Progressivism is a religion, really -
one that kills:
Nearly 9,000 people in California have come down with whooping cough this year, and a handful have died. Repeated pleas from public health officials have gone unheeded. “Children are the victims of our ignorance,” vaccination expert Paul Offit
wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “An ignorance that, ironically, is cloaked in education, wealth and privilege.”
Yet it’s conservatives – religious, less educated, less wealthy and certainly less liberal – who are generally condemned for dogmatically refusing to embrace science. After all, they’re the knuckle-draggers who believe that evolution is just a story and that global warming is a crock. In Canada, a week is not complete without another denunciation of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s so-called war on science.
But what about the progressives’ war on science? That war actually kills people. As Hank Campbell, co-author of the book
Science Left Behind,
writes, “If some crank school district tries to deny evolution, no one is going to die and it just makes them look backward and stupid. Denying food, medicine and energy science, like progressives do, is costing lives.”
I've written a lot about the stupidity and evil that surrounds the Environmental movement. This is a good taste of both:
Fifty years ago, enlightened people campaigned to ban the bomb. Today, they campaign to ban GMOs and modern agriculture. Vivienne Westwood, the famous British fashion designer, hand-delivered an anti-GMO petition to the British government earlier this month. Asked about people who can’t afford expensive organic food, she declared that they should “eat less.” She believes one of the problems with non-organic mass food is that it’s too cheap.
This article is a great refutation to the notion that Progressives are smarter and nicer than you and me.
4 comments:
To be fair, the incidence of pertussis is actually hard to gauge. Most of the cases you read about are where immunity from prior vaccination waned, and are mild, more or less nuisance illnesses. Of course, they can have consequences if an unimmunized small person gets exposed.
We get exposed to pertussis on a regular basis. Ever has it been so. The push for booster immunization as adults might make some difference.
Overall you can tell a lot about a state by the incidence of pertussis or certain food borne illnesses....it means they have an active public health program. Increased testing leads to increased diagnosis. Impact on clinical outcomes is less impressive but does from time to time shut down a few dodgy eating establishments.
By all means, immunize your children. But on a society wide basis you reach a point of diminishing returns. Even the money spent on pertussis boosters for adults only saves a few lives. Overall you could save more by hiring more highway patrolmen/women with the same resources.
btw, I do apologize for even discussing money when the initial topic is saving children's lives. They are worth A LOT. But if you can look directly at a painful question, those highway patrolmen would save quite a few also.
Tacitus
Each side has their shibboleths. Each side has their little things over which they will not budge.
My main problem with the left is that they pretend to be perfect, and more often than not, insult people for having failings that they, themselves, have worse.
Don't care about science? How about the fact that green energy doesn't work? Or the fact that there has never been a documented case of harm from genetically engineered food? Or that you are at far more risk NOT getting a vaccine than you are getting it. Or a thousand other things that they don't care about the "science" on, while at the same time they bleat on about how they are so "science minded" and so much smarter than everyone else.
The lack of self-awareness is what really bothers me. Motes and planks and what not.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Heinlein was correct then and he's correct now.
I grew up and lived in what was Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. I know what 'poverty' and 'hunger' means to ordinary Africans.
They means death.
Kwashiorkor. Malaria. AIDS. Bilharzia. Influenza.
All killers in Africa.
GMO foods and DDT would eliminate the two primary killers. Killers mostly of children.
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