That's got to be one of the greatest legacies in all human history. No politician or other empire-builder comes close.
And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose its measles-free status.<p>It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
We still have another chance for eradication in humans with Polio.
Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]<p><pre><code> ...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]
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[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_in_Pakistan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...</a>
This should be a war crime...
War crimes are "for Africa and thugs like Putin".
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at least at this point, I can attest that every European country I've ever lived in carries some more or less visible involvements in past few decades although this one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs.<p>We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
Who is we, who will pay for it, and how will such informational inoculation benefit the rich?<p>The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.
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.
Canada and the UK have a ton more measles than even the US's completely unacceptable level of measles.<p>Thinning this is a <i>US</i> problem completely misunderstands the nature of the misinformation problem.<p>And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel, according to how public health officials determine threats.
Food produced by Fritz Haber's Haber-Bosch process (making fertilizer) supports about half of the world's population.
He has quite a bit of chemical warfare weighing down his record.
There is no reason to believe that a lack of nitrogen was a problem in particular. It seems that most effort was spent on getting fertilizers with phosphorus and other minerals, nitrogen was secondary, as many plants can obtain it from the air. If anything, it allows our modern, heavily cereal skewed diet. Poor nutrition rarely meant an absolute lack of food, most of the time it only meant insufficuent quality, and the green revolution was a massive step backward in that regard
I think <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur</a> wins this one, though.
Norman Borlaug probably comes close. H. Trendley Dean was also impactful on a large scale, while its seemingly less important it helps a lot of people.
I completely agree, but to be fair, there are some people who are politicians <i>and</i> helped to eradicate a disease [0] [1].<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-eradicated-jimmy-carter-says/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-erad...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis</a>
Is there any way that people can work to re-introduce it into society? I know some folks are making a lot of progress with MMR.
Politicians and empire-builders (Elon) is currently standing in the way of human progress and history.
So creating cheap, reusable giant rockets is standing in the way of human progress? Being able to use neural links to restore sight to the blind is standing in the way?
There was another group of people famous for building innovative rockets, but are otherwise not associated with human progress.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb</a><p>So it is about the big picture. (And about small pictures like that of Elon making a salut like the other group).<p>So yes, currently his rockets do not transport explosives. But that can change anytime and I expect it will very soon.
I'm pretty sure that GP commenter was referring to the other stuff.
Yes, I'm sure that starting the EV revolution, creating a satellite based internet network that covers the all planet and making space launches fully reusable and 10x cheaper is "standing in the way of human progress and history".<p>If you people could only hear yourselves talk...
These people have been a problem in the west for over a century. They are unintelligent people who spend their lives fighting what confuses them, and replacing it with something worse, that they can understand.
Elon Musk is promoting progress only when he has something to gain from it (in economical terms or in terms of his image), but has no qualms wrecking progress, butchering indiscriminately and hurting prople when it comes to his personal grievances. This is further aggravated by his mercurial and egomaniacal personality, and the false reality build on conspiracies he surrounds himself in.<p>Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector on some ideological crusade was not advancing human progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems purely out of spite.<p>> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.<p>Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him, and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward some technological utopia.<p>Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it."
It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress & history.<p>Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
I'd add people who helped to increase overall population higyene standards, study conducted by dr. Humphries [1] shows how important that was<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines-Forgotten/dp/1480216895" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines...</a>
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Genghis Khan??
Genghis Khan also not too bad: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica</a><p>Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?
I thought it was clear from my statement about politicians and empire builders that I was talking about people who did <i>good, useful</i> things.
Greatest, not most fucked