At least he went down fighting (https://archive.is/M4nek, the op-ed referenced in the article). That's an impressively dignified response to a gobsmacking shift in public opinion. In his position, I might have given up and gone full Two-Face.

(https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)

I think this is a rationalization. Humans are always tempted to look up to power, and what's more powerful than an empire? It goes unquestioned that we should respect the Roman empire, for instance, and you pretty often see an argument for the Mongolian empire. But these days, we know that violence is bad so we have to find other reasons to justify our feelings. So we talk about the "peace" they established after all the war. But is the cost really worth it? How many people not attacked by bandits do you need to justify an innocent murdered by raiding soldiers? Never mind that even the "peace" is often sustained through oppression. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion for Jesus, it's something they did. Never mind that the empire never lasts, and plants seeds of the next dozen wars as it falls, watered with yet more blood.

Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace, would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO than Rome.

Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and power, and their actions are optimized for that over any actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors and colonizers were rightfully decry today.

Sometimes you have to do a lot of things that look very bad in order to do some greater good that overshadows all the bad you did.

No? That’s not at all obvious.

Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air. You are deeply misinformed on this subject.

He killed millions. He fed billions.

Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]

  ...The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.[2][3] The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a rise in violence against healthcare workers for being perceived as spies.[8] The rise in vaccine hesitancy following the program led to the re-emergence of polio in Pakistan, with Pakistan having by far the largest number of polio cases in the world by 2014.[8]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...

Not alone, but as a team I bet he did. Just as Fritz Haber did not personally save countless millions with his discovery, thousands of other people had to be involved there as well.

I'm pretty sure that GP commenter was referring to the other stuff.

There was another group of people famous for building innovative rockets, but are otherwise not associated with human progress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb

So it is about the big picture. (And about small pictures like that of Elon making a salut like the other group).

So yes, currently his rockets do not transport explosives. But that can change anytime and I expect it will very soon.

I would accept it if it even if it was done by Ghandi.

Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.

I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.

Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.

Are you kidding? A way to smear Obama and portray him as disrespectful to non-whites? The only reason it’s not on Fox is that it reminds Americans that we’ve only had one victory in the War on Terror and the Republican Party contributed nothing positive.

My replies ended in question marks.

Dropping a tungsten penetrator from orbit is an idea only science fiction can justify. In the real world the economics never close.

Should’ve could’ve. If the grandma had a moustache she would be the grandpa.

I admire your optimism. I genuinely wish I could share it. I hope that you are right.

Who is we, who will pay for it, and how will such informational inoculation benefit the rich?

The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.

How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?

As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.

People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice.

There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.

But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.

---

FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...

> The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year

American exceptionalism at its finest!

You do realise the vast majority of those "tourists, business travelers, and migrants" are all fully vaccinated?

In a world with a low vaccination rate, infection with measles is practically 100%. It spreads more easily than COVID.

You can take your risk with herd immunity if you want. That works well now, with a near universal vaccination rate. But if the rate drops below 90%, then you will get infected.