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 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?
@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 9d 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.