In all the hullabaloo over the homicidal Amy Bishop, it’s easy to forget that as far as murderous psycho-bitches go, she’s small potatoes.
Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.
Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes.
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The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately.
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The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst.
Doc Zero continues to draw the comparison to the current batch of environazis and their treatment of science and religion, and it’s all worth reading. Notably the quotes from various big names in the movement who openly suggest that such huge mortality rates are actually a good thing. (They don’t come right out and SAY “well after all, they’re just a bunch of backward black folks,” but then again, neither did Margaret Sanger.)
When I was younger and stupider, my big problem with my perception of “religion” was that, unlike my idealized idea of science, it came with a built-in mandate for adherents to do anything necessary to any group of nonbelievers. Scientific method was different, because it came with a built-in acknowledgment of its own fallibility; there was no One True God of science against whom any word of dissent was heresy. If you had reproducible and supportable evidence that weighed against the conventional wisdom, then conventional wisdom was subject to change.
What we’re seeing now is not a glimpse of what happens when science literally becomes a religion, because as is becoming increasingly clear, it was never “science” at all. What we’re seeing is a religion putting on a bunch of white lab coats like those twats on the White House lawn during a photo op.
apotheosis, wasteland legend 
