Taxpayer supported occasional law perfesser Glenn Reynolds is very worried that rogue members of academia may secretly be evil geniuses who seek to destroy their fellow man:

Lee was a nut, an eco-freak who said he was inspired by Al Gore’s environmental scare-documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” His badly written “manifesto” underscores his craziness. He hated “filthy human babies.”

But, of course, Lee’s not alone. Looking at the environmental literature, we find terms like those used above — the currently stylish description is “eliminationist rhetoric” — used widely, and plans for mass sterilization are fairly common.

And, as Mark Hemingway pointed out in these pages a few days ago, one need only look to the writings of President Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren to find something similar. Seeing humanity as destructive, Holdren wrote in favor of forced abortion and putting sterilizing agents in the drinking water, and in particular of sterilizing people who cause “social deterioration.”

Holdren has since distanced himself from these views, but still. Lee was a violent nut, but not a scientist. Holdren is a scientist (who held nutty views, at least at one point) but he’s not a violent nut.

But here’s what worries me: What if we get the two in combination?

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So far, we’ve been pretty lucky that there aren’t more scientists who are also nuts. Though the “mad scientist” is a staple of literature, they’re fortunately pretty rare in real life.

But biotechnology is getting more common and — thanks to folks ranging from Paul Ehrlich (Holdren’s coauthor) to Al Gore — so are apocalyptic environmental views that treat humans as a cancer upon the earth.

How common are these views? I typed “Humanity is a” into Google and the top three suggestions were “Humanity is a virus,” “Humanity is a disease,” and “Humanity is a cancer.”

Well, yes, typing “humanity is a” into teh Google will lead off with “Humanity is a virus” (which will no doubt thrill the Wachowski brothers) but if you type “Why can’t…” into Google your first hit is “Why can’t I own a Canadian“:

…so, using awesome law perfesser logic,  this indicates a universal desire to possess one of our cute and delightful neighbors to the north (which actually is true – Canadians are the french bulldogs of the ownable nationalities. They’re just darling. Everybody wants one.) But save that adorable pet talk for Cute Overload, back to the perfesser:

Policing the science is likely to prove difficult. But policing the rhetoric — as American society has long done with expressions of racial hatred or genocidal sentiment — seems well within reach.

In contemporary America, no respectable person would advocate, say, the involuntary sterilization of blacks or Jews. Why, then, should it be any more respectable to advocate the involuntary sterilization of everyone? Or even of those who cause “social deterioration?”

O RLY?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds 11/04/2006:

On the other hand, it’s also true that if democracy can’t work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab country can’t make it as a democratic republic, then what hope is there for places that are less wealthy, or less secular?

He ain’t Glenn, he’s Glennocidal…