Questions FEB 20

Presentation: Vuk

1. German lawyers meeting in Berlin in 1934 debated bringing what from the statutes of thirty U.S. states to the Third Reich?

2. Hitler thought the U.S. had made progress toward the creation of what kind of society?

3. What is the real problem of disability?

4. What concept did Quetelet derive from the astronomical "law of error"?

5. Galton's work led directly to what?

6. What state's "fitter families" contest declared that "a sound mind in a sound body is the most priceless of human possessions"?

7. "The Galton Institute" was originally called what?

8. Many scientists continued to believe in what core tenet of eugenics even after the atrocities of WWII?

9. What did Robert Edwards say he learned from the development of IVF?

10. What connects old-school eugenics with more recent "market" versions?

Premonition

1. What happened a week after Charity "railed about the idiocy" of CDC rules?

2. What would have happened if the first infected passenger on the Diamond Princess had flown to the U.S. and then home?

3. What mental model did Carter have wrong?

4. What CDC guidance regarding social gatherings defied common sense? Was it a good thing for people to not know what was about to happen, in early March 2020?

5. Why did Charity ignore her boss's order about emails?

6. What had Japanese public health authorities figured out about contact tracing?

7. What was Charity's interpretation of Nancy Messonier's public statement?

8. What's the simple truth about herd immunity?

9. What's an L6?

10. What did Charity insist was the single most important part of her COVID response plan?

DQs

• Does the extent of U.S. influence on Nazism shed any light on current events? Does it deserve significantly greater attention? Is its relative obscurity a stain on our educational establishment?
• COMMENT: "it's no great surprise that [Nazis] believed that what had made America great was American racism."
• Were you familiar with the views of Jefferson and Lincoln cited on p.62? Are you surprised?
• What do you think of the various euphemisms in current circulation that refer not to disability but to differently abledness, and the like? Do they represent an evolution of awareness and sensitivity? Do they reflect a failure to come to grips with the problem of creating and sustaining a genuinely open and just society? Or...?
• What do you think of the author's analysis of norms and ideals ? (64)
• Norms of the kind the author is concerned with, that make life more difficult for the disabled, are clearly problematic in an ethical sense. But what about the norms that have been flouted lately by the current U.S. president and his administration? Isn't that also ethically problematic-or just wrong? (See Adam Gopnik, "Norms and Cliffs in Drumpf's America")
• Is it significant, if true, that all the early statisticians were eugenicists? (66)
• Is it true that Darwinian evolutionary theory repudiates the disabled as "defectives to be surpassed by natural selection," (67) in view of the fact that culture now competes with pre-cultural nature for selective influence? (Put another way: culture is an ever-growing part of nature, making the fate and fortunes of the disabled a matter of cultural decision as much as natural default.)
• Is the impulse to perfect the human race entirely misplaced?
• Is men sana in corpore sano a good approach to health and social justice?
• Was Robert Edwards right that soon it will be widely considered a "sin" to have a child with genetic disease?
• Will it ever be widely acceptable to "select the features of future generations much like we currently configure...a new car"?