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If you had a secret biolab, and could engineer a plague that would kill everyone over 70, including those nasty politicians who are destroying our world, would you do it?
Everyone over 70, gone in weeks, good or bad.
How about just men* over 70? (* "men" being defined as having a Y chromosome, which could also hit some intersex.)
My mind keeps seeing a young idealist makes a grave mistake, then scrambles to find a cure for his own disease, with the help of assorted oddballs.
Everyone over 70, gone in weeks, good or bad.
How about just men* over 70? (* "men" being defined as having a Y chromosome, which could also hit some intersex.)
My mind keeps seeing a young idealist makes a grave mistake, then scrambles to find a cure for his own disease, with the help of assorted oddballs.
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Not only would, but did... at least got partway there. Plague to wipe out all of humanity, easy. Done that. One to wipe out everyone with a Y chromosome, slightly harder, but I had a solid idea how to do it. One to wipe out everyone with a Y chromosome and is say, over 50, or 60, or 70... yeah, not so easy... you have any idea how hard it is to find a trigger for that? Telomere length is the best indicator of age, and that is wildly variant between individuals.
I burned the results. I'm not a fan of humanity, but someone's got to feed all those house cats and some would be very upset if their human died suddenly.
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The thing I would worry about is viral mutation.
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I'm pretty fed up with both the young AND the old. The Old are only Interested in keeping and expanding their Privileges and the Young can't Prioritize. To most of them there is no difference in importance between, Say men wearing makeup and female genital mutilation. To me it's a "No Brainer"but I've actually HAD this "discussion" and is a big reason I don't "do" Activist stuff anymore....
Cheers,
Pat
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Depending on how contagious/airborne it is, entire sections of the world might be unaffected. ...Can it be targeted to only hit white men over 70? (Probably somewhat; there's no marker for "race" but there are probably markers for "pale skin" and a few related features.)
Throw in sensitivity/immunity based on various aspects of diet or medications, and it might even be able to target almost exclusively white American men over 70.
...ooh. Countervirus: doesn't cure it, but shifts it so that it only affects people who eat meat. Vegetarians over 70 are safe. Media is full of pundits trying to decide if the virus was engineered by the sugar industry or the corn industry.
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Plus, all the white people with Y chromosomes would be scrambling for any evidence that they weren't really white in the hopes it would miss them.
The hunt for who did it and a cure would be a whole go-around of finger pointing and politics, while the old entrenched "leaders" would be literally dying off.
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Also, I know many White folks, including White males, who don't support any of the idiocy that's running amok in the world, right now. It would, essentially, be analogous to a proposal to execute all the Ásatrú, because a significant faction of the Ásatrú are racist and White supremacist.
Disclaimer: I tend to be highly allergic to genocide and genocidal suggestions, as one of my (somewhat distant) relatives was a major player in the Holocaust.
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There are so many ways it could go out of control, etc.
One of the big subplots would be dealing with those who don't want it stopped.
Let the right wing nuts write the "gay plague" stories.
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Hmmmmm...
We've now seen what a shit show something like this is, especially since covid initially hit the over 70 crowd the worst. But I never in my wildest horror imagination envisioned an entire segment of the population denying its existence, downplaying its severity, and deliberately trying to prevent people from taking precautions and protective measures.
Truth is stranger than fiction.