From Discover The Networks:
Paul Ehrlich is a professor of population studies and biological sciences at Stanford University. He is best known as an environmentalist who first gained notoriety from the publication of his 1968 book The Population Bomb (co-authored by his wife Anne Ehrlich), which predicted an impending ecological apocalypse followed by mass starvation. “The battle to feed humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.” Ehrlich further decreed: “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” He suggested adding “temporary sterilants” to the water supply but thought “society would probably dissolve” before the government could do that. And he called China’s policy of forced abortion “vigorous and effective,” a “grand experiment in the management of population.”
Ehrlich’s predictions snared a generation of reporters and Green activists in the 1970s, who gave his totalitarian prescriptions serious consideration. Among his other predictions were the following:
“Smog disasters” in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)
“I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” (1969)
Falling temperatures will cause the ice caps to sink into the ocean, producing “a global tidal wave that could wipe out a substantial portion of mankind, and the sea level could rise 60 to 100 feet.” (1970)
“Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity ... in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” (1976)
In more recent years, Ehrlich has also made the following statements:
“Actually, the problem in the world is that there is [sic] much too many rich people.” (Quoted by the Associated Press, April 6, 1990)
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” (Quoted by R. Emmett Tyrrell in The American Spectator, September 6, 1992)
“We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.” (Quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet, 1990)
After switching from predicting an impending Ice Age to its logical opposite, Global Warming, Ehrlich said, “The population of the U.S. will shrink from 250 million to about 22.5 million before 1999 because of famine and global warming.”
Ehrlich is an inveterate critic of American foreign and domestic policies. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he theorized that a central cause of the attacks against the United States was the unequal distribution of wealth worldwide, and that American affluence was resented by much of the human race.
Ehrlich urged the U.S. to respond to 9/11 not with a military strike against the Taliban, but rather with charity and financial aid for the people of Afghanistan; the Taliban, in his view, should have been permitted to remain in power. Speculating on how the U.S. could “counter the intention of the terrorists” and “make a small symbolic start at solving the structural problems that have led to the current situation,” Ehrlich wrote in September 2001:
“Since we have moved a major aerial force into a position to bomb Afghanistan, we [meaning himself and others of a like mind] think the United States should use its airpower. We envision a huge flight of B-52s over that nation, opening their bomb-bay doors, and salvoing -- parachutes carrying containers of food. It could be followed up by fighter-bombers dropping some of our pre-packaged medical facilities, and leaflets volunteering to supply physicians on loan to operate them. … [F]ood is cheaper than bombs. … This is not to say we should not continue to try to … destroy terrorist networks and punish the perpetrators of the recent atrocities. But some move like this might make clear that the United States will not indisc[r]iminately destroy innocent people to get revenge on the guilty. [And] it might give us a good start on the sort of ‘Marshall Plan to the World’ that we and others think needs to be pursued over the long term to help close the widening gap between haves and have-nots, clearly one of the roots of recent terrorism. It might also help counter the idea that the West wishes to wage war on Islam.”
[. . .]
In Ehrlich’s view, U.S. arrogance and selfishness (he derided America’s “pathetic level of foreign aid”) were largely to blame for the 9/11 attacks. His proposed remedy was for America to respond with contrition and compensatory generosity. “I am convinced that the prudent course for the United States and other rich nations,” he said, “is to work to ameliorate social and economic rich-poor disparities while trying to unravel the complex root causes of terrorism. ... The United States should play a central role in improving demographic and socioeconomic conditions in developing nations. It is one of the stingiest rich nations in terms of development assistance … Without dramatic action, however, the demographic and socioeconomic conditions that prevail in much of the world will help provide a substrate on which 9/11-type terrorism can thrive into the foreseeable future. Exacerbating terrorist tendencies are policies [such as] waging war on anyone who we decide might impede the flow of oil into American SUVs and dollars into the pockets of George Bush’s friends.”
Given the fact that every prediction he has ever made has been wrong one wonders why anyone still pays any attention to him at all.
Of course the answer is simple. He hates the United States of America. The fact that he is a Marxist and a Green makes him attractive to the America-haters on the left. There are other America-haters on the right, or least the nominal right. The Libertarians who claim to champion the cause of human liberty yet would have left Saddam Hussein on his throne and his sons in their rape room and have no problem engaging in free trade with China even though the Chinese economy is partially based on slave labor are one such group.
Then there are the Southern Nationalists who wish the South had won the Civil War. The fact that the Confederacy would have been dominated by slave owning planters whose principal social goal would have been to preserve the South as a semi-medieval agrarian backwater and moral pariah matters not at all to them. After a Confederate victory the South would have stratified into plantation owners, slaves, poor white trash and a tiny middle class of artisans and merchants.
What would have been left on the North American continent would have been very much less able to confront the 20th century evils of fascism and communism or the 21st (and at the same time 7th) century evil of Islamism.
While the left-wing America-haters have a whole buffet of candidates on the Democrat side to chose from the right-wing America haters have only Ron Paul. In past elections they really haven't had anybody unless you count whatever nonentity the Libertarian Party was running.
The fact they now have one of their own in the race and able to stand up on the stage next to men with the stature of Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain has them all in raptures. However the first true large scale exposure of libertarian thinking has not had the effect that they hoped it would.
I remember my own days in the Libertarian Party where the conventional wisdom was that if we could just get "our guy" in the presidential debates where he could stand next to the Democrat and Republican and articulate libertarian ideas before a mass audience the great mass of the American population would realize that they really agreed with us and flock to our banner.
Well now Paul is getting the mass exposure for his ideas and about 1% of the Republican Party is supporting him and there is no sign of any significant number of Democrats crossing over to register Republican so they can support him.
Their response to this rejection is to grow more shrill, more strident and more purely obnoxious. When the online polls don't show much support for Paul then organize an effort to spam them. Sit around all day obsessively Googling Ron Paul's name. When you find a negative reference run over and defend him. Leave a lot of comments so that it will look like there's this big groundswell of support for Paul (note that while there are many comments on the Paul threads, there are only a few actual commenters).
This is why I call them pod-people. They are like mind programed zombies. In another place and time they would have been wearing brown and breaking up rival party's meetings.
But just like Paul Ehrlich whose constant doomsday predictions, which never come true, destroy his credibility with anyone outside his circle of like-minded kool-aid drinkers the pod-people are doing their cause far more harm than good. That many, if not most, of them know this and simply do not care (because it is just so much fun to be a part of something and get all the attention that they are getting) is just one more sign of how little they deserve to be taken seriously.
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