glimmer_twin

Winston Churchill spoke of the need to introduce compulsory labour camps for "mental defectives" in the House of Commons in February 1911. In May 1912, a Private Members' Bill entitled the "Feeble-Minded Control Bill" was introduced in the House of Commons… It rejected sterilisation of the "feeble-minded", but had provision for registration and segregation.

The bill was withdrawn, but a government bill introduced on 10 June 1912 replaced it, which would become the Mental Deficiency Act 1913.

At the height of operation of the Mental Deficiency Act, 65,000 people were placed in "colonies" or in other institutional settings. The act remained in effect until it was repealed by the Mental Health Act 1959.

from another article:

The pages of Winston Churchill’s biography is a chapter short. Written by his son Randolph the sibling was too ashamed to go into any detail about the letter his father wrote to British statesman H.H. Asquith.

Behind the parotic speeches of fighting them on the beaches Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill fought another battle to keep the vulnerable out of sight hidden in the dunes.

In December 1910 the British PM sent a letter to Asquith stating: “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.”

When Churchill moved to the Liberal benches in 1904 he tried to push through tougher legislations for the “feeble minded” after researching a controversial act which was being carried out in Indiana.

The Eugenics Law made it compulsory for criminals and the mentally unfit to be sterilised, they were also not given the right to marry. Reading the act in a book written by Dr. H.C.Sharp Churchill asked the Home Office to put the laws into practice on these shores for the “Feeble-Minded” and research the legal requirements so he could introduce the sterilisation process.

His proposed actions were challenged by Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Horation Donkin who called the laws “The outcome of an arrogation of scientific knowledge by those who had no claim to it….It is a monument of ignorance and hopeless mental confusion.”

Churchill wasn’t one to back down. In 1910 he told the Government Britain’s 120,000 “feeble-minded “people should be “segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations.” Angered his views on sterilisation had been aborted the leader argued the “feeble-minded” should be segregated from the opposite sex.

Defending his case Churchill said sterilising would come as a much cheaper cost opposed to sending the “feeble minded” to colonies and surgery would allow them “to live freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others.”

It tickles my brain in a strange way that the Americans did such a pissweak job of de-nazification after WWII (deliberately so in many ways) and it worked out great for the empire.

But after toppling Saddam, they did a much better job of removing every member of the Ba’ath party from civilian and military power, and it turned into a disaster.

I’ve been turning it over it my head, what was incompetence, what was deliberate, how these two distinct yet similar events played out. Was it simply a matter of the management of empire becoming less competent over time? Would full denazification have caused similar issues in postwar Germany (the experience of the GDR suggests not)?

Very interesting to think about.

Can’t believe I slept on it thinking it was gonna be some run of the mill “people go to a place and get slowly killed off” type thriller. Highly recommend if you’ve also let it pass by like I have.

It’s also very funny.

Like.... what the fuck? Danny Boyle has been known to make good films. You’re working with the catalogue of the Beatles, they have some, I dunno, pretty good songs. But what resulted is an absolutely jarring mess of shitty covers, bad acting, bad direction, weird editing, weird dialogue.... I honestly feel like I did a bunch of drugs before watching this movie, and not in a fun way. I haven’t felt this bemused and upset by a film since I did a bunch of ketamine watching Fear and Loathing and thought I was watching the movie from inside the TV.

This is a movie about Beatles music that has more screen time for Ed sheeran and his music than the fucking Beatles. They even manage to shoehorn in the despicable black hole of talent that is James Cordern. The whole time I was expecting a cameo from a living beatle (because if anyone can get a beatle, it would be the director who did the opening of the Olympic Games after all), and at one point they tease it but don’t do it! Instead they perform a travesty by having some dude that, admittedly, looks a lot like an old John Lennon, show up. In this dogshit movie. The surviving Beatles probably didn’t want to attach their names to this absolute turd.

I’m not even a huge Beatles fan. I think they have a bunch of good songs but are somewhat overrated. And even I feel like this does a disservice to their music, and it’s just on the whole a terrible movie. There’s so many Dutch angles I started to think the cinematographer had an inner ear disorder.

Has anyone else seen this? Am I completely off kilter? I thought this movie was dog shit from the first 90 seconds, how does this exist?!

The entire thing is indicative of the failure of the hippy project to even contemplate enacting real change. You wanna change the world? Nah, take LSD instead, “don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”.

The idea that any of these people genuinely believed they were doing anything other than assisting in the maintenance of the status quo is laughable.

Of course I’m not saying I thought rock stars represented the ideological pinnacle of the movement, but I’d claim that this sort of thought is indicative of the wider milieu.