- Joined
- Mar 24, 2016
Gather round, it's Handicapper General storytime with your host, Diana Moon Glampers.
In the dark ages, I went to a high school where they made a really big deal out of how someday we'd be the scientists making tomorrow's discoveries and the leaders of the free world. It was ultra-selective and the students frequently went to every college you're imagining when I say that.
Oh yeah, and students lived at the school. Which meant that orientation for new students was a week-long process before the upperclassmen got to campus. You met new students and did cool challenge problems that showed you the amazing array of talents of your fellow students and maybe let you shine with some of your own.
One of the challenge exercises we did was a team-based simulation. In the simulation, a virus that typically only transmitted to rodents (hantavirus) had potentially spread to a couple of humans, and our job was to figure out how spread was occurring (rat to human? rat to other carrier and then to human? or the big bad, human to human!), and what to do about it.
We worked on the simulation for an entire afternoon. Every so often, an adult would come around with an "update" of some new information, a new infection, data about what was going on. In the first hour we already agreed to set up a perimeter around the city where cases had been. Someone joked that they should just nuke it but everyone told them to shut the fuck up.
As the afternoon drew to a close, we realized with dawning horror that yes, it did transmit human to human, and that three likely infected humans had already left town just before the implementation of the quarantine and had boarded two different international flights. "Checkmate, game over, winner: the hantavirus," the teacher somberly intoned. Then he read us the "epilogue" about how five billion people died and the survivors struggled to rebuild humanity. It was creepy! We all felt a shared sense of shame and failure. We asked what we could have done and guess what? The only "right" answer was the one someone had at the start...to nuke or otherwise blow the town to smithereens, killing everyone there in order to stop the ensuing pandemic. Sure, thousands would have died, but we'd have saved billions.
They said that when they wanted us to be ethical leaders, we needed to understand that ethics can look different when you can see the bigger picture.
I've been thinking about that ever since 2020 started. I think about that stupid simulation almost every day.
I think about it when it turns out monkeypox, too, probably came from biowarfare experiments. How it may be that the bird flu we're seeing jump the species barrier may be a bioweapon as well.
I keep thinking we're already in the era of covert biowarfare, and that we're all unwitting guinea pigs experiencing viral releases and possibly even "counter-viruses" designed to limit the effectiveness of the weaponized ones. And I keep thinking that at some point, it'll probably either really go wrong and kill a huge percentage of people, or they'll think something has gone wrong enough that they nuke some town from orbit just to be sure.
A bunch of those kids from my school really did go into positions of power and influence, including at NIH and NIAID. And legislative bodies. I know with certainty that people in those organizations were exposed to that kind of thought, that "ethical leadership" includes nuking a city and shrugging off citizens' civil and human rights for the greater good. Of course it's fine to counterengineer other viruses to put into the air to make your opponents' viruses less bad. Of course it's fine to cover it up. It's better than nuking them, and that's the standard.
I don't really know why I'm posting this. It just seems like we were all being programmed to fight wars we couldn't even have dreamed of. It's made me realize how much of the last few years, which seemed to come out of nowhere, was actually all set up a generation ago by people who have probably mostly retired or died now. To the people in these institutions and agencies now, this is just the way things are done, the way things are and have been and have to be.
In the dark ages, I went to a high school where they made a really big deal out of how someday we'd be the scientists making tomorrow's discoveries and the leaders of the free world. It was ultra-selective and the students frequently went to every college you're imagining when I say that.
Oh yeah, and students lived at the school. Which meant that orientation for new students was a week-long process before the upperclassmen got to campus. You met new students and did cool challenge problems that showed you the amazing array of talents of your fellow students and maybe let you shine with some of your own.
One of the challenge exercises we did was a team-based simulation. In the simulation, a virus that typically only transmitted to rodents (hantavirus) had potentially spread to a couple of humans, and our job was to figure out how spread was occurring (rat to human? rat to other carrier and then to human? or the big bad, human to human!), and what to do about it.
We worked on the simulation for an entire afternoon. Every so often, an adult would come around with an "update" of some new information, a new infection, data about what was going on. In the first hour we already agreed to set up a perimeter around the city where cases had been. Someone joked that they should just nuke it but everyone told them to shut the fuck up.
As the afternoon drew to a close, we realized with dawning horror that yes, it did transmit human to human, and that three likely infected humans had already left town just before the implementation of the quarantine and had boarded two different international flights. "Checkmate, game over, winner: the hantavirus," the teacher somberly intoned. Then he read us the "epilogue" about how five billion people died and the survivors struggled to rebuild humanity. It was creepy! We all felt a shared sense of shame and failure. We asked what we could have done and guess what? The only "right" answer was the one someone had at the start...to nuke or otherwise blow the town to smithereens, killing everyone there in order to stop the ensuing pandemic. Sure, thousands would have died, but we'd have saved billions.
They said that when they wanted us to be ethical leaders, we needed to understand that ethics can look different when you can see the bigger picture.
I've been thinking about that ever since 2020 started. I think about that stupid simulation almost every day.
I think about it when it turns out monkeypox, too, probably came from biowarfare experiments. How it may be that the bird flu we're seeing jump the species barrier may be a bioweapon as well.
I keep thinking we're already in the era of covert biowarfare, and that we're all unwitting guinea pigs experiencing viral releases and possibly even "counter-viruses" designed to limit the effectiveness of the weaponized ones. And I keep thinking that at some point, it'll probably either really go wrong and kill a huge percentage of people, or they'll think something has gone wrong enough that they nuke some town from orbit just to be sure.
A bunch of those kids from my school really did go into positions of power and influence, including at NIH and NIAID. And legislative bodies. I know with certainty that people in those organizations were exposed to that kind of thought, that "ethical leadership" includes nuking a city and shrugging off citizens' civil and human rights for the greater good. Of course it's fine to counterengineer other viruses to put into the air to make your opponents' viruses less bad. Of course it's fine to cover it up. It's better than nuking them, and that's the standard.
I don't really know why I'm posting this. It just seems like we were all being programmed to fight wars we couldn't even have dreamed of. It's made me realize how much of the last few years, which seemed to come out of nowhere, was actually all set up a generation ago by people who have probably mostly retired or died now. To the people in these institutions and agencies now, this is just the way things are done, the way things are and have been and have to be.
