The Great Mortality
reallifemag.com
reallifemag.com
The only rampant plague I see is plethora extremely poorly written articles with vague socially suicidal liberal elitist positions.
and you write "Wrong. Plagues still occur unfortunately in the developing world as the Gates Foundation has been gloriously struggling against."
What is my response suppose to be?
This may just be my taste but even in long form articles I want the central hypothesis stated right at the beginning. Don't waste my time with your personal annecdotes, except if the annecdote is so interesting that your whole article is about it, at least then I'll know what you're talking about right from the start. Otherwise it's like a film starting with a bunch of backstory instead of an inciting incident.
Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome develops this idea in the context of the Roman empire, showing how the co-development of trade, commerce, urbanisation, and medical knowledge (or ignorance), interacted with other factors, including wars, climate change, financial crises, and religion, to provide the conditions for the emergence and spread of disease.
Thinking we are beyond diseases' reach strikes me as extreme hubris.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kyle-harper/the-f...
We say we need to control global warming to "save the earth". Save it for what? Well us of course.
But nature doesn't think or plan. There's no grand design. It's just as valid to assume our rabid desire for the latest iThing is merely the ant crawling to the top of the blade of grass.
We were just the necessary step to get the earth hotter for the next phase in microbe and insect development.
We are not the finished product, we're just the heater.
Because we only care about the short term. The very short term.
It's a great paradox that many philosophies tell us to only care about the present moment ("seize the day!") when in fact many if not all of our problems come from that exact behavior.
What we want, we want it now, and if a price will have to be paid in the future, whatever the actual amount, we regard it as zero. But we're wrong.
I love life, I love human civilization, and all things that technical and civil progress gave to us. I will work to get a better future for myself, my daughter, and everybody else. It saddens me deeply that there are people who want the civilization to end with some epidemic, who basically want people to die. What made them this cruel?
You take a mocking admission of own irrationality and turn it into a desire to control everyone. Certain instances of the former may turn into some form of the latter (environmental laws, let's say), but they are not the same, and your interpretation is as malicious as it gets.
(Having this discussion work is going to require a certain minimum amount of empathy and non-assumption of malice)
Re : control : clearly, we can't influence past circumstance, but we can exert some influence over current activity by choosing what to buy and not buy, i.e., 'voting with our wallets.' All, or nearly all, all activity is driven by economic incentives.
(That said, I still drink coffee)
Of course, but this "liberal guilt" phenomenon is specifically associated with people who try to act morally in general. Thus the only (or one of the few) thing they have left to feel guilty about is their cultural ancestry.
> (That said, I still drink coffee)
Monster!
Take a sip of coffee. Tastes good? Happy?
Now, how did that coffee get to you? Whose hands touched it? Were they working in free and fair employment, or were they coerced into it?
How did the coffee plantation come into being in the first place? Was it bought at market price from the original occupiers, or was it expropriated from them by gun or pen?
(And so on.)