The Right Fangirl

(EDIT: Turns out that every point I was making was made much better by Thomas L. Macdonald on the Patheos Website: Paul Ehrlich: Still Wrong After All These Years. Apparently he's still shooting off his mouth, and saying everything he's been talking about is right. Amazing. I apparently picked up his book at a fairly good time.

(I'm very glad that no money went to Paul Ehrlich for the copy of his book I'm reading for some time--it was in a car that once belonged to Bill's grandmother, many many years ago... and there's a note inside that's neither to or from someone with her name, so I think that she got the book from a used bookstore. Kinda cool.)

Anyway, back to the post.)


ford_prefect42 and I were prepping a car to go to the scrapyard today when I noticed a few books in the back. One of them was that famous piece of literature, Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1971 revision). This book makes the basic argument that, seeing as we're failing to even feed our current global population, we must use population control measures to reduce the population of the earth drastically--say, to half a billion--in order to be able to sustain the human race for generations to come at an acceptable standard of living.


( This gets long. )



I feel remarkably disillusioned. I mean, okay, I'm well aware that most of my information on the liberal mindset comes from internet arguments and political talking points. And I know that me and Bill can't argue laissez-faire economics like Mises or Rand (for example), so... well, I'd been hoping to get to one of the books that Explains It All in a way that I'd hopefully understand.

And finding what I think was one of those books (The Population Bomb was supposed to be incredibly influential), and finding that it did not, in fact, explain these things very well at all... well. It's disappointing.

I'll try to find another book to explain the liberal argument to me after this, I think. But I won't be expecting as much.