@morgan @suzannealdrich @cstross These people lived in gold encrusted marble palaces, wore the finest clothing, never lacked for a warm fire and ate the best foods and had the best doctors of their era. It didn't save any of them. What would have saved them are a series of inexpensive, widely available childhood immunizations with extremely high safety profiles.
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@cstross Not to put a too fine point on that, but people in iron lungs also don’t breed easily.
Pure eugenics.
@cstross People who are anti-vaccination for whatever fruitloops reason need to spend some quality time in old churchyards looking at monuments to dead children put up bereft parents.
@Infoseepage
Literally, just go to ancestry.com and map out your own family a couple generations back and find all the great uncles and aunties you don’t have because THEY ALL DIED OF CHILDHOOD DISEASES THAT THE US ADMINISTRATION IS INSANELY SUGGESTING WE DROP, LIKE A BUNCH OF GODDAMNED HOMICIDAL MANIACS #CantMakeThisShitUp #SureGoAheadKillMeAndMyEntireFamilyWhyDontYou #ActuallyNoYouCanGoFuckOffAndDieYourselves
@suzannealdrich @Infoseepage @cstross I was coming here to say exactly that. Just five generations ago, in Germany, my ancestors lost six of eight children before the age of three. Two survived to adulthood.
@morgan @suzannealdrich @cstross And this sort of thing cut across all divisions of class and wealth. I was at Versailles last week and they had an exhibition about the Grand Dauphin and his family. The Grand Dauphin was You're a parent to Louis XIV for most of his life, but his father outlived him. He died of smallpox at about the age of 50. A bunch of the dauphin's children and their wives and grandchildren were wiped out by "just measles" and other maladies.
@morgan @suzannealdrich @cstross These people lived in gold encrusted marble palaces, wore the finest clothing, never lacked for a warm fire and ate the best foods and had the best doctors of their era. It didn't save any of them. What would have saved them are a series of inexpensive, widely available childhood immunizations with extremely high safety profiles.
@Infoseepage @suzannealdrich @cstross I binged through the @empirepoduk podcast, haven't finished it, but listened to 150+ episodes. It's good.
There was a fascinating one where a British woman brought the concept and technology of #smallpox #inoculation home with her from #Turkey...
Here it is:
'She was a pioneering scientist, proto-feminist, and letter writer extraordinaire. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu escaped a marriage to Clotworthy Skeffington to become one of history's most incredible women. Listen this week as William and Anita are joined by Katie Hickman to tell the tale of her life.'
'Clotworthy Skeffington,' I think that might be my next fake name.
@cstross That means they’ll need even more white babies. Don’t these people talk to each other?
@bart Not to worry, Project 2025 is promising "marriage boot camps" for young white folks, along with subsidies for childbearing and obstacles to divorce. (Facepalm.)
They really *are* intent on taking the USA back to the 50s—the 1850s, that is, not the 1950s.
