Fact Checking in the Blogosphere:
From the opinion column in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6/19/05:
The Rachel Carson "quote" at the end btw, is also fabricated (see first link).
Now about this list of "dangerous books" -- I had to do a search but here it is --- The top ten most dangerous knowledge that may not be uttered includes:
"The Kinsey Report" by Alfred Kinsey;
"Democracy and Education" by John Dewey
"The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan
"The Course of Positive Philosophy" by Auguste Comte
"Beyond Good and Evil" - Friedrich Nietzsche
"General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" -- John Maynard Keynes
Sharing the "Honorable" mention category with Silent Spring were:
The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)
Madness and Civilization (Michel Foucault)
Coming of Age in Samoa (Margaret Mead)
Unsafe at Any Speed (Ralph Nader)
The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir)
Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)
To note a pattern common to the whole list, they seem to have it out for any kind of science that, even theoretically, might improve somebody's state of living. Which kinda speaks volumes about the judges.
So that's what we're dealing with in this thread, folks. Book burners.
>> One of the benefits that ought to arise from the existence of the blogosphere is that of fact-checking. False claims can be refuted quickly, and, we might hope, not repeated thereafter. Sadly it doesn’t seem to work out that way, as the following examples show.
...
Meanwhile, the claim that bans on the use of DDT in anti-malaria campaigns have cost millions of lives, has been repeated yet again, by Miranda Devine in the SMH, and Rafe Champion at Catallaxy.
So in the interests of accuracy and bipartisanship, let’s get the facts straight
...
* DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use. The main reason for declining use of DDT as an antimalarial has been the development of resistance. Antimalarial uses have received specific exemptions from proposals to phase out DDT, until alternatives are developed. Bans on the use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide, promoted by Rachel Carson and others, have helped to slow the development of resistance, and therefore increased the effectiveness of DDT in antimalarial use...
OK, I’m not really holding my breath, and I don’t suppose the SMH is going to apply the Google rule to lazy, sloppy and inaccurate work like Devine’s.
Devine scores just about all the points possible on this one, citing fiction writer Michael Crichton as a scientific authority, misrepresenting the easily checkable position of the WHO, and citing the ludicrous bookburners of Human Events. <<
The abbreviation "SMH" is particularly apt but who is this Miranda Devine and what is this work to which the above refers?...
Meanwhile, the claim that bans on the use of DDT in anti-malaria campaigns have cost millions of lives, has been repeated yet again, by Miranda Devine in the SMH, and Rafe Champion at Catallaxy.
So in the interests of accuracy and bipartisanship, let’s get the facts straight
...
* DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use. The main reason for declining use of DDT as an antimalarial has been the development of resistance. Antimalarial uses have received specific exemptions from proposals to phase out DDT, until alternatives are developed. Bans on the use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide, promoted by Rachel Carson and others, have helped to slow the development of resistance, and therefore increased the effectiveness of DDT in antimalarial use...
OK, I’m not really holding my breath, and I don’t suppose the SMH is going to apply the Google rule to lazy, sloppy and inaccurate work like Devine’s.
Devine scores just about all the points possible on this one, citing fiction writer Michael Crichton as a scientific authority, misrepresenting the easily checkable position of the WHO, and citing the ludicrous bookburners of Human Events. <<
From the opinion column in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6/19/05:
>> But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year, most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain damage to many more.
That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of Africans.
All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.
"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves." <<
That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of Africans.
All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.
"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves." <<
The Rachel Carson "quote" at the end btw, is also fabricated (see first link).
Now about this list of "dangerous books" -- I had to do a search but here it is --- The top ten most dangerous knowledge that may not be uttered includes:
"The Kinsey Report" by Alfred Kinsey;
"Democracy and Education" by John Dewey
"The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan
"The Course of Positive Philosophy" by Auguste Comte
"Beyond Good and Evil" - Friedrich Nietzsche
"General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" -- John Maynard Keynes
Sharing the "Honorable" mention category with Silent Spring were:
The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)
Madness and Civilization (Michel Foucault)
Coming of Age in Samoa (Margaret Mead)
Unsafe at Any Speed (Ralph Nader)
The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir)
Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)
To note a pattern common to the whole list, they seem to have it out for any kind of science that, even theoretically, might improve somebody's state of living. Which kinda speaks volumes about the judges.
So that's what we're dealing with in this thread, folks. Book burners.
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