Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmirate | Hacker News Reader

Well, iff the reader accounts for the headline's question implicit qualifier: "could it strike us again" where we probably aren't in China or Kazakhstan ...

... then Betteridge's Law applies as always.

(But seriously, this qualifier almost always applies when discussing any kind of non-universal disaster or malaise. Some resource-stripped sh&thole on the other side of the world could get overrun by zombies and it still needn't matter to us because it's only a resource-stripped sh&thole.)

View on HN

>and it still needn't matter to us because it's only a resource-stripped sh&thole

Yeah, if it was a resource-plenty shithole it would matter more, since it could be plundered. /s

There's also the fact that those suffering will still be people in either case, but who cares for that when they're living bit outside of shitholes /s

Your words ring true at face value.

Zombies are a physical impossibility, so nobody sensible worries about zombie attacks.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. I was using "overrun by zombies" as both a hyperbole and as a shorthand for "beset by insert the worst disaster that doesn't need geography to occur (e.g. tsunamis and typhoons)".

> so nobody sensible worries about zombie attacks

As an interesting aside to this comment: https://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombie/index.htm

I guess the CDC does this in good faith but for military, zombie scenarios are a way to prepare for civilian uprisings without explicitly naming it. Easier to make a "zombie plague preparedness" exercise than a "Trump supporters take arms when their president is impeached".

Zombies are a local inside enemy that allow training on the domestic territory. Hard to name a fictional enemy that would not make headlines otherwise.

Would a generic "terrorists" label spur too much controversy?

Terrorists that would take over a whole civilian area and are able to send waves of thousands of infantry? Yes, clearly.

It’s not necessarily that, it can also be tacitly referring to external civilian influxes, such as mass migration events. Either way, it’s a grim business that few people seem to grasp the full import of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com