Plague for all!

[andrewducker]

via peteyoung
and

from abbacat via Julie.

Comments

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

These posts are frakkin' brilliant!!

Though I gotta admit, I feel sorry for the piggies around the world as I don't think they should be feelin' any hate.

[opusfluke.livejournal.com]

Wow, those two pics have been all over thezombiehunters.com forums. And they still make me laugh.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

This'un summed it up for me!
http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=263

[andrewducker]

I do care. People are dying, it's pretty unpleasant, and while it might not turn into a full on epidemic there definitely is a risk.

So I'm not panicking, but I am paying attention.

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay, right, I didn't mean like that. Obviously I do 'care about' diseases which I can't hope to do much about curing or stopping - after all I do devote a fair amount of time to my voluntary work for an organisation which helps people living with HIV* in Edinburgh. (And naturally, I'm a bit concerned about the thought of my client getting it, because I understand any kind of flu can be pretty bad news if you have a compromised immune system). I CARE about a lot of things and apparently this comment has made me feel that that's called into question and very nearly activated my 'arguing on the internet!!!1!' gland, sorry!
Just that comic made me laugh because everyone who's been speaking to me about it this week has been definitely seemed to be concerned with 'What if I get it?' rather than anything else, and I identified with the feeling of 'oh god, I have more pressing things to do/worry about than what to do in case I get a flu that I can't do much to avoid getting and may not even get', you know?

*Incidentally: AIDS is a pandemic. In 2007, it was estimated that 33.2 million people lived with HIV/AIDS worldwide, and that AIDS had killed an estimated 2.1 million people, including 330,000 children. Those numbers have only gone up.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, I'm with you insofar as I'm not worrying overly much about me getting it so much as it killing off a lot of people.

And yes, IADS is horrific - particularly in Africa.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

"There's too many of us"

Would a billion here or there really be missed, except by economic planners?

[andrewducker]

Yes. By all the people they know.

And I've never understood the "there's too many of us" approach. We could feed everyone in the world if there was the will to do so. We have the food, it's just really badly distributed.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Yes, we could likely also support billions more if everything was calculated on a utilitarian basis, of whatever products were optimally nutritious etc, but would you want to live in a world like that? (Think Mega City One, Resyc "we use everything except the soul" etc.)

I should add that I don't think of this in first / third world terms - e.g. some have argued that the UK population should be 30 million.

[andrewducker]

We have _masses_ of free space in the UK. Cities cover a small proportion of the land, and there's lots of farmland that's not being used any more.

I don't think it's a choice that we actually have to make, especially as we're below replenishment rate in Europe, and this seems to be a trend that countries follow as education levels rise.