I don’t really agree with this — maybe some of you do. I think hardcore gun owners are likely to embrace the right-wing worldview that migrants and black/brown urban residents would sooner kill them than talk with them, therefore they need guns. Also, single-issue voters are, well, single-issue voters, and on this single issue, Republicans will always offer more to gun owners than Democrats.
Even so, I think the gun debate has introduced a form of all-or-nothing argument that gets thrown around whenever we’re talking about COVID. This argument is a staple of the discussions about guns: any proposed regulation (say, assault weapons) will still leave guns on the street, and those guns will still kill people. The goal to stop gun death, this regulation won’t accomplish that, so why bother? Basically, it rules out harm reduction or risk mitigation.
This same argument is being used all the time in the COVID discussion. Masking won’t prevent all infection, so why bother? You can still get COVID with the vaccine, so why bother? This from a group that does everything possible to limit the number of abortions by enacting ever so many incremental regulations. It’s stupid, but we hear it a lot.
bbleh
It’s stupid,
buttherefore we hear it a lot.FIFY.
MisterForkbeard
I think it’s tribal/cult oriented. A lot of the gun owners have just decided that Democrats are evil (hint: They ALWAYS have unrealistic and insane thoughts as to what Democrats will do with guns and their prophecies never make sense) and they’ve lumped themselves in with hard-core Republicans.
And since they’re part of that group and they’re authoritarian, they identify with them on literally every point, to the maximum that can be allowed by the “Democrats are evil / Own the libs” framework. So you get extreme resistance to vaccines, mask wearing, etc.
It has nothing to do with risk reduction or avoidance strategies. It’s entirely around being an asshole or calling Dems traitors, so long as they have social support to do so. And they do.
MisterForkbeard
@bbleh: There are times when I wish I could gold/upvote/SOMETHING a comment.
This is one of those times.
WereBear
Most of them are white evangelical Christians. Of some kind, even if they haven’t gone to church in years. Relatives do, and they all run in mental packs.
So Confederacy is also their religion, as is racism, sexism, anti-science, obedient to their favorite authorities, and secretly longing for the Rapture since they hate living “in the world” and being constantly tempted by it and thus, fearing hell.
They have horrible marriages, terrorized kids, and form alliances instead of having actual friendships. Every single transaction is a negotiation between who will kiss-up and who will kick down.
We have to do risk mitigation, everywhere. Because to do nothing will mean we all die.
VeniceRiley
There is a whole “ready for the apocalypse” vibe to them all as well. Their white evang churches have them primed. When the chips are down, they’ll side with the R (=Racists) on their framing and therefore their actions. That’s where all their buddies are at, and that’s where they’ll be atThey expect a horde onrush at the border, and violent inner cities. That’s what the guns are for. Gun fun, in other words, is rarely benign.
And they’ll never assign malign intent for all the rest to their buddies. Never.
Hoodie
@MisterForkbeard: This is probably accurate. They operate on a simplified heuristic of conservative good/liberal bad, kind of like brand shoppers. I think this is part of the evil genius of FoxNews, they understand that a lot of Americans don’t want to think too hard – or can’t.
MisterForkbeard
@Hoodie: Fox recognized early that large sets of Americans identify tribally AND prefer their news in ‘meme’ form – highly misleading small bits of information that might be straight up wrong (and requires lots of time to rebut) but allow them to feel superior.
That’s their entire news model. “Here’s a soundbite about how great/manly/victimized you are, and how terrible/aggressive/weak liberals are”.
marklar
I think there are three kinds of gun owners.
1- Some truly do believe they need it for defense from ‘mostly’ real threats, and they are actually pay attention to sociological arguments regarding public safety.
2- Hunters (primarily)…but we’re talking rifles here. They aren’t part of the equation.
3- Authoritarians, for whom guns are more a symbol of power more than anything else. They sometimes use the ‘safety’ and ‘hunting’ rationalizations, but their perceived fears are mostly a reflection of racism and fear of loss of hierarchy, and the guns that they use for hunting sure ain’t the guns that they tote to their rallies. These folks can’t be reached, because ultimately, guns aren’t the real issue for them. Power is.
Yutsano
Like everyone else has said, it’s tribal. The (shrinking) evangelical base is their tribe regardless of their actual church attendance. Add in saturation of right wing propaganda from Fox/Limbaugh/OANN and they live in another world from us. You can’t talk or reason with these people. We can only overwhelm them when we can.
zhena gogolia
Yes, this kind of reasoning makes me want to scream bloody murder.
West of the Rockies
I’d like actual evidence of these pro-vaccine, pro-choice Republicans. I think they’re as common as blue Cornish pixies.
zhena gogolia
@West of the Rockies: Not if you insert the words “for themselves” after pro-vaccine and pro-choice.
West of the Rockies
@zhena gogolia:
Ah, too true.
Bluegirlfromwyo
Mistermix, the tweet is 100% correct and so are you. There are plenty of vaccinated, pro-choice Republicans who keep voting Republican to keep their guns so they can shoot at the black and brown hordes coming to get them when they become a minority. I could introduce you to several.
As is often said on this blog, porque no los dos?
WereBear
@zhena gogolia: Brilliant!
I suspect if a few teams of brave mental health professionals waded in, there’d be a high percentage of all kinds of personality disorders.
Which are all difficult to treat.
Kent
Having lived for over a decade in Texas and having plenty of MAGA relatives scattered about the rural US I have come to conclude that both guns and abortion are really proxies for race.
What do I mean by that? I knew a shitload of white guys in TX who were racist as all hell. But they have learned over the years to not really give expression to their actual attitudes, except elliptically. But what they have learned is that there are basically two hot-button issues in this country that no one will question them on when they express them. Guns and abortion.
So they can freely say they are voting for Trump or other racist GOP horrors to protect their 2nd Amendment rights, or because they are “pro life” and no one thinks to even question their sincerity. But if they said they are voting for him because the GOP is the white party and the Dems are the party N***rs and illegals then people will tend to recoil.
That is one reason they LOVE Trump so much. He lets his racist free flag fly and gives voice to the attitudes the have always had but been too shy to express in mixed company. That’s why they are so obsessed with the Trump flags and Trump parades and MAGA hats. It is all a giant racist dogwhistle
Think about how much racist stuff you have heard from Trump. Then think about how much 2nd Amendment pro-gun performative stuff he has ever done. Has anyone ever seen Trump holding a gun or going shooting? I know the Trump spawn famously go on their hunting safaris, but Trump himself? Does he do that? I don’t think so. He knows the pro-gun stuff is mostly bullshit and so focuses in laser tight on the racism that people really want to hear. He has a feral genius that way.
Kent
The vaccination rate for people 65 and older in this country is 91%. Trust me, a whole lot of them are also gun nuts. The gun nuts aren’t limited to the 9% of seniors who aren’t vaccinated.
West of the Rockies
@Kent:
I suspect, Kent, that there’s a lot of misogyny and homophobia there as well that Trump can freely attack on his white voters’ behalf.
A Ghost to Most
One would think that a resident of WNY would be able to understand the importance of hunters. How many deer have you hit? You must stick close to Rochester if you haven’t.
I asked my half-rational BIL in Waterport if he knew anyone who hasn’t hit a deer. My sister was the only who had only hit one (plus me). You’re up to your ass in deer, but a generation of hunters has been driven away by the NRA and people afraid of a dangerous tool.
Some of us like to sport shoot as well. It’s harder than golf. I’ve killed a lot of clay pots and pigeons, but no animals in 50 years.
Some people stop living long before they die.
West of the Rockies
@Kent:
Good point. Is it really 91% +65 vaccinated? I’m surprised it’s that high.
James E Powell
@Bluegirlfromwyo:
I agree with you about the gun people, but they’ve been voting R for a long time. They don’t swing elections, they didn’t switch from Obama to Trump, & they aren’t the ones electing R governors in blue states. That’s the work of white suburbanites.
Poll white suburbs & exurbs. Ask them to name the top ten things they are afraid of or that piss them off.
Poll the same group a month later and ask them the top ten things they believe Democrats favor.
Pretty much the same list.
Betty Cracker
@WereBear: Oppositional defiant disorder, to be specific. Here’s a brief description of the symptoms from the Mayo Clinic site:
I mean, does this not describe Trump, DeSantis, et al, and their fan base exactly in every particular? Republicans should just adopt it as the permanent party platform!
Kent
@West of the Rockies: Well yes. Point taken. Perhaps “hate” is a better descriptor than racism. They have a whole collection of people they love hate that isn’t necessarily limited by race. LGBT, women, Libs, etc.
But I still stand by my point. I think guns and abortion are largely proxy issues for the real tribal hate that motivates them. I have talked with plenty of men who claim to be “pro-life” and claim to vote that way when I know damn well they couldn’t give a flying fuck about abortion one way or the other and rarely ever darken the doorways of any church.
Kent
@West of the Rockies: According to the front page of the NYT the vaccine rate for over 65 is 91% have had one dose and 81% are fully vaccinated. One presumes that if you have had at least one dose you are not anti-vax.
WereBear
@Betty Cracker:
Excellent point. Especially since they don’t have one!
TriassicSands
I’d say abortion has been behind the “all-or-nothing argument” longer than guns. Now, they work hand-in-hand to make democracy difficult to impossible.
gvg
I only know one real gun nut well. He is not religious. I don’t recall him ever attending and he doesn’t hang out with them either. He is older and vaccinated. He is a PTSD Vietnam Vet who only kept it together because his wife kept him together. I never really thought of him that way, but it is true. My father (his brother in law) pointed it out recently. He really thinks his guns are necessary and pictures himself as a heroic defender wheras I think he is unrealistic. He was a grocery store manager for decades and I don’t think most people realize how much theft and robberies happen in grocery stores all the time not just in bad areas, but all of them. He had lots of cash to protect and employees. There also is just a lot of shop lifting not to mention crooked employees stealing too. So I think the constant decades of small bad people did not leave him able to see guns as too many or not helpful.
He also just likes to collect them. he knew how to do checks for stolen goods and background checks but he got many very cheap.
He grew up poor and hunting and still does some. That is part of some rural backgrounds.
I know that he almost always voted republican. He didn’t like Iraq and voted Kerry not Bush (he thought is was like Vietnam) not sure on Obama, hated Trump both times. Pretty sure he still votes mostly republican, still because of guns. Abortion is not an issue to him.
I do think there are many that are only republican because of one issue and just don’t care about most other things. I think their are abortion republicans and low tax republicans and gun republicans and evangelical republicans. Some are all, many are 1 issue.
Betty Cracker
@Kent: As a woman who grew up surrounded by / currently lives among the MAGA horde, I can personally attest there’s a heaping helping of sexism involved too. The anti-abortion garbage is all about controlling women.
ETA: D’oh, never mind — West of got their first.
WereBear
@Kent: All true and don’t forget the sexism, either. That is clear.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Kent: This is a good point.
Kent
@TriassicSands: Pretty much every single protestant church was pro-choice or neutral on the topic up until the 1970s. Seriously. Even the Southern Baptists had official pro-choice resolutions up through the mid 1970s.
What happened in the late 1970s was that the conservative movement figured out they could weaponize abortion as a conservative web issue to win elections and they were off and running from there. The needed something to replace race as the organizational glue that they used to keep the rubes in line as by the 1970s that was becoming a losing issue when pushed out in the open. They were still racist as fuck, of course. But abortion became a convenient proxy.
Van Buren
“It’s stupid, but we hear it a lot” ….should be in the tag rotation.
Geminid
I am down to five close friends. Three of them and myself do do not own firearms, and two of them do. But Stephanie and Debbie vote Democratic, and I think neither would mind if Virginia adopted gun safety laws on a level with California or Connecticut.
Virginia may be get there before the end of the decade. The General Assembly passed a decent package of six gun safety laws in 2020, and I expect there will be more if Democrats hang on to both houses this fall. Ten years ago Democrats were reluctant to run on gun safety issues. In 2017 and 2019, though, gun safety was a winning issue for Democrats.
Now this issue is a problem for Virginia Republicans. Glen Youngkin, their candidate for Governor, would not return the NRA’s candidate survey and received no rating from them. Youngkin is afraid to go on record, and hopes that informal assurances to gun rights advocates will keep them on his side.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Define “Hardcore”
Traditional, the type who keep their guns in a gun safe, go shooting at the range or hunt, that type of gun owners are more open to reason.
Fuds. as in Elmer Fud, are in it for the Culture War and the chance to shoot themselves in the dick because of FREEDOM! Plus they need a gun at Disneyland to protect themselves from large rodents. Oh yes and WOLVERINES! I think that is important with that group too.
jl
I think it is social engineering by ideologically motivated think thanks and corporate interests aligned with GOP to control any effective public action to work only for their interests. This is done for several reasons: preserve status quo where they like it, discredit and gut any collective public action to solve any problem, entrench implicit assumption that individual action that places costs on burdens on individuals and small businesses is solution to all problems (even where that is absurd: infectious disease control and greenhouse gas emissions).
For covid, the by now dozens of comparable (and some non comparable because of very low income) countries on every continent don’t have this problem. Most of these countries have lower disease burden and less damage to society and economy, so dominate US performance over whole course of epidemic, often by wide margins. Standard quality control and improvement practices (including formal statistical The Data And the The Science certified) require multiple layers of control and policy instruments. You rely on them every time you take a pill.
Imagine applying this principle to industrial safety that is required to maintain corporate profits. Or traffic safety. Stop signs won’t solve all problems, so no point in having them, not even one.
Jeffro
Stupid people don’t do nuance/shades of gray/the real world.
Oddly enough, neither do Republicans.
Hmmm…
I don’t know what else to tell you, MM.
Jeffro
@Geminid: he wouldn’t. even. return. the survey?
LOL
Oh Glen, you marvelously rich cipher, you. You right-leaning black hole of nothingness.
Kent
I grew up in rural Oregon around guns. Did lots of deer hunting and duck hunting with my dad and uncles when I was a kid. I remember as a little kid going to the gun range every fall with my dad and uncle to sight in their rifles. But that was the only time they ever went to the range. All my relatives were very much into hunting. When we visited my grandfather in rural PA their house was stacked with Pennsylvania hunting mags and they had a hunting cabin up in the mountains above the valley. I just went through a lot of old family photos and an astonishing number of them (with the men anyway) are about hunting.
Yet no one in the family had more than a couple of guns, usually a good deer rifle like a bolt action 30-06, some kind of shotgun, either a double-barrel or pump action 16 gauge for ducks, and probably a 22 for coyotes and gophers. Often they were battered 30 year old guns sitting in the kitchen closet with a box of shells on the top shelf. Usually something that was handed down from your dad or grandfather that had lots of history. About as utilitarian as a hammer or crescent wrench. One of my uncles was more obsessed and had fancier rifles with polished maple stocks that he carried around in padded cases. But they were still just bolt-action single shot rifles.
The whole current obsession with military style rifles and handguns is pretty much all new in my experience. As is the thing about having a gun room or gun case with 2-dozen weapons of every variety. No one used to do that unless they were the rare gun collector. Now you see it everywhere.
Another Scott
Speaking of mitigation, …
Yup. If it can’t be scrapped or made irrelevant via the old “deem and pass” mechanism, then kick it up to Biden and move on. Don’t let them make it a crisis.
October 1 is believed to be a critical date (when $150B is due at the start of the FY).
(via LOLGOP)
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@Kent: You should see my double barrel, 50 bore Purdey Muzzle loader! It was sold to Captain Lowe of the British Army in 1861!
Jeffro
@Kent:
@West of the Rockies:
@Betty Cracker:
so we’re agreed, then: guns -> tied to race/racism, abortion -> tied to gender/sexism?
(anti-mask- > still grieving for trumpov’s loss and acting out?)
do these people know how to offer anything positive or constructive in any way? rhetorical question but probably not a bad one to bring up in ’22, ’24, etc Dems
Jeffro
@Betty Cracker: trumpism presents much the same as ODD, but ODD it is believed to be caused by a “combination of inherited and environmental factors” whereas trumpism is caused by the overriding, Fox-reinforced belief that nobody* tells white people what to do.
*except trumpov, of course. they’d get those shots yesterday and show their vaccination cards to the clerk at 7-11 if he told them to.
narya
@marklar: There’s a fourth category that some above have noted: sport shooting. Bro does a lot of handgun competitions, enjoys it greatly, and also hunts. He’s not a complete and total gun nut, i don’t think, though it is a voting issue for him.
I think the other piece to this is that harm reduction/mitigation is complex–it’s not a simple good/bad dichotomy. And one of the things I’ve noted about a lot of folks is that ambiguity, complexity, things not easily sorted, makes them nervous.
Old School
For those who enjoy Jen Psaki/Peter Doocy interactions, here is today’s version:
Geminid
@Jeffro: Youngkin evidently hopes he can put Virginia Democrats to sleep with his bland thematic campaign, but I don’t feel sleepy, and I bet you don’t either.
Roger Moore
I think the perfection or nothing worldview is mostly an excuse for inaction, and almost always used selectively. The same people who reject masks for offering less than perfect protection against COVID are perfectly happy to argue for guns, even though they know they offer less than perfect protection against violent crime.
Wapiti
@Kent: Or they got their shots early, before the group decided that anti-covid vaccine was the group position. (They aren’t anti-bax in general, just covid vax).
Brachiator
WTF? From CNN
Strange game being played here. Taking help from the federal government while pretending that help is not needed??
Old School
I know there’s a thread for it from earlier today, but since this is the current thread, I wanted to note:
The Four Directions thermometer has passed $25,000!
Way to go, everybody!
trollhattan
@Brachiator: DeSantis et al learned from Daddy Trump that it’s easiest to lie if you lie about every last thing. For starters, you don’t need to worry about what you did and did not lie about. Winning!
DeSantis would challenge an assertion he’s wearing pants. “I can’t verify pants at this point in time.”
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@Brachiator: Gov. Death Sentence is not known for being rational.
randy khan
In my personal experience, the people who think guns are really important fall into two categories – the ones who buy into the whole Republican package and libertarians. Libertarians are, I suppose, theoretically gettable, but in practice there are too many other things that Dems want that libertarians don’t like. And, frankly, they’re an example of a group that is way overrepresented in our discourse compared to its actual size, partly because there are a bunch of rich libertarians.
Another Scott
My favorite uncle growing up was a life member of the NRA, had a 3-pounder canon that he would fire at artillery ranges, had lots and lots of different handguns, rifles, shotguns, etc., that he collected. But he never talked about politics when I knew him, so who knows how he felt about things like that. I’ve never considered owning a gun, myself.
No huge group is uniform. I suspect that most “gun nuts” are nonuniform as well. I think they’re probably like “car nuts”:
Some of those groups are examples of people just being really interested in something and developing an expertise in it. They know how to use cars and how to control them safely. Some of those groups are actually dangerous to the rest of us.
It’s the same way with gun nuts, I think. The question is, how to you address the problems created by the dangerous ones without alienating all the rest of them and causing additional, needless, backlash that makes the politics harder?
(To be clear, Heller was a bad decision – there’s no Constitutional “individual right” to keep and bear arms without the “well regulated militia” part, IMHO.)
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
@Brachiator: Maybe the state health department — like the universities, and the K12 schools, and the cities, and Disney, and the cruise lines — is ignoring the governor?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@randy khan: Also Libertarianism is a halfway house for a lot of people shaking the Republican habit
trollhattan
@randy khan:
I need to put a word in for ammosexuals, the people who are really, really attracted to guns for psychosexual reasons. They are legion.
raven
@Another Scott: I’d rather push my Chevy than drive a Ford! I just ordered three point seatbelts for my truck after rising eating a steel dashboard for 50 years!
trollhattan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Gateway drug and exit drug? Yoikes.
narya
@Another Scott: According to #5, I am apparently a car nut (even though I’ve never owned a car). :-)
I watch all the IndyCar and F1, and have attended multiple of the former; would love to see the latter, but don’t want to shell out the $$ it would take.
I haven’t actually DRIVEN a car in 20+ years; as I say to folks, I have a driver’s license, but you don’t want me to use it.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: The most radical gun owners believe that the 2nd Amendment’s purpose is to empower citizens to fight an out off control, tyrannical government. “It’s the right that protects all our other rights,” they like to say.
This is a fantasy, but a minority of gun owners fervently believe in it. Scalia’s Heller opinion clearly rejects this expansive view of the 2nd amendment, but the fanatics like to pretend that Scalia did not say what he said about the powers of governments to reasonably regulate firearms sales and use.
rp
@Old School: Her response was good of course, but I really wish one of these days she’d tell Doocy to go home and get his f*ckin’ shine box.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan:
Something you never have to worry about with Baud!
Another Scott
@narya: Car nuts are everywhere!!
:-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
It’s also possible it was someone lower in the government who made the request, not DeSantis.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@trollhattan: Exit. Everyone I grew up was a Republican in the 80s, Libertarian in the 90s and fuck the Republicans-and-the-crappy-horse-they-road-in-on Democrat in ’00s and beyond.
One of the reasons for the cult behavior from Conservatives is to stop the defections. One of my small c conservative friends is in the middle of it and driving his family nutters, he’s a libertarian now and moved to California from Texas and they are losing it lol.
Earl
@Betty Cracker:
Per our brief convo the other day… everyone is getting Delta. Astra Zeneca told the UK parliament that herd immunity is not possible with Delta.
Time to bow to the inevitable, bin the masks, get Delta, hopefully live through it, and carry on.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8
J R in WV
@marklar:
You are leaving out target shooters, like those who compete in the Olympics, or the NCAA shooting matches. Or who just like to shoot at plastic pop bottles behind the barn. Lots of my hippie friends hunt or target shoot.
I don’t hunt any more, never did very much, but I do target shoot, and have put down seriously injured wild life and livestock.
@A Ghost to Most:
What Ghost said, also too.
Another Scott
Speaking of mitigation (2), CalculatedRiskBlog:
It’s not the number for the necessary quarter, so it’s not guaranteed to be the number used for Social Security COLA calculations, but retirees should see a hefty increase in their Social Security checks in January 2022.
Cheers,
Scott.
MisterForkbeard
@Brachiator: I think the play is to get help and then pretend that Democrats are fucking you over.
Another Scott
@Earl: Er, no. No thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Old School
@Earl: Do you think we can wait until my kids get vaccinated?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott: OMG…inflation, we’re all going to DIE!
cain
@Old School: Peter is such a doofus. I am glad he enjoys being humiliated every single day he’s out there.
gvg
@Brachiator:
Why would the Biden administration bother to tell deathsantis they were sending anything? Send it directly to the hospitals that requested it IMO. I read that as the requests come from healthcare orgs not the Governor. desantis would probably try to stop it, so don’t give him a chance.
sab
@West of the Rockies: They are probably all extinct now, but my mom and her friends were all pro-choice, pro-vaccine, and anti-gun suburban country club wives who liked low taxes and good schools.
Keith P.
All of my Trump-loving friends (and COVID deniers, too) AFAIK support the GOP solely because of guns – they are fanatical about their guns. Totally obsessed with them….always buying parts for existing guns or parts to build new guns if they see them for a good price. I don’t understand it at all, since a) I’ve never needed a firearm, and b) I don’t see why you’d need 3 ARs, and AK, 3 9mm’s, and a couple of .45’s. One of them asked me how I expect to protect my family, to which I replied “I call the sheriff, but why would anyone break into my house? All my items of value require a truck and multiple people (aka movers). Hell, AFAIK the only things my friends have of major value *are* their guns.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Earl: While I understand Business Insider is up there with Lancet on medical journals,, I couldn’t help but notice this bit;
Perhaps wait until the children get vaccinated?
Brachiator
I think there might be some connection between the attitude towards guns and Covid. From the beginning, some right wingers have said that some deaths are inevitable, so we might as well learn to live with it.
But ultimately, conservatives are not offering an argument at all. None of them are offering that old religious chestnut, that the pandemic is God’s will.
Instead there is the flat, insistent assertion that response to the pandemic must be left to individual choice and the magic of personal responsibility.
This is the ultimate, faux libertarian, anti government solution. It does not even pretend to offer a solution. Instead of the Invisible Hand guiding markets to capitalist Nirvana, the miracle of millions of individuals deciding for themselves what to do will somehow defeat the virus.
This is infantile nonsense, but it neatly counters any organized communal effort to deal with the pandemic.
And note that this is not just an American thing. This is common to a right wing mindset all over the world. It also overlaps to some degree with leftist anarchic ideology.
trollhattan
Scotty Hot Pants redux? Can we be this lucky?
Can’t wait to find out how Trumpy he’s become.
trollhattan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Knew libertarian voters (small l because they weren’t active Libertarians) back in the day who thought Republicans were too squishy, but Reagan put stars in their
eyespants because he attacked gummint, just like the Libertarians wish to.matt
‘we have to risk kids to keep gun freedom’ is very similar to ‘we have to risk kids to stop economic damage from COVID’.
Ken
@trollhattan: “Re-building the Republican party” sounds almost anti-Trumpy. He may figure that’s the only way he’s got a chance, if he’s considering returning to Massachusetts politics.
smith
@Earl: Doesn’t this seem to assume that neither vaccines nor having had a case of Delta confers any ongoing resistance to another infection? That basically, we are doomed to catch covid again and again for the rest or our lives with no diminution of our chances of catching it again?
But we already know that the vaccine does decrease the chance of catching it in the first place, and, I assume, getting subsequent infections after a breakthrough case. And even though the protective effect of having had it is not as strong as that of having been vaccinated, there should be some decreased chance of reinfection there as well. So as covid continues to ripple through the human population and everyone has either had it or been vaccinated, shouldn’t there be over time a gradual decrease in new infections? Especially if young children are routinely vaccinated so there aren’t new unvaccinated reservoirs?
This of course presumes that we won’t see a new variant that can totally evade the vaccines, which could happen — this is why we don’t achieve herd immunity against colds and flu. But, as with flu, there is the possibility of adjusting vaccines to address that. It seems to me that this scenario is what medical professionals mean when they say covid will become endemic. The response to this is not to drop all efforts at prevention — you don’t intentionally expose yourself to flu because we can’t achieve herd immunity there,do you? You take your flu shot, stay away from sick people, wash your hands, etc. etc.
Old School
@trollhattan:
It’s just a stunt to promote his tour.
No update was provided on his truck.
VeniceRiley
BTW, one of my doctors in santa ana told me half of her customers are declining vaccine.
J R in WV
@Earl:
But your sentence at the bottom of the quote box, “Time to bow… and carry on.” That’s the very definition of “herd immunity” — what I think you should mean is everyone needs vaccinated soonest, which provides far more immunity that a case of the disease.
And more vaccinations if needed later on against Variety Zeta-52…
Fair Economist
@Another Scott: I think it’s possible the Democratic leadership plans to use the debt crisis to force SineManchin to reform the filibuster, if it comes to that. If it’s 10:30 on Sept. 30 and the Republicans are filibustering a debt increase I think they’d be very reluctant to risk economic disaster.
mrmoshpotato
@Ken:
I can guarantee you this is just “Not shouting the atrocious things.”
Fair Economist
@Earl: Dumping masks is an absurd response. Even if vaccines can’t produce full herd immunity, public health measures like masking will still reduce the proportion of the population that get infected, and the severity for those who get infected.
Quite possibly vaccination + masking may suffice to suppress broad transmission entirely and keep the disease rare, even if vaccination can’t all by itself. Layered defenses, as many others have said.
J R in WV
@VeniceRiley:
If I were that doctor, I would hand those patients their medical records chart and inform them that they need to find a new primary care physician, as I cannot treat patients unwilling to avoid a deadly plague. Fuck that noise!!
Roger Moore
@gvg:
Then tell the world about it so it’s obvious that A) the feds are helping and B) DeSantis isn’t.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
speaking of killing people, trump met with Ashli Babbitt’s mother and says he knows who “murdered” her
responsible news outlets should always mention, as Nicolle Wallace did not when she conveyed this news, that Ashli Babbitt was a Q-Anon psycho, and play ten or fifteen seconds of her shrieking-in-the-car video
Ruckus
@Kent:
Bingo!
Mike in Pasadena
Republicans are the friends of Covid.
Peale
@Earl: I think we can just kind of wait for a little while longer before we throw in the towel, thanks. Seriously, while there is growing data to support the idea that the vaccines are less effective with Delta, there isn’t evidence that they are completely ineffective either. Nor is there evidence that those who acquire immunity by actually catching have a better immune response than those who are vaccinated. If there is a variant that is more transmissible, deadlier, and efficiently evades the immune system that’s been acquired through past infection or vaccination, we’ll all be back to square one. If you want to see what a curve looks like in a country that had low acquired immunity, check out what Thailand is going through right now. That’s not what our curve is looking like. Our curve is pretty dismal, but it still bends favorably.
satby
Oh, absolutely! The Right-to-Life organization was very open before Roe that only educated white women would be interested in getting an abortion, and that would change the demographics in our country . I heard it from them at my Catholic nursing school right after Roe was decided too.
And the guns are always needed for protection against looters, just ask any gun nut. One of the first things they’ll say. And who do you think they think looters are, and where do looters come from? Urban areas. It’s all racial.
Another Scott
@Ken: It sounds to me like he’s going after the Broderite faction of the GQP, or maybe of the TV press, since the Broderite faction has maybe 3 members in today’s GQP….
It’s nonsensical.
“Support me while I remake my party to be more like me!”
and
“My party is part of partisan gridlock which is bad, we need more diversity of opinion and compromise!”
Meh.
It’s just mouth noises.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Sure. But it is not necessary for DeSantis to play dumb.
Another governor might say procedures are in place to get and deploy needed equipment as soon as possible.
But there’s something about his response here that suggests that he wants to be disengaged from the federal government.
“I don’t know what the feds are doing. I barely know what I am doing.”
Ruckus
@gvg:
My limited experience with vets my age (Vietnam era) is that the PTSD guys fall into one of two categories, want nothing to do with them or they are perfectly acceptable/necessary tool. Younger folks may be the same and as I say, this is a limited sampling but I’ve been in groups with both types and only once was there someone outside of Vietnam era vets.
I wonder if any one here has had much exposure to the younger female military who have combat experience and if so is there any difference between the male/female sides or if this is a geezer issue.
germy
scav
Even if we all will <scarequotes!!!>inevitably get COVID!!!!!</scarequotes> we’ll have a better outcome if we put on on big-boy masks and not catch it all at once. Intubation via kluged bicycle pump in a parking lot tent performed by an intern pulling a second or third shift probably isn’t geared to peak outcome.
Just Chuck
@Keith P.: Sometimes, guns are just a hobby. I’m all about mad gun restrictions and screening, permits, mandatory training and insurance, but I’ll also freely admit that guns are fun. There’s an atavistic thrill in blowing up melons, and they’re also cool mechanical gadgets that range from simple and elegant to complicated and gimmicky.
There used to be a lot of gun owners like that. Still are, but they are entirely drowned out by the right wing noise machine. And of course a good chunk of them still vote R just for the guns.
bluefoot
@Earl:
Not inevitable. If everyone took precautions, including masks, distancing and vaccination, then transmission would be VERY limited. And it’s possible the Delta strain would die out or be crowded out by another variant that’s less dangerous. Did you see the articles about how entire clades of the flu look to be gone because there was no transmission over the last year while everyone was masking and distancing?
And I’ll continue to mask to protect people who can’t get vaccinated or are immunocompromised.
germy
My experience was not dramatic at all. Sore arm for about one day with both pfizer shots. Some mild fatigue after the first shot. Nothing after the second.
Matt McIrvin
The all-or-nothing arguments are post-hoc justifications: they don’t want the vaccine because it’s established in their right-wing social circles that getting the vaccine makes you a bad and wrong kind of person, so they’ll use any justification that serves. If risk mitigation is in the service of a behavior they approve of, they’ll happily follow.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
Dad (WWII, Navy) had a hair-trigger temper as did several other neighborhood dads. We kids would swap stories and knew who to not tick off at all costs.
Of course PTSD was not a topic for consideration and they just lived their lives surrounded by people walking on eggs throughout. We could not know if being in the war was even a factor because there was nobody to compare notes with. “Dude, maybe your dad’s just a jerk.”
smith
@satby: They need their guns so that when the Civil War II that they’re jonesing for happens, they can FINALLY shoot Black people without consequences.
Just Chuck
@germy: Mild soreness on shot #1 typical of any injection. Moderate soreness on shot #2 but nothing a couple advil didn’t fix. Wiped out with fatigue for the day of shot #2, but just that day.
Ruckus
@Jeffro:
It depends on your version of positive or constructive.
Positive for us may be absolutely negative for a gun humper.
We are, for want of a better concept of government, desiring to limit damage to people and the environment as much as possible, they want the corporate side, to be able to make money in any way possible and often to be able to kill anyone they disagree with because they bother them.
Inclusive vs exclusive.
Martin
@Keith P.: The guns are part of the response to their fear. The denial of the complexity of the world are the rest, and the GOP enables and feeds both.
They don’t deny everything – they pick and choose based on what they can’t cope with.
VeniceRiley
@J R in WV: With hispanic immigrants- We have more work to do. It’s none of these willful ahole Repukes.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
This is absolutely correct. The goal is to get Reff well below 1, which is when infections start to drop rapidly. When it gets rare enough, it can be managed by testing, tracking, and tracing. When we talk about “herd immunity”, what we mean is that vaccination by itself is enough to get Reff to below 1. It’s possible* that Delta is so bad we can’t get there just by vaccination, but we can probably still get Reff below 1 by a combination of vaccination and public health measures like mask wearing. “The vaccine isn’t good enough by itself, might as well give up,” is the thinking of someone who has wanted to give up all along.
*I’m not convinced this is true. The mRNA vaccines we’ve been using in the US are stunningly effective, and given their measured effectiveness we can probably still reach herd immunity even with Delta’s higher R0. I suppose it’s possible that the AZ vaccine isn’t up to task, but Pfizer and Moderna very likely are.
Matt McIrvin
@Earl:
This still makes no sense, for reasons explained in “flatten the curve” discussions a year and a half ago before we had vaccines. Even if everyone is going to get Delta, the Boris Johnson v1.0 “bring it on” approach leads to health-care systems collapsing–mostly from the remaining unvaccinated getting very sick, but also from some smaller fraction of vaccinated getting very sick. Slow it down enough and we can deal. Slow it down and we also get better treatments and possibly better vaccines coming down the pike–the virus is not the only thing that can innovate.
Peale
@scav: Yep. There really is a failure to see the hospital as something we’d like to keep running and not be full up. We’re all better off if every space in the hospital isn’t a converted ICU bed.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Scott Brown may looking towards a rematch with Elizabeth Warren. She is not up for reelection until 2014, but it’s not too early to start doing the spadework. I expect Brown will be cautious with regards to trump, and may just pick up some IOUs for a while by supporting select Massachusetts candidates.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: Scott Brown briefly had a “sensible moderate” image but when he was running against Warren, he was where Donald Trump’s “Pocahontas” attack came from. I would expect him to go the balls-out insane route if he’s coming for another bite at the apple.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
I sat in a group once at the VA and was teamed up with a guy my age who was, IMHO, PTSD’d to the max. The task we were given was to sit and look at each other for 2 minutes without saying a word. I was ready to run after about 30 seconds, scariest dude I’ve ever been in the same room with. And I sat next to a guy in the hospital in 73, who was on maximum thorazine, had stolen an M16 and some ammo on I believe Okinawa on his way home, climbed up a hill and would shoot at anyone trying to come up and get him. (that was some serious PTSD) Many vets can get this way after enough combat, especially if they are in the thick of it and have/develop issues of trust and risk. We all have our breaking points, limits for different types of stress, combat being one of the most stressful activities that humans engage in. If you ever have a chance to experience it, I’d bet good money that you’d either want to kill everyone or no one. And I’ve only experienced it second hand, but under settings that the, in my case guys, didn’t know your actual experiences but were unusually willing to open up. I’m so very glad I didn’t have to experience this first hand. I can imagine, oh hell no, I really can’t.
There is a Netflix documentary about dealing with combat stress and the after effects called Resurface. I thought it was really, really good with the concept of PTSD, even though they didn’t mention it much. In my mind it’s well worth a watch.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: If Brown goes after Warren, he has until late 2023 to decide on his tactical approach. He can stick to platitudes until then. By 2024 Massachusetts Republicans may tolerate a moderate conservative candidate. It seems to have worked some for their governor, and I believe he is the only Republican to win a statewide election since Brown beat Martha Coakley.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
Appreciate that. Nobody, myself included, can project ourselves into a shooting war and have a clue of how we’d emerge. And “big” wars produce millions of folks who did it.
Having been around combat vets from every war, “police action” and in between from WWII to present day I have not encountered a single one who recommends the experience. To your point, some are deeply damaged humans.
Ken
Hmm… There are diseases and parasites (toxoplasmosis, ophiocordyceps) that take over the host and compel behavior that helps them spread. Even the common cold does this to a degree, by increasing coughing and sneezing. Are we sure there isn’t a COVID strain that causes some victims to start screaming “there’s nothing we can do, just get infected”?
Which admittedly is less dramatic than making them hang upside down from the ceiling until mushrooms burst out of their heads.
trollhattan
@Geminid: Are Mass Republicans in decline in the fashion of the Pacific states, or do they still find themselves being elected?
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: +1
The pandemic is less than 2 years old. We’re still learning about the virus and what it does to people. We still have little in the way of affordable effective treatments.
Going <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4″>Leeroy Jenkins</a> is no plan.
Cheers,
Scott.
Earl
@bluefoot: Yes, if we didn’t have substantial numbers of people refusing the vaccine, etc, things would be different. But we have the people we have, not the people we wish we had.
Any solution predicated on high percentage vaccination is nothing but magical thinking.
mrmoshpotato
Got a minute?
debbie
@West of the Rockies:
I would proffer members of my family. Not speaking to any of them because TFG, but one brother got the vaccine, has a gun but isn’t rabid about it, and is pro-choice. I’m not sure if the real lunatic brother got the vaccine, but I know he supports TFG and sneers at 1/6. I would be surprised if he wasn’t pro-choice.
My point being that these people can’t be pigeonholed.
Brachiator
@Earl:
This is your own conclusion, and not that of the people cited in the Business Insider story.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
One of the things that makes it so hard to understand is that it is a life and death struggle but on a repetitive basis. It beats upon you constantly for extended timeframes, in differing ways, and the risk is almost always set at maximum. And then you have to kill people. For most of us that is undeniably a hard thing to do, over and over.
I’ve been in an accident that could have very easily killed me and yet I walked away. When anyone asks me if I’ve ever been hit by a car, I answer, yes but I wasn’t in a vehicle and it was literally head on and by a truck. And while that was a bit stressful during, from my experience that I’ve heard from combat vets, that is far, far worse.
debbie
topclimber
@Geminid: A quick google search says Mass governor is limited to two terms. Current GOP gov Charles Baker will be replaced in 2022. Maybe Scott thinks he can be the guy. It seems to be Mass thing to elect Republican governors.
Another Scott
@debbie: Looks like FYWP hit us both. :-)
Leeroy Jenkins.
Thanks!
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Earl: But the “throw away your masks and let it rip” approach is also predicated on high-percentage vaccination, because it’s the only way we’d avoid catastrophic social effects of an unrestricted infection wave.
Right now, in most of Massachusetts, the effective R value is somewhere around 1.2 or 1.3, and that is basically all Delta, and is with frankly a lot of people not masking in public or doing much beyond getting vaccinated (if that). I don’t see any reason we couldn’t get it down below 1 with measures short of a draconian reordering of society. I suspect it’ll turn around by itself just from the remaining unvaxxed getting acquired immunity from infection.
Ksmiami
@Geminid: what I find funny about this is if the US government really comes for you, they’ll just drone you out of existence and your measly gun won’t do a thing
Matt McIrvin
@topclimber: But Baker tries very hard to play the sensible centrist whereas Scott Brown slid further and further toward a Trumpy red-meat appeal, especially when he ran for reelection. I doubt he’s the guy.
Ksmiami
@Matt McIrvin: the unvaccinated idiots will die, recover and potentially have long term medical costs that we shouldn’t pay for plus they will become a reservoir for new variants. I stick by my thesis that pandemics alter history, crush empires and like wildfire set the stage for innovation
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: The reports of subtle long-term damage to brain tissue from COVID infection have made me wonder if we’re heading toward something like the world posited by the lead-crime hypothesis, in which public behavior is driven by mass organic brain damage.
debbie
@Another Scott:
I’m still trying to figure out why I even tried! ?
Martin
140 people dying a day in Florida. And yet they keep inspecting condos.
WhatsMyNym
LA Times
rikyrah
Thom Bird, Democracy Worshipper (@ThomboyD) tweeted at 2:56 PM on Wed, Aug 11, 2021:
You know what I haven’t seen? Masses of Black citizens descending on school boards or lining the streets protesting mask wearing and vaccinations. This seems like a 99.9% whites-only movement.
(https://twitter.com/ThomboyD/status/1425546586629677061?s=03)
topclimber
@Matt McIrvin: You need to check your timeline. Brown was out of office in 2013, way before Trump. It is true he served in Trump’s administration, but that was as ambassador to New Zealand. I don’t think he has much TFG stink on him.
trollhattan
@WhatsMyNym:
Yeah, this fuckin’ guy. “Criminal justice professor” is going to get some justice rained on his head, and it won’t remotely compensate for what he’s done (presuming he did it, and the investigation details are damning to say the least).
debbie
@rikyrah:
The video clips of local protests that have been shown on local news have been pretty diverse.
Spanky
@trollhattan:
Hmmm. And at the same time Baud stepped back to take care of some things. Hmmmmmm…
Matt McIrvin
@topclimber: I’m saying he was a prototype for Trump. Particularly when it came to needling Warren over the “Native American” thing. He even had his own earlier version of the “covfefe” incident
I remember the dude in my town who hung a big banner on his house saying “VOTE FOR SCOTT BROWN – NOT AN INDIAN”. Total pre-MAGA vibes.
trollhattan
@Martin:
Has DeSantis suppressed Covid data reporting? Johns Hopkins daily and weekly data for Florida have a lot of gaps.
mrmoshpotato
@debbie:
Diversity in dumbassery?
WhatsMyNym
@trollhattan: The guy is just evil
zhena gogolia
@mrmoshpotato:
Lovely! Totally my mood.
topclimber
@Matt McIrvin: Your dude might have been the only one in MA to think “Pochahontas” was aimed at stirring up the anti-Indian vote, instead of a put-down of an elitist law professor who stretched the truth to help her career (the GOP take, not mine).
BTW, who else does the MA GOP have to run? I ask because I do know.
Bonnie
It’s too bad that too many Americans are too young to remember when there was no vaccine for polio. It seemingly took forever before we had the Salk vaccine. I think I was just finishing the ninth grade. But, until then, polio was the most scary thing we lived with then–along with the threat of nuclear war, of course
I worried some about how fast the covid-19 vaccine was created; but, the times and technology are very different from the 1950’s. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that if we can’t come up with a vaccine faster than in the 50s, all this technology and progress has been wasted. I hope they find a vaccine for children under 12 soon.
zhena gogolia
@Bonnie:
Remember all the TV shows with people in an iron lung?
The iron lung was my #2 fear. #1 — see Slim Pickens in a certain Stanley Kubrick film.
smith
@trollhattan: Florida switched to weekly reporting about 6 weeks ago. They report their numbers on Fri afternoon, so if you want to see the true state of the delta surge, wait until the DeSantis Death Spike hits the aggregate numbers on Sat.
Ruckus
@Bonnie:
I think they have the vaccines, same ones as we’ve taken but the dosage might be different.
When I took the polio vaccine it was a blue drop on a sugar cube, the Sabin vaccine. This was I believe 1955. A guy had a tray of sugar cubes and he was putting drops of blue liquid on them about as fast as we walked by and took one. A long line outside a bank, in the evening, after normal closing time. The whole famdamnly was there and got a sugar cube.
Matt McIrvin
@topclimber:
Ha ha no. That was what they said in polite company, but the dogwhistle was pretty obvious. It was an excuse for his fans to shock the libs with war whoops and tomahawks and have some fun.
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia: It’s also very danceable – even when wearing your mask!
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
I remember 2 of my friends moms had iron lungs in their front rooms-they wouldn’t fit anywhere else in their homes. A lot of my neighborhood at the time were new houses built in 1949, my family moved into the new, first house I grew up in while my mom was in the hospital having me and we would have had to put one in the living room as well, too big and long to get through the doors/hallway to get into any other room.
satby
@Ruckus: Our sugar cube line went around the park district parking lot, all the way from deep inside the building in the gymnasium. Hundreds of moms and dads with all their kids, back in the day when families were much bigger too.
sab
@Ruckus: A classmate of my SIL snuck back into the line to get a second cube, and got polio as a result, it being a live virus.
sab
@Ruckus: They were still doing the sugar cubes in 1964.
sab
@trollhattan: I jad a friend who was an Army brat whose dad and all of his brothers had been in the Normandy invasion. They all stayed in the Army for their whole careers. She said he was strict as hell and often scary, and never talked about the war at all. Her little brother enlisted and was killed on his second tour in Vietnam.
She said she never had a clue what made her dad tick until she saw Saving Private Ryan.
Ruckus
@sab:
Dad served in the Navy during WWII. I have some pictures of him in uniform but he would never discuss anything about the navy or the war. Even when I enlisted in the navy in 1969, he wouldn’t talk about it to me. This seemed pretty common among all my friends. The only adult that would talk about it at all was a neighbor in the 1950s, 3 doors away who had an artificial leg and worked as a clown. He’s likely the only reason I don’t hate clowns, I got to see the person with and without the makeup/clown outfit. He didn’t talk a lot but at least he would talk about his leg and that he lost it in the war. I have no memories of any other details. The concept of PTSD had seemingly never occurred to anyone at that time, it was added to the DSM in 1980, but the symptoms had been recognizable long before, it was thought to be weakness, rather than a disease. Since about 40-45 yrs ago the attitude has changed rather dramatically and treatment is actually understood now. No one really had any idea when I was in the navy hospital in 1973 and most of the patients were Marines with massive physical and mental wounds from Vietnam. At best treatment was thorazine, lots of thorazine and time. I didn’t think that was adequate.
burnspbesq
@J R in WV:
Santa Ana is heavily Hispanic, with a significant Samoan community. That number should surprise exactly no one. Minority communities have plenty of reason to distrust the healthcare-industrial complex.
Geminid
@trollhattan: I have no first hand knowledge of Massachusetts politics. I can tell that it is much more Democratic than Virginia. Biden carried Massachusetts by over 30%, and before that Clinton won by 27%. Biden carried Virginia by 10 points, and that was the Democrats’ best performance since LBJ in 1964.
Massachusetts has no Republican Congress members. I don’t think there are any now east of New York, and Republicans are starting to get scarce there (once they redistrict, Democrats in Albany might make Republican Representatives even scarcer next year).
Massachusetts Republicans must have some state and local elected officials, though. My guess is that they are like the Chamber of Commerce types who used to call the shots in the Virginia party. These have been eclipsed by a coalition of evangelical dominionists and tea party cranks who seem determined to drag the Virginia Republican party into the Dismal Swamp.
But I don’t think that the politicized evangelicals swing as much weight in Massachusetts. That’s a good thing for Republicans, because these nuts tend to repel some Republicans and even more independents. Even regular church goers don’t neccesarily want Baptist preachers running their state or nation.
James E Powell
@WhatsMyNym:
How about a Netflix series where they show how they figure out who started fires in national parks & forests?
Matt McIrvin
@sab: I had an oral polio vaccine in the 70s, but they didn’t give it on a sugar cube–I remember drinking a few drops of sweet liquid from a straw-like vial.