Posted on 01/02/2012 1:19:22 PM PST by DogByte6RER
How you equip yourself for a zombie apocalypse depends largely on your personal belief systems. Are you going to focus solely on self-preservation? Or is restoring order to your country a transcendent objective? How willing are you to share your resources with strangers? And how discriminating will you be in shooting other human beings?
Author Daniel Drezner tackles such moral dilemmas on a global level in his book Theories of International Politics and Zombies. Drezner is the real deal, by the way, a professor of international politics at Tufts University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s how he breaks down America’s potential responses to a global zombie pandemic by ideology:
Realists would not risk American blood and treasure being the world’s zombie police. In fact, they would take advantage of the outbreak in other countries to advance our own political and economic strength. It’s every country for itself, especially under these circumstances.
Liberals would focus on global cooperation to quell the problem through international bodies like the United Nations and the World Health Organization. Even if not every country pulls its weight, we will be better off by at least trying to coordinate our policies with other governments.
Neoconservatives would take swift, unilateral, military action and start establishing strong anti-zombie bastions worldwide. There’s no time to haggle with second-tier players about what the best course of action is. Zombies are an evil threat and must be dealt with decisively.
Constructivists would use the zombie epidemic as a means of uniting humanity’s differing worldwide cultures. They would emphasize what we all share in common as people and establish a moral peer pressure for nations to act bravely and nobly in the face of the zombie crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at kitup.military.com ...
And of course, there are those miserable tax zombies who crash local tea party rallies
The book's author is from the evil Council on Foreign Relations! Bilderburgers! Zionist conspirators! Evil banksters!!! O NOES!!!
The book's author is from the evil Council on Foreign Relations! Bilderburgers! Zionist conspirators! Evil banksters!!! O NOES!!!
This guy is a joke. I heard him on UFO Radio (Coast to Coast A.M.) and he honestly believed liberal philosophies would best be equipped to handle a zombie apocalypse. Do Liberals want to close the borders, ever?
Zombie Ping
The libtards would create and join the People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies (PETZ) as seen here:
As a Texan who has the EPA wanting to freeze me in the dark, I’d use them to give coal a break for a couple weeks.
Electricity doesn’t care HOW you got the steam to spin the turbines, it just never asks.
In a way, a zombie invasion is just a fantasy step beyond something much more realistic.
In 1859, 12 wild rabbits were brought to Australia by a man who liked to hunt rabbits. By 1886 their descendents were colonizing new areas of southeastern Australia at the rate of 66 miles a year in all directions. By 1907 the rabbits had reached both the west and the east coasts of Australia, roughly the distance between California and New York. Nothing could stop the plague of rabbits.
The rabbits were eating much of the sparse vegetation that supported Australia’s huge sheep and cattle industry, and the graziers were suffering enormous financial losses.
The only solution was biological control. After much testing, government biologists introduced a mosquito-borne virus called myxomatosis, that was only lethal to rabbits.
The disease did indeed take hold in 1950, and by 1952 it had produced a nationwide epidemic in the rabbit population. The mortality rate reached an estimated 98% of the rabbits. But the remainder were immune and have since replenished their overpopulated numbers.
Were such a disease, likely an influenza, to strike the human population with high mortality, the world could lose billions of people. And not evenly distributed. The third and fourth world would likely have far greater losses.
Yet this is the opposite of a zombie invasion, for instead of zombies everywhere, large habitable areas would seem to have few if any people.
If you take his list of various groups, you have to ask yourself how different their responses would be to this scenario, instead of the zombie one.
An Aussie fellow told me, after I showed him my AKUBRA hat, that approximately 200 rabbits are used to provide the felt for just one hat(I’ve got four). He said that they are vermin, pests and good riddance.
Excellent book. I read it immediately after I read Zombie War Z.
I love detailed lists. :-)
zombie apocolypse is fun, because it is silly and cathartic. The thought of a Black Death scale epidemic is horrifying because it is realistic. Civil society, infrastructure and transportation would collapse. More people would die of starvation and anarchy than the disease.
Oddly enough, it’s not like that. People recover very quickly from even devastating plagues, which are often followed by economic boom times.
The plague of the 14th Century was followed by the Renaissance, and the plague of the 17th Century was followed by the Age of Enlightenment. Prices are low, wages are high, youthful people inherit land and money from their deceased elders, and invest it rather than save it.
Agriculture is more productive, as lands are consolidated, and innovation is adopted by business because of labor shortages. The wealthy invest a lot in the arts and sciences.
Importantly, plagues tend to work from the bottom of the societal pyramid, so the greatest number of people killed are otherwise poor, sick, mentally defective, with bad hygiene, and who live in denser population areas. Those with bad judgment also die off.
On the higher levels of the pyramid are those who cannot resist involving themselves with the plague for whatever reasons. And those who are wealthy but not too bright.
Plagues don’t work quickly, and often behave like wildfires, savaging one area, yet bypassing another. And often, like the worst threat, a killer influenza, they happen in waves of varying strength and duration.
Unless you are in a bad area, there is time to adjust and rearrange business and society. Then the bad area will have a respite to recover somewhat.
Again, like a wildfire, there are some odd limiting factors, such as weather, incubation period, and that a typical infected person is somewhat limited to how many other people they can infect before showing symptoms.
Yet there are also what are now called “super-carrier” people who for some reasons are able to infect dozens.
Perhaps the deadliest pathogen humanity has ever faced in history is the H5N1 Avian flu. It has a 60% mortality rate *among those infected*, which is important, because not everyone will be infected.
Pulmonary infectious disease, spread by coughing and sneezing, transmit best at 40F and low humidity. Increase the temperature and/or humidity, and they become much more reliant on hand contamination. Mexico only rarely has a flu epidemic, yet when they do it is bad, because they only have limited resistance.
Nothing about plagues is fair. America would almost certainly do very well relatively speaking, even in a terrible plague. But many other places in the world would not.
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