4 ms·
> lots of people were predicting a pandemic yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.” for that m
by tessierashpool 5y ago
> lots of people were predicting a pandemic
yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.”
for that matter, Obama predicted it too, setting up a pandemics office, and he did that because as (again) Stross himself says in this blog post, this pandemic came along after two prior coronavirus pandemics.
(I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.)
- sangnoir 5y ago> (I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.) I suspect you (and parent) may have misunderstood him. IMO, he meant a pandemic (like COVID-19) - just like WWII - was predicted by a lot of people. What people could not predict (for both scenarios) was when it would happen.
- halostatue 5y agoWould anyone have predicted that a sizeable minority of people would simply deny the existence of the pandemic and/or refuse to do the most basic precautions to protect society? Not ten years ago.
- ansible 5y agoYeah, that one has really thrown me for a loop. Just how willing a large segment of the population can be to "score points" against the other side... by killing themselves. It is kind of funny, the pandemic could have been politicized the other way as well: "wear a mask to protect yourself from ethnic group's disease", and such. But as it turned out, the primary concern was with just one man's ego, and trying to pretend that everything is fine... until it clearly wasn't.
- tessierashpool 5y agofun fact, masks were politicized the other way during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. try "homosexual diseases threaten american families" on Google Images.
- tessierashpool 5y agoanyone who looked at the history of the 1918 pandemic in the US might have. a lot of the same things happened, for example fighting over masks. a guy was shot in San Francisco for refusing to wear a mask.