social outcast and the attitude toward this group has changed very little. Today the sophisticated intellectuals continue to bully others with their social influence, and often they are justified by even more laws.
Parts of the compulsory public education in the United States was designed based on the militaristic views of the Prussian government. The so-called reforming of our educational system continues to be mainly influenced by the liberal elite who was originally behind the Moral Treatment movement. This is why pity and shame are such effective weapons against the disabled and are continued to be revered as morally based.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a United States federal law that governs how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education, and related services to children with disabilities. It addresses the educational needs of children with disabilities from birth to age 21[1][2] in cases that involve 13 specified categories of disability.Also:
"The reauthorization of IDEA in 2004 revised the statute to align with the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB allows financial incentives to states who improve their special education services and services for all students."
"NCLB is the latest federal legislation that enacts the theories of standards-based education reform, which is based on the belief that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education."
"And the IEP:
"In the United States an Individualized Education Program, commonly referred to as an IEP, is mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). In Canada and the United Kingdom, an equivalent document is called an Individual Education Plan.
These programs work very closely with the registering and ranking of statewide positive behavioral support (the method of providing one specific and detailed standards based on Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) to all criminals, disabled people, and school children) which documents each detail of how a person's behavior is evolving to be more sophisticated and socially acceptable.In the US, the IDEA requires public schools to develop an IEP for every student with a disability who is found to meet the federal and state requirements for special education.[1] The IEP must be designed to provide the child with a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). The IEP refers both to the educational program to be provided to a child with a disability and to the written document that describes that educational program. At the end of twelfth grade, students with disabilities will receive an IEP diploma if they have successfully met the IEP goals. If they have not met the requirements for the high school diploma, then the IEP diploma is not awarded."
Positive behavioral support was recently encouraged in the bill HR 4247 known as Keeping All Students Safe Act which deceptively claims that it will reduce harmful restraints and seclusion.
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This says of Behaviorism:
"The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind.[2] Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling)"
Governing our institutions based on these beliefs would provide for a state religion and a government operating in a similar way as ones ruled by fascism. This allows for only what science can describe as "real" to be the judge of our behavior, character, and worth. Only the ways that we respond to stimulus according to our animal nature are seen as the valid basis for any of the ways we act. We are seen as having no mind, no soul, and therefore, no free-will. This provides for the strictest of authoritarian control and should never be confused with any type of liberation.
Among other things, the ACLU, when describing the School to Prison Pipeline, attributes the exclusive nature of the standardized test from the No Child Left Behind Act as contributing to the delinquency and oppression of minority races.
It says:"There is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer or improve stu¬dent behavior. On the contrary, research suggests that the overuse of suspensions and expulsions may actually increase the likelihood of later criminal misconduct." (2)http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.alamo.edu/sac/honors/main/papers02/Image9.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.alamo.edu/sac/honors/main/papers02/judge.htm&usg=__hQbXaGVDSu4f-Sqg-wJPVVIODxI=&h=672&w=432&sz=27&hl=en&start=23&sig2=Q5-dNqs9nZu0Nafz9jZr6w&tbnid=WMYvBxeSNxdWRM:&tbnh=119&tbnw=77&ei=OHVkTMnJMcSblge-l7Ek&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthe%2Blynchburg%2Bcolony%2Bfor%2Bepileptics%2Band%2Bfeeble%2Bminded%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26gbv%3D2%26biw%3D800%26bih%3D408%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C880&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=249&vpy=37&dur=44&hovh=280&hovw=180&tx=78&ty=279&oei=ynNkTOy3HcT48AbTpPGPCQ&esq=9&page=4&ndsp=8&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:23&biw=800&bih=408
AND:
• Growing numbers of school districts employ full-time police officers, or “school resource officers,” to patrol middle and high school hallways. With little or no training in working with youth, these offi¬cers approach youth as they would adult “perps” on the street, rather than children at school.
• Children are far more likely to be arrested at school than they were a generation ago. The vast majority of these arrests are for non-violent offenses such as “disruptive conduct” or “disturbance of the peace.”(3)
• Children as young as five years old are being led out of classrooms in handcuffs for acting out or throwing temper tantrums. Students have been arrested for throwing an eraser at a teacher, breaking a pencil, and having rap lyrics in a locker. These children do not belong in jail.
• The explosion of school-based arrests cannot be attributed to an increase in youth violence. Between 1992 and 2002, school violence actually dropped by about half. Despite the fear generated by a handful of highly publicized school shootings, schools remain the safest places for young people.(4)
• Resources that could be put towards improving under-resourced schools are instead used for security. School districts spend millions of dollars for police officers and security personnel,(5) despite the fact that these very schools are the ones lacking basic educational resources like textbooks and libraries.
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The reforms in modern education are responsible for encouraging the belief that so many children have behavioral problems and need to be given amphetamines. This has led to even more people being diagnosed with psychological disorders and viewing a large part of the population as the result of disease. This also tightens the gap between jails, addiction programs, mental institutions, and schools.
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Autism is a developmental disorder (a type of retardation). Academic and behavioral development can only be judged by a particular standard or scale. There are many dangers in using these scales too broadly or for too many value judgments. There is much historical information that shows how the standards of typical development and age appropriateness have been designed in the most harmful ways and led to atrocities.
Many of the advocates who are working to encourage the rights of autistics and many others that are committed to the rights of the mentally ill are too often claiming we are moving toward more civilized treatment for these groups through the political process. I see the problems associated with the Moral treatment advocacy of the 1800s continuing to repeat themselves. These problems are primarily due to disenfranchisement of the people most hurt by the programs promoted within public policy.
The Moral Treatment advocates were from a different class than those who were treated the worst and were primarily interested in reforming the people involved in the treatments rather than the system that designed and administered the treatments. Often what are considered to be treatments are merely research experiments being carried out on the most vulnerable part of the population that is the least likely to feel empowered enough to report abuse.
There is not much of anything that can be done to stop these abuses without restructuring of the values which created and has maintained the problem.
There is no system reform possible without an attitude reform and continuing to blame the victims whose powerlessness is encouraged by selfish thinking does nothing but causes more problems. The power structure supported by this is too old and too intricately woven into the fabric of our society to attempt changes in the traditional ways which have always been shown to fail.
We need to start encouraging advocacy that accepts the views of autistics and mental health consumers rather than continuing with the restrictions of age appropriateness, IQ test based on eugenic goals, and arbitrary labels of high and low functioning. If as soon as someone appears competent and articulate enough to express themselves competently, they are then seen as lacking in credibility and in understanding the critical problems that others are facing, we will all continue to face the same traditional mistreatment, and the worst abuse will continue to go unreported.
We can't keep promoting an oppressive system that labels people in order to exclude them. It hurts everyone when anyone is taught us to distrust in their own ability and worth so that they won't think critically and therefor be a part of their own liberation. We can't promote or even condone these practices and at the same time claim we are part of the solution.
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