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Which Beloved Public Figures Do You Most Despise?
On Tuesday, Google celebrated Rachel Louise Carson, arguably the mother of modern environmentalism, and, in the remarkable way modernism has with irony, murderess of tens of millions. I despise Carson, her almost single-handed fabrication of the DDT scare, and especially the “savior of the world” conceit of environmentalists resulting in the deaths of millions of, dare I say it, black African children. If I hadn’t already been told so many times that leftist and environmentalists are genetically immune to it, I might believe the ban on DDT was a racist ethnic cleansing program.
It’s positively scandalous that there are schools named after Carson — schools! With children attending! In Chicago! And other urban centers with large populations of African-Americans. Pagan “Earth Day” celebrations including Carson-worship are part of nearly every public school curriculum. Can you imagine sending your kid to Adolf Hitler Elementary? Well, he killed fewer people than Rachel Carson and her genocidal movement. By some estimates over 50 million people have died from malaria since the DDT ban took effect, and counting.
My fantasy is to see the face of every DDT-banning environmentalist just before we send him to live permanently (however long that may be) and DEET-free, into malaria mosquito infested villages with only a mosquito net as defense. “Have a nice life! You might want to reconsider sleeping, so you can make sure you don’t accidentally expose some juicy body part in the middle of the night.” Insert smiley face here.
The difference between the racism of Cliven Bundy and Rachel Carson is, Cliven Bundy’s bigotry never killed anyone. Carson has the blood of millions on her hands. Would that we never see her like again.
How about you? Who’s your most despised celebrated public figure?
Published in General
Since we’re speaking of non-dictators who enabled genocide in the millions: Margaret Sanger, of course.
(Grrr! Double-post due to 504)
Che Guevara. He wasn’t necessarily genocidal or have millions of deaths directly attributable to him but he was a stone-cold murderer, for sure.
And racist.
He’s not my number 1, and I think both Sanger and Carson have much more destructive legacies than him, but I hate how lauded Bill Clinton is.
Jenny McCarthy. She may not have started the Anti-Vax nonsense (I beleive that dubious distinction belongs to Dr. Andrew Wakefield) but she was one of the main proponents of a movement that is now seeing outbreaks of things like measels and whooping cough spread through our our country.
Well, if that’s what we’re looking for, and it doesn’t matter if they’re alive or dead, I think Karl Marx takes the cake.
And on the arts-and-entertainment side, it really saddens me when I see actors I admire working with Roman Polanski and praise heaped on him.
I would make a moral distinction between those whose ideas directly or indirectly led to massive loss of life, and those who deliberately committed outright murder, either personally or by direct order. I wouldn’t compare such people to Hitler. (Of course, if the theorist sanctions murderous tactics to reach utopia, the distinction is more blurry).
Not my “least favorite” — partly because there is too much evil in the world to compete, and partly because I do remember with true appreciation his support in the aftermath of 9/11 — but I grew tired of hearing American conservatives singing Tony Blair’s praises. His overall impact on Britain was destructive.
To me, Carson and Sanger are the winners because the millions of deaths they have caused are not only targeted (primarily at blacks in this country through abortion, or blacks in Africa through malaria), but they do it using the shield of “good intentions”, and pseudoscience/pseudosociology to back them up.
I wonder . . . if we brought them back to life, to see what the actual results of their “work” has wrought on humanity (blacks in particular), what would they think?
I’m guessing Sanger would declare “Success!”, don’t know about Carson . . .
Right now? Barack Hussein Obama. He is ruining lives on a daily basis, and he and his henchmen (and women) are bringing down our great country, from the Light of the World, to just another country. With malice aforethought.
Can I just stab myself in the eye with a fork ? My thoughts about this are completely obliterated by the MSM, as they consider my villains to be heroes and they buy ink by the truckload.
Hey, has eugenics to boot–bonus!
Didn’t she co-do one of those “paved paradise and put a parking lot” remakes?
When I was twelve the “don’t care about spots on my apples, leave me the birds and the bees, please” line made me breath fire–what an incoherently IGNORANT bunch of crud… whoever wrote it had no clue what more than “spots” were involved than some joke child has that grocery store meat is from animals.
Golden example of not arguing to tear down a fence unless you can explain why it was built.
These are all “good” thoughts, but Carson still “wins” for me. Remember, none of these others is being lauded at your neighborhood elementary school — with the possible exception of Bill Clinton. While he’s a gifted sociopath and low-life, he’s not the progenitor of lethally toxic movement founded in falsehoods and repellent self-satisfaction. Oh, wait…
Leigh: I would make a moral distinction between those whose ideas directly or indirectly led to massive loss of life, and those who deliberately committed outright murder, either personally or by direct order. I wouldn’t compare such people to Hitler. (Of course, if the theorist sanctions murderous tactics to reach utopia, the distinction is more blurry).
I know you’re cautious about invoking Godwin’s Law, as I’ve done, Leigh, but even actor Will Smith (one presumes a black liberal Obama voter) acknowledges that almost no one wakes up in the morning wondering, “What evil can I perpetrate against humanity today?” Hitler thought he was doing the world, and particularly Germany, a favor. The Left has managed to put all the emphasis on “good intentions,” whether or not the outcomes are murderous. I’m simply correcting a grave error by inspecting the fruits.
Because it’s my profession….
one of the bits of “evidence” offered was egg shells being thinner because of DDT.
Egg shells are kind of like sponges, and micrometers are very much done on feel.
NONE of the claims of thinner eggshells that were measured could not be explained by “they twisted a tiny bit more” on the measuring device.
Good heavens, with iron standards I had to make sure that the room temp was right and I hadn’t touched the cubes, because body heat would change it–and these folks claimed to get better accuracy off of EGG SHELLS?!?!
I think the number is in the 100 millions. The science report lauding DDT estimated that by 1970 DDT had been responsible for preventing 500 million deaths. DDT use allowed the US to (which suffered from malaria until the 1940) to become malaria free.
Here the source on the 500 Million claim. Page 432.
Say, didn’t John Yoo ask what as the worst public policy decision ever made by the US and we responded with the DDT ban – and he never commented on it?
I would note that the Doodle is accurate to the desires of the environmental left, depicting a world where there is only one human, presumably soon to be extinct.
Great post WC. Carson has done more damage to the world than anybody. Between her and Sanger, they have so much blood on their hands it’s beyond comprehension yet they are celebrated by the left as heroic for their views and are to be exemplars for women. They’re nothing but a couple of white women rightly associated with the ethnic cleansing of blacks in America and Africa.
Here’s a link to George Savage’s post on the main earlier this morning.
I like this last quote:
Western Chauvinist
I know you’re cautious about invoking Godwin’s Law, as I’ve done, Leigh, but even actor Will Smith (one presumes a black liberal Obama voter) acknowledges that almost no one wakes up in the morning wondering, “What evil can I perpetrate against humanity today?” Hitler thought he was doing the world, and particularly Germany, a favor. The Left has managed to put all the emphasis on “good intentions,” whether or not the outcomes are murderous. I’m simply correcting a grave error by inspecting the fruits.
Hitler might have thought his intentions were good, but he still deliberately ordered people to be shot — something none of the other suggested villains have done. I agree about the Left’s error, but going too far leads to the opposite error.
My distinction is not on whether they thought their goals were good, but on whether they deliberately endorsed killing people. A person who promotes a philosophy which eventually leads to thousands of deaths, even if they did not foresee that consequence, bears a certain responsibility for those deaths — but not the same level of responsibility as a person who orders those people to the gas chambers.
I admit I have trouble making a moral distinction in this case. Rachel Carson started with a lie. Her lie has been perpetuated by self-satisfied liberals for decades now, and one of the reasons they can be smug and sanctimonious is they have no skin in the game, as we like to say on Ricochet.
Malaria has been eradicated where left-wing environmentalists and their kids live. They know, if they retain any moral reasoning, the DDT ban is sentencing black people to unnecessary early death. How is that different, ultimately, from ordering Jews to the gas chambers?
Trust me. They’re using the mirror of my same reasoning on us AGW skeptics. They’re trying to save the world and they hold us morally culpable for not complying with their, (not) coincidentally, socialist solutions to the (non) problem.
I’m not demanding DDT deniers be locked up. I just don’t want them celebrated in our taxpayer funded indoctrination camps — oops, I mean public schools, of course.
Now that you mention it, I do kind of hate Google.
Funny story about liberals and Godwin’s law. Conversation with a liberal guy resulted in the following two lines of dialogue (not a direct quote, as this was a few years ago):
Couldn’t agree more for two significant reasons:
1- CRA signed into law under Carter administration but aggressively enforced by Clinton.
2- Osama bin Laden (a CIA target years before 9/11) was finally spotted in 1998 for a kill. Clinton was informed between the 12th and 13th holes of his favorite golf course. He chose to finish the 18.
Rachel Carson didn’t kill anybody, purposefully or not. She wrote an alarmist book about pesticides in general. As wrong and unscientific as it may be, she doubtless believed it, meaning she wasn’t trying to spread a lie. Then she died of cancer (the fact that she had that while writing the book probably colored her point-of-view). Somewhere along the line environmentalists (i like how that word has “mental” in it) and government regulators/lawmakers isolated DDT for special contempt, and later banned it by bureaucratic order, while a Republican was president (of course). This being 8 or 10 years after Carson’s death. So I would rather blame the government, though without accusing them of being genocidal. Just a seemingly harmless case of “do-something disease” that went awry.
I’ll go with FDR. He only gets so much credit for WWII, most of which is negated by his ceding Eastern Europe to the Soviets. The massive expanse of the administrative state, attempting to pack the courts, confiscatory government meddling, etc…
That is one of the acceptable corollaries.
Hard to pick anyone over Margret Sanger, but you make a good case for Carson. Along those lines, how about Al Gore. Or Paul Krugman.
WC — but did Rachel Carson ever consider those people and deliberately determine, based on her personal hatred and prejudice, that they were to die? Did she even realize that her ideas would lead to their deaths? There is a difference.