Light reading

The Drunkablog is currently getting his yocks from Better for all the world: The secret history of forced sterilization and America's quest for racial purity. Initial reaction: One look at the D-blog and these eugenics "scientists" would have fallen to sharpening (okay, dulling) their little scalpels. But, as usual, women got the worst of it. Excerpt:

How do you spell that word?" asked Congressman William Vaile of Colorado.

"M-O-R-O-N," replied [eugenics advocate Harry] Laughlin. "It is a Greek word, meaning 'a foolish person.' . . . [W]e find that the moron girl is highly fertile sexually. She has not any sexual inhibitions, as a rule, and her fecundity is limited only by the number of children and coming in contact with men; that is, physiological, not social, conditions limit the fertility of the average female moron that is not placed in an institution and protected."

The debt the Nazis owed these freaks is apparent in their propaganda war against (and sexualized fascination with) the Jews, but author Harry Bruinius doesn't fudge it: in the U.S. and Britain, eugenics and forced sterilization were largely supported by progressive zealots eager to eliminate the "unfit" for the good of humanity. Of course, as the omni-maniacal blogger Crazy John Ray never tires of pointing out, Nazism itself was a socialist movement (scroll down to near the end of the "Elsewhere" post).