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 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.
@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.