What’s Wrong with the World

Ironic how for close to eight years we wallowed in the misuse and overuse of the word Fascism. Mow that it, and they, are in power, or have come out of the closet shedding a hated moderation. the word has dropped from the public vocabulary, the votaries of abusive power enjoying the expression of their favorite nightmares, their plans for the unfortunate normal.

Given the plain evidence available during the election campaign we ought not to be surprised. Yet the abominable reality of what is developing still appalls.

And the average leftist voter who bandied the fascist word about with neurotic regularity strangely seems quite contented with the swamp we are sinking into.
But it would have helped if they had known what it meant.

"the left will mouth the phrase "out of context" (despite the fact that such views were absolutely typical of the population control enthusiasts of the 70's and despite all the money quotes you can eat from the book itself)"

They can also mouth "tu quoque."

I don't know if I've reported this before at 4W, but Rep. George H.W. Bush in 1969 spoke in praise of one such scientist who talked about man's own procreation being the greatest threat to humanity. The future president
favorably introduced into the congressional record comments of this scientist open to coercing those with defective genes into not reproducing.

Under the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger authored Natl. Security Study Memorandum 200 which called abortion "vital to the solution" of overpopulation.

Perhaps Overpopulation was the Environmental Apocalypse issue of the 70s, and inaction was a sign of stupidity or retrograde opinion.

The harsh reality may be that support for coercive population policy has been more mainstream and establishment than opposition to such coercion.

I do recall a recent flareup over a Louisiana state legislator who wanted to tie welfare benefits to sterilization, but that may only have become an issue because of the influence of Catholics in the state and because it targeted poor Americans, not poor foreigners.

Yes, this guy spoke long ago in favor of spiking the water supply with anti-fertility drugs.

Makes you wonder if the high level of estrogen in the water now is really such an unforseen and unwelcome consequence of The Pill. Feminizing males has been one of the goals of the modernists for a while, after all.

Not that I think it was necessarily planned (no black helicopter remarks, please), but it doesn't seem to bother anyone at the EPA that much. If it were some other chemical that came from chicken processing plants or coal mines, they would be tying their intestines in knots over it and holding highly publicized congressional hearings.

Kevin, and while you're at it, you can include Jared Taylor, author of Paved With Good Intentions, in your list of ostensibly "conservative" or at least "libertarian" people who have espoused some such views. And that book, in which Taylor says that welfare mothers should be required to have Depo-Provera shots (or is it under-the-skin implants?), is copyright 1993.

Of course you are right that population control was all the rage in the 1970's. I once did a longitudinal survey of Reader's Digest going back to 1968. (Which means I just read a lot of old issues of Reader's Digest.) In 1970 they published an odious little article by Paul Ehrlich espousing some of the views I mentioned in the main post, though in very slightly more veiled terms. By 1978, oddly, they were publishing at much greater length Steve Mosher's horrified, personal, dramatic, and courageous expose of China's coercive one-child policy. Make of that what you will, them's the facts. Perhaps it was a case of, "We didn't mean _that_!"

Tu quoques are a tad boring, though. If I had known of Bush, Sr.'s, comments in 1969, I would certainly have called for him to disavow them in the 1980's. It's at least worth noting that not only Reagan but also Bush, Sr., himself stopped U.S. funding for population control abroad, whereas the first thing Obama did was to overturn Mexico City (for example). So one could say that whatever he said, Bush Sr's actions later went in the opposite direction from his earlier remarks, which hardly appears to be the case with either Holdren or his patron, Obama. And Holdren is right now, under Obama, being put in a position of apparently some importance concerning science (of all things). So this is the issue we face now. I'm not quite sure if your phrase (in your 2006 post), "The usual conservative suspects were quite admirably on the case" is meant to be facetious or what.

That won't work, Tim J., because say what you will, the guys are still fully capable of fathering children. So whatever worries the EPA should maybe have about fish, and even if all this stuff about the Pill in the ground water is true, I don't think it's having any effect on population growth.

His book Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1977, contains such charming proposals as forced abortion, putting sterilizing drugs in the water supply and staple food items, forced surgical sterilization, coercive government two-child policies, eugenics for undesirables, and a world-wide police force to administer all resources fairly.

It is proposals like these that make it clear that left-wing thought is almost invariably satanic and axiomatically unreasonable.

And to think that just four years ago the loony left (I'm ashamed to say I was a part of it then) were getting thier nickers in a twist over the grand Evangelical/Catholic conspericy to take over America:)

Lydia,

I agree on the tiresomeness of the tu quoque. I meant to praise George W. Bush for his break with his father's views, but I feared I was going over-long.

Tim J. mentions estrogen in the water. Today I learned at least one blogger is digging into the issue, though the problem if it exists may be linked to pre-contraception industrialized water systems rather than the Pill itself.

I go back to the abortion debate in the early 70's and recall talking with people about it. Among whites the consensus was that it would help control the population of undesirable people - underclass blacks and whites, essentially; and that whites wouldn't need it but the underclass could be pressured into it. people on Welfare were having too many kids, and abortion was supposed to solve that.

Most agreed abortion killed a baby, but it wouldn't kill worthwhile babies. Just the ones doomed to be a problem and be tax eaters. The undercurrent of thought that allowed abortion to become the law of the land was pure expediency: an unspoken eugenics program.

What surprises me is that inJustice Ginsberg appears to be one of those white women who would mutter under their breath that abortion would solve that underclass problem, the lowlife welfare breeders.

Isn't it funny how racism sneaks out of radical liberals?

But you can imagine the fear and dread someone like Ginsberg would've had if she ever rubbed up against underclass thugs, punks, criminals, scumbags, whores, etc.

She must have been terrified as a professor at Columbia, going through Harlem to work during the vile 70's in NYC. She worked in Newark in the 60's. Not safe places for a small Jewish woman with an agenda to save the world and save women from men.

Moralists generally know how to deal with the depraved - you enforce logical consequences and make the punishment fit the crime. Ideologues, suddenly confronted with a barbarian scumbag wants to immediately eradicate such creatures. Their delicate utopia of mind can't handle the outrage of having such people in it. People either have to be controlled or eliminated.

Mark, it's interesting that your recollection and Ginsberg's recollection dovetail so well! :-)

My perception of her in the interview is that she did not think of herself as conceding anything but merely as coolly reporting what "everybody thought at the time" was the point of Roe. What is chilling is that she doesn't seem to realize that the _obvious_ question that then springs to mind is, "Were you in favor of this or against it?" And she doesn't seem to realize that this question is especially urgent in the light of her own avid present support for federally funded abortions. She seems to think she can distance herself from it merely by reporting what everyone thought, as though this absolves her from the need to answer any further questions.

Moreover, and even more weirdly, she talks as though the McRae decision somehow "purged" federal funding of any possible worries about eugenics and coercion! But that's utterly silly. If federal funding of abortion carries connotations or a danger of coercion or eugenics, this is true regardless of whether that funding is approved by the legislature or mandated by an imperial Supreme Court ostensibly telling us what Roe requires. All that McRae did was to pull back from _requiring_ federal funding of abortion as part of the abortion right. What does this have to do with the possible eugenic purpose of federal funding? But as Ginsberg talks, one gets the feeling that she thinks she somehow "discovered" as a result of the McRae decision that (thank goodness) good liberal pro-choicers no longer have to worry about being associated with eugenics when they push for abortions for poor people! What a relief! The conclusion is unworthy of a legal mind.

But even that is a relatively charitable interpretation of what she said. The reason I brought it up in the main post is because I was convinced (and am more convinced the more I think about it) that it says something very bad about a possible resurgence of respectability for such eugenic attitudes that she a) brought it up out of the blue and b) didn't feel more of a need clearly to distance herself from those views.

Lydia,

I agree that Ginsberg seems completely unaware that her tacit support of a eugenics program in the pro-choice agenda has an odious taint to it. I think the "we" in her statement clearly indicates her own view. Otherwise, who is the "we" she's referring to?

She could be referring to what she believed to be the general intention at the time, which would make "we" the pro-abortion consensus. She also says that "some people" were concerned that this could lead to women being forced to have abortions they don't want, a practice she presumably doesn't support, though she never mentions whether she is one of the "some", or whether that particular group was wholly opposed to the view of abortion as having a eugenic function or merely concerned about the direction such a function might lead.

Incidentally, who can argue with the idea that abortion is for the elimination of undesirables? It's obvious this is exactly what it is for, for all but a very few cases in which it is performed. Pro-abortion types will clarify that this is not an institutionally driven elimination, but an individually driven one, which is true.

To the hard case liberal everyone else is an undesirable, some a little more than others, but abortion is a non-discriminating, equal opportunity desideratum. Those who have escaped the meat grinder are deserving targets of the appropriate measures of control, taxation, coercion, and the now painfully apparent blitzkreig towards a managed crippling of our economy and the hoped for impoverishment of many of our citizens.
I think Mexico is a good roll model for our would be ruling class, this poff about Europe is far to optimistic,far to grand for the envisioned peasant class.

Meanwhile the loon Al Gore lets the cat out of the bag with his babble about world governance. Quiet Al, you'll give the game away.

Makes you wonder if the high level of estrogen in the water now is really such an unforseen and unwelcome consequence of The Pill.

Tim J,
The Pill and chemicals that imitate estrogen are the culprits. It can literally be said the culture of death is in the very water we drink;

Researchers in Colorado have made a startling discovery. Fish, apparently male, are developing female sexual organs. Scientists believe it's the result of too much estrogen in the water and they're finding estrogen in rivers across the country...But also, they say, certain chemical compounds in detergents and soaps can mimic estrogen.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6436617/

Nature is at our disposal not as “a heap of scattered refuse”[116], but as a gift of the Creator who has given it an inbuilt order, enabling man to draw from it the principles needed in order “to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15)...The way humanity treats the environment influences the way it treats itself, and vice versa. CARITAS IN VERITATE

Disagreeing with the basis for a decision in the sense that one believes another basis forms a stronger case doesn't necessarily obligate one to prefer a different outcome and conflating those considerations with possible policy considerations at play at any one time would seem to be a category error. Westly called it right.

I urge you to check out Dr. Albert Bartlett's videos on youtube, maybe even get the DVD. He's not into Orwellian measures to control population. He just uses arithmetic and our current energy consumption levels to show that at some point the party will end. Think of it this way: we're 7 billion and growing, and the developed nations rely heavily on a nonrenewable energy source. Resource wars will occur over fresh water, food, and oil at some point, it's a question of when. Anyone who really feels like this party will go on forever is deluded and has no foresight whatsoever.

That said, I'm not into forcing population control onto people. Either nature will do the work for us and we'll war with each other, leaving the poor and unfortunate behind in our wake (as if that's never happened before?), or we'll be enlightened neough to do the work ourselves before things get really bad. I think smaller communities of intelligent folks who want to live autonomously should be allowed to form, and they shouldn't pay into federally funded welfare systems nor pay any welfare benefits to anyone inside their community. You would population be regulated willfully by the people in that community; a family of 20 would have to hack it on their own and not be allowed to gobble up everyone else's resources unless they were producing more than that, creating a surplus, etc. This is a simplified explanation of such a plan.

Shutting off the immigration relief valve would also be a good start, both in Europe and in the US. Stop allowing populations in developing nations to grow, and half the problem is solved.

Beyond Bartlett, you can check out Pete Murphy, Corrupt.org, and many other more reasonable sources. In our current government, at the federal level, NO policy will ever work well to reduce population unless we decide to shut off the immigration relief valve to developing nations. It has to be done in each community.

Anyone who really feels like this party will go on forever is deluded and has no foresight whatsoever.

Party? Two-thirds of 6.7 billion people live within failed states that lack any real administrative competence beyond providing physical security for their plundering and debauched elites. Resource wars are the result of corruption and a disordered view of the human person, not because the earth has exceeded its alleged carrying capacity.

a family of 20 would have to hack it on their own and not be allowed to gobble up everyone else's resources

Oh yeah, the Third World is just selfishly inhaling all the good stuff. They have to tamp down their appetites, not us. Anything it seems, is to be tried as long as it doesn't require any change on our part. Wonderful.

Kevin, remember the old saw about history repeating, first as tragedy, second as farce. All of these arguments about restraining population growth in the third world, and inculcating in the inhabitants of those blighted lands suitably progressive sentiments, are recapitulations of, say, elite British discourse during the Irish famine: better that they starve, errr., learn providence, lest, dependent upon our benefactions, they produce a greater surplus population. Nothing ever changes, except perhaps the identity of the benighted populations, the untermenschen affronting the comfortable by having the temerity to be.

Although, to be fair, elimination of the immigration safety valve is not a bad idea, albeit on the grounds of political economy, if not demographic concerns.

...lest, dependent upon our benefactions, they produce a greater surplus population... Although, to be fair, elimination of the immigration safety valve is not a bad idea, albeit on the grounds of political economy, if not demographic concerns.

And what are we to do whatever with all the minorities, especially those of lower society and most especially the impoverished, who even in spite of their exceedingly modest or less than means simply continue to reproduce at such alarming rate; they burden an already overburdened (welfare) state that is America?

Yet, I take it, pursuant to the "Golden Rule" of the democrats and all other exemplary exponents of 'social justice', all is fair in Love and Big Gov.; the citizenry is more than happy to finance the whole of society, including the irreponsibly indigent and the Octomoms.

Maximos, I agree we should restrict immigration in order to preserve some modicum of cultural cohesion and to avert the ethno-religious violence that comes with Balkanization. But FJ's argument is part of the Life-boat Ethics 101 lesson plan and is obviously immoral.

To be fair, Ari, you ought to have noted the context of my remarks, which, following upon the immediately preceding comments, were concerned with population control in the third world. As in wealthy Westerners sneering that there are just enough of them, and way too many of the Other? As regards the domestic situation, notwithstanding the social, economic, and spiritual costs of a welfarist culture, I'm dubious that simply cutting the lifeline will accomplish anything towards the restoration of a culture of thrift and duty among the dependent. More probably, it would accomplish nothing more than a shifting of the externalities, for example, from the present subsidies to the necessity of caring for more abandoned children. It may be satisfying to imagine that there exist simple solutions, such as a refusal to pay, that would rectify the problems of the welfare culture; in reality, the problem is so multifaceted as to belie such dreams of being quit of a social problem.

But FJ's argument is part of the Life-boat Ethics 101 lesson plan and is obviously immoral.

Right. That's why I wanted to emphasize the cash-value of the lesson: letting people die, or causing them to die, preferably while striking a pose of sagacity, stroking one's chin, literally or metaphorically.

Maximos:

Fair point -- however, even were we to turn off the spigot that is immigration to such a degree as to prevent the floodtides of the predominantly impecunious variety (whether they eminate from the Old World or the Americas); that does nothing to relieve us of that sorry swell that continues to tax us beyond the breaking point, which resolution seems for some merely to increase subsidies devoted to such abysmal projects that do nothing more than substantially provide greater fuel to an already blazing conflagration of debt and the further multiplication of ghetto fiends and Octomoms.

But, hey, if the current financial crisis teaches us anything, we all (even the fiscally responsible) should take responsibility for financing families that live beyond their means; most especially, those that are bent on multiplying the problems of the State and, moreover, imposing an exceedingly excruciating toll on the average American family, pushing even them beyond the precipice and into poverty.

I would never count on Ari's noticing the context of anybody's remarks. Or even the content, for that matter, much of the time.

What is amusing about FJ's perspective is that these "food wars" and other apocalyptic predictions were made back in the 1970's by Ehrlich and co. and didn't happen. It's a nice little non-falsifiability clause FJ has built in there when he says these things will happen eventually, and it's just a question of when. In other words, if a hundred years pass and they don't happen, and his ideological heirs happen to be around, they don't have to revise their ideas. They can just say, "It'll happen eventually. It's just a question of when." Karl Popper's philosophy of science has its problems, but the Popperians are right on when they talk about what it means to immunize one's theories from any possibility of falsification. That is pseudo-science, not science. Which makes the appointment of an unrepentant population controller as "science czar" all the more bizarre.

So I noticed, Lydia, before I decided to begin commenting here.

So I noticed, Lydia, before I decided to begin commenting here.

So writes the author of gay -- not to mention, remarkably insipid and even spectacularly vacuous -- poetry.

Poor Fool, a camp song is *supposed* to be insipid and even vacuous.

But, in fact, mine was quite deep. It was deep, not broad.

Poor, poor deluded twit; thank the major, somebody with far greater intellect shrewdly thought otherwise. Besides, if anything, Milne's was comparatively more profoundly clever.

Poor, pointless git: a hymn is not a camp song.

Gentlemen, if you keep arguing on my thread about something completely different without any content relevant to the post, the terrible swift sword of my delete key will fall upon you. Knock it off.

Gentlemen? I'm a savage, and he's a person of whom it is appropriate to say:

I would never count on Ari's noticing the context of anybody's remarks. Or even the content, for that matter, much of the time.

letting people die, or causing them to die, preferably while striking a pose of sagacity,

Yes, carnality with a conscience. The Great White Fathers jet into Davos, cobble together another care package of condoms, mobile abortion units, IMF austerity plans and perpetual debt, even as ingrates of the Southern Hemisphere continue to breed and disturb the travels of eco-tourists. Sorrow towards the pending correction of the Great Die-off comes with a barely concealed whiff of impatience.

No room at the Inn. Again.

That was a little masterpiece, Kevin. Thank you!