A 91-year-old freshman state representative has angered a Dover Community Partners staffer for his comments he doesn't support state funding for "the crazy people" who should be sent to "Siberia."...
Where does he get his ideas?
Martin Harty of Barrington made the comments to Sharon Omand, a program manager at Community Partners, which provides behavioral health and developmental services for Strafford County. Omand had called Harty and other legislators to discuss measures in the proposed House Republican state budget that would make significant cuts to mental health services.
Omand told Foster's that Harty told her he disagreed with her about the need for funds for mental health services and he believed in eugenics.
"The world population has gotten too big and the world is being inherited by too many defective people," he told her.
Explaining his thoughts, Harty said one of his main concerns is population explosion, and he is wary of funding a social issue that can't really be helped...
Harty referenced science fiction writer Isaac Asimov and his stories about a pending population explosion as someone whose messages he is "in tune with."When I sent the link to a few usual suspects, Eileen Gunn pointed out that Harty was most likely channelling Cyril Kornbluth's satirical short story 'The Marching Morons', in which the US has become populated by lowbrows kept content by shoddy consumer goods and pointless jobs. In fact, Harty's idea about sending inverts Kornbluth's scenario: in 'The Marching Morons', the high-IQ elite have set up an Arctic retreat from the stresses of trying to run the US. As for Harty's claim of 'being in tune with' Asimov's messages about the population explosion, I really don't think so. Asimov, ever the rationalist, believed that the solution to over-population lay in promoting voluntary contraception, encouraging homosexuality, and world government. Not, I think, the typical views of a Republican - even of the New Hampshire variety.
Question - I have a vague memory, exclusive of title and author, of a short story in which criminals were sent to a walled territory to do as they would. Anyone know anything about this? Or of any SF scenario, apart from HG Wells' 'The Country of the Blind' or John Varley's 'The Persistence of Vision' where the differently-abled have either volunteered for, or have been driven into, exile?
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