Friday, December 26, 2008

Oh, how we bought into that BS....

The "Insights" of Paul Ehrlich
It is, I suppose, possible to find a "key insight" about population growth in Ehrlich's book that's anodyne enough to qualify as "elementary" and irrefutable. But there's a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over," and that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other "triage" methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

And, of course, there's no way we could be repeating that same hysteria now, is there? We just luuuv to use the latest scientific fads combined with our self-loathing to come up with recipes for curing our sick, sick society of all its ills. Is there really any difference between the followers of Erlich, the Al Gore sycophants, and the apocalyptic religious fanatics (see the movie "The Seventh Sign") who think that we need to be punished for our collective sins?

Not really....... so just chill a bit, take a deep breath and then try and go live your life as best you can without trying to tell everyone else what they must do to be righteous, pure, and green, i.e. shut the fuck up! (Please...)

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