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Monday, April 03, 2006
The Convergence Continues
Just a few days ago was the first anniversary of the judicially sanctioned torture-murder of Terri Schindler-Schiavo by her soi-disant husband, Michael Schiavo. During that gruesome process, your Curmudgeon penned a cri de coeur that, had he had his druthers, would have been read by every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth.
To cut to the chase: it wasn't. At least, it wasn't taken to heart.
On March 2, 3, and 4 of this year, the Texas Academy of Sciences held its annual conclave, at which it awarded a certain Eric Pianka, a biologist at the University of Texas, with its Distinguished Texas Scientist Award. Whatever Dr. Pianka's achievements as a researcher or educator might be, they were overshadowed, for the moment at least, by his proposition that 90% of the human race must die:
"Every one of you who gets to survive has to bury nine," Eric Pianka cautioned students and guests at St. Edward's University on Friday. Pianka's words are part of what he calls his "doomsday talk" -- a 45-minute presentation outlining humanity's ecological misdeeds and Pianka's predictions about how nature, or perhaps humans themselves, will exterminate all but a fraction of civilization.Though his statements are admittedly bold, he's not without abundant advocates. But what may set this revered biologist apart from other doomsday soothsayers is this: Humanity's collapse is a notion he embraces.
Indeed, his words deal, very literally, on a life-and-death scale, yet he smiles and jokes candidly throughout the lecture. Disseminating a message many would call morbid, Pianka's warnings are centered upon awareness rather than fear.
"This is really an exciting time," he said Friday amid warnings of apocalypse, destruction and disease. Only minutes earlier he declared, "Death. This is what awaits us all. Death." Reflecting on the so-called Ancient Chinese Curse, "May you live in interesting times," he wore, surprisingly, a smile.
So what's at the heart of Pianka's claim?
6.5 billion humans is too many.
In his estimation, "We've grown fat, apathetic and miserable," all the while leaving the planet parched.
The solution?
A 90 percent reduction.
That's 5.8 billion lives -- lives he says are turning the planet into "fat, human biomass." He points to an 85 percent swell in the population during the last 25 years and insists civilization is on the brink of its downfall -- likely at the hand of widespread disease.
"[Disease] will control the scourge of humanity," Pianka said. "We're looking forward to a huge collapse."
Let's get one thing straight before we proceed: Anyone who agrees with Dr. Pianka had better keep his hands where your Curmudgeon can see them.
An attitude like Pianka's can only come from an ivory tower. One must be utterly isolated from real life and real people to contemplate their extinction with such cheerful equanimity. Yet according to the linked story, Pianka is well supplied with admirers and acolytes:
Most of Pianka's former students are bursting with praise. Their in-class evaluations celebrate his ideas with words like "the most incredible class I ever had" and "Pianka is a GOD!"Mims counters their ovation with the story of a Texas Lutheran University student who attended the Academy of Science lecture. Brenna McConnell, a biology senior, said she and others in the audience "had not thought seriously about overpopulation issues and a feasible solution prior to the meeting." But though McConnell arrived at the event with little to say on the issue, she returned to Seguin with a whole new outlook.
An entry to her online blog captures her initial response to what's become a new conviction:
"[Pianka is] a radical thinker, that one!" she wrote. "I mean, he's basically advocating for the death for all but 10 percent of the current population. And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he's right."
Today, she maintains the Earth is in dire straits. And though she's decided Ebola isn't the answer, she's still considering other deadly viruses that might take its place in the equation.
"Maybe I just see the virus as inevitable because it's the easiest answer to this problem of overpopulation," she said.
Of course, "this problem of overpopulation" is a completely impersonal matter. It has no bearing on the identities or futures of identifiable individuals. Were Miss McConnell asked if she expected to be among the doomed 90% or the fortunate 10%, what do you suppose she would say? Is it not likely that in her unspoken thoughts, she assumes herself to be among the architects of the annihilation, rather than an honoree?
Your Curmudgeon calls this the Commissar Complex. It puts him in mind of an anecdote from the 1848 French Revolution, when a coal-carrier scoffed at a lady of the upper classes: "Yes, madam, everything's going to be equal now. I'll go in silks and you'll carry coal." They who imagine the remaking of the world after their own preferences are like that.
Never imagine that they aren't serious. Consider the following:
"The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!'" -- philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics
"Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet....Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." -- biologist David M. Graber, in review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, in the Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1989.
But in keeping with the "death cults" motif, your Curmudgeon must emphasize the underlying attitude: Superior individuals, disdainful of the common herd and disinclined to rub elbows with them, theorize about the management of the hoi polloi while sipping Cointreau. Such management connotes a shepherd-to-sheep relation. Certainly it would include a willingness to "thin the herd" at need -- with need determined solely by the self-nominated master intellects in the closed circle.
"Kill five-billion-plus people because their continued existence offends us? Why not? Haven't we acceded to the deaths of millions of unborn children in the name of convenience? Haven't we argued that to let a child be born with a birth defect, or against its mother's will, is an act of 'wrongful life?' Don't we have such luminaries as Peter Singer to justify infanticide as a form of retroactive abortion? Haven't we condemned a president and his administration specifically for liberating two nations from monsters who were slaughtering tens of thousands each year? Haven't we argued in the highest chambers of power that 'a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,' and that rocks and moss and tundra are more precious than the human lives the oil beneath them could sustain? When we argued for those things, did anyone rise to stop us? Who could stop us now?"
This morning, a grace note for this uniquely academic species of mania has arrived from from columnist Star Parker, in discussing the social pathologies of inner-city blacks:
For the academics, the inner city is a laboratory. Do research on how condition A produces behavior B. And what can be done do create condition C to produce behavior D.Except for allusions here and there to issues of building character, there is no hint that this human tragedy reflects a moral crisis.
It's not an accident that when the inner city became a laboratory for politics and university research in the '60s and '70s, the black family collapsed. Single-parent black households have almost quadrupled since then.
Apposite and accurate. But it's not just the inner city the academics treat as fodder for their experiments. No, not nearly.
The convergence of the death cults continues apace.
Comments
Thank you Fran. I was expecting your commentary. This incident provoked even me to <u>write in a timely fashion</u>.
Posted by Pascal (the derivative) on 04/03/2006 at 05:23 PMI’m sorry, because though I’m moved to coment, you tend not to allow the types of words I’d like to use.
Posted by og on 04/03/2006 at 05:25 PMI have a question: Does Brenna McConnell’s blog exist? It isn’t mentioned on technorati or Google blog search and the general Google web search didn’t have anything bloggish on Brenna McConnell.
I expressed some skepticism about the accuracy of unverifiable anecdotes on the alleged self-censorship of Arkansas biology teachers a few days ago and I think similar skepticism is warranted here.
Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger on 04/03/2006 at 05:26 PMBTW, please note that February 15th, in my testimonial to Ethics, my second sentence said I do not write about some things because I fear I would only promote a bad idea that some miscreant is too stupid to think up on his own.
And now? Here we have this ubermensch professor informing us: “Good terrorists would be taking [Ebola Roaston and Ebola Zaire] so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of people.”
Posted by Pascal (the derivative) on 04/03/2006 at 05:38 PMYes, Joe, it exists:
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 04/03/2006 at 05:48 PMOkay. Okay. Her blog exists.
It looks like something from a religious conservative gradually becoming convinced of the Truth of Liberalism by sheer intellectual conviction.
In fact, it looks too much like that. It might be an attempt by a leftist to simulate a convert.
Maybe I’ve been reading too many conspiracy theories…
Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger on 04/03/2006 at 10:45 PMI think I can only say to Dr. Pianka:
Apres vous, mon ami.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 04/03/2006 at 11:40 PMHoo boy! Miss Brenna and her Dr. Pianka and the posters to her blog that agree with them are…sick, self-hating people, seeking a connection with Something bigger than themselves and purposely, purposefully avoiding the only One there is. I’d like to feel sorry for them, but I am unable to pity evil. They scare me so badly that they trigger the kill-mechanism in me as a form of self defense. Does this make me like them?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/04/2006 at 03:31 AMNo Cindi. Self defense is a natural instinct. You instinctively seek to defend yourself in the manner which would end the threat.
This brings to mind one of those instititional disfunctions to which I refer. Ask Kevin Baker about what he calls the chilling effect the Left has brought to self-defense, and you gain a glimpse as to how the convergence is completing its encirclement.
Posted by Pascal (the derivative) on 04/04/2006 at 04:00 AMI keep waiting for people like Brenna and Pianka to lead the way by example, but they just keep on living:)
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/04/2006 at 10:00 AMNutbars like Pianka can only survive (and flourish, apparently) in the protective environment of academia. Somebody ought to put him in touch with these fine folks.
Posted by Sarah on 04/04/2006 at 04:17 PMBrings to mind the classic definition of an intellectual…. one who is educated beyond his/her intelligence.
And the irony of their anti-technology screeds being posted on an internet blog seems lost to them—I’m sure Pianka, Brenna, and their ilk don’t avoid any technology used to make their own lives easier/longer.
Keep up the good work, Fran!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/04/2006 at 08:35 PMWho are you people? You don’t know Brenna. All you did was google some catchphrase word. Found an poorly written article and wrote an inciteful, ignorant post about how some imaginary academic, inherently liberal and intelluctual force is raising itself above the masses and killing anyone it finds distasteful. Brenna is no intellectual elite. She’s a college student. That’s it. She never advocates or attempts to pursue the death of anyone. She never claims to be part of the solution, and readily admits she’s part of the problem and that no one has the authority to choose who lives or who dies. (by the way, how many knee-jerk right wing reactionaries here readily support the death penalty, war and the killing of people like Pianka… somehow the supposed intellectuals have no right to choose death for anyone, but you have every right and authority?...) If you have a problem with someone, you confront them in person. Fanning flames of ignorant hatred through polemic blogs does NOTHING.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/05/2006 at 12:47 PMYou’re funny, David, you know that? Rage of your sort—rage over having been found out—always is. Eternity Road can always use a dose of humor.
No one here has advocated killing anyone, though some of us do support the death penalty for convicted murderers and believe that war, however horrible, is sometimes preferable to the alternatives. No one here is clapping with glee over the prospect of a lethal plague, as Pianka and McConnell are. No one here would dream of pronouncing 5,800,000,000 human lives disposable because they’re “fat, human biomass” and “too many.”
The facts are as they are. Pianka’s attitude, the attitudes of Leftist ivory-tower intellectuals, and the admiration of their hangers-on toward human life are on conspicuous display, from coast to coast. If anyone here is “fanning the flames of ignorant hatred,” and if anyone here has a problem with facts, I’d say it was you.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 04/05/2006 at 01:11 PM“I’d like to feel sorry for them, but I am unable to pity evil. They scare me so badly that they trigger the kill-mechanism in me as a form of self defense. Does this make me like them?”
“No Cindi. Self defense is a natural instinct. You instinctively seek to defend yourself in the manner which would end the threat. “
“I keep waiting for people like Brenna and Pianka to lead the way by example, but they just keep on living (smile)”
“Nutbars like Pianka can only survive (and flourish, apparently) in the protective environment of academia. Somebody ought to put him in touch with these fine folks.”
“No one here has advocated killing anyone…”
...except for 4/10 people commenting on this post.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/05/2006 at 01:22 PMDavid, you seem to think that self-defense makes us like those who are out to kill us. No one here is out to kill anyone EXCEPPT when they find themselves threatened. It is unconscionable to permit yourself to be murdered just as much as it to let the weak die at the hands of the predator when you have the menas to protect the weak. That is the judeochristian ethic whether or not you like it.
David, did you come here just to help me focus on what it is I’ve been trying to convey? Thanks.
Posted by Pascal (the derivative) on 04/05/2006 at 01:43 PMI went to Brenna’s blog, read her post and all of the comments. I did not misunderstand, nor blow out of proportion, the implied threat to me and mine of being judged as a toxic surplus on display there. All couched in the reasonable tones of the higher intellectual, of course. And then they have the nerve to get into high dudgeon when their words are taken at face value. I see they’ve wished a pox on my house and I will not sit still for it. I object most strenuously and, yes, violently if necessary.
Look, finally, to the face of God, David, if you can, and see your judgment there.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/05/2006 at 02:01 PMFran, I think you hit the nail on the head with the commissar complex. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that neither Dr. Pianka nor Ms McConnell includes themselves in the fat, human biomass that someone or other has to dispose of so that the talented 10% can live long happy lives of peace and contentment. It’s easy to deal in such unpleasantness when you know you really dont have anything to fear.
Posted by akaky on 04/05/2006 at 06:00 PM
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