E-Lynching?

A couple of days ago, I ran a piece - along with a slew of other conservative bloggers - on remarks allegedly made by Prof. Eric Pianka which, a detractor claimed, showed Pianka eagerly looked forward to a pandemic wiping out 90% of the world's population. The initial report - circulated on Drudge - purported that Pianka was giddy with glee at the prospect.

It was red meat for the conservative blogosphere, a class A example of academic arrogance run amok. It was the kind of thing we love to pound on.

And it was wrong - or, according to the transcript of his original speech, so it seems.

Oh, it certainly seems Pianka has some odd ideas of his own:

Here's China. How would you like to live there? Look at all those little window A/Cs. They've got power. (Garbled). Humans can be packed in. There's China. You want to live like a termite? Are we termites? Come on. I want to be up on top of the hill where that chair is and I want to have some space around me.

Now cartoonists have had fun with this. People don't seem to care. We still allow you people to have more than two kids. Our tax system is completely backwards. We encourage you. We give you a discount for having kids. You should have to pay more when you have your first kid you pay more taxes. When you have your second kid you pay a lot more taxes, and when you have your third kid you don't get anything back, they take it all. Our tax system is bad; it's backwards.

And this:

Here's one more little upbeat thing, and unfortunately this isn't very much of an up, Herman Daly has identified the big problem, which is our economy. It's basically completely flawed. You've heard the politicians talk about the growing economy. Our economy is based on the principal of a chain letter, a pyramid scheme. They cannot work. The bubbles always burst. And the bubble is going to burst.

And it's bursting right now in terms of the oil. The price of gasoline isn't going to go down again. You need to get rich from this...He wants the economy to be sustainable, and he has the idea of an equilibrium economy. In an equilibrium economy, every one of us would leave this earth in exactly the same shape it was when we came into it. None of us are doing that. None of us.

Uh, mainstream economists think he's a nut, he's a kook — they just ignore him. Mainstream economists, the economists that advise our politic (political) figures, have believed completely in grow, grow, grow growth-mania — impossible economics.

So if your have a leaning towards economics here's a challenge for you. Economics has to be reinvented. Herman Daly's published four books on it. He has to get some people on his side. People have to think. They can't just keep behaving like sheep thinking resources are ever expanding. They've got to realize that the resources are ever retracting, and we're running out of everything that matters. And I mean everything — oil, food, clean air, clean water.

To give you a brief idea - the guy still takes Paul Ehrlich seriously. Y'know, Paul Ehrlich - the guy who said India was going to be a famine-wracked wasteland by 1980, the guy who said America would see food riots by the mid-eighties.

But one thing he didn't do, if you read the transcript, was cackle with glee as reported in the initial piece.

Longtime commenter Thorley Winston noted:

Mitch, rather than being upset with Pianka OVER SOMETHING THAT HE NEVER SAID, we ought to be royally pissed off that (a) an a$$hole like Forrest Mims smeared someone and (b) so many on our side of the aisle were so quick to believe this smear because it fit within their own worldview over what they think is the dominant culture within many universities...We do our own side more harm than good by piling on to say nothing of the harm to the country and scientific inquiry in general when we allow this sort of garbage to go on unchallenged or worse, perpetuated by people on our side of the aisle.

Very true.

There is more than enough factual material to criticize out there.

And I apologize for joining the mob. Getting logrolled is one thing; joining in the logrolling, to say the least, is chagrinning.

Posted by Mitch at April 7, 2006 12:33 PM | TrackBack