Eyck Freymann: How to Break China’s Minerals Chokehold
Why the allies need a multilateral commercial stockpile This essay is based on a Hoover History Lab working paper, co-authored with Joshua Stinson, William Norris,…
Thought Leader: Eyck Freymann
Western mismanagement of coronavirus means the elderly are targets
By Niall Ferguson (original source The Boston Globe)
The word “genocide” — meaning the murder of a tribe or people — was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish refugee whose family was all but obliterated in the Holocaust.
The word “senicide” — meaning the deliberate murder of the elderly — is less well known, though of older provenance. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first used by the Victorian explorer Sir Henry Hamilton Johnston. “The ancient Sardi of Sardinia,” he wrote in 1889, “regarded it as a sacred . . . duty for the young to kill their old relations.”
Lemkin’s word caught on. Not so “senicide,” which is so rare a word that Microsoft Word’s spellcheck underlines it in red, itching to autocorrect it to “suicide.”
All that is about to change. If, as seems increasingly likely, a significant number of Western countries are going to continue mismanaging the pandemic caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2 — the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, in December — then a very large number of old people are going to die before their time.
Click here to read more
Relevant and recent posts
Chris Miller: Robotics Manufacturing: The Rise of Japan
“To the Americans, a robot is a computer attached to a mechanism. To Japanese, a robot is a mechanism attached to a computer.” The future…
Thought Leader: Chris Miller
Dr. Sanjay Gupta: A New Understanding of Parkinson’s Disease
Parkinson’s disease, a progressive movement disorder whose hallmark is damage to the dopamine-producing neurons in the brain, afflicts almost 12 million people worldwide. And the…
Thought Leader: Sanjay Gupta
More with this speaker
Niall Ferguson: War, Peace, and Global Power Shifts
Thought Leader: Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson: OpenAI’s House of Cards
Thought Leader: Niall Ferguson
