Submitted by Doctor de Vaca
Today will be a very busy day for me, for reasons beyond the scope of this rant. And so, as befits the Grand Ironic Tradition we faithfully maintain here at Liberty’s Torch, I have far too much to write about. Worse, I must begin by reposting an old piece: one which first appeared fifteen years ago, at the late, lamented Eternity Road:
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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?”
Gentle Reader, I wish I had preserved for your edification the batch of hate mail I received after posting that piece. It was an undifferentiated mass of viciousness. You would have thought I’d come out in favor of executing homosexuals, or discriminating against rhythm-challenged Negroes, or the designated hitter rule. But if memory serves, not one of my correspondents dared to address the central thread of Pianka’s lectures — that the death of 90% of the human race would be a good thing — even though Pianka himself has openly said so.
Why would a hate-mailer address that thesis? It’s so clearly anti-human that only someone who actively hates other people and desires their destruction would adopt it. So anyone determined to defend Pianka, but equally resolved to represent himself as a “good guy,” must treat Pianka’s thesis as “off the table.” He must assail the one who dares to express shock and horror that anyone could espouse such an idea as somehow evil.
Doesn’t that suggest that the hate-mailer finds the thesis worthy? Doesn’t it bring to mind the faux-equality of the Parisian coal-carrier — the “Commissar Complex” mindset I alluded to in the above piece?
Which brings me to my third citation: a look at one of Pianka’s more overtly genocidal fellow-travelers:
This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.
He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:
What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.
He sees America as the root of the problem:
The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.
He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:
Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.
We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.
A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.
As is often the way with extremist central planners Linkola believes he knows what is best for each and every individual, as well as society as a whole:
Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic countries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.
Linkola’s ground assumption is that the current penetration of environmental alarmism is an adequate popular basis for his recommendations. He’s wrong, of course; most Americans, at least, would not consent to having nine-tenths of their number liquidated and the survivors subjected to rigid totalitarian rule for any reason, much less to “save the planet.” But his aim isn’t truly to bring about mass death and totalitarian rule for the sake of the environment; it’s to use “the environment” as the rationale for mass death and totalitarian rule. Indeed, he hardly bothers to disguise it.
The disturbing things about this vile notion are:
That there are many, including many in the United States, who would call Linkola’s unsubstantiated assumptions of ecological crisis, like those of the aforementioned Eric Pianka, rational and defensible;
That the “us” group now promulgates those assumptions as dogmas beyond question;
That those dogmas are now the overt basis of public policies at all levels of government;
That anyone who gives these obscenities true coloration — i.e., as expressions of hatred and contempt for Mankind — will come in for the full vituperative, calumnious force of the “us” group, most particularly via their mouthpieces in the media.
Do you disagree? Read this, and tell me if you still do.
***
Did you enjoy that, Gentle Reader? Did you get the impression that there are…persons who regard you as “fat, human biomass” whose proper fate is extermination? To make room for “wilderness,” of course. That’s so much more important than your life or your right to it!
But restoring a planet-wide wilderness is just one excuse, isn’t it? I mean, there are so many reasons to exterminate us:
We’re “racists.”
We’re “fascists.”
We’re “xenophobes.”
We’re “climate deniers.”
We’re “white supremacists.”
We’re “homophobes” and “transphobes.”
We’re Christians.
I’m sure the list could be extended, but I only allow my gorge to rise so far on a Sunday in April. I think the point is clear enough as it stands.
But hark! What have we here? Our favorite Graybeard has posted a piece on “Agenda 21” and related matters, and it’s a beauty. Si’s Sunday punch:
That’s right, “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever they call it this week, is the basis for mass murder on a scale that Mao, Pol Pot, or Hitler could never aspire to. You see, to quote from this piece at End of The American Dream, (source missing, 4/14/21) the population must be reduced:
CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
Maurice Strong: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Gee, the moderate guy only wants to kill off more than 95% of the human race. See the current world population is around 7 billion people. For Dave Foreman, 100 million out of 7 billion is 100 out of 7000 or 1.4 %. At 300 million, Ted Turner would generously let 4.3% live.
Indeed.
I’m sure nearly all my Gentle Readers have seen such sentiments before. After all, that piece from Eternity Road goes back fifteen years. Back then, it excited a lot of controversy…and a lot of hate mail. What I want to stress today is that those ideas have been mainstreamed. Worse, they now represent the thinking of quite a lot of people in the corridors of power. Agenda 21 is founded on them. They are the credo of the worldwide Death Cults.
The bottom line is plain and open: If you dissent to any degree from the radical Left’s positions and agenda, have no doubt of this: you will be classified as “fat, human biomass” to be extinguished.
Think about that for a moment while I fetch more coffee.
***
We read and watch the reports of rampant looting and violence in our cities…and we sit, appalled.
We hear the Left’s mouthpieces denounce anyone who stands against them, threatening them with everything but canonization…and we shake our heads.
We read of the advance of totalitarianism in Europe, Canada, and parts of these United States…and we express disbelief.
The Left has taken the offensive. It’s seized our federal government and many state and local governments. It dominates our entertainment industries. It’s controlled the major media for many years. It owns the schools, from kindergarten all the way to the highest of the universities. And it is advancing wherever it stands forth.
We cannot win – nay; we cannot survive — if we restrict ourselves to “playing defense.”
Not long ago, Matt Bracken left this as a reply to something I said at Gab.com:
“In the absence of orders, find a Communist and kill it.”
Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? Even Communists have a right to life, don’t they? I mean, if they have freedom of expression, they must have a right to life!
Time was. Before they went on the attack. But matters have “progressed” too far. They’re openly maneuvering for the power to kill, enslave, and expropriate without let or hindrance. The violence in the cities is merely the most visible manifestation.
Note that in nearly all the riot-torn cities, the “forces of order” have stood aside while the rioters have rampaged. When they’ve acted, it’s usually been against people who dared to oppose the rioters with weapons, such as the McCloskeys of St. Louis. That puts the “forces of order” on the side of the rioters and despoilers: Communists de facto, despite their badges and uniforms.
Think about what’s being done to Kyle Rittenhouse, because he used lethal force to defend himself from a potentially lethal assault by a marauding gang. Put yourself in his place…because as sure as the Sun will rise tomorrow, if we remain on the defensive while the Left presses its attack, you will be.
For a summing-up, hearken to the indispensable David DeGerolamo:
In the absence of orders, go find a Communist and kill it.
Not a very Christian sentiment unless we are at war.
I believe we are in a religious war now that seeks to destroy our culture and our religion. Only you can account for your actions that you will take to save your children from evil.
The war is religious, cultural, political, racial, and creedal. No mercy is being shown to anyone the Left deems an enemy. The time is past when we could afford to wring our hands, fret, and do nothing else. Indeed, it passed long ago.
Think about it.
Submitted by Doctor de Vaca Via Liberty’s Torch Today will be a very busy day for me, for reasons beyond the scope of this rant. And so, as befits the Grand Ironic Tradition we faithfully maintain here at Liberty’s Torch, I have far too much to write about. Worse, I must begin by reposting an … Continue reading “There Is No Time”
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