So you might have heard that I’m a eugenicist.
I’m not, of course. Very few people are anymore, in the strictest technical sense of the word, and for good reason. “Eugenics” – the modern scientific name assigned to the somewhat ageless concept of trying to improve the human species through controlled breeding and population control when a certain movement of late 19th and early 20th Century scientists, philosophers and sundry thinkers began to discuss applying then-modern understandings of genetics, evolution and social-science to it – had a relatively brief shelf-life as a meaningfully-popular idea in the developed world before seeing it carried to its logical extreme in the form of Nazi “Master Race” ideology and the Holocaust. Still, it was prominent and “popularly advocated” for long enough to leave an ugly legacy even apart from that: Forced sterilization, racially-charged marriage/cohabitation laws, the works. Bad, bad, bad scene all around; one that every decent person regardless of ideology or outlook would (to my way of thinking) reject and denounce as I do.
What does that have to do with me? Well… social media, shitty jokes (mine), disingenuous people with a lot of time on their hands and people who have trouble not hitting back even when it’d be for their own good (also me.)
Short version: I put a lot of effort into staying sharp and behaving with a composure that befits the professional/intellectual caliber I try to invest in my work… none the less, I frequently fail at it, because no matter how book smart and “academic” I can affect – that’s just not where I’m from and it’s not the core of who I am, or where I’m from or how I came up. I won’t play at being some kind of “street-tough bad-ass made good, either;” but suffice to say what’s in my blood when it comes to any kind of conflict is: You hit me, I hit back. You tell me to fuck off, I tell you to fuck off. You talk about my mother, I talk about your mother. It takes a lot for me to not hit back even when it’s in my interest not to, and the instinct is especially hard to resist when the “fight” is here in the ephemera of The Internet where the “hits” are just words and I tend to feel like I have an advantage to start with.
So… yeah, I get into a lot more “Oh yeah? Well fuck you too, pal!” back-and-forths over (often) meaningless bullshit on dumb forums like Twitter than I probably should, and it frequently comes in the form of attempting to “cleverly” turn someone’s bad opinions back onto them.
And since over the last 4-5 years or so the bulk of folks taking swipes at me and mine in such spaces tend to be coming from the right-wing/alt-right space (first with “gamergate,” then with the Trump campaign and subsequent presidency); that’s meant I’ve spent a lot of troll-smacking time doing that turnabout/reversal bit to various stripes of bigots, white-nationalists, isolationists, “race-realists” and so on: “Oh, you’re the Real Americans? Actually, you’re in demographic decline and the country is gonna look much more like where I am than where you are in a generation.” “Oh, you’re a Real Man and I’m some liberal beta cuck? Actually, your job is probably gonna get automated out of existence in a few years and my Blue State tech/commerce/culture-economy taxes will be paying for you and your state’s life-support – ain’t natural selection a mother?” That kind of thing – sometimes (okay, most of the time) with more colorful language and a rambling tangent thread to over-explain the joke because I don’t know when to knock it off.
And speaking of not knowing when to knock it off, since that kind of thing tends to get my self-righteous streak up, those rambling-tangents can (and do) often spill over into more florid rants about “societal evolution,” technology, geopolitics and admittedly cheesy word-salads about “the superior future versus the superior past” or somesuch. What’s wrong with that? Well, apart from sounding like the visionary-crackpot older scientist in a pre-WWII pulp adventure story, not too much – especially since I won’t pretend not to believe in such things in a big picture sense: I’m an unapologetic technophile, scientific-utopian, futurist, globalist, post-nationalist… whatever other word describes the component parts of a general philosophy that wants human civilization to hurry up and A.) automate to the point where physical prowess is no longer a determinant factor of social mobility (while intellectual prowess is, perhaps more determinant than ever) and B.) advances in travel, commerce, communication and resource-management have reduced the need for strict and contentious national borders. Now, plenty of people disagree with those outlooks, sure – but I hardly think they make me particularly threatening.
(Moreover, I tend to be a political pragmatist about the same: Barring undue harm to others, whatever puts me closer to those ideals I’m for, what takes me further away I’m against – right, left, center… generally not where I like to concern my thinking. If anything, my “philosophy” would be closer to technocratic – note the small “t” and this subsequent acknowledgement that “Technocracy” as an actual system of government would all but certainly be a disaster… but that’s a different post.)
vs Believers 
