House of Eratosthenes

The latest award for Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes to Dr. Thomas Sowell; in this case, it is two sentences and not just one, but we’ll find a way to deal with that. Once again, it is an overdue complaint which has enjoyed too much silence for too long, that puts the Professor’s pen in motion, and the complaint is about intellectuals:

If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.

Hat tip goes to a certain left-wing gadfly, whose own pen has been agitated into motion, busily correcting Sowell over quibbling, inconsequential things that were not actually said.

Much is made of the anger the future generations will have with us for acting as poor stewards of the “environment.” Should future generations feel inclined to ask the necessary questions, I think they’d be much more perplexed about the environmental movement, specifically about the brittle lefties who look down with sneering condescension upon anyone who does not genuflect with unquestioning obedience and obeisance toward said movement.

How in the world did that work? …the future generations would want to know. Decades and decades of manufacturing with mass production, with iron, plastics and paint; centuries and centuries of people investing in enterprises, trying to make money; and thousands upon thousands of years of people growing crops, trying to figure out how to harvest more, struggling against the ever-attendant insect problems.

Environmentalists made up their minds that industry became toxic, in all these different ways, somewhere around 1960? And then they started selling variations on this theme…and getting away with it, getting the pitch sold. How?

If said future generations come askin’ me, I’ll be able to produce an answer but it won’t indict only the environmentalists. My answer would have to have something to do with the rest of us, and our lack of reasoning ability. The idea that, in the heyday of helpful, productive industries earning profits by giving people the things they actually needed, some new industries could be created out of nothing but fear — I’d tell them this whole idea seemed so foreign to us that we got snookered by it over and over again.

That’s about as good as I can make us look. Can’t do any better than that.

DDT indubitably did kill lots of cute, feathery little birdies. It also indisputably killed millions of plague-bearing mosquitoes, which dropped human deaths from malaria in tropical hellholes by several thousand percent.

Given these two options — save the cute birds and let brown children die, or save the brown children at the cost of a few species of pretty bird — of course the left with the pretty birdies. After all, it ain’t their kids dying of malaria.

Gotta love the left’s ever-compassionate compassion for the wretched of the earth.
- Severian | 05/17/2011 @ 14:29

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Best Sentence CXIVTuesday, May 17th, 2011

Best Sentence CXIV
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011