Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

This blog will pay for itself.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

The revolution will be supervised.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Facebook: Empowering Dumbshits Since 2004

Facebook: Empowering Dumbshits Since 2004

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We haven’t had a good Cletus Safari from a coastal media outlet lately, one that quasi-respectfully invades a diner and nods and listens sincerely to some Trumpets make mouth noises. But, good news everyone: with idiots spouting off loud and proud on Facebook, there’s no need to visit diners and inhale their COVID spew ever again. Let’s start with this fool:

Hope this Hail Merry is full of grace after his friend is full of sheep drench / horse deworming paste.

Now this one is better–it’s a “holistic” nurse practitioner in California, with her COVID protocol:

(CI02 is Chlorine Dioxide, a.k.a., bleach. NAC is N Acetyl Cysteine, used for Tylenol poisoning and supposedly as a cough suppressant.) Here’s another part of her extremely long Facebook post about (I think) her husband, who has a 50 year history of smoking.

His oxygen saturation would not rise above 83-87, even on 4 liters of O2 […] So I took him to the ER to be assessed and get hydrated. He tested positive for covid and they wanted to admit him.

At first we said no…we were more afraid of the insanity of big pharma system there and what mistakes they would make.

If that last line doesn’t make you laugh, then you probably don’t want to visit the HermanCainAward and Covidiots subreddits, where I got these screenshots.

You may think it’s a reflection of my black, black heart to point and laugh at the suffering of morons, but Jesus H Christ on a stick, after every authority figure in the country has tried to explain the benefit of a free, safe, incredibly effective vaccine, sympathy time is over. The mainstream media — who these people revile and would have strung up after they’re tarred and feathered — still treat these folks with respect, by which I mean they report their idiotic statements with a straight face. Lots of liberal commentators recommend kindness as the only answer, because if we ridicule them we may not be able to reach them later to get them to take the shot. I have a bit of a different, if less nuanced take: fuck that noise, bring on the mandates.

Anyway, tots and pears to these folks. Hope their GoFundMe appeals and prayer chains work out for them.

Reader Interactions

149Comments

  1. 1.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    s, but Jesus H Christ on a stick, after every authority figure in the country has tried to explain the benefit of a free, safe, incredibly effective vaccine, sympathy time is over.

    And they booed their own Lizard King himself when called on them to get vaccinated.

    There is something seriously wrong with these people’s thinking and stopped being cute a long time ago.

  4. 4.

    Baud

    We don’t need to be mean to be forceful, but I don’t mind being mean. The damage these people are causing isn’t only to themselves.

  7. 7.

    WereBear

    Lots of liberal commentators recommend kindness as the only answer, because if we ridicule them we may not be able to reach them later to get them to take the shot.

    You mean “commenters we hand-picked to pretend to be liberals but exist as ineffectual bleeding hearts our true Republican masters like to point at and laugh.”

    Corrected for accuracy.

  10. 10.

    tom

    And there is this:

    “I think it is time where God is separating the sheep from the goats….I’m a goat. Because I am not a sheep. I’m not doing what they tell me to do. I’m fighting against it (the vaccine).”

    In Alabama — the state with the lowest vaccination rate in the nation. w/@Sarah_Boxer

    https://twitter.com/donie/status/1429975129988214784

    Anyone with even a passing familiarity of the story of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 knows the goats are the one who refused to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or visit the sick and imprisoned, and went to hell because of that. The sheep did do those things and went to heaven.

    But knowing what Jesus was actually saying seems not to be a strong point among many evangelicals.

  12. 12.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    You may think it’s a reflection of my black, black heart to point and laugh at the suffering of morons, but Jesus H Christ on a stick, after every authority figure in the country has tried to explain the benefit of a free, safe, incredibly effective vaccine, sympathy time is over.

    I would cheerfully laugh at them if they weren’t variant farms. I don’t care about them. I don’t give a shit about Phil Valentine or anyone over the age of 18 who has refused the vaccine. I’m about to cancel, again, an already postponed trip to Europe in no small part because of people like this

    These people listened to Ron DeSantis and instead of getting that free and effective vaccine, they’re now in a line of cars with a two-hour wait for the very expensive regeneron therapy. Are my tax dollars subsidizing their irresponsible lifestyle choices?

    Brian Entin @BrianEntin
    Spent the afternoon at the Tropical Park, Miami Regeneron site. Saw an entire family with COVID – the mom and daughter so sick they could barely even make it to the door. There was a 2 hour wait and COVID patients were waiting in their cars. Some were laying down in the backseat.

  13. 13.

    Ken

    I see the nurse has fallen for both horse paste and the “brew your own HCQ from grapefruit” idiocy.  Next to that, the megadosing on vitamin C, D, and zinc looks almost normal.

    BTW that’s an expensive way to get more C, D, and zinc into the sewer system. The bacteria in your septic tank or municipal wastewater treatment facility thank you.  Do not however take megadoses of vitamin A.

  14. 14.

    Chat Noir

    I have a bit of a different, if less nuanced take: fuck that noise, bring on the mandates.

    I concur with this statement. ??

  16. 16.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Shared by a friend, and JAY-sus!

    “How can you go to church and pray when you’re wearing a mask? Do you think God can hear your prayers through a mask?”
    —- Televangelist Jim Bakker

  17. 17.

    dr. bloor

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    These people listened to Ron DeSantis and instead of getting that free and effective vaccine, they’re now in a line of cars with a two-hour wait for the very expensive regeneron therapy.

    Don’t forget the punchline–if they don’t die in the back seats of their cars, they’ll vote to re-elect him.

  18. 18.

    Ken

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: People that sick are not likely to benefit from the antibody therapy. Are the clinics doing assessments and turning away those who can’t be helped? Or has the state required them to treat everyone?

  19. 19.

    Punchy

    “….able to reach them….”?  Nope.  They’re steadfastly unreachable.  Jonestownian.

    Kudos to you, Mr. Lotsofnames blog poster guy, if you’ve just run out of sympathy recently.  That well went dry in May for me….Not only am I lacking sympathy, I’ve moved full-on to “fuck it, lets Darwin this country with this”.

  20. 20.

    satby

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Joke’s on them, if they’re that sick it’s likely too late for Regeneron to be effective. DeSantis needs to go to prison for mass murder when all his ties to that company are fully investigated and his refusal to institute covid safety measures are exposed as the disaster profiteering it is.

  21. 21.

    Eunicecycle

    @Ken: I was going to say the same thing. I hope they are sending these people to the ER, although I guess that’s not a good option in Florida. I think the treatment has to be given in the first 3 days of symptoms, while they are still mild. People who are that sick should not be given the expensive and limited supply of Regeneron.

  22. 22.

    Jeffro

    Ingesting bleach.

    Gulping hydroxychloroquine.

    Taking Regeneron.

    Consuming Ivermectin.

    Praying fervently.

    Refusing to wear a mask when indoors and around other people.

    All of this, as opposed to getting a simple shot (or two) and getting on with their lives.

    I really do think that the 27% have broken their brains somehow.  I don’t know if it’s prion disease, white anxiety overload, subliminal messages in social media, or terminal cases of Cleek’s Law, but they’re clearly insane.

    President Biden, won’t you please, please come out in favor of breathing?  Do it today and we’ll achieve herd immunity within 15 minutes.

  24. 24.

    Betty Cracker

    @satby: Yep. His Twitter feed is one long monoclonal antibodies informercial. Not one goddamn mention of the free (to recipients) and effective vaccines that would prevent infection in the first place, even though millions of eligible Floridians are unvaccinated.

  25. 25.

    sab

    @SiubhanDuinne:Yiles.  I just had a fully masked ( all of us) annnual doctor visit. My doctor and her staff could hear me through the mask,so I expect God wouldn’t have a problem.

  26. 26.

    geg6

    @Ken:

    Since Deathsantis apparently owns a chunk of the Regeneron business, I’m guessing they are happy to extend useless treatments to the rubes.

  28. 28.

    Roger Moore

    @tom:

    But knowing what Jesus was actually saying seems not to be a strong point among many evangelicals.

    They think the words in red in their Bibles are marked that way to show they’re optional.

  30. 30.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @sab: I actually had some trouble ordering take-out with a mask on the other day. The guy couldn’t hear me. I had to repeat myself while projecting my voice a little more. I finally understood what repressed peoples throughout history have gone through. I am become Spartacus. I shall now post here under the name of Nathan Hale.

    I came straight home to order a musket and tricorner hat from Amazon Prime, but I saw some funny memes on twitter and got distracted. Also had to eat my schwarma.

  31. 31.

    Ken

    @geg6: Are my increasing insurance premiums paying for these assholes?

    Yes, although that’s going to decrease now that most insurers are no longer picking up the whole tab for COVID treatment. The patients will be back on the hook for the copays and deductibles, and may run into coverage limits.

    Also it seems likely to me that a fair number of unvaccinated people will have also fallen for scam insurance policies, so will be on the hook for the whole cost of treatment.

  32. 32.

    Anthony

    One thing that encourages a lot of this nonsense is that 98% of COVID patients survive, so if you treat them with newt’s eye and spider webs, you’ll still be batting well over the Mendoza Line.

  34. 34.

    Damien

    Those two subreddits are among my favorites. Stupid, awful people making stupid, awful decisions and paying for it with their stupid, awful lives has become better than my morning coffee.

  35. 35.

    The Moar You Know

    You may think it’s a reflection of my black, black heart to point and laugh at the suffering of morons

    I can’t do it but you go right ahead.  These people are beyond help, and should not be helped!  Someone yesterday in one of the threads said that vaccination status should be part of triage for maxed-out emergency rooms.  I completely agree.

    It’s unfortunate that most of them have reproduced

    ETA:  HCQ was a cruel joke but at least wouldn’t cause much overt harm.  Ivermectin, at equine doses, will.

  36. 36.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Baud:

     

    FWIW, there’s no indication that his friend Dennis Meiser isn’t a horse.

    I am curious, is Ivermectin effective for jackasses also too? What about ponies? I have been wishing for a lot of those lately so having some medication for them is useful.

  37. 37.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    Look, these people infuriate me. I am really mad about their refusal to get vaccinated or take it seriously until it hospitalizes or kills someone they know. That being said, I am forceful about the facts, but not mean. I can’t let these people turn me into an assh*le, like they are.

  38. 38.

    geg6

    @Ken:

    Good.  As it should be.

    I have zero compassion for these assholes.  I hope they all die and I hope they do it soon.

  39. 39.

    lollipopguild

    @tom: Wheat/chaff. The wheat gets harvested and the chaff is burned. Maybe she would like to be chaff instead.

  41. 41.

    prostratedragon

    “Regimin” up top sounds like a phase of ritual self-mummification. After a few days they can leave him alone with just a little bell to ring,  while he can.

  44. 44.

    dmsilev

    “Hydroxychloroquine is grapefruit!” is a new one to me. I am impressed with the reappearance of colloidal silver as a cure-all; at least the covidiots will be easily identifiable by the lovely blue tint of their skins.

  45. 45.

    Just James

    Every analogy breaks down somewhere, but I can’t help but think about the football reference. Now that it’s fourth and goal and they’re going for the stupid trick play Hail Mary, they seem to have forgotten that they’ve spent the last three plays taking a knee to waste time. .

  46. 46.

    HeleninEire

    Black heart? Nah. I am loving the Herman Cain reddit. It’s one of the last things I read before falling off to sleep every night.

  47. 47.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Baud: It’s not really mean to point out the truth to COVIDIOTS.  I do feel sorry for their children whose lives they are damaging with their anti-science nonsense.

  50. 50.

    Roger Moore

    @Anthony:

    One thing that encourages a lot of this nonsense is that 98% of COVID patients survive, so if you treat them with newt’s eye and spider webs, you’ll still be batting well over the Mendoza Line.

    It’s true that 98% or 99% of COVID patients live, but that includes all the people who test positive but never develop symptoms.  Once they go to the hospital, which is where a lot of this nonsense is happening, their chances are quite a bit worse.

    Of course this highlights the second cognitive bias: there’s an assumption that if the patient survives it’s because of the treatment, while if they die it’s because of COVID.  As long as you limit your view to anecdotes- we treated this patient and they lived, we didn’t treat that patient and they died- you’ll only confirm your theory.  That’s why randomized trials and statistics are so important; they let you do an unbiased comparison.

  52. 52.

    Fair Economist

    @Jeffro: Do you remember when we joked Obama should say “don’t drink bleach” because then they’d start? And here we are. It turned out not to be a joke after all.

  53. 53.

    waspuppet

    I’m fully in the “If you didn’t trust what the doctors said would protect you from COVID-19, don’t go running to them after you get it” camp. “Treat” yourself at home. If you do that, then sure — good luck and I hope you “recover” (which of course actually means you didn’t have a very bad case in the first place).

     

    That’s all the goodwill I can muster.

  54. 54.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Oh that’s special, apparently the latest Wingnut mem is “men are the only ones qualified to talk about war because we have to register for the draft”  translated “I am a real warrior because was the slight chance I might have been conscripted, but now I am over 55” how much for Lazy, Entitled, White American can one get?

  55. 55.

    cain

    I find it crazy that they would do all these damn remedies instead of science based vaccines. I just can’t understand it.

    But are spending an inordinate amount of time on these people. Vaccines need to be mandated now and they need to tow the line.

    As for the ER – they need to triage based on vaccination status – it should be clearly communicated to the community that if you’re not vaccinated that there won’t be any time spent on you due to lack of labor. We are exhausting our medical folks.

  57. 57.

    Brachiator

    Now this one is better–it’s a “holistic” nurse practitioner in California, with her COVID protocol

    Jeezus! Inevitably, some of these people will recover. They would have without any snake oil at all. Others will die at home.

    But damn, $600 for a useless “remedy.”

    Unfortunately, this alternative medicine nonsense has a long history in America and elsewhere. I wonder what percentage of the population is into this. This is a wildcard that is going to make recovery from the pandemic difficult.

    The mainstream media — who these people revile and would have strung up after they’re tarred and feathered — still treat these folks with respect, by which I mean they report their idiotic statements with a straight face.

    This is a false argument. You are confusing journalism with snark. Most stories I see emphasize how wrong these people are. But it is up to me to provide the judgment and mockery, not a reporter.

  59. 59.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: better than your tax dollars supporting dragqueen story time in the children’s section* of the local public library

    *greatest scourge on literate children since carl monday caught mike cooper redhanded

  61. 61.

    Taken4Granite

    @Roger Moore: They think the words in red in their Bibles are marked that way to show they’re optional.

    I always thought it was because they thought those words were erroneous. That’s what red pens are for, right?

  62. 62.

    Roger Moore

    @cain:

    But are spending an inordinate amount of time on these people.

    I think that’s what they’re really after more than anything.  They want all the attention to be on them and their issues.  We must not focus on anyone else.

  63. 63.

    Another Scott

    The House is close to coming to an arrangement for how to proceed on the “bipartisan” $1.xT infrastructure bill and the $3.5T reconciliation bill.  Apparently they’ll be back in session around noon to start the debates.  It could be a very interesting day in the House.

    https://www.c-span.org/

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  66. 66.

    PsiFighter37

    To be fair, Facebook was pretty benign when it was limited to just college students. It’s when they threw open the doors to everyone in 2008 or 2009 that things invariably got to where they are now.

  67. 67.

    Kay

    @Another Scott:

    Oh, I’m glad. I saw the Chamber of Commerce are running ads supporting the “moderates” – yuck.
    Dishonest as usual. They make it an either/or for infrastructure.

  69. 69.

    Brachiator

    @The Moar You Know:

    Someone yesterday in one of the threads said that vaccination status should be part of triage for maxed-out emergency rooms.  I completely agree.

    People will simply lie, even to the point of providing fake vaccination cards.

  72. 72.

    sdhays

    @satby: Our Supreme Court has helpfully ruled that corruption of elected officials is very Constitutional, so I assume “corruption leading to mass death” is also very Constitutional.

  74. 74.

    VeniceRiley

    Just found out last night a HS friend who is a sane nurse, fully vaccinated, is one of the hen’s teeth in hospital with covid. She is being treated with oxygen and steroids. I hope she bounces back quickly, so she can tell her success story.

  75. 75.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    OT: listening to a Pentagon press conference about the evacuations of Kabul, and the tone of righteous indignation from CNN’s Barbara Starr about them not having hard numbers of American and Afghan evacuees is just strange to me. It’s a fluid and difficult situation, the’ve already disproven the CNN CW of a week ago.

    I have generally good memories of Barbara Starr from when I watched more CNN, so I don’t want to blame her for all the past coverage of these misadventures, but I keep thinking back to coverage of Bush when he was redirecting military efforts to Iraq: The Annie Liebovitz picture (The Vulcans!, wasn’t it?), the Mission Accomplished, the statue coming down…. Didn’t we have Afghan allies and interpreters in 2003?

  76. 76.

    Ninerdave

    I don’t get posts like this. What’s the point of dancing around someone’s grave or ICU bed and pointing and laughing.

    It’s not like these people are thought leaders or have huge megaphones, in fact they’ve probably never had an original thought in their lives and have just spend time spewing what they heard from right wing media. They only damage they’ve done is to their own families and communities. What happens in Lake Ozark has no bearing on your life. These people have no bearing on your life.

    I’m not saying you should feel sorry for them, I don’t, I don’t care what happens to them frankly, but if pointing and laughing at the misery of some random schmoe makes you feel better, you really should be looking inward. Seems to me that makes you a pretty shit person.

  77. 77.

    Another Scott

    Meh.

    Punching down isn’t helping and isn’t going to help.

    The people we should be going after are the people pushing this nonsense – Fox, OAN, Zuckerberg, the Q zombies, and the leadership in the GQP.

    Very few of us really understand the disease, the treatments, the vaccines.  We trust people to tell us what to do.  Those people who take up the mantle of trust have responsibilities to tell the truth.  Politicians have responsibilities to make people understand the truth and how they should act.

    The small town mayors and preachers and radio people aren’t the ones creating the  disinformation.    They’re just doing what their team has decided to do.  They’re victims as much as the other people at the end of the puke funnel.

    Mandates, yes.  Masking, yes.  Vaccinators everywhere, yes.  New treatments, yes.  Paying people and giving them paid time off, yes.  We need to do it all, and feeding the Us vs Them political battles doesn’t help us get to where we want and need to be.  “You can’t reason someone out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into…”

    tl;dr – I get it.  We shouldn’t be here and stupidity is killing people.  But don’t punch down – it’s counter-productive.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  78. 78.

    Kathleen

    @Jeffro: I’m old enough to remember how we joked that we wanted Obama to warn the country about dangers of drinking bleach so Rethugs would drink bleach in defiance. Such innocent times

  79. 79.

    Brachiator

    @MattF:

    Also, their behavior is putting herd immunity out of reach

    Herd immunity was never a certainty, and the behavior of the Delta variant complicates things even more than anti vaxxer stupidity.

  81. 81.

    rikyrah

    @satby:

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Joke’s on them, if they’re that sick it’s likely too late for Regeneron to be effective. DeSantis needs to go to prison for mass murder when all his ties to that company are fully investigated and his refusal to institute covid safety measures are exposed as the disaster profiteering it is.

    TELL IT

    TELL IT

    TELL IT

  82. 82.

    Kathleen

    @geg6: So refreshing to see national media pursuing this story with the same fervor they employed to hammer Biden for visiting grandchildren on the weekends..oh, wait.

  84. 84.

    PsiFighter37

    @germy: No, I think that was what Zuckerberg was brainstorming before he started FB. Having been one of the early users (I signed up in 2004 once I had my college email; at the time, only a select group of colleges were included), I found that most of the site was pretty innocuous. But it’s hard to monetize such a small base of users, which is why I imagine it got scaled to the entire planet.

  85. 85.

    sdhays

    @Another Scott: Was it in the COVID post this morning that the most shared link on Facebook was about vaccine lies?

    Zuckerberg could stop that within minutes. He chooses not to because it drives clicks and thus his revenue. He’s a monster.

  86. 86.

    Doug R

    @Punchy: Even in Jonestown, there were a significant number who didn’t want to take the Flavor-aid; that’s what the machine guns were for.

  87. 87.

    Brachiator

    @Another Scott:

    The small town mayors and preachers and radio people aren’t the ones creating the  disinformation.

    Often they absolutely are the ones creating the disinformation, and they are happy to spread it around.

    Mandates, yes.  Masking, yes.  Vaccinators everywhere, yes.  New treatments, yes.  Paying people and giving them paid time off, yes.

    I like how you slipped some socialism into the situation. I agree, but how likely is it to become part of the protocol?

    We need to consider paying people who become ill and lose work, people who have to go into quarantine, and people who have to take off work to take care of children, parents or other family members.

  88. 88.

    Kay

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    They’re now at the part of the cycle where they have to justify their past coverage. They can’t change course- that would entail examining what they did 72 hours ago and that ain’t gonna happen.

    It’s a “debacle”. Catastrophic. They all said it. Everything from here on out will go towards proving that. They’re in too far to get out now, without a loss of face. Just brazen it out.

  89. 89.

    Kay

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Apparently some or a lot of (civilian) Americans register that they’re in the country but they don’t de-list when they leave. But we’ve all collectively decided that any decisions Americans made in Afghanistan are wholly the responsibility of one “Joe Biden” so that’s that.

  90. 90.

    Mike in NC

    Facebook was fun for a few months. I created an account circa 2012 and uploaded pictures of my family, dad in the South Pacific in WW2, our foreign vacation spots, etc. Then I kept getting emails telling me to check out the latest shit my neighbors were doing with their Facebook accounts, like what they ate for lunch and pictures of the newest grandchild. That crap got old very fast and I finally deleted Facebook in the Age of Trumpism. Zuckerberg should rot in hell.

  91. 91.

    JAM

    Couldn’t a nurse practitioner get sued by someone who tried this nonsense cure? Especially if she is actually prescribing it to her patients?

  95. 95.

    mrmoshpotato

    I doubt I’m the first to say, but I got some comments for this horse’s ass of a mayor!

  96. 96.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Ksmiami: As other have pointed out these dimwit plague rats endanger the immune compromised who the vaccine can’t help.  The anti vaccers richly deserve all the scorn heaped on them.

  98. 98.

    mrmoshpotato

    Anyway, tots and pears to these folks.

    No.  Give those shredded spuds and fruit to people who actually want to care for their bodies with, ya know, actual medicine.

  100. 100.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Ninerdave: Yes is does, the longer the virus circulates the better the chance it mutates again. And I don’t accept these people are sleeple innocently doing what their betters tell them. The fact that they booed Trump shows that this their choice, that they only follow Trump as long as he is saying what they want to hear.

  101. 101.

    Searcher

    @PsiFighter37: For a span Facebook was basically “a better phone book” — it was a phone book that had the people you actually knew, no matter where they lived, instead of just the people physically closest to you.

    I’m sad it’s turned into “a series of tubes through which misinformation and agitprop is pushed” rather than “the identity service of the internet”.

    The latter would be legitimately useful; while anonymity has its place on the internet, it would be really, really useful if there were an authoritative way to say “person X on the internet is person X in the real world”.

  103. 103.

    Mike in NC

    As a country, we will deserve to elect Ron DeathSantis / J D Vance in 2024. They will run on a platform of drinking bleach-flavored Gatorade and standing our ground against mask wearers.

  105. 105.

    Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)

    Yeah, I saw a post this morning on Facebook from some fucking nurse who was wailing about how it was her right not to get the shot, and now the mean, mean hospital is going to fire her if she doesn’t come around by the end of the year.

    Fuck her. Yes. Yes, yes, a hundred times yes, she does indeed have the right to choose to not take the shot. And then she gets to deal with the consequences. That’s life.

    It’s like going on about how you have the right to take a walk over the edge of a cliff, and then when you do that, whining about how deeply unfair it is that you now have two broken fucking legs to deal with.

    Fuck these people. Laugh at them. Laugh, point, mock, who gives a shit? They’re unreachable. But maybe those around them who still are barely reachable might see that, and then decide they’d rather take the shot than come in for all that ridicule. Or, you know, die.

    To quote the very people whose tender sensibilities we’re now told we have to cater to, fuck their feelings.

  107. 107.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Ninerdave:

    These people have no bearing on your life.

    Untrue. Their actions have direct bearing on everyone else’s lives. That’s how communicable diseases work, especially ones like Covid. If the disease was a more efficient killer, then, yeah, the covidiots would have less impact. If the antivaxxers died quickly enough, they couldn’t pass along the disease appreciably. But as it is, they linger long enough to keep the case numbers up.

    But that’s all an aside. Shitting on these people is a viable strategy towards a couple of goals. First, the more sympathy they lose and the more people are willing to assign to them the blame they richly deserve, the faster it is that decision makers will enact mandates. Second, the more it is highlighted that antivaxxers are dying, and that their deaths are being “touted” as evidence of what abject losers they are, the less people will be willing to emulate them. Finally, shitting on these people highlights that they are soaking up healthcare resources. Their asinine decisions are making life horrible for doctors/nurses/others and are making it impossible for the rest of us to get treated. This aspect of shitting on them increases the probability that the healthcare decision makers will move to triage based on vaccination status.

  108. 108.

    Another Scott

    @Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):

    2020NurseandMidwife.org:

    There were 4,096,607 registered nurses (RNs) and 920,655 licensed practical nurses/licensed vocational nurses (LPN/LVNs) in the United States as of October 2019 (NCSBN, 2020).

    It would be surprising if there were not a few kooks among nearly 5M people…

    Every distribution has long tails. We shouldn’t let long tails dominate our responses.

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  109. 109.

    Mike R

    @Jeffro: Only one problem, we had a child who held his breath till he passed out.  Of course we would panic, Dr told us not to worry as soon as he passed he would start breathing again and he did.  Of course Biden could tell people to breath and not stand near deep drop offs.

  110. 110.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    And they booed their own Lizard King himself when called on them to get vaccinated. 

    Does anyone know what scared the orange shitstain so much that he’s now bellowing for his cult to get vaccinated (for a “hoax”)?

  114. 114.

    gvg

    @Another Scott: ​
     Nurses who push quack medicine or who are antivax should not be nurses. I am skeptical though that a real nurse practitioner is saying this stuff. It’s not impossible, but she is a liar and kook and I think she might just be lying about that.

  115. 115.

    different-church-lady

    @Jeffro:

    I really do think that the 27% 40% have broken their brains somehow.

    Trump turned it into growth industry.

  118. 118.

    Bluegirlfromwyo

    @SiubhanDuinne: If God knew you in the womb (which evangelicals say happens because of some verse in Matthew), she sure enough can hear prayers through a mask.

  119. 119.

    different-church-lady

    @cain:

    I find it crazy that they would do all these damn remedies instead of science based vaccines.

    Well there’s your problem right there.

  120. 120.

    Nutmeg again

    Creeping Christ on a Pogo Stick!  I mean, really.  I just can’t with these people.  I am so angry they are sucking up medical resources, and yet … there is no cure, or even vaccine for stupid.

  121. 121.

    different-church-lady

    @NotMax: It’s kind of amazing that East Germany had to coerce people to spy on each other’s every move, and here we are 30 years after the wall came down and we’re all just volunteering the same level of surveillance.

  122. 122.

    Gravenstone

    @Ken:  Excess vitamin D isn’t great either, unless you’re a big fan of kidney stones due to calcium build up.

  123. 123.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Ksmiami:

    apparently after the fact his inner medical circle admitted he was very very sick with Covid at Walter Reed… 

    Yeah, but that was months ago.  Dump having this “epiphany” now is just strange.

  127. 127.

    different-church-lady

    @Chief Oshkosh:

    That’s how communicable diseases work

    And then, additionally, when you remember the analogy baked into the term “viral media”, you have an excellent additional point as to why these folks are not benign. A metaphorical virus has become a major pathway for a literal virus, and these people are spreading both kinds.

  130. 130.

    JaneE

    I expect if Fox or OAN suggested 10 grams of cyanide to prevent Covid-19, there would be a few who would actually take it.

  131. 131.

    Doc Sardonic

    Interesting items from my corner of COVIDIA formerly Florida. The city of Winter Park and Orlando Utilities Commission are requesting residents to conserve water due to a shortage of liquid oxygen for water treatment, as they are getting smaller deliveries due to hospital needs. Disney has reached an agreement with their union employees on mandatory vaccines by October 22 or they will be terminated eligible for rehire after they are vaccinated. So looks like the vaccine mandates will be coming down now and increase as Moderna and J&J get approved.

  132. 132.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @CliosFanBoy: Yes, I was in the first year of the new Draft Registration and it was BFD, there isn’t going to be another one.

    Also, my family’s service of choice is the Marines and that’s all volunteer.

  133. 133.

    Gravenstone

    @Doc Sardonic: I saw that and my first question was, why liquid O2? I mean, ozone generators aren’t that hard to come by, and it’s a very effective treatment. Although the energy costs might be an issue on essentially industrial scales.

  134. 134.

    Brachiator

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    And I don’t accept these people are sleeple innocently doing what their betters tell them. The fact that they booed Trump shows that this their choice, that they only follow Trump as long as he is saying what they want to hear.

    Bingo! Trump succeeded because he was exactly as angry and as stupid as his supporters. But now that they have been stirred up, they are not so easy to control or to satisfy.

  136. 136.

    HarlequinGnoll

    1. Amused the nurse mentions putting a few drops of bleach in a few gallons of water.  I “might” do that…if I was camping and was so dehydrated I couldn’t wait to boil the water.
  137. 137.

    Ksmiami

    @Ninerdave: they are needlessly causing the pandemic to keep going; their choices will most likely create more variants and they are taking hospital beds away from other sick and injured people. Public Health affects everyone so now if the miscreants die, I just pray for expedience

  138. 138.

    Snarki, child of Loki

    Bleach is Sodium hypochlorite, NOT Chlorine dioxide. And I’ve heard that smallish doses of sodium hypochlorite is not considered ‘toxic’, although the death of your intestinal bacteria will make your next few days ‘interesting’.

    Chlorine dioxide is closer chemically to the infamous FOOF (two fluorines, two oxygens, eats up EVERYTHING in its path; recommended safety equipment for FOOF: good running shoes).

     

    So go ahead MAGAts, earn that Darwin Award in honor of Trump.

  139. 139.

    Noskilz

    @Jeffro: 

    If PSTD is caused by feeling one is never safe, that one is in danger at all times, I’ve long wondered if Fox News and the rest of the right-wing propaganda machine haven’t succeeded in creating millions people suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Fear of almost everything at all times is their business model, and their customer base seems to have wholeheartedly bought into it, to the point where if Fox tries to dial it back a bit, they accuse Fox of selling out and switch to Newsmax or OANN.

  141. 141.

    Gravenstone

    @HarlequinGnoll: Back of the envelope estimate (5 drops bleach in 5 gallons water) would be ca. 135 ppm bleach solution. Bleach itself is ca. 5 wt% sodium hypochlorite, so divide the 135 by 20 you get roughly 7 ppm hypochlorite in water. Barely worth considering and certainly not toxic.

  142. 142.

    Richard Grant

    Just too many people out there with dual citizenship:  American and Batshit American.

  144. 144.

    Doc Sardonic

    @Noskilz: Seems to me it is not just FOXNoise, they are just the worst offender. CNN, MSNBC, and the local news stations all follow the same basic 3 part reporting format.
    Part 1: Here’s what happening/going wrong.

    Part2: This is why this should scare you.

    Part 3: This is the Politician/Person/Group or Corporate entity you should be angry with and direct your anger to accordingly.

    Adding the fact that any given emotion can become a state of being, especially the powerful ones such as love and anger, those hooked on rage need even stronger sources to fuel it and are willing to engage in the willful suspension of disbelief to maintain that high. Unfortunately, there is always someone willing enough to provide a source and profit off of it.

  145. 145.

    hotshoe

    Since we have had a few mentions of black hearts in this thread:

    BLACK HEART by Calexico

    on u-tube, official recorded version :)

     

    … Sifting through the remains
    One man’s close pursuit is another man’s
    Last chance, make it through the divide
    Last chance, suffer the weight or get buried by this
    Black heart, sweeping over the land
    Black heart, crawling its way
    To the four corners of the world

  146. 146.

    Ramalama

    Ain’t going to lie. I belong to a Covid Survivors Group on Facebook. Some of the posts helped me immensely, when the beleaguered nurse on the other end of the phone delivered the bad news to me, saying to not call 911 if I needed to go to the hospital but rather 811 instead, and to take Tylenol not Aspirin for any pain, and good bye good luck.

    There were three posts in particular that had golden info that I think helped my spouse and me turn the corner. We had mild cases. But were still ill enough.

    I never followed the chats about the alternative meds. I just didn’t bother. A friend with long haul told me not to bother with the nuts. So I didn’t. I posted when people had questions about stuff I had direct experience of. I thought I was giving back.

    Then I noticed two people in particular posting images of their devastated bodies during hospital stays thanks to Covid. And how they finally turned a corner, and …. are now not getting vaccinated because their bodies have learned how to attack the virus… and then one of the mods of the group started ballyhooing the vaccines saying he had done all of the research. I asked him if any of the research was peer-reviewed. Or if he’d spent at least a couple of years doing research or if this was just a recent expedition into footnotes, and I realized like a dumb ass that … they were now in the house.

    For the record I know that even simple vitamins and supplements that are natural can still kill you or at least counteract medication.

    There’s a problem with the knowledge gap caused by a novel virus. All medical and science people needed to get up to speed with stuff (like taking melatonin might help you ward off Corona virus), and that the research to follow would follow months and years and decades later. Meanwhile people had symptoms and virtually everything was anecdotal. And facebook filled that gap like the mutant that it is.

  147. 147.

    J R in WV

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    Also, my family’s service of choice is the Marines and that’s all volunteer.

    It is now… it was not when I was about to be drafted in 1970. Dream on. I enlisted in the USN to avoid the chance of being a Marine in Viet Nam swamps… the Marines had the highest fatality rate IIRC.

  149. 149.

    RevRick

    @tom: It sends my Yankee Puritan soul into paroxysms of rage that Evangelicals are given even one ounce of moral authority. They are, after all, the literal and spiritual descendants of the churches that vociferously defended slavery, enthusiastically supported secession, provided the votes for Jim Crow governments, and opposed every effort to include African Americans into full citizenship.

    Those blasphemers make a big deal about repentance, but have never repented of their complete complicity in slavery and Jim Crow.

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