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>Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US. Have to guess the Aztecs and many other civilizations before that had it figured out before us.

throwanem 9y ago
They were religious about it, and offered no inspiration to modern societies. We were scientific about it, and inspired, among much else, many enormities of the Nazi regime. I get that American exceptionalism galls people, and I don't ask that they feel otherwise on the subject. But having inspired the 20th Century's greatest horrors - we had a strong, if still rather quiet, hand in the Soviet Union's origins as well - seems pretty legitimately exceptional to me. I don't know. No one I've ever heard has argued other than that the British Empire bestrode the world as the titan of its age, leaving the places where its feet fell forever changed in its wake. Why is it "American exceptionalism", rather than simply historicity, to suggest that the inheritor of that empire, in its own now fast closing age, did the same?
- cat199 9y ago
  > We were scientific about it what makes you think that scientific rationalism isn't a religion, or that despite 'being religious about it', prevous experiments weren't done in a rational, controlled, repeatable way by practitioners?
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Man, I don't know. Only the one of them having made it possible to build the technology by which we're communicating with one another right now? Assuming we are communicating with one another right now, a point on which I have my doubts. I mean, I'm placing the responsibility for eugenics and its consequent enormities squarely upon those who saw no reason to involve any concept of morality other than the most reductive utilitarianism in their development of the science of heredity into the technology of eugenics, and you seem to find that in so doing I'm saying something laudatory, so...

throwanem 9y ago

They were religious about it, and offered no inspiration to modern societies. We were scientific about it, and inspired, among much else, many enormities of the Nazi regime. I get that American exceptionalism galls people, and I don't ask that they feel otherwise on the subject. But having inspired the 20th Century's greatest horrors - we had a strong, if still rather quiet, hand in the Soviet Union's origins as well - seems pretty legitimately exceptional to me. I don't know. No one I've ever heard has argued other than that the British Empire bestrode the world as the titan of its age, leaving the places where its feet fell forever changed in its wake. Why is it "American exceptionalism", rather than simply historicity, to suggest that the inheritor of that empire, in its own now fast closing age, did the same?

cat199 9y ago
> We were scientific about it what makes you think that scientific rationalism isn't a religion, or that despite 'being religious about it', prevous experiments weren't done in a rational, controlled, repeatable way by practitioners?
- throwanem 9y ago
  Man, I don't know. Only the one of them having made it possible to build the technology by which we're communicating with one another right now? Assuming we are communicating with one another right now, a point on which I have my doubts. I mean, I'm placing the responsibility for eugenics and its consequent enormities squarely upon those who saw no reason to involve any concept of morality other than the most reductive utilitarianism in their development of the science of heredity into the technology of eugenics, and you seem to find that in so doing I'm saying something laudatory, so...