On a possible recession and the Black Death
Bob Morris @ Apr 17th 2008 10:30 - Category: Climate change, Peak oil
Watched a documentary recently about the Black Death. The known world had death rates of 25-50%. Think about that. No family was spared. Things got completely psychotic for a while, what with flagellants whipping themselves publicly (when they weren’t partying with the fair maidens) and Jews being slaughtered (surely they must be to blame, let’s torture them until they confess.) But the Black Death did finally burn itself out. When it was over, the population size was much less, so there were no more food shortages. Thus, peasants didn’t have to indenture themselves to royalty any more, they simply moved on. With more spare time, culture began to flower, and this eventually led to the Renaissance.
What we’re going through now is a blip compared to the Black Death. Still, there are unsettling parallels. The slaughter and torture of innocents by frenzied mobs looking for someone to blame, happens too often in history. Religion can provide a rationalization for it too. We are to blame for letting the Jew spread the Black Death, so torturing him is only just and might save his soul too. Uh huh. Or maybe that Jew had been a moneylender and if he’s dead, then the debts never need be repaid, now do they?
Will our planet, currently straining to provide resources to all, have another Die-off? Or will climate change and peak oil will somehow lead to another flowering of culture and technology?
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5 Responses to “On a possible recession and the Black Death”
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woody on 17 Apr 2008 at 5:18 pm #
I think we’ll be seeing this again very soon, with a large pandemic. But this time the homosexual will take the place of the Jew, since they seem to be the modern scapegoat of choice.
It’s no longer kosher to call a Jew a Jew these days, pardon the pun. But it’s perfectly acceptable to call someone a fag or a homo. Don’t think so? Ask yourself this: If you were at a bar and loudly called your friend a Jew for not paying for a beer, would it pass or would you get cold stares or even be asked to leave? Now what if you called him a fag or a homo for the same thing.
Save Money on 17 Apr 2008 at 6:55 pm #
Yeah but give it a few years and it’ll all change for the gays, then the next group of people will arrive and they’ll be the joke of the day.
Bob Morris on 17 Apr 2008 at 10:21 pm #
Depends on the bar. There’s used to be a leather gay bar in L.A. populated by ultra-macho bodybuilders and even the cops didn’t hassle them.
Ten Bears on 18 Apr 2008 at 12:14 am #
We are but fleas agitating the hide of a fa greater organism.
DJ on 18 Apr 2008 at 11:06 am #
Malthus’s math was wrong, but his principle was sound: if we don’t regulate our population, Nature will. We’ve reached the point at which the cause of poverty is no longer simply poor distribution: there just aren’t enough resources to lift everyone into the middle class. We’ve exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity for what anyone would consider a reasonable standard of living.