Sibylla Bostoniensis

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0.

Way back in June of 2020, I wrote:

Some of you are asking, "But, for how long? How long do we have to live like this?" If you're asking the question, the answer is "forever".

A whole bunch of people wrote anxious comments asking me if I meant that I didn't think Covid was ever going away. More than are visible, because I screened many of them.

I decided not to answer with my real answer at that time. It was pretty clear a lot of people were absolutely not emotionally prepared for it.

My answer was neither that I thought Covid was going away nor that I didn't think Covid was going away.

My answer was, "Covid? Who's talking about Covid?"




1.

I strongly suspect we have entered what future ages, should they exist, might look back and term the Great Age of Plagues.

I don't want to overstate my confidence here, but I also don't want to understate it. In my capacity as your friendly neighborhood oracle, I feel I would be remiss not to bring this to your attention, because if I am right, it will affect the entire rest of all of our lives.

Normally, one predicts the future by going, "If this goes on..." Alas, this is not that. Would that it were. This is a, "If these go on..."

Any one of these three trends alone would presage a rise in infectious illness in our species, but together they make a perfect storm.

They are: population, COVID-19, and climate change.

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What follows is a discussion of these three factors, serialized across a number of posts. They are meant to be read as a single work, though, understandably, you may want to take breaks between the sections for obvious reasons.

Special content advisory:

This series of posts is approximately 100% nightmare fuel. It is a catalogue of horrors and accompanying discussion of their imminencies.

This is highly depressogenic content. This might not be the best thing to read if you're given to despair. While I'm not going to tell you what you can and can't read, I would suggest that if you are particularly vulnerable to psychiatric consequences of despair this is not a safe thing for you to engage with. And even those of you who have no particular reason to expect negative medical consequences may want to give these posts a pass if you are not in a place, emotionally, to grapple with them.



The Great Age of Plagues
Table of Contents

• 0. Intro – You are here
• 1. Population
• 2. COVID-19
• 3. Climate Change
• 4. Climate Change, II
• 5. Conclusion

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