Quote from: RE on Jun 27, 2024, 07:54 PMUgo Bardi ran Cassandra's Legacy until 2023.  He got targeted by TPTB and moved to open the Seneca Effect.

On March 2, 2011, I started the blog that I titled "Cassandra's Legacy." 10 years later, the blog had accumulated 974 posts, 332 followers, and more than 5 million visualizations (5289.929). Recently, the blog had stabilized at around 2,000-3,000 views per day. It is now moving to a different site with a different title: "The Seneca Effect"

The reasons for this move are not because I wanted to. I was forced to change. Cassandra was a small blog, by all means, but I always had the sensation that it was not without an impact on the nebulous constellation of the people, high up, whom we call "the powers that be" (the PTBs).

Seneca Effect has a Paywall.  I love Ugo, but sorry I don't do paywalls.

Although I didn't contribute any of my limited funds to Ugo's retirement income, dropping my email addy in before it asked for money put me on the mailing list for the blog.  It automatically sends any blog published as an email.  You can't comment this way, but you do get to read whatever he publishes.

Today's musing was about propaganda and how misinterpretation is often promulgated as truth.  He focuses on Malthus, the famous 18th Century Doomer Nostradamus who predicted population overshoot and famine, along with attributing to him beliefs like the poor should be encouraged to haave poor hygiene so they would die off preferentially.  Malthus is also held up by Denialists as an example of Doomers who were wrong in their prediction.  Ugo demonstrates here how this isn't true at all, and is just a typical gimmick of misquoting and taking lines out of context by other ideologues later on.

Since I'm sure Ugo won't mind, I'll reprint all his blogs here on the Diner as soon as I get them in my email.  We'll begin with today's.  We can discuss his stuff here on the Diner.
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We are All Joe Biden (and Malthus was not a Reptilian)
Ugo Bardi
Jul 1
 
   

Thomas Malthus was not an evil Reptilian alien, but propaganda has turned him into one.

This post was inspired by Joe Biden's disastrous performance at the recent presidential debate with Donald Trump. It generated much sneering at poor Biden, showing, among many other things, how cruel our society can be—too much, really. But what impressed me most was how far from reality both debaters were. And how far from reality most of us are, or at least, are moving in that direction. I was writing in 2016 that "we are swimming in propaganda, drinking propaganda, eating propaganda." Reality is fast becoming one of those "unknown unknowns" that Donald Rumsfeld mentioned, and you don't have to be suffering from senile dementia to lose track of what's going on. So, let me discuss an example that appeared on my screen a few days ago. Just one among many.

Recently, a post from the Corbett Report appeared in my mailbox. It was an old report from 2011, but it had resurfaced from the depths of the Web. It went viral and received several comments on the social platform where it was posted and on the site where it had been posted year ago. Its success was, as usual, because it repeated and reinforced memes already present in people's heads. (and never forget Daniel Dennett's definition of human beings as "meme-infested apes")

It wouldn't be worth commenting on this low-level screed, but I thought I would mention it to you as an example of how easily reality can be hacked, cut to pieces, mashed, cooked, hashed, and boiled until it becomes a gray goo that can be described in whatever way the cooks want it to appear: nouvelle cuisine or slop from the mess hall. What difference does it make?

So let me cite from the Corbett site:

Malthus himself, an Anglican minister, wrote that: "We are bound in justice and honour formally to disdain the Right of the poor to support," arguing for a law making it illegal for the Anglican church to give any food, clothing or support to any children. Not content with consigning thousands of children to death for the misfortune of being born poor, however, Malthus also advocated actively contributing to the deaths of more of the poor through social engineering:

    "Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they are doing a service to mankind by protecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders."

The beauty of this is that it is a complete invention. Try as you may to find these words in the link where they are supposed to originate, and you can't. Maybe they were proffered by Reptilian aliens, but they do not exist anywhere in Malthus's "Essay on Population." Malthus was a prolific writer, and he left a corpus of many letters. But, a search using the usual engines returned nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nul. صفر.

In another post (see below), I already commented on how a sentence from one of Malthus's letters could be hacked out of the original text and presented as recommending genocide. It is clear from the complete text that Malthus was a generally benevolent person, not a bloodthirsty reptilian. In that case, at least the sentence was there. But here, no. It is invented from scratch, it doesn't exist anywhere else.

But the best of all was that none of the post's commenters (hundreds) wondered about the origin of what they were reading. Any lie goes once it is printed, and it suits the taste of readers.

Do you think the Corbett report is an exceptional case of madness that somehow found a way to appear in a Website? Not at all. Just look for keywords such as "eugenicist," "The Club of Rome," and "Malthus," and you'll find plenty of stuff that is not better than the Corbett report example.

Just as a more recent example (2023), from "The Atlantic" Magazine, you find

    China's one-child policy can be directly traced to Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome's famous Malthusian screed warning of resource shortages and overpopulation.

Yes, except that if you follow the chain of references, you arrive to a 2005 paper by Susan Greenhalgh that's a pure fantasy based on no data, as I described in a post of mine.

And so, what is truth? We have been asking ourselves this question for two thousand years and still haven't found the answer.

h/t my friend Mera Te Aì 'Enge'ite, chief scientific officer of the Reptilian Starfleet.

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From Cassandra's Legacy, 2016 (slightly edited)
Malthus, the prophet of doom: Why bother reading the original when you can simply cut and paste from the Internet?
   
   

An excerpt from the book I am writing, "The Seneca Effect," that contains a chapter dedicated to the Irish famines. Above, the reverend Thomas Malthus (1766 - 1834)


The demolition of Thomas Malthus' work in our times is often based on accusing him of having predicted some awful catastrophe to occur in the near future, sometimes on a specific date. Then, since the catastrophe didn't occur, it follows that Malthus was completely wrong and nothing in his work can be salvaged. It is a well-tested method that was successfully used against "The Limits to Growth," the report to the Club of Rome that appeared in 1972.

Except Malthus never made the "wrong predictions" attributed to him, just as "The Limits to Growth" never made wrong predictions, either. There are no specific dates in Malthus' book "An Essay on the Principle of Population" for where and when famines or other catastrophes should occur. For instance, Malthus says that,

    Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

— Malthus T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter 7, p 44

You can surely say it is doomerish, but not something you can define as a "wrong prediction." Events similar to Malthus' description really occurred before Malthus's time, and in the "Essay," he normally refers to historical cases, especially those that occurred in China.

So, Malthus was not babbling about dark and dire things to come; he was describing and analyzing well-known events in his time. However, few people today seem interested in looking up the original text and prefer to maintain that "Malthus was wrong" by repeating the legend. And, by the way, even if Malthus had been guilty of "wrong predictions," that doesn't mean infinite population growth could occur on a finite planet.

The other way to demolish Malthus's ideas is to paint him as evil, in the sense that he had proposed or favored mass extermination as a consequence of his ideas. This is also a common legend and a great injustice done to Malthus. Over the great corpus written by Malthus, it is perfectly possible to find parts that we find objectionable today, especially in his description of "primitive" people whom he calls "wretched." In this respect, Malthus was a man of his times, and that was the prevalent opinion of Europeans regarding non-Europeans (and maybe, in some cases, still is, as described in the book "Can Non-Europeans Think?" by Dabashi and Mignolo, 2015).

Apart from that, Malthus' writings are clearly the work of a compassionate man who saw a future that he didn't like but that he felt was his duty to describe. Surely, there is no justification for criticizing him for things he never said, as it can be done by cutting and pasting fragments of his work and interpreting them out of context. For instance, Joel Mokyr, in his otherwise excellent book titled "Why Ireland Starved"⁠ (Mokyr 1983) reports this sentence from a letter that Malthus wrote to his friend David Ricardo,

    The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.

Clearly, this sentence gives the impression that Malthus was advocating the extermination of the Irish. But the actual sentence that Malthus wrote reads, rather (Ricardo 2005)⁠ (emphasis added):

    The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil into large manufacturing and commercial Towns.

So, you see that Malthus wasn't proposing to kill anyone; rather, he was proposing the industrialization of Ireland to create prosperity in the country. Nevertheless, legends spread easily on the web, and you can see the truncated sentence by Malthus repeated over and over to demonstrate that Malthus was an evil person who proposed the extermination of the poor. Did Professor Mokyr truncate this phrase himself? Maybe not, but he was at least careless in cutting and pasting something that he read on the Web without worrying too much about verifying the original source.

The Web, indeed, is full of insults against Malthus. You can find an especially nasty (and misinformed one) attack against him at this link, where you can read that, yes, the Irish famine was all the fault of Malthus, who misinformed the British government, who then refused to help the poor Irish, who then starved - all based on that truncated sentence.

Sometimes, I feel we are swimming in propaganda, drinking propaganda, eating propaganda, and even being happy about doing that.

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Dabashi H, Mignolo W (2015) Can Non-Europeans Think? Zed Books

Mokyr J (1983) Why Ireland Starved. Routledge, London and New York

Ricardo D (2005) The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis