Max Fagin 🚀🔴🌐☄🌘

paul ehrlich predicted hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s, that england would cease to exist by 2000, that the battle to feed humanity was already lost and advocated spiking water supplies with sterilants to prevent the population bomb he wasn’t even close. the green revolution fed billions, famines collapsed, birth rates declined entirely on their own. every single major prediction in the population bomb was wrong, and the institutions that built 60 years of environmental policy on his thesis never updated the model he died in a world where south korea hit a 0.72 fertility rate, japan is shutting down schools faster than it can demolish them, every developed nation is spending billions begging its citizens to have kids, and somehow the new york times called his predictions “premature” as if the mass starvation is still coming some time in the future (it’s not) the most influential environmental thinker of the 20th century spent his entire career being wrong about the one thing he was famous for, and the policies his work inspired (population control programs, anti-natalist funding, development restrictions) actively accelerated the real crisis of a world that cant replace its own population

Paul Ehrlich has passed away, and I wanted to see whether he was as bad as his quotes and short clips suggest. Surely, there might be some nuance or careful thought in his worldview. Nobody is that purely evil. So I picked up The Population Bomb and started reading. It turns out, he's even worse than you think! I’m putting together a thread below. Quotes taken out of context don't get at the degree to which he is consistently evil and misanthropic. He had an entire system that he pursued in which human life was constantly denigrated and devalued, with an eye toward elimination. You’re left wondering what you’re even reducing human population for, since every form of life seems to be not worth living. Some people are racist and just hate poor and brown people. Some hate the rich. Paul Ehrlich doesn't discriminate. He wants you not to exist if he can get away with it. But if he can't stop you from living, he wants you to have a much worse quality of life. Ehrlich has a plan for both advanced and poor countries. He has blueprints for entire regions of the globe. Humans do not have agency in Ehrlich’s world. They’re simple consumers of resources, with no ability to create, better their circumstances, or exert individual agency to make the world a better place, except to the extent that they ensure fellow humans no longer exist. You might find all of this depressing. But I’ve found reading Ehrlich invigorating. It is a reminder of how much evil there is in the world. Recall that Ehrlich was not some guy in his room putting out diatribes. He was a professor at Stanford, a highly decorated scientist, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his generation. While reading Ehrlich today, know that he has intellectual descendants in the form of degrowthers and other environmental extremists, along with anti-capitalists who don’t understand the basis of prosperity and prioritize redistributing wealth over all else.

This is about to radicalize a lot of people. The national media isn’t covering this but it’s really gearing up

Andy Weir just confirmed he’s already working on a new novel. "I’m working on my next book right now… It’s science fiction, of course, and a brand-new standalone story. It's not a sequel to anything". I wonder what kind of problem he’ll strand his next protagonist with.