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Andre
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Dennis Dutton looks back on Y2K one decade ago.
Evaluating that Y2K was supposed to be another apocalypse that was called off, he generalizes:
Is his assessment of Y2K accurate and does he have a point or is comparison with other scenarios a stretch?
Evaluating that Y2K was supposed to be another apocalypse that was called off, he generalizes:
Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.
Is his assessment of Y2K accurate and does he have a point or is comparison with other scenarios a stretch?