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Scott was living two blocks from downtown Hiroshima and asking why everybody got so nervous about nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, like 5 comments upthread, @ArjinFerman is telling us that the AIDS crisis was oversold. (I really wanted to gloss his complaint as “fake and gay,” but figured that could be mistaken for mockery). There’s clearly some sense where he’s correct, and HIV will see use as a political lever long after everyone who knew a victim is also dead.
I’m not sure how to square this other than a rather uncomfortable model: the amount of suffering around us at all times is literally inconceivable, but your brain works really hard to filter it out. Turn off too many of those filters and you end up going mad and/or effective altruist.
No, I'm saying it was self-inflicted, and doesn't deserve more thought than a "men purposefully hitting their own balls with a hammer" epidemic. That the expectation that society would drop everything and save people who refused to take the barest of precautions, when their own lives were on the line, and they only did so for the purpose of sexual gratification (which they didn't even have to abstain from, just limit to a reasonable level), was deranged, as was the implicit (and sometimes explicit) moral judgement when society failed to act fast enough.
Decades later we put half of the world under lockdown over a glorified flu, and anyone who didn't wear a mask when they were entering a restaurant, where they could sit without it for hours, was seen as a moral freak, but somehow we have to look at the AIDS episode as a giant tragedy, because it got in the way of a bunch of guys having unlimited orgasms. Then, to add insult to injury, we immediately dropped all Covid-era moral norms, when the same community brought in monkeypox.
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