Some thoughts on the new green fascists and mass murderer wannabes, from Glenn Reynolds:
In contemporary America, no respectable person would advocate, say, the involuntary sterilization of blacks or Jews. Why, then, should it be any more respectable to advocate the involuntary sterilization of everyone? Or even of those who cause “social deterioration?”
Likewise, references to particular ethnic or religious groups as “viruses” or “cancers” in need of extirpation are socially unacceptable, triggering immediate thoughts of genocide and mass murder.
Why, then, should it be acceptable to refer to all humanity in this fashion? Does widening the circle of eliminationist rhetoric somehow make it better?
I don’t see why it should, and I don’t see why we should pretend — or allow others to pretend — that hate-filled rhetoric is somehow more acceptable when it’s delivered by those wearing green shirts instead of brown.
It’s a fetish of the left. It’s like the eighties, when they feigned outrage at the way the South Africans treated blacks, and were indifferent to the fact that places like the Soviet Union treated everyone that badly, or worse. If you’re a leftist, it’s perfectly OK to oppress people, as long as you’re an equal-opportunity oppressor.
Also, Jim Bennett emails:
Actually, Tom Clancy wrote a novel about a rich eco-nut who funds the clandestine development of a plague that will wipe out all of humanity, except for a small group who will have the antidote.
Highly improbable, of course. Almost as improbable as the one he wrote about the fanatic who crashes a fully-fueled airliner into a major US government building.
Not just improbable — unthinkable. At least if you’re Condi Rice. But perhaps not if you’re John Holdren.
Actually, Tom Clancy wrote a novel about a rich eco-nut who funds the clandestine development of a plague that will wipe out all of humanity, except for a small group who will have the antidote.
Does anyone seriously doubt that were the means available, that the Left isn’t capable of producing people who would use such a weapon without the slightest hesitancy?
It is interesting that lack of relative prosperity is what makes people bitterly angry and unhappy. People in poor countries can be very happy so long as they are doing alright compared to the neighbor – but if they get an intimate sense of how well the average person from a first world country is doing – they start to get very unhappy. Absolute prosperity seems to have far less effect on happiness, yet from a moral perspective, this would seem far more important (reality verse the perception thereof).
This presents an easy option for the left, make all the rich poor and suddenly the average person becomes a lot happier (due to much greater relative prosperity). It is much easier to make the rich poor than the poor rich – and there goes the middle class (the very rich have more options for escape).
The questions raised are very important but do you know that a lot, really a lot of people in the former USSR miss those times and wish there had never been any changes and think they were happy then and they have a number of reasons to feel so? What I mean ids that you can’t judge being a stranger.
This is nothing new. George Bernard Shaw, in addition to his advocacy of Eugenics, held that people should be required to appear before a Board periodically to justify their existence.
Like Algore, he won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize…
I have long said that we were very, very lucky that the Unibomber was a brilliant mathematician rather than a brilliant microbiologist.
Frank Herbert too wrote a ‘brilliant microbiologist wages genocide via basement-made disease’ novel, The White Plague, back in the early 1980s. The villain (if that’s the right term — it’s complicated) had motivations other than ecoterrorism, but it is nonetheless an interesting (and relevant) thought-exercise in what sjv alludes to above.
Was the rich guy’s name Bill?
http://www.news-medical.net/news/2009/05/11/49308.aspx
The Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation is all about improving the standard of living in third world countries, developing treatments for diseases like this, providing contraception – and recently, some new “advanced” contraception.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8674380.stm
Worried yet?
No, not yet.
…when it’s delivered by those wearing green shirts instead of brown.
Yes, as long as one remembers that it’s not two separate or competing groups.
It’s the same people with the same philosophies, they’ve just changed the shirt color.
Another book with that theme is “Alpha Centauri”.
Pete: “…make all the rich poor and suddenly the average person becomes a lot happier…”
That’s called bankrupt thy neighbor mentality.
A peasant was visited by a genie.
Genie: You can ask me for anything you want. Whatever I give you, I’ll give your neighbor twice as much.
Peasant: Blind one of my eyes.
“I have long said that we were very, very lucky that the Unibomber was a brilliant mathematician rather than a brilliant microbiologist.”
Too late.
Good thing there are limits to what microbiologists can do. Even the smartest microbiologist has to work within the limits of natural law. No “designer” life forms yet, even viruses have to be based on pre-existing ones. There are some that are still nasty enough to be a starting point for a world-ending virus (rabies probably being the most likely, as everything else either doesn’t have a high enough mortality rate or cripples its own spread by displaying obvious symptoms people can watch for), but there’s still the fact that pathogens survive by evolving around our continually-adapting immune systems, and would eventually find a way around any cure such a group decided to use for itself as it begins repopulating the world in its utopian vision.
No.
And a Clive Cussler book – “Plague Ship” of similar method and goal. We’ll be having to confront this threat I’m convinced.
And likely addressed in a generally prohibitionist fashion – as chemistry as a hobby is now.
Devilish hard to get chemicals as a hobbyist – from a 1986 act under President Reagan that initially prevented the sale of direct precursor chemicals to manufacture specific illegal drugs. This straightaway became a general control on ordering from Supply Houses – Cenco, Fisher, whatever.
So we won’t get the innovation of an Army of Davids with things that require access to specialized chemicals. We don’t achieve the noted aim of controlling drug creation.
We’ll likely see the same pattern in bioengineering / gene engineering / whatever.
Just pushes the activity over seas. Threat / payload can still get here, unless you want to control the whole world…
We truly need to be more agile as a society, not less, to deal with these threats. The easy win of prohibition and control paradoxically won’t help.
I must say that recently I have fantasized that Clancy’s scenario would come to pass — it would, it one fell swoop, get rid of a lot of horrible people: Harry Reid, The Wicked Witch of the West, and the remaining 533 thieves.
Of course, the aftermath would likely be worse.
In nature, predators weed out the weak genes from the prey population. This filtration is necessary.
Since humans no longer have significant natural predators, humans have to find another way to filter out defective genes.
This causes leftism, and the need to eliminate others including themselves. Whether an eco-nut, abortion nut, or suicide bomber, these are all people who nature has selected to be the wastebaskets of genetic matter, and who are obligated to filter their own defective genes out of the gene pool.
That is why so many leftists are unusually ugly.
This presents an easy option for the left, make all the rich poor and suddenly the average person becomes a lot happier (due to much greater relative prosperity).
Back when Jerry Brown was governor of California, there was a joke going around:
Jerry Brown thinks it’s fundamentally unfair that our society has such huge inequalities that some people drive luxury cars while other people have to hitchhike. In the truly just society that Brown intends to build, everyone will hitchhike!
Did the ex-CEO of SEIU read the Tom Clancy story? Or what? Yes I’m worried yet.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=andy+stern+siga+biowarfare+antidote&src=IE-SearchBox&oma=toggle_off
Terry Gilliam nailed the archetype in the archvillian of the underappreciated “12 Monkeys.”
The plot of the movie revolves around the search for the source of the supervirus 20 years later. The twist in the plot is that the killer turns out to be a save-the-whales “humanity is a disease” type.
This is nothing new. We’re told the Pilgrims gave smallpox carrying blankets to Indians. A thousand years ago, when Mongols laid siege to cities, they used catapults to throw the bodies of disease victims into the besieged city. Worked equally well for Typhoid as for Bubonic plague. The Japanese army conducted biowarfare experiments on Chinese villages in WWII, air dropping disease carrying fleas over villages.
Remember when Britain had a little outbreak of Mad Cow disease? It’s deep under the Official Secrets Act but there are suspicions the outbreak was started deliberately by an environmental group who want to force us all to stop eating meat.
Just for fun. How did Leftist Journalists feel about the suspects who mailed envelopes of Anthrax to congressmen? Apparently, the Leftists care more about the criminal’s party affiliation than the crimes.
We’re told the Pilgrims gave smallpox carrying blankets to Indians.
We’re not told that by anyone familiar with the actual history –just people who want to slander the Pilgrims.
Agreed. That’s why I used the phrase ‘we’re told’.
Hard to say it’s unthinkable. Remember the journalist who licked doorknobs to share his flu with a politician he despises.
”Dan Savage Goes Undercover to the Iowa Caucuses and Gives Gary Bauer the Flu Bug”
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=3092
IC – give me a young, athletic, intelligent, adventurous, loyal, loving, tenacious, hardworking and beautiful wife. Jealous, too.
Ed Bosco – no more 8 – 16 yr old kids drooling over the Sears catalog 356 chemicals/elements/solvents Laboratory, how to make things blow up included in the Experiments booklet.
Well it wasn’t biological but a chemical attack in this case. There was that Japanese death cult that wanted to instill a new supreme emperor of Japan. They released sarin gas in the neighborhood of a Japanese judge that killed 7 people. Then there was the more infamous attack on the subway system that killed 13 people and injured a thousand more.
“The Cobra Event” is another book along those lines.
What’s weird is that years after this book was published, I heard a Kuwaiti imam describe how good Muslims could attack the Great Satan in exactly the way “The Cobra Event” describes.
The H1n1 of late 2009 is under suspicion in some rather high quarters –such as Australian National University prof Adrian Gibbs –as a lab-made virus accidentally released into the human population. If he’s right, some might say the accident was fortuitously timed to’ve become epidemic –had it become epidemic –during the congressional debate over the healthcare bill.
ic, I heard it was the mother-in-law that would get double and the son-in-law asked to be beaten half to death.
Although Microsoft has had an active philanthropic arm for two decades, only in 2006 did it start seriously experimenting with software in poorer counties in ways that would fit Mr. Gates’s creative capitalism idea. Under that 2006 program, handled by about 180 Microsoft employees, the company offers stripped-down software and alternative ways of paying for PCs to poorer countries.
What the poor need is access to capital, but all B.G. can think of is how to get computers in their hands so he can sell them s/w.
Microloans have worked pretty well in the third world with better than normal repayment rates. If only B.G. knew someone with capital to start a program like that?
Biological attacks are frustrated by geography. It’s hard to distribute them widely enough to be effective. Not to say that it couldn’t be done or someone evil wouldn’t do it.