Yes, and I’ve heard people say “It’ll be OK; the strain that goes pandemic won’t be as lethal as the current strains.” There’s some truth in this, that extremely deadly viruses will tend to burn themselves out by killing their hosts so not spread so widely. So perhaps bird flu transmitted from person to person would not sustain the extremely high death rates this type of flu has shown in people in the past. But as the 1918 flu and even the COVID pandemic show, there’s a lot of wiggle room for a virus between utterly deadly and utterly harmless, and even something that’s far from the worst can still go pandemic and cause huge amounts of death, disruption and misery.

That’s their problem

Unfortunately, with how pandemics work, it would be everyone’s problem.

This would be much worse than COVID. Bird flu is far more deadly.

If I saw serious attempts anywhere from right-wingers to advocate for their views as an actual political philosophy I’d be more concerned by this. But we need spaces where people actually discuss how to build a better society, and simply because of that concern these spaces lean left. It’s rare to find right-wingers who are even seriously interested in that question, except as a pretext to vent their unexamined prejudices and personality issues.

If, on internet forums, you push for everyone to have equal say even when their views are not well considered, everyone’s energy gets used up arguing with the most offensive right-wing posters. I think it’s a good thing to have spaces where that isn’t how it goes. As for centrists, I think there’s a place for engaging with them because there’s more of a chance that they just haven’t examined their views but can be brought to. But I’m not going to miss them if they’re so put off by a left-leaning space that they won’t participate, and I don’t think every left space needs to spend its time arguing with liberals.

Frankly, my view of the right wing these days is that there’s no particular need to treat a mishmash of selfishness, greed, lust for power, deceit, gullibility, ignorance, insecurity and hatred as if it’s a political philosophy at all. Left versus right isn’t a helpful picture. Serious vs unserious would be a better one. If someone has serious arguments for a right-wing position made in good faith, then they’re not just wasting people’s time. But that’s not usually what you see, and I suspect it’s because there’s a lack of serious arguments to be made for it.

I don’t miss the right-wing voices. For the most part they just dominate, disrupt and obstruct serious discussion. That said, it’s important we don’t forget how unrepresentative our online discussions are of society as a whole, and how little impact merely talking about them here has.