@camlok,
Quote:
Quote:I mean, like, let's say you had to make a choice between killing either:
1. One 97 year-old American, dying of cancer, or
2. One thousand newborn FOREIGN babies.
Only a damn commie would pick #1, eh?
I don't know, layman. Perhaps you should ask your good buddy, Finn.
The most common version of that kind of question goes like this: suppose you had a pistol with one cartridge (or an 18th-century flintlock pistol. And you could go back in history and pick one person to shoot to shoot through the head on the day that he was born so as to do maximum good for the human race... Who would that one person be?
If it had to be just one person, the only possible answer is Mohammed, you'd be talking about saving upwards of a half billion human lives over the course of 1400 years.
But there are several good candidates for such a choice and if you have a revolver with five or six cartridges and a time machine, your choices might include:
1. Mohammed, still by far number one in any such calculus.
2. Rachel Carson, who with the single insane act of banning the super pesticide DDT, is responsible for more than 100 million human deaths.
3. Chuck Darwin, whose quaint notion of viewing one's neighbor as a meat byproduct of random processes (rather than as a fellow child of God) is largely responsible for the two world wars.
4. An Lushan, the man chiefly responsible for the fall of the Chinese Tang Dynasty, which was probably an absolute high point of human civilization on earth. Military history books describe the An Lushan rebellion as one of the most destructive if not THE most destructive war in human history. That rebellion weakened the Dynasty to the point that it could not continue more than a few decades afterwards.
Aside from Rachel Carson, the other arch villains of the last century or thereabouts (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung...) don't even figure in the same ballpark as the four mentioned above. The only other guy who comes close is Genghis Khan and at least two of Genghis Khan's most destructive wars amounted to scores being settled in which the victims in some sense had it coming.
