POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

The Breslin Massacre (& Yesterday’s Eliminationist Rhetoric Dust-Up)

Warner Todd Huston dissects the patient etherized upon a table, Jimmy Breslin's cut and paste of "The Waste Land," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Howl," to produce the pastiche "Love Song of Wasted Howler," a proem about Tea Parties, subtitled "Apoplexy Now!"

@iowahawkblog:

@vermontaigne any1 still nostalgic for those 2-fisted, hard-drink newspaper scribes of yesteryear? Breslin: a diseased liver w/ a byline.

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What follows is the very condensed outline for what could well be a book.

Yesterday, at The Washington Examiner, Glenn Harlan Reynolds published a piece on the eliminationist rhetoric of the eco-radicals. The question posed is whether we should tolerate the rhetoric:

Likewise, references to particular ethnic or religious groups as “viruses” or “cancers” in need of extirpation are socially unacceptable, triggering immediate thoughts of genocide and mass murder.

Why, then, should it be acceptable to refer to all humanity in this fashion? Does widening the circle of eliminationist rhetoric somehow make it better?

I don’t see why it should, and I don’t see why we should pretend -- or allow others to pretend -- that hate-filled rhetoric is somehow more acceptable when it’s delivered by those wearing green shirts instead of brown.

Our leftist friends have told us for years that right-leaning public speakers must watch their language with exquisite care, or be held responsible for any violence that occurs. This degree of responsibility has had its effect -- virtually all of the violence associated with the Tea Party movement, for example, has been perpetrated by leftists, while Tea Partiers have been remarkably restrained -- but now it’s time to recognize that responsibility cuts both ways.

The environmental movement needs to bring its hate-filled rhetoric under control, before it’s too late. There are too many potential James Lees out there, and some of them may be more competent than Lee was. Don’t encourage them through over the top rhetoric.

Basically, it turns the tables on those who would seek to charge all kinds of incidents on Tea Party rhetoric, such as Bill Sparks, Amy Bishop, the guy who flew the plane into the IRS offices, the Holocaust Museum shooter and others.

Patterico was disturbed by Reynolds' argument: was he advocating some form of censorship, or was it a kind of performance piece meant to demonstrate the demonization techniques employed by the left? He was particularly unhappy with the evocation of Nazi eliminationist rhetoric as a point of comparison, because that comparison is generally employed to silence debate.

Dan Riehl jumped into the argument to say in effect that Reynolds' column was determinately an irony-laced performance piece (and comparing Pat to Toto from The Wizard of Oz), but Reynolds put the question to his audience, and as of the last time I looked, 69% were taking Reynolds at his apparent word.

Pat then went on Twitter to defend the analogy of humanity as a kind of cancer on the earth's ecosystem, stating as well that he wanted it to be brought under control so as to continue existing, which brought on lots of hooting. I was put in mind of this quote:

"For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them." — George Eliot (Middlemarch)

And I understand that Pat's not advocating the rhetoric that humans are vermin, or a pestilence, or any of the other sick self-loathing masquerading as enlightenment that tells us that we are evil and that all of our handiworks are nothing but future garbage.

It seems to me that there are two separate questions, here. My view is that whatever influence eco-eliminationism may have had on James Lee, the Discovery Channel hostage-taker---and it seems to have been overwhelming---he and he alone is responsible for what he did, in spite of his mental illness. At the same time (and I don't think it's contradictory), any doctrine that represents human life (especially of other, unenlightened humans) as less than worthless is pernicious and should be treated accordingly.

A top scientist gave a speech to the Texas Academy of Science last month in which he advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the population through the airborne ebola virus. Dr. Eric R. Pianka's chilling comments, and their enthusiastic reception again underscore the elite's agenda to enact horrifying measures of population control.

Pianka's speech was ordered to be kept off the record before it began as cameras were turned away and hundreds of students, scientists and professors sat in attendance.

Saying the public was not ready to hear the information presented, Pianka began by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”, as he jumped into a doomsday malthusian rant about overpopulation destroying the earth.

Standing in front of a slide of human skulls, Pianka gleefully advocated airborne ebola as his preferred method of exterminating the necessary 90% of humans, choosing it over AIDS because of its faster kill period. Ebola victims suffer the most tortuous deaths imaginable as the virus kills by liquefying the internal organs. The body literally dissolves as the victim writhes in pain bleeding from every orifice.

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Being proud of being human is like being proud of being an ebola virus.

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins argues that all that we experience ourselves as being is an illusory epiphenomenon of our genome, which consists of individual genes mechanically projecting themselves into the future. It's an interesting dislocation, but Richard Dawkins seems to have no problem exploiting his own consciousness to come to that conclusion, and most of us are rather attached to our consciousness, which is why we are reluctant, even if we buy into eco-eliminationism, to begin the necessary depopulation with ourselves. Love may be an illusion, for all I know, but if I believe that I'm in love with you, and you believe you're in love with me, what is the difference? I'd rather experience it as love than some neurobiological process, because it is much more pleasing to me. But back to the point.

As Glenn mentions in his piece, Science Czar Holdren made his nut ginning up hysteria about overpopulation, and arguing for mass sterilization, among other measures. You can add that to this administration's other totalitarian tendencies, such as determining what one can eat and drink, what sort of vehicle one ought to drive, pace Cass Sunstein what information one ought to consume, and so on and so forth. All of this control is justified by allusion to the common good, of course. More, we are entitled to be controlled by people who know better than we do. Unfortunately, those controllers are as a general rule self-anointed members of the most delusional segments of our society. They are saving us from ourselves. They are the ones we've been waiting for.

Their fear-mongering is meant to gain them power and authority, obviously. What's disturbing is how much of the PC curriculum is designed to help young people understand just how horrible they are. Their country is horrible, founded on the bodies of dead noble indigenes. Their religion has caused unspeakable horrors. Their sports are violent. They are racists and sexists. Their material possessions are all unfairly wrested out of someone else's labor and at the expense of posterity. Naturally, though, it's important that these enlightening teachers concern themselves deeply with their charges' self-esteem. They are our secular confessors.

And to them, any doctrine that claims we are made in God's image is pernicious, and must be forced out of the public sphere. We need to understand that, to them, the movie 2012 is wish-fulfilling gratification.

If all humans are subhuman, all control, including eradication, is justifiable. And if anyone reading Reynolds' article decides to eliminate an eco-eliminationist, it will be on the actor, rather than Glenn.

UPDATE: Pat's latest on the subject.

Also germane to the discussion: Review of Kos' crap book, American Taliban