Re: idiots walk among us

On Fri, 07 Mar 2025 18:11:04 -0500, WolfFan wrote:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/marjorie-taylor-greene-

promotes-

measles-parties-for-kids-amid-deadly-outbreaks/ar-AA1At4JL
 
you can’t make this up. If someone tried to put this into the plot of a
work of SF, any competent editor would reject it as too stupid to allow
suspension of disbelief.

There is an SF story about that, sort of. It's called "The
Waveries" by Frederick Brown. It's about a deluge of radio signals
that turn out to be early earthly radio broadcasts that have been
bounced back at us. What we're seeing in the public sphere
currently is something analagous: a whole bunch of century-old
cultural memes being bounced back at us. Allusion to real early
20th century medical practices is just one of them. Think about
it: tariffs, immigration, a war (Ukraine) full of imagery
resembling World War II. So it goes. The parsimonious interpretation
of all this is that the nation has been rented out to some sort of
theatrical production.