Fuck, the yanks have gone and confirmed Brainworms Kennedy as their health secretary, just as H5N1 bird flu is taking hold in mammals and bird migration season is starting.
We're doooooooomed.
@cstross I need to update my stock in Iron Lungs. Do we still know how to make these things?
@cstross It doesn't matter who the health secretary is, because no one is going to implement the necessary quarantine measures (such as shutting down all global air travel). At least this way the disaster sticks to the deserving.
@cstross At least y'all will have some distance from it all and can still get vaccines. From now on my health insurance will only cover "correcting an imbalance of the humors"
@cstross And Ireland just activated our official "keep free-range chickens indoors because of H5N1 in wild birds" plan this morning...
@cstross This feels like the foreshadowing part of the zombie apocalypse movie. Review: less enjoyable in reality.
@cstross It's a sad day for public health in the US.
@cstross *incoherent screaming* overwhelmed American citizen screaming in frustration.
Maybe Bruce Willis will come back in time to save us.
Oh right, that didn't work out so well...
@cstross Which of your books is this from? I want to purchase a copy...
@cstross I expect UKGOV to hold the airport gates open to the American diseased for as long as possible in the name of 'Growth', just like last time
We really are fucked, and we should never stop wearing masks in public now.
Edited 9d ago
@cstross Chrissakes. You know it's really beginning to suck being their next-door neighbours.
@cstross I don't have the words. I'm hoping you do. There's no way to adequately describe our current situation.
@cstross I wonder who Trump and his media sponsors will blame for it all, when the consequences become impossible to hide.
Even, or especially, the MAGA faithful drooling and nodding-along to Fox News.
What does a successful blame campaign look like, during and after a Megadeath epidemic?
@cstross My predictions:
*RFK Jr will appoint Andrew Wakefield to a position of responsibility, causing a ríse in polio and smallpox.
*RFK Jr will appoint several eugenecists, causing cuts to any healthcare for African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities.
Edited 9d ago
"Mierda, los yanquis han confirmado a Brainworms Kennedy como su secretario de Salud, justo cuando la gripe aviar H5N1 se está extendiendo entre los mamíferos y la temporada de migración de las aves está comenzando.
Estamos condenadooooooooos.
@cstross
THEY're dooooomed, and the Canucks & Mexicans will face a worsening healthrefugee problem.
Americans as trans-Atlantic boat people is a problem that will largely solve itself.
@cstross I think California and the New England states need to seriously consider becoming part of Canada.
@hairyears Easy: he'll blame Biden, DEI, and trans kids.
No, they'll need more than "The usual suspects, only harder"...
An effective deployment of blame propaganda needs to elicit a level of hatred and fear in the general population which is as frightening, and as capable of provoking violent anger, as a rational response to the real disaster and the real danger would be.
...And even more so, in 'street politics' among the foot soldiers of the regime: they will have a lot of work to do.
Edited 9d ago
@hairyears "The untermenschen are unclean disease spreaders!" worked just fine in the 1930s/1940s at raising hatred/fear levels. Emphasis on "spreading disease"—that's been the Christian rallying cry for antisemitic pogroms going back a millennium.
@cstross @hairyears For a long time (since the 1990s) the rhetoric about memes has made me wonder if it would be used in a xenophobic way, as it's a disease metaphor.
(The original metaphor never got beyond being a metaphor and never became a way of analysing culture.)
Workable.
Labelling the most-affected subpopulation as ’dirty' and 'harbouring disgusting diseases' plays well to pre-existing class and racial prejudices.
And, as you say, it's a tried-and-tested playbook.
A bonus is that the middle classes will suppress and under-report their symptoms for fear of being labelled 'that sort'; and dissidents can be denounced and shunned when (not if) they fall ill.
Edited 8d ago
@geoglyphentropy @hairyears The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book "The Extended Phenotype" in the mid-70s, and as Dawkins has drifted to the right with age, so has his meta-meme.
@calum Tough: it won't be published for at least two years.
@cstross As if there'll still be a free & independent publishing sector in two years!
@steevmi1 @cstross It's entirely nightmarish, no argument.
One of the really difficult things about the passing of the golden age of the End Holocene (at least for someone tolerably prosperous in a North Atlantic economy) is that there are now things one cannot do. Several of those things are "during a plague, one must not" and there's no present construction of the civil power that will exercise itself to enforce those limits appropriately. (~"on everyone, all the time")
@steevmi1 @cstross Immunocompromised people, disabled people generally, are used to the "you can't do that" part. (Since if they didn't get used to it they may well not be with us.)
It's getting everyone else to acknowledge the inhabiting the domain of necessity and the scope of appropriate constraint that's the really hard part, and until the civil power is prepared and able to enforce it I don't think we've got much hope of a sufficiently general collective response.
However it is also during these types of events in human history that people actually are able to network together for the greater good. Which is of course, why they are trying to control social media too.
It is unfortunate but I do feel we are over the tipping point now and until we have some great tragic loss in the US, we wil not be able to regain our sense of compassion for a shared humanity which is what we lack currently. Feelings of compassion. MAGA wants Civil War. The only reason anyone WANTS war is because they have lost their ability to understand what happens when a group suffers a great tragedy.
We are asking for a gigantic nationwide great tragedy so everyone can realize on what level we are all actually the same.
It IS history repeating itself yet again only this time the lesson is coming directly to America.
@LaNaehForaday @graydon @steevmi1 I wouldn't be too optimistic about the USA coming together for the common good in future—it's already memory holed genocide several times over, and right now the right are trying to rewind society all the way back to 1825, never mind 1925.