Premature - "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

I saw this in my feed this morning.

pic.twitter.com/LgYXaogNKF

— Derek T. Muller (@derektmuller) March 15, 2026

Profoundly revealing.

This past week CNN and most the other legacy Mainstream Media have repeatedly beclowned themselves by trying to make Iran and individual terrorists into sympathetic characters.  Trying so hard that they keep having to rewrite headlines multiple times and stealth edit the articles.  It is just a mockery of the profession of journalism.  

The claim that mainstream media writers are enemies of America is patently absurd; but they keep providing evidence to support the claim.

And it seems like half of their errors are entirely unconscious.  They are so steeped in old Gramscian falsehoods that they don't see themselves stating obvious falsehoods.

In this instance, the headline in the tweet was so egregious that I assumed it must be AI generated.  I went to the NYT site and, sure enough, it is legit.

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Click to enlarge.

The profound but perhaps easily overlooked error is in the subheading.  "But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature."

His predictions were not criticized because they were premature.  They were criticized because they were wrong.  Ehrlich was a neo-Malthusian.  

Malthus (1766-1834) was an economist who had the misfortune to base his economic theories on the entirety of human history up to his time.  And while they had some use and accuracy in describing that past, his theories were entirely invalidated by the triumvirate of Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution, all of which blossomed in his lifetime.

Humankind prosperity, productivity, longevity, health and growth all inflected into a rocket-like climb between 1750 and 1850.  Theories from the beforetime had not validity in the new reality of the successful world created by the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution.  Malthus had an excuse - he couldn't see that the new world emerging around was categorically different from the entirety of human history on which he based his theories. 

Paul Ehrlich never had the excuse of not being able to see the evidence emerging around him.  Malthus was wrong from the time he wrote and there has been 150 years of evidence as to how wrong he was by the time Ehrlich, a neo-Malthusian, was writing in the 1960s.  Ehrlich had a flare for dramatic claims of disaster which then never occurred.  He was not even a Cassandra because he was never right.

Systematically and categorically wrong about everything across his entire oeuvre.  But his theories appealed to the anti-Age of Enlightenment, anti-Industrial Revolution, and the anti-Scientific Revolution biases of the clerissy and chattering classes nestled in academia and legacy mainstream media.

Biases which the headline reveal are still strongly rooted in the sterile mind of writers.  Ehrlich was not premature.  He was wrong because he never understood that the world changed between 1750 and 1850.  He was anchored in an antique mindset that one hundred and fifty years of evidence had not budged.  

Hailed as a prophet by the clerissy and chattering class, he was a prophet with no useful prophesies.  He was always wrong for obvious reasons.

We would never describe a weatherman repeatedly forecasting since 1965 balmy weather in the eighties next week in Antartica as having made premature forecasts.  His forecasts were always wrong.  Ehrlich is that weatherman.  His forecasts were always as confident as they were wrong.  

The use of the word "premature" in the headline betrays at best profound ignorance on the part of the editor/journalist.  At worst it is a knowing propaganda for a long overturned ideology.  Trying to change the world by changing the meaning of words is always a red flag.