this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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Viruses had only been discovered a few decades before this picture was taken. It's very likely that the family (and most of society) had no understanding that the virus was unlikely to jump species and so took the same precaution to keep the cat from spreading the disease that they themselves took. I'd rather people made this sort of mistake than the willful idiots we had this time around refusing to believe in viruses at all.
Oh, there were plenty of those in 1918, too.
It's a lot harder to be ignorant today. There's so much knowledge everywhere, and literacy rates are really high.
Florida people: "That sounds like a challenge."
Counterpoint: it’s actually not that hard, because of echo chambers and the algorithms pushing/feeding those echo chambers. Just because people are actually able to read and write more nowadays doesn’t mean critical thinking has improved a lot too.
That's very true!
In the Age of Misinformation, basic literacy isn't enough to learn.