Gregg Easterbrook, is a suspected anti-semite and writer for the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Monthly, Brookings Institute, etc., and his latest book denies genocide.  Should he share a prison cell with other genocide deniers?  Should there be a new facility built to keep his type off the street and out of trouble?  Naw…. no one should be in prison for genocide denial…

As sell-out scum go, I like Gregg Easterbrook.  For instance, he has more principles than Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit.  Unlike Reynolds, Easterbrook shares, with me, a long and deeply held objection to the Shuttle program during a time when others were cheerleading for it.  Moreover, Easterbrook even took his stand against it, during the early 1980s, before I recognized what a profound threat it was (although he never did properly estimate how profound a threat but that is another story).  Good for him.  Glenn Reynolds, well, don’t get me started on that topic.  I’ll even admit I used to, when I was doing politics subscribe to Washington Monthly and read some of his articles which weren’t too bad given the company we were keeping.

Likewise, Easterbrook’s recent Slate article on autism’s plausible connection to early video viewing shares my general skepticism of the “genes only” and “the autism ‘epidemic’ is just changes in diagnostic standards” bromides offered by public health authorities.  Although I have been on the look-out for any by-State data on video viewing that could shed light, by comparative ecological correlations with other variables, on the autism epidemic, I’ve not run across any.  (If you have some please let me know.)  It may even be the case that my version of the video hypothesis—that the visual signals possibly generating autism via amygdalar damage are doing so as extended phenotypic parasitic castration—and Easterbrook’s “unnatural pollution” hypothesis of video damage is more correct.  I don’t know.  There’s even less data available to test the video hypotheses than to test my hypothesis that immigration may be a major cause of autism which at least has by-State ecological correlations supporting it better than are other hypotheses supported by such by-State ecological correlations.

Having given the devil his due, Gregg Easterbrook is a genocide denier.  Indeed, his latest book, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, is cover-to-cover genocide denial that goes beyond what any genocide denier sitting in jail has done:  He proclaims the victims should feel privileged to experience their genocide.

Easterbrook is denying genocide as outlawed by the Geneva Conventions:

“Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity but as members of a national group.”

Cited in “Beyond the 1948 Convention—Emerging principles of Genocide in   Customary International Law,” Maryland Journal of International Law and Trade,   vol. 17, no. 2, Fall 1993, ppp. 193-226.

• National identity is important where “nation” had its “nat"ural meaning to the signatories of the Conventions, most of whom were “nat"ives of their “nat"ions, and
• That therefore people should feel any sense of loss when their nation is destroyed by a program of anti-nationalist ideologues hijacking their government, reducing the reproductive viability of those people and then importing foreigners to replace them.

According to Easterbrook’s brand of genocide denial, replacing one nation with another or others, within a country, over the course of little more than a lifetime, is not grounds for people of the original nation to feel bad.  They don’t even get reservations to go “off of” because life is supposed to be grand.  Well many of us would be happy to have reservations half the size and quality of Amerindians but Easterbrook is too busy telling us we’re crazy to care.  There’s a nation to destroy in contravention of the Geneva Convention and so little time before the natives might go off the reservation—if they had a reservation to go off of!

Typical of mutilators of history and genocide apologists, he uses really abysmal math to argue that, real income has risen over the last 50 years.  As I’ve described in detail already, the real cost of reproduction has not gone down by a factor of 2 as Easterbrook might have us believe, but has risen by nearly a factor of 4!

Basically Easterbrook’s accounting is the kind offered stockholders by Enron or World Com during the pump prior to the dump.  Only Easterbrook and his ilk from the “think tanks” can raise this to civilization scale fraud.  Fastow is a choir boy by comparison.  Oh, maybe Easterbrook isn’t really aware of the fact that he is propagating falsehood, hence not technically guilty of “fraud”—but then I suppose many of the early sell-outs of Enron stock viewed the accounting reports in a similar light.

My basic view about Easterbrook is he’s a good old dog gone rabid.