Celebrities are in a unique position in modern society. Like the aristocracy of the past, today’s most successful actors and singers have a great deal of license in how they conduct themselves. This means that they sometimes go completely off the rails and cause a great deal of harm.
Of course, any reasonable person knows that being really good at hitting C-sharp doesn’t make you an international authority on the wealth of nations, just as having a perky derriere isn’t quite the same as earning a doctorate in immunology. But over the course of thousands of years, many of us have been conditioned to trust the authority of the insane baron in his castle and to turn a blind eye when the village’s maidens start disappearing in the night.
Modern celebrities are rarely as openly predatory as the Countess Bathory, but since they lack the security of a hereditary title they tend to mind their publicists.
This is probably the reason why today’s high-profile nutcases do their damage under the guise of “charity” or “philosophy,” so the nobleman’s madness can be both profitable and praiseworthy.
Here are three examples of celebrities, or of celebrity-drenched causes, that objectively made the world a worse place by being stupid, crazy, or some awful combination of both:
Jenny McCarthy Works to Increase Awareness, Preventable Disease Rates
If autism has affected someone close to you, you know that these children need extra love and attention, and that the rewards are worth all of the effort. If you don’t have an autistic kid, however, you’re probably scared to death that your family might be cursed with a mysterious nightmare that ruins your formerly happy life.
Part of what makes autism so scary is that it’s so goddamn random. Nobody knows what causes the condition, and there isn’t an effective treatment out there. It’s as if a passing Gypsy woman just randomly put a curse on your three-year-old, and summarily devastated your life. With that kind of evil abroad in the land, it’s no surprise that some parents are really easy to con just by pushing the [something] = autism button.
This story begins in 1998. In that year, a medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield (formerly M.D., but we’ll get to that) published a bombshell study in the British medical journal The Lancet that purported to show a link between the triple-dose MMR vaccine and autism rates.
When other scientists failed to replicate Wakefield’s findings, and especially when it came out that Wakefield had falsified his data because he had a financial interest in a competing vaccine, The Lancet withdrew the paper, published a retraction and an apology, and invited public comment on how to avoid such disasters in the future. Wakefield himself was as disgraced as a scientist could be: his paper was trashed, he lost his job, and the institution that had awarded him his medical degree took it back and practically burned it in front of him.
You can’t really purge stupid, though, and this was the early days of the Internet. Soon enough, gullible parents with 56k dial-up connections were mass you’ve-got-mailing each other the exaggerated story about how all vaccines definitely cause autism, and how the “authorities” were “covering it up” for unspecified, but undoubtedly sinister, motives.
Around this time, Jenny McCarthy had a kid who turned out to be autistic, and she started looking for an explanation. At first, she fell in with a group of similarly distraught parents and pronounced that her son was an Indigo Child. You don’t need to know what that is, but it’s basically some kind of autistic superhuman. Eventually, reality kicked in—a little bit—and Jenny had to admit that her son was genuinely disabled and not actually one of the X-Men.
Falling for the next hilariously irrational belief to cross her path, the (very) former celebrity started running publicity games for the anti-vax movement, which is mainly composed of people who think scientists and the government are running an impossibly ruthless global conspiracy to suppress truths that can only be discovered by dedicated researchers who are willing to spend two hours googling things on the Internet.
Thanks in large part to Jenny’s awesome activism, hundreds of thousands of parents, who maybe should get their health advice from doctors instead of ex-Playboy Bunnies, have declined to vaccinate their kids, which has led to a doubling just of whooping cough cases since 1996 and a measles outbreak in California. Thanks, Jenny!
Bill Maher Has Doubts About Germ Theory
Source: Philly
Speaking of superstitious medical denialism, HBO TV host Bill Maher has made a bit of a splash with comments which seem to indicate a certain ambivalence toward the germ theory of disease. To quote the man himself:
I don’t believe in vaccination either. That’s a… well, that’s a… what? That’s another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur theory, even though Louis Pasteur renounced it on his own deathbed and said that Beauchamp(s) was right: it’s not the invading germs, it’s the terrain. It’s not the mosquitoes, it’s the swamp that they are breeding in.
Germ theory denialism is common to a quixotic subset of anti-vaxxers who think microorganisms don’t generally cause illness and that Louis Pasteur’s deathbed recantation invalidates 140 years of research by literally millions of scientists. That “Beauchamp(s)” mentioned in the text probably refers to Pierre Jacques Antoine Béchamp, a French chemist and rival of Louis Pasteur who thought that microorganisms were the result of disease, rather than the cause.
He also had a magnificent beard, but that doesn’t (entirely) excuse him.
The damage germ theory denialists cause isn’t nearly as immediate or as lethal as that of vaccine denial, though it’s distressing how often the two coincide. Rather, the harm of germ denial is that it degrades the discourse of rational people and pushes otherwise intelligent people into bizarre apologetics to defend the indefensible.
Take Bill Maher, for example: as a high-profile atheist, you’d expect him to scoff at the rumors that Charles Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed and became religious just hours before the end. Maher would probably argue that even if the story was true, which it isn’t, that has no bearing on whether or not natural selection can be observed to function in the world. The theory is sound because it makes testable predictions, Maher would tell you, not because some authority believed in it.
Yet that is exactly the nonsense Maher evidently believes about Pasteur. For the record, Louis Pasteur did not recant the germ theory on his deathbed, and even if he had, nobody would care because the theory has made hundreds of thousands of verifiable predictions and drastically improved life on Earth for nearly a century and a half.
Ignoring all of that and cherry-picking false anecdotes to promote pseudoscientific woo degrades actual scholarship and paves the ground for creationism, flat-Eartherism, and Holocaust denial.
Live Aid Really Helped Collectivize Ethiopia, Maybe Killed Six Figures
Source: Dark Star
The Ethiopian famine of 1983-85 was actually two famines, one in the South and one in the North, which were both the result of maddeningly complicated politics. In a nutshell, a communist military dictatorship took over the country in 1974 and spent the next 10 years collectivizing agriculture like good little communists. This had the same effect in Ethiopia as it had in China and Ukraine decades earlier, and grain prices became totally irrational with no connection between supply and demand.
By 1982, armed rebellion in the south had paralyzed the Derg government. The dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, decided this was just the right time to increase military spending to 46 percent of the national budget and start seizing foodstuffs from rebellious provinces.
Before long, Derg forces had been largely driven out of those disputed zones and were facing fresh revolt in the North just in time for a huge drought to strike. The government used the drought as a cover for their military operations and claimed that starvation, which may have killed up to one million people, was due to unforeseeable natural causes.
This is where Bob Geldof, formerly the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, comes in. Figuring that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by socially conscious celebrities, Geldof pulled together what would become the largest simulcast live event in TV history: Live Aid.
As a technical achievement, Live Aid was brilliant. For a few hours on July 13 1985, several of the most titanic egos in showbiz came together to sing and raise money on behalf of the starving children of Ethiopia. Initially hoping to raise £1 million, the synchronized international concerts wound up raising £150 million, allegedly for famine relief.
Also: Freddie Mercury.
What made it “allegedly” was that little problem with Ethiopia’s government you remember from a minute ago. See, the problem with getting useless celebrities (and Freddie Mercury) together for a big relief concert is that it assumes Ethiopia’s problem was that it was poor. That is, the extremely shallow clinical narcissists running the show presumed that Ethiopians would totally have bought food if they’d only had the cash, so obviously the solution was to get them the money. What could be simpler?
Once the concert was over, however, there was the thorny problem of what to do with that £150 million. After all, if it were as simple as a quick trip to the grocery store, there wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place. Instead, the money was distributed between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) carrying out famine relief in the country and the government in Addis Ababa—that would be the Derg, which was not only responsible for the famine in the first place, but which by 1985 had effectively no control over the rebel territories and couldn’t distribute aid if it had wanted to. Officially, none of the aid money went to relief in the areas most affected by famine, as the Derg blocked relief efforts and bought weapons instead, though reports exist that Oxfam covertly aided some rebel areas.
The situation got so ridiculous that, when the food aid was delivered directly to the docks in Ethiopia, it sat rotting while the Derg complained they had no trucks to transport the food. When trucks were shipped, at tremendous cost, to Ethiopia, the Derg commandeered them for troop transport and intensified operations against the OLF rebels in the South, as well as forcing the relocation of farm communities onto state-run collectives.
In the end, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that well-meaning people all over the world raised a fortune to end famine by financing the war effort of the famine’s perpetrators.
As for the Derg, the rebellions grew into full-scale revolution after Mengistu’s Soviet backers went out of business. He fled the country and took up exile in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and a whole lot of his old friends got 20 years in prison for genocide. Maybe 700,000 to 1 million people starved to death in the famines. Bob Geldof is still organizing concerts, and everybody agrees Queen was amazing.
