I Have Trouble Taking Ebola Hysteria Seriously

Back in the 1990s, most of the hysteria (or maybe it was gloating) about Ebola came from environmentalist wackos. A claim was that such outbreaks were due to human beings moving into “new lands.” I'm not sure where the people saying that thought human beings evolved in the first place. Another common claim is that the Ebola outbreak was due to high population densities, even despite the fact in the real world, Ebola originated in a rainforest on a thinly-populated continent.

In short, the Ebola hysteria sounds too much like people trying to come up with reasons to believe the Earth goddess is fighting back against that crime against nature known as civilization.

The people hysterical about Ebola in the 1990s had a few things in common with the people hysterical about Ebola today. There's opposition to Julian Simon's theories, a self-congratulatory belief that they are paying some attention to basic science (unlike the Other Side), and bizarre, not completely debugged, religious rhetoric.