Forecasts of doom

There are a few things I need to write about but I have to deal with a couple of notes first. This could drag on, sorry...

First, lets pick up a point made by Dickie yesterday. In response to my claim that ridiculous forecasts of doom serve no purpose, he said,

"we need people to make scary apocalyptic forcasts of these things in order for them to get peoples' attention, and thus be avoided. You only need to look to South Africa as an example of a country that ignored the AIDS warnings and is now paying the consequences".

Firstly, lets remember that South Africa is right in the center of the continenet where, as far as we know, AIDS made the jump to humans. It could therefore be argued that the disease was already far more prolific there than in the west by the time we realised there was a problem. Also remember that South Africa is surrounded by third world countries that didn't have the money to spend on awareness campaigns, there are high levels of illiteracy, which doesn't help when trying to teach people the dangers, and border controls are tricky in a land-locked country in the middle of Africa. Do you really think that telling everyone that they were all going to die in 10 years would have made a difference?

In Britain Mrs Thatcher launched the most effective AIDS awareness campaign the world had seen, before or since, and the British people should be glad that she did. She did not however make predictions that we would all die. The AIDS charities did. And, if memory serves, one major charity also got taken to caught for "exagerrating" claims about how the disease was spreading in the heterosexual comunity. The inference was that they did so to attract more charitable donations from the heterosexual community. And here is the point I am trying to make. It's in the interest of AIDS charities to exaggerate claims to increase their incomes. Likewise, it's in the interest of research scientists to tell politicians what they want to hear to keep the grant cheques rolling in. Tell me I'm wrong, go on, I dare you.

I'm going to split this entry in two because it's big, the next part deals with id cards, again.