Chidi Anagonye (ikanteven) wrote in incompletedata, @ 2018-02-17 22:25:00 |
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So I've been thinking about this for a few days, really ever since the post where they
But, if this zombie virus is only affecting men then it behooves us to try and find a solution that minimizes harm to everyone.
So, the simplest solution would be get the women to safety and quarantine the men somewhere secure.
Only I'm not sure that's the solution here, because there are more ...zombies than just us. Even if we lock up all of men either together or separately, there will still be the possibility of not-us zombies being a danger to both male and female groups. Obviously, women still have the greatest chance of survival in a scenario like that, so, it's probably still the ethical choice to make for men to depart from homes with women, and women
Or maybe two groups, in case one gets overrun. Or maybe three groups But then that reduces the number of people in each group which reduces defensive position. Or perhaps the groups should be somewhat unevenly stacked in order to defend younger and non-combative women. But then that group could be attacked.
In any case, for women, there's a clear advantage to segregating themselves away from men and in higher numbers.
But what about men? As a gender, they're not yet a completely lost cause. Since there's a sort of vague method of transmission, theoretically any man who's been injured (or maybe even some that came into contact with zombies? I'm not an expert on undeath, I suppose despite truly a lot of experience in death itself for all I remember of it...)
Yes, men are at a higher (or well the only) risk of becoming zombies, but not all men might. So for men, is there strength in numbers? Surely there a higher risk of being attacked if or when one of your fellow men becomes a zombie. But, any one man on his own, particularly those of us who spent our lives writing HDR dissertations instead of becoming superheroes, is at a strategic advantage to have allies when confronted with zombies, either us or not-us.
It really gets to a sort of central question. Is the danger from within ourselves and our group, or from an external source. If you consider the cold war implications of this scenario, perhaps the real concern should be the not-us zombies. Though I suppose the cold war was fought by spies infiltrating in-groups which would mean that the greatest threat is the latent zombies waiting in our male population. So the biggest danger would be, us.
But I can't believe an every man for himself solution is how we're going to save the greatest possible number of people.
Unless we accept some casualty among women as a way of reinforcing the male population. I don't know if that would end in fewer deaths and injuries overall. It obviously increases the threat to women, but with suitable precautions, men could be contained or even restrained in case they became zombies, which would keep risk still fairly low (though not zero) to women from us-zombies, and maybe even provide extra protection from not-us zombies, in the form of extra people. Men benefit clearly against not-us zombies
and the threat from other us zombies could be reduced by precautions.
Perhaps mixed groups could still reasonable? Is it unfair to think men and women should work together on this even though the men are the most dangerous element? Is it paternalistic to assume that women should be sent away to survive this. That really isn't my intention, but we all have to work to distance ourselves from certain subconscious biases.
But I do think we should definitely do something. Probably