We are all Joe Biden (and Malthus was not a Reptilian).
Ugo Bardi
[Mr. Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome. Ed.]
This post was inspired by Joe Biden’s disastrous performance at the recent presidential debate. It generated much sneering at poor Biden, showing, among many other things, how cruel our society can be—too much, really (*), but what impressed me most was how far from reality both debaters were, and how far from reality most of us are. Reality is fast becoming one of those “unknown unknowns” that Donald Rumsfeld mentioned and you don’t have to suffer from senile dementia to lose track of what’s going on. So, let me discuss an example that appeared on my screen just a few days ago. One among many.
Recently, a post from the Corbett Report appeared in my mailbox. It was an old report from 2011, but it had resurfaced from the depths of the Web for some unfathomable reason. Full of insults against Thomas Malthus and the eugenicists who are planning our doom, it went viral and received several favorable comments on the social platform where it was posted and also on the site where it had been posted a year ago.
It wouldn’t be worth commenting on this low-level screed, but I thought I would mention it to you as an example of how easily reality can be hacked, cut to pieces, mashed, cooked, hashed, and boiled: nouvelle cuisine or slop from the mess hall? What difference does it make?
So let me cite from the Corbett site:
Malthus himself, an Anglican minister, wrote that: “We are bound in justice and honour formally to disdain the Right of the poor to support,” arguing for a law making it illegal for the Anglican church to give any food, clothing, or support to any children. Not content with consigning thousands of children to death for the misfortune of being born poor, however, Malthus also advocated actively contributing to the deaths of more of the poor through social engineering:
“Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations, but above all we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they are doing a service to mankind by protecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”
The beauty of this is that it is a complete invention.
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[Important point below. Ed.]
…Malthus never made the “wrong predictions” attributed to him, just as “The Limits to Growth” never made wrong predictions, either.
[Indeed, Malthus simply advocated for self-control (family planning) so that people could avoid suffering and death from famine, disease, and violence. Ed.]