Vaccination does not modify your genes, so it’s completely irrelevant to this conversation

The Patriot Act is evil, laws against eugenics are good

The tricky philosophical line here for me is - what are we allowed to say parents can’t do in regards to what they see as improving their children’s life?

Eugenics, parents can’t do fucking eugenics

You can fight the system

There’s no difference actually. You seem uneducated about eugenics

Eugenics is actually disgusting and horrific and totally inconsistent with the values of anyone who isn’t a nazi

It’s literally eugenics. There’s nothing ungenerous about calling it what it is.

If you don’t see the issue with genetically modifying children without their consent to “enhance” them or make them racially “superior” then I can’t help you.

The idea that you can modify someone’s genes to “enhance” them is bog standard “positive” eugenics. It’s literally the definition of eugenics and it’s upsetting to me that you are treating this like a debate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127045/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41434-019-0088-1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_eugenics

New eugenics […] advocates enhancing human characteristics and capacities through the use of reproductive technology and human genetic engineering.

Again, the strange practice the writers chose for this planet was eugenics. It’s like writing nazis as a minority. I’m a Jewish person and my family’s entire town was slaughtered by nazis. Romani people were also slaughtered in the Holocaust. I’m sure they would not appreciate their murderers being framed as the victims.

The writers didn’t have to depict eugenicists this way, as if their practice was a benign cultural tradition. Eugenics is an awful practice that’s killed tens of millions in the real world. It doesn’t need apologetics that make people question “but what if we’re being mean to the nazis by not letting them do their tradition of genetic modification for the betterment of their race?”

It’s illegal to practice eugenics in the star trek world because the eugenicists literally took over as despots and oppressed everyone during the eugenics wars. Do you think that it would be appropriate to have people who are proud eugenicists come into your society flexing their supposed genetic superiority (another piece of writing I protest btw) and teaching people by their presence that eugenics is actually benign and actually does make one genetically superior to others?

When I think of the situation with Una, it makes me think of cultural practices like genital mutilation, a backwards practice that parents make for their children, as individuals, that is traditional but hurts their child. It would indeed be fucked up to hurt someone in that way, and it’s illegal for good reason. It’s not benign, but it also would be cruel to blame the child for something their parents did to them and make it illegal for them to participate in society.

But genital mutilation isn’t genetic modification for the betterment of the race. There’s no such thing as genetic superiority, eugenics is a pseudoscience and it’s messed up and irresponsible to depict it as an effective benign thing that works at actually making a race superior. The writers should have chosen a different practice than this instead of worrying an episode that does apologia for a terrible practice that is illegal (in universe, not irl unfortunately) for a good reason

That’s really incorrect. I hate that this episode is spurring eugenics apologia like this

Can’t believe I have to tell you that deliberate genetic modification for the enhancement of individuals and species is the definition of eugenics, and that eugenics is not “so obviously acceptable that it’s impossible to even come up with an argument against it that stands up to scrutiny”.

I really hated this episode for this reason. I hate the thought experiment of “what if we found a planet where everyone practices eugenics and so therefore it’s racist to be against eugenics”.

Like if the rest of the world had found an isolated Nazi Germany, would it have been discriminatory and prejudiced to be against their practices? To not let them into the military? Of course not

Like why even write that plotline? Why are the writers choosing to legitimize eugenics like this, like it ever could be neutral or good and not horrific? I’m unwilling to entertain the idea that there’s a good way to do it, just as I’d be unwilling to entertain a fictional society that showed slavery in a positive light