From Michelle Malkin. David Letterman has invited “wackjob science czar” (Malkin’s phrase, but I think it’s more accurate) John Holdren onto the show.
Malkin runs down a lot of the particular craziness associated with Holdren, things like, oh: “extremist musings on forced abortions, mass sterilizations, and undesirables.”
Y’know, yer average research background. And it sounds like Holdren has a real paragon of a mentor:
“Holdren’s office has gotten away with stonewalling questions about the science czar’s promotion of his colleague and mentor, eugenicist Harrison Brown.”
This Brown fellow sounds like a swell chap, making his name in the mid fifties with a Paul Bunyan sized tall tale about overpopulation, and how unless civilization takes extreme measures (from regulating daily caloric intake to forced abortions to limit the family size), eventually the Earth would be “covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.” (emphasis mine).
When you try to look past the straight-up depravity, you can at least find some things to ridicule, almost laugh at here.
Are we seriously still on the Malthus bandwagon? Hasn’t that one been discredited enough already? Damn, you’d think I was the bloody progressive here, with a little faith in the future and the willingness to discard outdated notions. If nothing else, you’d think Eugenics was discredited by the SS’s little jaunt through Eastern Europe, but maybe they just didn’t do it right (in the same way that it was Russia’s fault Communism failed, not Communism qua Communism).
There’s a further two-fold irony in the certainty that (1), we’ll hit some brick wall in terms of technical innovation that will render population levels unsustainable, and that (2), humans seem to be so inherently bad for the Earth (a la Goreism) that we need to kill ourselves off. On the first point, we’ve had a pretty good linear development of technology sustaining increasing populations ever since the heavy plow was developed in the Middle Ages (England couldn’t support 20 million nine hundred years ago, so why should we be certain that it won’t be able to handle a billion in another nine hundred years?). The refusal to acknowledge that things will change in manners outside of our control (and that that’s generally a good thing) is perversely one of the oddest things you see in ideologically-bound individuals.
And on the second point, Eugenicists and population control types seem willing to cull off large numbers of the species. If most individuals are either so parasitic (or at least worthless), what’s the problem if we just let nature take its course and lead to a boom and then bust? It works for lemmings anyway. Or maybe Holdren’s just a selfish and controlling bastard who wouldn’t want too many people crowding his planet with him.
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