Apparantly, Tesla fandom is impossible without absolutely hating Edison, which is bizarre. That's like being unable to appreciate Mercedes without hating Porsche. There's this terrible whitewashing of history with Tesla. His advocates clean up his image and purposely turn the narrative away from him toward Edison when presented with any criticisms.
I'd like this museum to show us the historical Tesla, not the fanboy generated meme that appears in web comics. I took my wife to a Tesla presentation at a science musueum in Milwaukee a couple years ago and it was the most shrill and factually questionable presentation I've ever seen. It was more or less an hour of Edison bashing with hints toward things like time travel, death rays, and free energy. I want Tesla to get his due, but not the whitewashed grandfatherly Tesla of meme legend, but the real very flawed guy. A bright engineer who failed in business for valid reasons.
I guess everyone likes an underdog story, but this one is beyond reasonable.
Eugenics quote: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1010618-the-year-2100-will-s...
I'm not saying we should whitewash history and avoid talking about this detail of his life at all costs, but it is not a huge black dot on his record either that is relevant to the narrative of his life. Plenty of worthwhile individuals in history were slave owners. Homophobia only became socially unacceptable in the last decade. You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures.
That's fine, but lets understand that this applies to Edison as well. Tesla fanatics judge him by modern business practices and regulations, but Tesla gets the hand-wringing reply of "but but at the time..." which seems unfair.
Lets also get something straight, its one thing to have a positive view of eugenics and another to be a fervent supporter. Tesla published that screed in, what we would call a sci-fi or futurist magazine, and signed his name to it in 1935, during the height of Jewish persecution in Germany. As an educated Serbian I'm sure he was fully aware of this.
You have to see that in context, this was before the second world war and he wasn't aware that in the future you can manipulate/analyze genes.
Today he would probably just be an advocate for that kind of technology.
Definitely not an easy topic, but also not black and white.
Maybe there is more from him, but your source indicates an opinion like that.
As for his beliefs on eugenics expressed in that quote, they were very popular at the time and not even particularly illiberal by contemporary standards - being more associated with a sort of scientific socialism like the Fabians - unlike the beliefs of Ford, or Shockley, for example, which were far to the right of their peers.
As is every other patent ever. No scientific breakthrough or cutting edge device is ever created out of thin air. Nearly all of them are through combining and expounding upon existing theory and research. Relativity, for all its brilliance, was an extension of existing thought in theoretical physics at the time that had been coming to a head over the course of centuries prior to that. It is no coincidence that so many great discoveries and inventions in recent history have ended in a race to the patent office or a highly publicized science drama between great minds. Often these great thinkers are working on the same things at the same time because those are the subjects the scientific world is chattering about. Even so, Tesla created a number of things, such as radio control, that were well ahead of his contemporaries and immensely improved upon existing ideas such as Edison's DC systems. He is definitely worth some fair criticism, but not on this basis.
As to his business success, I can hardly see how that's even relevant. Few great scientists have also been great entrepreneurs. I'll agree he didn't fail solely on the basis of Edison's supposed feud with him, but neither does his lack of success at business diminish him as a successful engineer and scientist.
Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work in sterilizing drug addicts (voluntary sterilization in exchange for cash) to prevent children being born into misery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention
We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics and consider why a number of national heroes (including Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg) were proponents.
No, its not. Eugenics is about ensuring that only people with the "best possible" (from the point of view of its proponents, which is always subjective) genetic makeup live. Killing people with undesired genetic makeup, penalizing or preventing reproduction by those with undesired genetics, and promoting or compelling reproduction by those with desired genetics are among the means of eugenics.
"Ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed" is not eugenics.
> Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work in sterilizing drug addicts (voluntary sterilization in exchange for cash) to prevent children being born into misery.
Aside from discussion of whether that's a desirable policy, if it's really motivated by concern for childhood environment and not about eradicating drug addiction on the assumption that it is purely hereditary and preventing drug addicts from reproducing will prevent drug addiction, its not eugenics at all (as your wikipedia link correctly states, its been compared to eugenics, which is not the same thing as being eugenics.)
> We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics and consider why a number of our national heroes (including the likes of Walt Disney) were proponents.
Just because someone is a "national hero" because they did (or are national mythology has attributed to them) something good in one domain doesn't stop them from holding reprehensible views in other domains. "National heroes" are not gods, and we are poorly served by treating virtue in one domain of life as granting special consideration in unrelated domains.
Drug addiction is all about the inability to commit to long term plans in favour of the quick short term happiness. Drug addicts are not capable of making rational decisions when faced with cash on the spot. There is a reason why we don't have a problem with boxing or MMA, but "bum fights" is unethical and looked down upon.
Offering drug addicts money for sterilization is unbelievably unethical. It is reinforcing the idea in their minds that their addiction is irreparable, probably guaranteeing after the fact that they will never seek help and recover. And if they do turn their lives around and are faced with different priorities than they did during addiction? Too bad so sad?
By the way, I'm not at all expecting to change your mind on this. Given your use of phrases like "left-wing metropolitan elites", I don't see how you could possibly be interested in a debate that involves you questioning your preconceived perspectives.
This is one of the few cases in which Godwin's Law probably doesn't apply. The implementations of the National Socialist Party by themselves are an excellent argument against eugenics of any sort.
Meanwhile, it is worth mentioning here that Winston Churchill, while a "national hero" to some people, was unusually strongly racist even for his time. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest...
For a good time, read the proceedings of the international conferences, starting in 1912 and running for the next ten years or so. Some great scientific efforts, combined with some pretty appalling work, as well.
Check out 'The Cause of the Inferiority of the Physical and Mental Characters in teh Lower Social Classes' to start, from 1912: https://archive.org/details/problemsineugeni00inte
Who decides who is "unfit"? In the not too distant past, and possibly even today, that might include the non-white, non-straight, non-wealthy, etc. I find it incredibly scary that you could so easily agree that others should decide who gets to enact their human instincts. Let's face it, it would almost certainly be old, white, wealthy men that would make those decisions.
Dan's thoughts on the first Tesla Museum story were interesting:
Regardless, very cool that Musk ponied up. Makes me want to go buy a Tesla even more now.
http://jalopnik.com/5935362/elon-musk-pledges-to-support-nik...
(note Inman's "pledge drive" letter is classic Inman and amusing to read as usual)
Inman is now asking Musk directly for $8m, to build a museum. The only primary source is this tweet - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/466518346574626817 - which simply says "I would be happy to help."
And, if we're going to judge by modern standards, it's not even unpopular in our times. The word was dropped after the atrocities carried out by Germans but often the same people who express their horror at the idea laud and support Planned Parenthood despite its roots and policy.
Anarchism. [1] "Stateless libertarian" is by most useful definitions an oxymoron.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism - the popular conception of the term and the totality of what is lumped under that term are quite dissimilar. Non-disclaimer, I'm not an anarchist, only a libertarian.
But that truth was not fully revealed until 1945 with the liberation of various concentration camps. Until then, most details and rumors about the camps was dismissed as idle propaganda because noone believed the reality could possibly be so shocking.
In 1935, little was known about what was going on in with the Jews in Germany, and most of the really extreme ideas were not implemented yet. What discrimination occurred was not unique in Germany, as most nations of Europe practiced some minor forms of tacitly-approved anti-semitism
This is harmful revisionism. What was going on in Germany in the 1930s and the laws and actions against Jews were well known at the time around the world.
If you're saying that racial laws and discrimination against Jews were well known, that's clearly true. Eugenics has nothing to do with fair treatment, though, it has to do with sterilization and extermination. Discrimination against Jews by law in Europe is older than Christianity.
(Hint: Australia was practicing real race-based eugenics programs until the 80's. Australian aborigines' weren't even considered human beings until the late 60's.. the point is that atrocities can occur right in front of our eyes, and if we're not willing to see them, they can just stay there ..)
One is about picking winners; the other is an opinion on how to pick them.