Paul Campos dips his toe in the Herman Cain Awards and makes a smart observation:
(3) The whole key to understanding the anti-vax pro-horse dewormer mentality is that it’s not just this one thing for these people. Admitting that they’ve been wrong about this isn’t like admitting you were wrong about thinking that Willie Mays hit 700 home runs or that Detroit is the capital of Michigan. To admit you were wrong about this thing in particular would be to pull on a thread that could unravel your entire social and political identity. For those in the right wing bubble/base, admitting error on this point basically requires a literal conversion experience. It would be like a former Christian fundamentalist coming to the view that the Bible isn’t actually the inerrant word of God. In other words, that’s not just some random fact, but THE fact, that holds every other part of the person’s world view together.
I have a prediction. With 40,000 kids out of school in Texas due to COVID shutdowns, and one in three COVID cases in Florida being a kid under 19, the next act in this play will be “fuck it, we’ll just keep the schools open”. Thinking that you are immune from electoral consequences as long as you keep the faith with your idiot supporters is a helluva drug, and DeathSantis and Abbott are definitely high on their own supply. The main risk they’re facing, and I’m not kidding here, is that they will kill off too many Republican voters.
Cermet
They know full well that the death toll by Covid is insignificant compared to voter margins; also, this will further polarize their voting block and bring in new voters who are motivated. Their approach is win/win for them; they also know that some of the deaths are democratic voters. Power is all that matter to these ghouls.
brendancalling
“ The main risk they’re facing, and I’m not kidding here, is that they will kill off too many Republican voters.”
So what?
That’s what the GOP says about women’s rights, black lives, poor people lives, children, workers’ rights, voting rights, and global warming.
So. Fucking. What?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I don’t know if they’ll kill off too many Republican voters in TX, and FL…well every election cycle it seems within reach but never is so I’m not optimistic there either. But, some swing States – WI, MI, PA, NC…the right wing jokes about it being 1% fatal (which is probably an underestimate) like that’s no big deal, but if deaths from here on out are basically all R voters and they lose 1% of their voting base in swing States, well, those States become significantly less swing-y.
tokyokie
Excuse me, but if we’re going to use “DeathSantis,” shouldn’t we also employ “Abbottoir”?
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Cermet: I’m totally serious. DeSantis won by 32,000 votes. They are at 46,000 deaths. The R vs D spread on death in Florida on this last bunch has to be pretty heavily weighted R. He might will kill off his margin of victory. That said, I think they regularly import a new crop of idiots so those numbers might not mean that much.
Another Scott
Meh. People change their minds, or decide things are not important, all the time. Motorola flip phones were the thing to get, until they weren’t. People were against changing the state flag, until they weren’t. People marched for Susan G. Komen, until they didn’t.
Eventually nobody much going to care about horse dewormers or vaccines. Helping to turn down the heat will help that day come.
Cheers,
Scott.
Citizen Alan
Well, I finally got out of Facebook jail and then immediately got put in Twitter jail for a week because I let myself get triggered by some asshole in response to a post about Michelle Obama. I’m sure you can guess what the filthy SOB said about her.
In happier news, I spent Labor Day at the MoMA and then the US Open. So that’s 2 things off my New York bucket list.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I was just reading this story about “first responders”– cops and firemen mostly, I expect– who are refusing the vaccine. This is a firefighter from San Francisco:
He’s turned his stupidity into, in his own half a brain, a virtue. In his own mind, he’s Spartacus, Nathan Hale and Sir Thomas More rolled into one– I’d be the farm– trumpy moron.
Ann Marie
I think work mandates (and mandates for other activities) will make a difference. My office has been letting small numbers of people come into the office but mainly work from home. Not we are planning to reopen in full this October and everyone is required to be vaccinated. There are medical and (sigh) religious exemptions, but I just learned today that one of my colleagues is getting her second shot today. I strongly suspect that work is the reason.
Jeffery
I am hopeful that DeSantis and Abbott do kill off enough of their base to swing their reelection to the democratic candidate despite all the Gerrymandering they’ve done.
MattF
I’m wary of the ‘COVID will kill off the R voters’ notion. R voters are clustered together and classical cognitive dissonance only strengthens beliefs, so the clustering will stay constant or increase over time. I think functional schools are more of an issue– killing off teachers and forcing kids to stay home is something everyone in suburbia will notice.
oldster
There’s a great exchange in the Tim Robinson + Bob Odenkirk sketch, where Odenkirk has helped out Robinson by agreeing to a lie that Robinson told his kid. Then Odenkirk keeps piling on lies of his own making, like claiming to have three of every classic car, and when Robinson balks, he says, “if I don’t have triples, then the other stuffs not true.” And Robinson is stuck — he has to support the bigger lie, because he does not want to give up the smaller lie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Inf1Yz_fgk
It’s an amazing sketch on its own terms — hilarious and heartbreaking — and that exchange is a great example of Campos’ point.
Another Scott
On the larger point, turnout matters much more than just about anything. The GQP killing people is obviously bad independent of the effect on voting numbers. I don’t think that they’ve done calculations of how many voters they can lose to the morgue, but they have done the calculations on how continuing to drive “engagement” drives their primary voters and that’s what matters to them above all. So, don’t expect much of anything to change on that score.
We have to keep doing what we’re doing and fight for every vote. Eyes on the prizes.
Cheers,
Scott.
taumaturgo
@Another Scott: Really Scott? Do you believe that one more election that is predetermined by oligarchs that have set rules for the selection of primary candidates with their big buck donations this time is going to make a difference? Are we choosing our poison? There is a reason close to 50% of the eligible voters have dropped out. They figured out that they lose, no matter where they put their chips.
waspuppet
This is not a difficult prediction, and flows directly from Campos. After all, it’s worth any price not to admit that (checks notes) a broke, senile game-show host might not know everything about tax policy, foreign relations or public health.
Seriously, the entire conservative project is at stake here. Trump is the logical extension of Reagan, and, to twist an old phrase, in their hearts they know that’s true. (If you know what I mean and I think you do.) It’s failed every real world test it’s ever faced, and to back off one step would start the dominoes falling.
MattF
@Citizen Alan: MOMA is a great museum. I saw that famous and notorious Diane Arbus show there, back in the day. And, of course, the water lilies.
Kirk Spencer
It’s newsworthy to report how person x vows to stay on the antivaxx course despite the death of a loved one to COVID. Yet anecdotally, it seems to be a wake up call for many more.
Im thinking the recent drop in poll numbers for Desantis reflects this. Not that they’re dying off, but that they’re no longer of the mind that it’s worth dying to own the libs.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I don’t interact with firefighters much but I have to say I’ve been pretty shocked at how many of them seem like they must be Trumpers given their high propensity to reject the vaccine. I heard an interview with a local who got vaccinated way earlier than expected because she was a county worker in charge of rolling out the early access to the vaccine among first responders, so they made it available and nobody came to get their shot so they just started vaccinating other county workers or anyone else who wanted one they could think of because otherwise the doses would have gone to waste.
Why are a lot of cops supporters of TFG? Well, that I get because it’s a profession that attracts bullies and petty tyrants of the highest order. But firefighting/EMT work…it’s not a profession where “I get to boss a bunch of people around and make them knuckle under for LOLs” is front and center. But firefighters/EMTs don’t seem inclined to get the vaccine.
kindness
There seems to be a link between being hardcore conservative and bulldogging forward leading their parade. OK, so the parade size is dwindling. Silent Republicans actually preferred abortion rights and families with compromised immunity folk like going on living with their families even during Covid. The parade leaders will never admit this. They don’t have to. Right wing media props them up no matter what hare brained scheme they come up with next.
It may be impolite to suggest it but if we are going to want to keep the government sane we need to go after the money sources that prop up these crazy Republicans & their media.
Matt McIrvin
In Massachusetts, our “nice Republican” governor’s insistence on keeping public schools open is having the effect of driving kids whose parents can afford it out of the public schools, to the extent that I’m starting to suspect that is a motive.
Alex
It’s not just the red states that are planning to keep the schools open as the bodies pile up— the expiration of the federal unemployment insurance program signals a federal policy to no longer accommodate school closures or remote school. Many blue/purple state governors have decided the answer to slow vaccine uptake is to use kids to carry the virus into those households. States like Michigan will automatically defund schools if they go remote, and they won’t mandate masks in schools. The Michigan DHHS predicts 75-90% of unvaccinated kids will be infected in school this semester, but they are going ahead. I think they are tragically underestimating pediatric ICU capacity and the risks of long covid.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix:
I also saw a headline recently that voters are souring on Abbott, that Texas is on the wrong track. All the usual caveats about polling applies, but it’s an interesting data point nonetheless
VOR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Exactly. Refusal of the COVID vaccine and not wearing masks are markers of their identity. You could say it is a Shibboleth, a way to indicate to others they are faithful members of their group. Admitting they were wrong is to question that membership and all the other attached beliefs.
NotMax
@Citizen Alan
For future reference, really good Brazilian restaurant right across the street from MoMA.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Alex: The thing is most parents, even a lot of pro vaccine ones, are in favor of having schools open. They may come to regret that attitude but I really don’t see much political appetite even among liberal parents (at least the ones I talk to) to keep schools closed any longer.
Betty Cracker
@Another Scott: I think the point of the post is that beliefs that are central to a person’s identity are hard to change. It’s not the same as moving on from a flip phone. The fact that these people are moving from one type of quackery to another during a pandemic that has killed more than 600K of their fellow citizens and affected everyone’s life on a fundamental level is a pretty good indication that their core beliefs are on the line.
MattF
@Alex: Speaking of long COVID, it’s worth remembering that the movie (and book) ‘Awakenings‘ were about a long-term aftereffect of the 1918 flu pandemic.
Ken
@MattF: Also Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, primarily in the first couple of collections (Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll’s House).
rmjohnston
I’m not so sure. They’re probably losing and motivating all the vaccinated adults whose under-12 kids, nephews and nieces, cousins, and other relatives they’re moderately close to end up hospitalized, and that group includes cynical Republicans, low-information “swing” voters, non-hard-core libertarian types, Democrats who only bother to vote in Presidential elections, etc.
Then there are the widows whose spouses couldn’t get into an emergency room after a heart attack, ranchers who can’t get ivermectin for their horses and cattle, etc. Basically, all infrequent voters personally affected by COVID running out of control. Those votes can tally up pretty quickly.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
And the passion. The screaming and crying about masks. That’s not hyperbole- they’re screaming and crying. How they seize on every error or update by the experts as “proof” of something or other. All health care advice always comes with updates. When they change the screenings for cancer recs were any of these people immediately downloading studies and (sort of) reading them then decrying cancer research?
Why wasn’t telling people to stop smoking cigarettes insulting and elitist? How did this become all about them anyway?
Matt McIrvin
@waspuppet: it’s like the brittleness of conservative evangelical religion, in which they insist that if the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, that means the Bible is a lie, God is a lie and Jesus won’t save you, so you have to commit to it all. And that means that some of their kids get that little crack opened in their faith and it all just breaks.
MomSense
Does Paul read balloon-juice? We’ve been making that point in the comments section for months.
cintibud
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
My sister is a family practice MD and she once described EMT’s as “Cowboys”. Not in a bad way – this was in response to a conspiracy theory some time back that if an EMT saw that you were an organ donor they wouldn’t work very hard to save you. She was “BS – those guys are cowboys and they are there to save lives as best they can.”
So I think it’s not a bully thing but a macho independent man type of thing. Those type of men seem to be attracted to TFG even though he’s NOT a macho man.
Mai Naem mobile
@Matt McIrvin: our ALEC governor Ducey in Arizona was giving financial rewards to schools which didn’t have mask mandates – these would inevitably be charter schools here most of which are worthless. They say Rahm Emanuel said ‘never let a crisis go to waste.’ Nah, the RW sphere is the one that puts this into effect every single time.
Ten Bears
May not kill off the repub voters, but there appears to be a significant threat to their reproduction.
If not sterility deformed, doubled-headed albino sperm. There’s a link up at my house, but I dare not leave a link here. I found it at the Daily Chaos. The “albino (white)” caught my attention because as ever I laugh at the white nationalists’ “superiority”, this is just one more thing to laugh at.
Deformed, doubled-headed albino sperm, lol.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@MattF: I agree with you. COVID will not turn the electorate more blue. It is killing people on both sides of the political spectrum and that will continue, especially with schools opening. I know it is proportionately killing more GOP voters, but it is the way they are distributed across low population states and rural areas that gives them their voting power. The death rate is just not high enough to make a difference. I am more worried that Delta and maybe Mu will undermine turnout among soft D voters. Its more that than Afghanistan that is reducing Biden’s polling numbers. We have to be more focused on getting our voters vaccinated and energized. There are still plenty of unvaccinated people of color in this country. That is a big concern.
Another Scott
@taumaturgo: Vote by mail and early voting and all the rest shows us that making voting easier drives up turnout. And the GQP’s emphasis on making voting as difficult as possible shows that they think that that drives down turnout (and helps them win).
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
And how they never come up with anything else. You could be a school ventilation evangelical. Ventilation/filters is one of the stack of mitigations that works. But none of them even suggest alternatives. They just scream.
I’m perfectly willing to admit maybe public health went too far with mitigations outdoors, when people aren’t in crowds. I’ll deal. I’ll give them no masks outdoors for masks in schools. But it’s never a negotiation. It’s all emotion- “stop scaring kids!”. Our public school kids aren’t “scared” by masks. They rolled with it easily. It isn’t kids that are scared and I’m not “scared”. These people are scared. Stop putting that on the rest of us.
rikyrah
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Then fire these muthaphuckas. They can get new jobs, and we can get new recruits that won’t endanger the general public?
jonas
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve seen elsewhere that *closing* schools prompts more privileged families to pull their kids out and send them to private schools that are still offering in-person instruction.
matt
I see people like Conor Friedersdorf are still on the ‘dont mock idiot right wingers’ beat. I agree.
I think vaccinated people should just go around coughing on right wingers. Let them think about whether they’ve done enough to keep themselves safe or not.
RaflW
@Kay: “Why wasn’t telling people to stop smoking cigarettes insulting and elitist?”
As far as I can remember, it was! There was a lot of pushback, even from non-smokers to banning cigs in public places — at least on the conservative end of politics — that the nanny state was way overstepping.
We can look back now and think that it’s a blessing that restaurants don’t stink of cigs, and we aren’t flying in aluminum cans for 2, 3 or 9 hours with that sh*t swirling around us, but it was a huge fight. As were seatbelt laws, and even fer chirssakes air bags.
Humans are terrible at 1. estimating risk and 2. adapting to change. It’s one of the reasons I think climate change is going to rip the global social fabric to absolute fucking shreds.
Kay
It’s just infuriating to me that these are the exact same people who blamed public schools for closing. The same ones. So schools open again and they up the ante on the demands- schools must not just be open they must drop all mitigation efforts. It was never about schools. It still isn’t. It’s about these people being proven right.
They haven’t pitched in at all. At no stage of this pandemic were they even slightly helpful. Do we need an entire cohort of paid and unpaid, expert and inexpert pandemic mitigation critics? This is essential? This is how they see their role? Sitting on their ass criticizing schools while schools do all the work?
Citizen Alan
@NotMax: I know! But I was worried about eating Brazilian and then going on a 4 hour museum tour followed by a 5 hour tennis match. I tend to view Brazilian restaurants as an excuse to get meat sweats. :)
mrmoshpotato
Oh to admit that they voted for a Soviet shitpile mobster conman who fleeced their racist, fascistic, white trash asses!
RaflW
@matt: Young Connor isn’t so young any more. But he’s still a nozzle of terrible takes. As I said last night, he’s managed twice (first in the thread he deleted, and then in the ‘replacement’ defensive thread) to insult the heck out of rural & ag people.
He thinks farmers and ranchers just self-prescribe veterinary meds because why, now? Are they such rubes that they won’t go to doctors? Also, what about the financial reasons that rural folk have less medical care?
He’s such a Pomona pinhead.
eclare
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I was married to a firefighter. They are hugely RWNJ. My ex and I kept our mouths shut on many occasions.
They are also not the “heroes” that they are portrayed to be. Even my ex admitted that.
Kay
They’ve added a group. We now have the pandemic mitigation critics and the pandemic mitigation critics defenders. Not only is all your pandemic mitigation advice subject to their analysis, they will also police how you talk to the pandemic mitigation critics. God, you guys can’t get anything right. You can’t even talk to people without a stern lecture on how you’re doing it wrong.
I guess I’m baffled why the pandemic critics need high profile defenders anyway. They seem to be disrupting schools pretty effectively, threatening people, passing laws. Are they a downtrodden group being silenced? They never shut up.
ruemara
@taumaturgo: then those 50% are incredibly stupid & can take some of the blame off GOP shoulders. Inaction is also a choice.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: At least in some places, the anti-mask fanatics are being ginned up by Trump-adjacent orgs. But like you said, the passion seems real enough. Notice the invitation to disrupt the Manatee Co. school board meeting pointedly says the fanatics don’t need to have anything personal at stake, like a child in school. It’s a cult.
mrmoshpotato
Yup. They definitely don’t give a flying fuck about anyone else – including the Dump-humpers’ children.
taumaturgo
@Another Scott: Nice sidestep to voting by mail, as that would somehow significantly change the way the voting in our country is hijacked. The victims of class and economic warfare that advocated for meaningful change are waking up to the voting charade, those who are the beneficiaries of trickle-down, and the status quo which pretend to care continue to ignore that they are the biggest obstacle to change. Half measures, stern letters, and virtue signaling won’t do.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: But it’s worth than that because they don’t even READ their bibles. There was an amazing video last week in which someone was interviewing some ridiculous old biddy who explained her opposition to masks and vaccines by mentioning that Jesus would divide everyone into sheep and goats. And she wanted to protest masks and vaccines to show that she wasn’t a mindless sheep. She was proud to be a goat! That was a direct quote! One that proved that she had never onceread Matthew 25, the Bible passageshe was referencing. That or she was proudly announcing that she was going to hell.
Jeffro
Admitting that Covid is serious means admitting trumpov was wrong and got a couple hundred thousand Americans killed through his negligence. Admitting that masks are helpful in limiting the spread of the disease = same. They just can’t do it. It means they enabled a monster, it means their god-king is fallible, etc etc etc.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
It worries me. They’re targeting low turnout local elections to push the Trumpist cult. Like the Tea Party, they’ll be booted in a cycle on the local level – because local involves actual work and people notice when they fuck it all up immediately- but they can do a lot of damage in the meantime.
The Tea Party here got elected at the city council level and every one of them was kicked after one cycle, because they refused to pay for anything or do any work. They had a project that became a kind of symbol of their incompetence- a supermarket that the city purchased for city offices. They wouldn’t pay to remodel it, so it sat there. The roof failed and it was damaged by water. The local newspaper went out and took photos of birds roosting in there- the property we had purchased but they refused to remodel. They all lost the next election.
mrmoshpotato
@tokyokie:
I was wondering the same thing.
Jim Appleton
@cintibud: As a former fire chief and EMT, I assure you there is at least one very common culture of what I know as Big Swingin Dicks.
cope
Who needs actual living, breathing voters when you have gerrymandering, the Supreme Court, dark money, foreign interventionists, the majority of state legislatures and governors and a neutered press? It’s all good if you’re red.
randy khan
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
The school opening issue is complicated. There is a very strong belief (backed by at least some data) that remote learning really hurt a lot of kids, and particularly hurt the most vulnerable kids. Meanwhile, with the UE benefits ending, staying home to take care of kids becomes less and less of an option for lower-income families, and even some higher-income families.
Miss Bianca
@cintibud: Yeah, the thing that cheeses me off tho, is that they are MEDICS. And if they are into SAVING PEOPLE, why doesn’t that mentality encompass getting the vaccine?
I am planning a Q & A with the new fire chief of our District pretty soon, who seems like a reasonable guy but wasn’t wearing a mask at a Hospital Board meeting. Wondering how I am And I found out from another member of the Fire Board that the vast majoroty of firefighters here are unvaxxed. WTAF.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Being on a public school board is really hard. It’s thankless. Because every parent – understandably or not- “not” in my case- I don’t know why they don’t get they are in a PUBLIC school that has to serve more than their kid- demands that the entire school revolve around their 2nd grader.
Have you been to a school board meeting? Fully half of the “questions” are broad speeches about the person’s opinions. It’s true for these people too. They scream about masks for the first 30 seconds and then it’s 4 minutes and 30 seconds of their entire world view.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: from the TX abortion law to the TX and other voter-suppression laws (“poll watchers” I think is the phrase?) to this, vigilante-ism and actual physical intimidation are a key part of trumpism. 1/6 brought to every election the way they did with local elections and “life”
Kirk Spencer
@taumaturgo: What you seem to be saying is that there is no difference between Trump’s administration and Biden’s.
If so, that your ability to discern detail is so poor that you can only discern gross differences, then I must admit to pity.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: Notice anything similar in this response to COVID mitigation and schools and the Biden Administration’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan?
Kay
@randy khan:
I think kids were really harmed by closing schools and the most vulnerable were the most harmed. I wanted them open and said that. I’m madder than anyone at these people. We got the schools open and here they come! Fucking everything up again!
The LAST thing kids need is more chaos. They don’t care about these kids. If they did they would stop making every fucking thing immeasurably harder. They demand 100% of what they want. That attitude is inconsistent with a public school. It won’t work. They can no longer function in a public entity environment. They don’t have the neccesary qualities. They have to homneschool or all the other kids will suffer. Get em out of there and let the 97% get some work done.
Starfish
@jonas: True. One of our most privileged public schools let a parent that yanked their kids and put them in a private school stay the president of their public school PTA, and this is ridiculous.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker:
I can’t read the highlighted part because I’m not on Twitter.
eclare
@Miss Bianca: Not surprising.
PaulWartenberg
I think they’ve done the math on this, which is horrifying in its own way. The GOP leadership is aware that COVID is lethal around 5-6 percent of the infected population at worst, meaning there’s more than 90 percent that will survive (albeit heavily scarred with Long COVID). As long as they don’t lose just enough of their base – and they won’t, the base is too invested in their cult – they figure they can suppress the rest of the vaxxing vote population (the Dems and Indys and even Republicans who break free of the hive-mind) just enough to steal the 2022 midterms.
DeSantis and Abbott and the rest of the trumpian crowd think they can get away with genocide of thousands (and blame it all on Biden like they think the voters blamed 2020 COVID hell on trump) because there is currently no judicial way to hold them accountable for it, and the only official recourse is an electoral system they’ve rigged to implode in their favor.
Miss Bianca
@taumaturgo: Oh, fuck off. It’s hopeless, everything’s rigged, people of good faith are doomed, we will never win, IT WILL NEVER WORK, OH NOES, so why not just go home and eat worms, dude.
Just don’t come back and start screaming at us then how the Democrats let us all down by not telling us how sucky worms taste, and that that means that they are in the pocket of BIG VERMICULAR, y’all.
Hildebrand
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: The handful of firefighters I have known were, how shall I say this…meatheads. Macho, like a bit of danger, not too bright, not likely to be able to pick up anything too complicated.
Now, this isn’t wholly true of those who work their way up through the ranks – I’ve known a couple of very bright folks who were captains. But the rank and file? Not great.
This is all just anecdata, but wanted to toss this into the conversation because I don’t think the folks I knew were outliers.
mrmoshpotato
@Citizen Alan:
You’re doing it right.
David Fud
Kemp in GA doesn’t seem to be quite as out there with it, but he is empowering the Republican majority in Cobb, where they have enraged many parents with their Petri dish approach to “natural immunity” for children who cannot get vaccinated. I can only hope the demographics shift enough to topple the officeholders the current Board of Education majority next year. In the meantime, we are stuck with their egregious behavior.
Mike R
@Miss Bianca: Nicely done.
eclare
@Hildebrand: Very accurate description. I am an ex wife of a firefighter/paramedic.
Suzanne
Well, yeah. To admit that you were wrong about this is essentially to admit that you’re too dumb to be capable of self-governance.
raven
@Jim Appleton: I have a friend and former employee who is a fire chief in Tucson and she’s not part of that club but she is tough as nails!
Nicole
@Starfish:
That is bananapants. In NYC you can’t run for school board if you don’t have a kid in public school. I can’t fathom a circumstance where someone could run the PTA at a school their kid doesn’t attend. Doesn’t matter how much money they could raise.
BigJimSlade
The people who don’t trust the safety of the vaccines, but are ok with trusting their own immune system against Covid are like people who won’t fly in airplanes, but take up wingsuit base jumping as a hobby.
Starfish
@taumaturgo: You and your racist clown left ideology need to sit down forever.
Pretending that half of voters sit out because they are making a deliberate choice to do so speaks to your privilege in not ever having to understand the level of disenfranchisement that goes on in this country, especially against young adults, ex-felons, and communities of color.
This garbage take is completely unaware of the shenanigans in historical and present elections.
“Let me tell you how smart I am with my completely unawareness of how elections work” is not going to fly here where people volunteer on elections regularly.
If you want to run your mouth, go find somewhere else that is into people running their mouth without putting any effort into real elections
@Another Scott was far nicer than you deserved on this particular topic.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yep, the conversion is going to have to happen because Nature doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone’s deeply held beliefs. but it going to have to happen.
Nicole
@Kay:
This, a hundred times over. It’s not just the kids back in school; they want them back in school without masks and without vaccinated staff. It’s ridiculous.
My son’s K-8 school is a lab school run by a large private university and so they have oodles of experts weighing in on Covid protocols for this fall. They feel that double-layered cloth masks are adequate protection as long as kids keep them on (which is required, along with all staff and eligible students also being vaccinated). They are confident about it to the point where if/when a student tests positive, the rest of the class will not have to quarantine, as they feel the risk in a masked class with 3 foot distancing in a room with open windows and fans is enough to minimize transmission risk. Last year they would move the entire class to remote learning upon a positive test but this year they feel the data indicates that’s not necessary.
Which indicates to me it’s not “that” hard to reopen schools safely, it’s just that these right-wing assholes’ sense of personal identity is more important to them than children’s lives. For all their “my body, my choice,” they sure are set on pushing their reckless choices onto all of us. I have so much rage about this.
Another Scott
@Kay: We shouldn’t over-estimate the numbers of people who scream at school board meetings and the like.
They are likely to be as unrepresentative as the OCD olympmic althlete or the Westboro Baptist Church. Public policy should not be (and usually isn’t) determined by the noisy outliers.
Just about everyone sensible wants in-person schooling to happen. Biden, too. There are ways to do it safely, but it costs money and effort. Too many monsters want to throw bombs because they think it hurts Democrats and increases their chances of taking and holding power, and they push any conspiracy theory to help make that happen. We have to fight them, yes, while being smart about it and recognizing that they’re a small number and they’re losing.
Cheers,
Scott.
frosty
@Kay: Bring it, Kay!!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Cermet: More basic that that, if the pastors of the Mega Churches keep on ended up ill or dying from disease that puts the whole they are the voice of god in question to the believers.
mrmoshpotato
@Nicole: Also bananapants.
Nicole
@mrmoshpotato: Those are hilarious. No judgments on anyone wearing them, of course.
Suzanne
@MomSense:
SRSLY. We need more insightful pundits. Anyone with passing familiarity with crazy people could point this out.
Look, they have a massive inferiority complex. They are terrified, deep down, that there isn’t a God and that what liberals say is true. But they have to believe to belong to their social cohort. They are terrified that going to college is a good thing. And they are terrified that they aren’t really competent enough to manage their freedom. They are terrified that they, in short, deserve the lower social status.
Kay
@frosty:
Do people not understand that kids had lives (especially high school kids) and they had to get things done and they didn’t? They have to catch up. We can’t afford to indulge these people right now. They’ll have to come back next year. We’re busy.
One of the things kids didn’t do was learn to drive and get permits and licenses. Ours here are all catching up. Again- too busy for your screaming protest. Schedule an appointment.
mrmoshpotato
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I have a deeply held belief that I should be rich as fuck.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Betty Cracker: Yes, it’s like they are trying to negotiate with a force of nature lol.
mrmoshpotato
@Nicole: Oh, I’d just the wearer – judge them to be awesome!
MisterForkbeard
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: What’s nuts about this is the “I want to keep my job but I have concerns over vaccine efficacy” bit.
FFS dude. If your job required that you wear a seat belt, would that go against your deeply held personal beliefs because they don’t save your life 100% of the time?
It’s a cult.
mrmoshpotato
I hear screaming protests on the Sun are very, very effective.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: It says something to the effect that if you don’t know what to say when it’s your turn to scream at the schoolboard members, we’ll provide a script. (The “we” in this case is an org called “Trump Train Manatee,” with Manatee referring to a FL county, not the gentle, slow-moving, spud-like water critter.)
Felanius Kootea
@Kirk Spencer: This. There are many unvaccinated families coming down with COVID-19. Those who survive understand that they didn’t have to get sick and that their loved ones didn’t have to die. I can’t even imagine the terrible grief they’re going through. At some point they have to look askance at the antics of politicians like DeSantis and Abbott.
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
I dunno, “spud-like water critters” might be appropriate too. ?
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I think a while ago in a conversation about messaging, you recommended emphasizing how busy schools are trying to bring kids back to classrooms safely, so they don’t have time for this bullshit. It’s true, and it’s easy to understand. I was pleased recently to hear the admin’s Ed Sec say something along those lines.
Ruckus
@Kay:
I just was having a discussion about the ME personality with my neighbor. She is an assistance person, my best description, she assists adult partially disabled people with their needs. Her current client is a ME person, everything is about them. Even his grown kids have to be about him. I call it the world revolves around the stick up their butt syndrome, or the ME concept. I wonder how many current day republicans have this disease to some degree, because everything is about them and their victimhood. The world would be a better place if it were all about ME. The world would be a better place if everyone did everything my way. We all are centered somewhat about ourselves, there are very few humans that can or will be only about everyone else. But people only centered about themselves or about the group they belong to, which says the world is only about them, does that remind anyone about a particular political party? One that does/says insanely stupid things and they all fall in line, like believe a vaccine that millions of people have taken will be worse for them than the disease it stops. The entire republican party is the ME party, made up of ME people. There doesn’t need to be any rationality because their entire belief system is an irrational belief system, the ME system. The world can’t be any different that the belief system because that would invalidate the belief system.
SiubhanDuinne
@Miss Bianca:
?? “in the pocket of BIG VERMICULAR”
Jesus, that’s good!
Was getting ready to pie TurgidTrauma, but maybe I should reconsider as long as they inspire such great response comments.
Alex
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Yes, most parents want schools open at this point. But I don’t think they’ve all realized that in many places the school won’t be allowed to close even if there is a huge outbreak. And that truancy cases are still a thing, especially for Black and Hispanic families.
In my state, public schools will have to stay open in person even if most of the staff and students are absent. Even if 15 teachers and staff die in 10 days, like in Miami. Or they will have no funds to operate. The only other choice would be to seek an act of the legislature, which is already hostile to public schools, and where the majority is actively grandstanding against any covid control measures.
SiubhanDuinne
@David Fud:
Same in Forsyth County, FWIW.
Eunicecycle
@Citizen Alan: yeah, that’s a very strange interpretation of Mt:25.
Baud
@Citizen Alan:
Wake up, goatple!
debbie
@Another Scott:
And watch to see how they distort the vote. You just know they’ve got a plan up their skeevy sleeves.
West of the Rockies
I find myself thinking that some of these shit-issues would be solved if there could be real movement on slam dunking a few hundred 1/6 traitors and making the instigators face the music: Trump, Flynn, MTG, etc.
Otherwise, they all keep doing this stuff because there’s no reason to believe they’ll face consequences.
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
For me, the most chilling words in that announcement were the first four:
I wasn’t really surprised by “We’ll give you a script,” but I’m still a bit shocked at how very blatant these folks are.
maura
@tokyokie: yes!
debbie
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Abbott’s lying his ass off to avoid having to say he was wrong about anything. He was quoted on NPR this morning saying his abortion ban has resulted in more business flooding into Texas. To the contrary, a Texas columnist states Abbott’s really just “whistling past the graveyard.”
Not only will Abbott not face up to making any mistakes or to killing bunches of people; he’s willing to sacrifice Texas’s economy for his fragile, tiny ego.
way2blue
I’m thinking that many of these ‘disease-mongers’ did process public health messaging early on [e.g., masks aren’t needed; children are immune; young adults are immune; only elderly adults are at risk], but as public health messaging evolved with new findings—it was overrun by organized disinformation flooding their trusted news sources [e.g., it’s a hoax; it’s no worse than a cold; rural areas are safe; only blue cities are hot spots; masks cut off air; my immune system is robust]. Disinformation enlisted to reelect Trump.
But now they’re worried. Because people they know have become ill & perhaps died. And talking heads they listen to for guidance have become ill & perhaps died. ‘Tough love’… But their tribe doesn’t vaccinate, doesn’t mask; doesn’t socially distance… Nonetheless they’re worried. So they look for miracle cures (just like Trump is a miracle cure for humdrum life). Not comprehending that SARS-CoV2 is an airborne virus not an ingested worm… And so it goes.
SiubhanDuinne
@Eunicecycle:
Fixed.
MattF
@debbie: Abbott will never admit error. Never. Period.
scav
@Citizen Alan: Repeated lifetime exposure to the concept of Jesus as “shepherd”, both textually and visually (traditional technique to keep the illiterate up to speed) completely over her head.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
I wonder how many Republicans who know horse paste is bullshit will speak up to try to convince their allies to cut it out. I’d bet not many. They’d be seen as traitors. This is like a self-perpetuating quagmire they’ve all found themselves in.
frosty
@SiubhanDuinne: I pied Turgid today but I’m weak and I’ve been toggling the replies. BIG VERMICULAR was a winner!
Brachiator
Just like the mayor of the island community in the movie “Jaws,” Republican leaders are determined to keep everything open no matter how many people get consumed by the virus.
And it is not just a craven desire to protect business and to keep the economy going. There is this fetish for maintaining “normalcy.” And this means welcoming death as a necessary consequence of a weird adherence to the cult of personal liberty. Big government may try to save your life, but a real American would rather kill of himself and all his friends rather than let the government tell him what to do.
I recently listened to interviews with some of the leading Republican candidates in the upcoming California gubernatorial recall election. All of them were strongly committed to keeping the schools open. None of them had much to say about public health.
At this point, it is more like a suicide cult. True believers are willing to die for this new lost cause.
Eunicecycle
@Felanius Kootea: we have some anti-vaxxers in my family. One of my nephews was vaccinated, but his wife and 3 teenaged daughters were not. Two of the daughters got Covid, one was hospitalized but is now okay. NOW the mother and daughters are going to get vaccinated, and we all hope the daughters don’t have long Covid. Another niece is not vaccinated, and she has a 1 month old that she drags everywhere. It’s frustrating.
CaseyL
@Nicole:
@mrmoshpotato:
I’m a complete sucker for bright prints on black backgrounds, so I would totally wear these.
Fortunately, or not, I already have more leggings than I need.
Robert Pierce
@Betty Cracker:
Move on from Motorola, nbd.
Move from Iphone to Android, NEVAH!
Brantl
For a loooong time, IT WAS.
Eunicecycle
@SiubhanDuinne: thanks for the fix! You are, of course, exactly right.
sdhays
@MisterForkbeard: “I have concerns about efficacy.”
I really wish anyone who says this would have to itemize their concerns and specify their criteria for having those concerns alleviated every single time. Because you know that they don’t have a specific issue and they don’t know how efficacy is actually measured, or what the efficacy is of the vaccines already injected into their bodies long ago were.
Not a single one of these jackasses actually has any concerns about efficacy or long-term effects. That’s just an excuse for the real reason they don’t want to do it. For some, that means they’re scared of needles or some other irrational but not necessarily wing-nut reason; for others it means that Fucker Carlson says that if he gets a vaccine, Dump (who is probably the second-coming of the Baby Jeezuuss, of course) won’t love him anymore.
Interviewers shouldn’t let them perpetuate that bullshit. Call them out and make them own it.
Nicole
@CaseyL:
@mrmoshpotato:
I have a collection of leggings, too, CaseyL. More than one pair has unicorns on them. I wouldn’t wear the banana ones just because I don’t like bananas. For those who like bananas, they are perfect in their bananadom.
Betty Cracker
@Steeplejack: Sometimes Tampa Bay area newspapers use “Manatee” to refer to the county in sentences that are rendered hilarious if you think of the dugong’s cousin, e.g., “Manatee Gang Busted for Intent to Distribute Meth,” etc.
Eunicecycle
@frosty: I’ve pied him for quite a while but still usually toggle. I see the pie as kind of a warning to brace myself. He doesn’t often disappoint.
Brachiator
@way2blue:
Most people initially followed the lockdown guidance. But conservatives did not like it. From the beginning the worst of them were looking for reasons to rebel, especially as the economy was affected.
But it wasn’t just about reelecting Trump. Trump himself did not want to look bad. He wanted to minimize the importance of the virus. And he was also deeply ignorant of science and given to believing absurd conspiracy theories. He encouraged disinformation.
Bobby Thomson
This take is absolutely correct. The Republican voters they don’t kill will definitely vote for them no matter what happens.
Suzanne
@Brantl: Barbara Ehrenreich argues — somewhat convincingly — that public smoking bans are classist. I, for one, love them, because I cannot stand the smell and find that it irritates my allergies. But she does make a solid point.
Eunicecycle
@Betty Cracker: yes, you don’t think of manatees as outlaws. Let alone making meth!
MisterForkbeard
@debbie: This is the conservative/Trump doctrine that they’ve figured out over the past 6 or so years:
The entire party does this for literally everything.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: I’ve heard public-health experts argue that you only get one hard lockdown–when you lift it you can never go back; people will not comply. But from the situations in some other countries I am not sure if this is universal or just American.
Woodrow/asim
I contend this is a bit to follow — some (not all, not right now) on The Right are taking advantage of this crisis.
They talk a good game about “back to normal,” but can see things must change. And forcing public education into no-win scenarios is a win for them, a bigger win than all the horrors DeVos visited.
All the deaths and dying and defunding devolve public trust in schooling, as well as thin out the people devoted to the cause of teaching. What’s left is a core they hope will be hollow enough to defund public schooling in these states to as close to extinction levels as possible, funneling money into kick-back friendly private schools.
It’s already being tried, here in South Carolina:
Again — this isn’t every Right winger on the State level. But I’d bet anything a ton of them are thinking hard about how to abuse the system in exactly this way, in conjunction with funding/fueling School Board takeovers/public session abuses, among other points. I mean, it maps right into ruemara’s front-page post today, as well, on union takeovers…
debbie
@frosty:
With a certain amount of worminess and shame, I must admit I had to look it up (pasta? planting material?), but now that I know what it means, absolutely brilliant, Miss B!
Auntie Beak
@Cermet: DeSantis won the governorship by 32,000 votes. He’s killed off at least 40,000 people, and Imma guess the majority of them were his unvaccinated followers.
Jim Appleton
@raven: She’s a good one then, and thankfully the good ones are gaining ground. My motto was how can I help, and how can I put your wellbeing first.
That said, there are many Big Swingin Dicks who don’t have Dicks.
Matt McIrvin
@MisterForkbeard: Biden is actually following “don’t apologize, and get liberals to back you up” on withdrawal from Afghanistan. But it doesn’t seem to have traction with the center, even though he doesn’t have to lie at all. You may need the media to abet it. As it is, they’re screaming for him to apologize and reverse course so they can slam him about that.
Another Scott
@sdhays:
Yup. Over 5.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine shots have been given. It’s pretty hard to hide issues with that big a number…
It’s not about numbers and reasoning at this point. It’s about increasing access, mandates, and finding trusted people to listen to them and tell them it’s Ok.
I don’t think that “anti-COVID-vax” is a deeply held belief like America #1 or something. It’s a new tribal marker, and tribal markers can and do change. Remember when cell phones were going to give us all BRAIN CANCER!!?? Who hears about that any more? (Now it’s a few fringe people blowing up 5G towers, but everyone else uses their cell phones all the time.) People do move on, and they will from being anti-COVID-vax too, if we give them space (and do all the other things to increase vaccination rates).
Cheers,
Scott.
MattF
@MisterForkbeard: You’ve omitted step Zero:
0. Lie.
ETA: I see you’ve got it in step 3., but I’d say step 0. always comes first.
lee
I’m going to go against the grain here and posit that the deaths might actually influence some elections.
Not the big state-wide elections but there are some House elections (state and federal) that are won with margins of less than 1%. Often it is because of a urban/rural split
I can see these races slipping blue (or more blue) because the rural voters killed themselves off or made themselves so disabled they can no longer vote (especially with the new voting laws).
taumaturgo
@Kirk Spencer: In a broad sense yes, however, some credit must be given to the attempts by the conservative democrats to somehow at the periphery reduce the pain and suffering of the many even though the systemic corruption that drives both parties continues unabated rendering such attempts futile. Since the only viable voting choice is between two parties and the worsening of economic and class injustices continue to escalate election after elections -under both – we continue to find both sides politicians acting on behalf of the wealthy donors and not on behalf of the voters. Until the voters demand that this issue be address head-on, the kabuki voting theater will render the same disastrous results. I repeat myself, under the current voting rules bought and paid by the oligarchs, they get what they want and block what the voters need. *Princeton 2014 study.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
The center is the only group of people who wanted forever war.
Jim Appleton
@Hildebrand: Again, former fire chief here.
There’s a joke that cops want to be firefighters. The ones that become firefighters bring the meathead component of coppentry.
I know them as Big Swingin Dicks. As noted earlier, not all of them have dicks.
Thankfully a trend is well established now among rank and file which explicitly rejects the BSD approach in favor of progressive, compassionate service.
trollhattan
Believe the only “proper” response in the face of scores of former Confederacy schoolkids being hospitalized with Covid is to ask, “Why and how has sleepy Joe Biden failed us this time?”
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Kids are scared when adults send them in and refuse to do anything to protect them. They’re not oblivious; they know what’s going on.
When it turned out most outdoor activities were basically safe, we had a round of chest-beating from the savvy about how the authorities were going too far by mandating masks outdoors–but now Delta has made being outdoors with other people actually kind of dangerous, yet I don’t see much reversal on this.
WereBear
@Miss Bianca: The part that might be missing is the motivation. They don’t all go into the profession to help people. Their urge to play He-Man can be more powerful.
Another Scott
@Baud: Excellent point.
Funny how that works, isn’t it??
Cheers,
Scott.
burnspbesq
@taumaturgo:
If you’ve foolishly given up on the American idea, kindly get the fuck out of the way so we can save your miserable ass for you.
MisterForkbeard
@MattF: Actually, I missed a couple:
#1 is what they always do: Talk about how Florida had the best recovery EVER due to DeSantis and complete lack of regulation, even though it actually was pretty far behind many other states.
#2 is also standard. Look at Abbot and DeSantis both screaming about how Biden can’t lecture them because immigrants are coming in (with lower incidence of Covid than Florida/Texas by a huge margin, and whom are also getting vaccinated in large numbers).
Declare success, blame brown people. There you go.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
They have re-applied lockdowns in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. But I am not certain how comprehensive these have been. We had second lockdowns in California, though not as stringent as the first ones.
But resistance grows with new lockdowns and other measures. People get weary.
But the weariness includes reasonable people also. I see some becoming discouraged when they hear new, higher numbers required for herd immunity. Others believed that time and the vaccines would solve everything, and don’t want to hear that the Delta variant and new variants affect what we need to do.
It is tough on everyone. But the crazies make things worse.
Heidi Mom
@RaflW: Late to the party here, but: I think that in some ways people can be incredibly accepting of change. The prevalence of cell phone use, for one simple example. But the accepted change that’s really struck me is sonograms–the ability to know the gender of one’s unborn child. As any reader or viewer of Wolf Hall knows, that’s an astonishing change from what was the human condition since forever. And what has been our response to this incredible change? Gender reveal parties. And “Good, now I’ll know what color of baby clothes to buy.” There is such a thing as non-threatening change, apparently.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Aside from putting accurate information out into the public sphere, people mocked and ignored the “cell phones equal brain cancer” people. No one indulged them or claimed that we needed to consider their point of view.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I like him. I think he does a good job. People only pay attention to the Sec of Ed if they’re bad. It’s a shame.
The Pale Scot
That’s not a bad thing, right? Cue Seinfeld, “was that wrong?”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It wasn’t just Trump; Brazil, India, England and Mexico all have Pro-Death conservative ruling governments and it’s clear the Australian News Media wish it had one too. Brazil is the major pusher of Ivermectin as a cure for Covid.
germy
MisterForkbeard
@Heidi Mom: If you think Gender-Reveal parties are non-threatening I don’t think you’ve been following the news :)
Jeffro
I felt this way when cassettes gave way to CDs! ;)
germy
MattF
@germy: It’s been suggested he was trying to purchase a black-market chin.
ruemara
@Matt McIrvin: American. Both due to our stubbornness and because we don’t have the type of LEO systems that would enforce it like France or China or some Caribbean nations. I watched a video of a woman in France getting a beating from cops for trying to shop without a mask. Meanwhile, at my gym, they can’t enforce mask wearing because the guidelines say you can’t ask for health details.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I think a lot of people here aren’t getting that the Republicans are believers in this too. Maybe they think they are cynics exploiting the rubes like Goebbels and the Nazis, but like Goebbels you say bullshit enough you start believing that bullshit, then end up poisoning your kids and shooting your wife. I am sure Governor Abattoir and Governor Death’Santa see themselves as stern men of principle with their eyes on the greater good and not the vaculating spinless weasels they really are
Just keep in mind as far as hard core SOB cynics go that was Cuomo and the one thing he was right on was the pandemic response.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: This is why they always are reading at top speed off their phones. Stephen Colbert had some really funny epithet for them along the lines of “wingnut auctioneer,” but it was better than that. I haven’t been able to find it again.
germy
@MattF:
They thought he was stealing a thumb drive.
” No,” he told them. “That’s my head.”
Baud
@germy:
I’d prefer Stephen Miller, but I’ll take it.
Tony Gerace
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “After praying about it with my wife” … I’m pretty sure that a very high percentage of these idiots are white evangelicals (with the occasional right-wing Catholic thrown in for diversity). They’ll have a heart-to-heart discussion with the Make Believe Sky-Daddy who will send signals telling them what to think. These people cannot be reasoned with. Shun them. More to the point: Fire their sorry asses.
Eunicecycle
@Jeffro: I remember being invited to a party when we were told to bring our favorite CDs. We thought, “Bring certificates of deposit?”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: Oh dear, the Stephen Miller have an even more loathsome brother / henchthing? I mean that would be so Bond Villain of them.
taumaturgo
@Starfish: Reading compression, please. I was referring to eligible voters, not to felons that are not able to vote due to state statutes. However, I think it goes to prove my point. I ask you, what have been the effective, concrete answer to this issue of the Democratic party? What has been the effective response to Florida’s disfranchisement actions? Remember, concrete effective actions, not how horrible and despicable the GQP is. I’ll wait, in the meantime, I’ll tell you that the PEOPLE are not waiting, they are at the grassroots level raising funds and taking court action to address this issue. As a party, the democrats can end the war on drugs that historically they have embraced and is a large contributor to felony incarceration that results in voting disenfranchisement. Will they do it? But if you dig a bit deeper, the democrat’ hands are tied because they respond to the donors and the donors are heavily invested in law and order, private prisons, and making tons of money overcharging prisoners for the privilege to use paid phones.
It goes like this, the wealthy buy and pay for the election of their ideal candidates during the primary process. The fringe 10-15% goes to the polls to select from the most polarized candidates around polarized social issues which ensure a more deadlocked congress. in the general elections, we get to choose from two candidates that have begged, received, and deposited money from the oligarchs in exchange for the defense of the status quo and the passing of their agenda, which happens to be diametrically opposed to the voter’s agenda.
Tony Gerace
@Ann Marie: People getting fired for being unvaccinated will change some behavior, even if it doesn’t change any minds. Let them bitch an moan as long as the get vaccinated. Otherwise fire them.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty Cracker:
Too bad that meeting hadn’t been two weeks earlier – I’d have been there. (We had a very relaxing week on Anna Maria Island, btw.)
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia:
This isn’t it, but it’s really good (and scary).
https://uproxx.com/tv/stephen-colbert-insane-anti-vaxx-rant/
MattF
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Stephen Miller’s family has pretty much disowned him. Jason Miller is the (chinless) Trump henchman who is behind in child-support payments.
catclub
3. assessing longer term than a flea’s attention span. eg. flossing.
Suzanne
@Brachiator:
I’m fucken weary. I have long thought that communication on this has SUCKED. Namely, there has been no real expression of the criteria for when we will have the lockdown and then when they will be lifted. If they don’t know an exact timetable, list the criteria. Like, the kids are back in school, but by any measure, shit is worse now than it was last year. And this fucken nonsense with the kids’ vaccine?!?! Every time, it’s some nonsense “maybe this fall, maybe this winter, oh but for just some kids, for other kids it’s the spring” bullshit. It’s fucking bullshit. Make a commitment, make a strong statement about when it will be available so people can make plans. And if something happens that will change this, THEN say so. I admire Dr. Fauci, but the whole “the virus will tell us” approach is no way to manage human beings who need/want to do stuff. And they will do that stuff. Compliance is not assured, but the better way to get it was to be clear about EXACTLY what is okay, and for how long.
Ksmiami
@Jeffery: Me too- I really don’t care do you?
JoyceH
@Citizen Alan:
I saw that clip, and I too was struck by it. It’s astonishing how in a few years, Wingnuttia has managed to overwrite literally TWO MILLENNIA of messaging! These people spent their whole lives from their earliest memories chanting in unison, “The Lord is my Shepherd”, under a stained glass window depicting Christ carrying a lamb over his shoulders, and listening to a pastor who referred to the congregation as his ‘flock’. But a few years of indoctrination, and suddenly it’s “Hay-ull no, Ah ain’t no sheep!”
Chief Oshkosh
@David Fud: Hell, they KILLED a couple or three teachers 100% due to their asinine policies and the fucking school district supervisor was OUTRAGED that his (and the governor’s) policies were even being questioned. Made the national news briefly until the next bright, shiny object flitted by.
And they just keep rolling along.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
In my county (Calvert County, MD), what else is there to do? Apparently they’ve got some ridiculous rule that nobody can answer your question, I guess just in case one board member’s answer gets interpreted as official school board policy.
So really the only reason to go is to make your opinion known. If you want a question answered, you need to write a letter. I’d be a hell of a lot more inclined to attend board meetings if there was the opportunity for actual discussion between board members and attendees.
MattF
@JoyceH: One suspects that for the people reading scripture in public, it all goes in one eye and out the other.
scav
@Tony Gerace: Oh, the Make-Believe Sky Daddy never ever sends signals about what to do or think. He’s merely the Holy Claque, the applause for decisions and biases already held, plus the inviolate justification to escape public censure.
Ksmiami
@catclub: most humans can’t process large numbers/ logarithmic math or exponential growth. Anything greater than about 100k, and it’s out of human scale. It’s why people freak out over 13 soldiers but 600k dead gets blank stares. The virus’ advantage is it operates way beyond human scale.
germy
News from upstate NY:
germy
@scav:
He just calls balls and strikes.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
“Blob Marley”. ?
My favorite is still the nurse who demanded someone explain to her why a key stuck to her magnetic neck, even as it fell off and she repeatedly attempted to stick it back on. “Can you explain this? Can you explain this?”
The Golux
@zhena gogolia:
Right-click on the image and select “Open image in a new tab”.
Works for me on Chrome; should also work in Firefox.
Poe Larity
They’ve done the math. The loss in IQ from Covid more than makes up the loss to their base. They see it as a growth option and vaccines are a threat to that. Completely rational.
Roger Moore
@Kirk Spencer:
Exactly. This is the flip side of the “they have to change their whole worldview to accept that vaccination is OK”. Yes, it’s going to be hard to get them to change their minds, but doing so has the potential to affect far more than just this one thing. Every person who decides that maybe getting vaccinated is a good idea is also opening themselves up to the idea that maybe the other Republican bullshit isn’t worth paying attention to, either.
That has the potential to make it really dangerous for the Republicans, because it fundamentally affects everyone. Most of their other big issues around gender and illegal immigration are things that don’t affect most of them personally, so there’s little cost to going with the party line. That doesn’t apply with vaccination and masking. Everyone has to make a choice about those things, so pushing it as a make or break issue has the potential to push relatively a lot of people out of the fold.
Starfish
@taumaturgo: I used the term ex-felons for a reason. There are very few disenfranchising felonies in some states and very many in others. Chipping away at those things has been a way to reduce the racism in the entire system. The party should be investing in chipping away at the list of disenfranchising felonies.
Chief Oshkosh
@Felanius Kootea: Not necessarily true. I know of two people who are so far gone that they can’t admit that Covid killed their loved ones.
One of them is a woman whose mother died very clearly from Covid, no underlying health issues other than being 78 years old. The daughter is convinced the doctors, nurses, hospital admins, everyone, is lying because there is no such thing as Covid, and besides, doctors get more money if they put “Covid” on the death certificate.
The other is an older gent whose wife died from Covid exacerbating pre-existing pulmonary conditions. His belief is that it was finally just her time, and that she couldn’t possibly have gotten Covid because she was bedridden and only he (the husband) was caregiving, and he never had Covid. Another thing he’s never had was a Covid test. He did, however, have really bad allergies in May (never had ’em like that before!) and a really bad summer cold in June, but definitely not Covid. She, of course, died in July.
And these two are not malicious wackos. The woman is a perennial “volunteer of the year” at her workplace for all of the food pantry and homeless outreach she does (or did prior to the pandemic). The old guy would give you the shirt off his back, and often takes in homeless vets and wayward runaways (he has some land with several habitable outbuildings) and gets them into respective programs for longterm help. Somehow these two (and many like them) are convinced that Covid is not real, or at least, not real bad.
yellowdog
@Cermet: Not only that, but voter suppression and vote nullification will insure that their reign of terror continues unabated.
Soprano2
Our local school board has been paying attention to this happening in other places; last week, they instituted a new policy that there will only be so much time for public comment, people have to sign up ahead of time, and they each only get 3 minutes. I think they’ve only allowed 30 minutes, so only 10 people will be able to speak. Everyone else can submit written comments. I hope they stick to their guns about this, because we just got a new principle who is Black, so in addition to the screaming about masks they’ll be wanting to lecture everyone about CRT, too.
Cameron
@Kay: That’s because you’re not dealing with actual thought, just a seething mass of inarticulate resentment. That’s why they love Trump – “No one has ever been treated more unfairly than me!” To which they reply, “Amen, brother!”
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I wouldn’t argue against her, but it doesn’t matter.
You know that old libertarian line about how your freedom to swing your fist ends where my face begins? Same with cigarette smoke. Unless they have a way of keeping the carcinogens from their cigarettes from reaching my face, they can step outside if they really need a smoke.
Needless to say, same deal with Covid. Since they can’t stop their germs from reaching my face once those germs have gotten away from their faces, they need to be wearing their masks indoors.
yellowdog
@Felanius Kootea: There are also a lot of unvaxxed people who get covid and they don’t get very sick (the majority). Then they turn around and say “See, I didn’t need the vaccine.” Of course, they may have given it to co-worker who gives it to her elderly aunt, who dies. But the unvaxxed idiot thinks he has a point. And a lot of people will agree with him.
trollhattan
@debbie:
“Showering: it’s fundamental.”
“Hi, can I have somebody else besides Nurse Sticky today?”
Cameron
@Betty Cracker: Christ. I live in Manatee County. Glad I’m way down south.
MattF
@Chief Oshkosh: Sounds to me like your acquaintances were Foxified.
lowtechcyclist
@Jeffro:
Weird to think about how many changes we’ve seen in music delivery systems.
When I started buying records, you could still get monaural record albums for a buck cheaper than stereo – I think the difference was $2.98 v. $3.98, so a buck wasn’t trivial. And of course if you just wanted one song, you bought a 45 rpm single with a big hole in the middle.
Even in college, I had a roommate who insisted that the sound quality on his reel-to-reel tape deck beat my stereo LPs hollow. (And it may have been, if recorded at high speed.) That was less than 50 years ago.
Since then, it’s just been one thing after another. Cassettes, CDs, and now it’s all on your phone or thumb drive.
Captain C
@Kay: I suspect that one of the (possibly unintended) side effects of movement conservatism is that it made shouting one’s narcissism from the rooftops an actual virtue.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
They did specify only one hard lockdown, which goes with the subsequent ones being milder. I think this was actually a pretty reasonable strategy. We did the hardest shutdown* first when we didn’t really know what was going on with the virus. Once we had a better grasp of what was happening, we could move to more targeted approaches that got most of the benefit of the more complete shutdown while being much less disruptive. The success of California’s rapid return to inside mask wearing this July is a good example of this approach. We didn’t freak out and try to shut everything down; we just reimposed a simple requirement that got us most of the benefit without much pain.
*I would argue we never really had a hard lockdown at all in the US. We had what I would describe as a shutdown, where lots of businesses and government agencies were closed, but never a true lockdown where people weren’t even allowed out of their homes without permission.
MattF
@lowtechcyclist: And, nowadays, in the ‘cloud’… i.e., on a server in an undisclosed location.
burnspbesq
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Observing him from up close, I have no doubt that Abbott sincerely believes the bullshit he is spouting. He has principles, and he intends that all 29 million Texans will come to see the wisdom of those principles.
It’s like someone once said of Howard Cosell: “often wrong, but never in doubt.”
HRA
Whoever mentioned the firefighters and EMTs not getting vaccinated helped me somewhat understand why 2 firefighters in my family are not vaccinated. It is a great problem to just find out they work at the same place and they have a baby daughter. They are 100 miles away from me and in the big city in the north area. We are a family of 6 children, 10 grandchildren plus spouses and in laws present and weddings coming soon.
Kirk Spencer
@taumaturgo: Again (still), I pity you.
What do you, personally, intend to do about it? What do you plan other than spout polemics – boring, old, generic “the people shall one day rise up against their oppressors” claims?
Because looking back at this and past threads, all you really seem to do is claim the current government is corrupt and that people are beginning to catch on. And that’s it.
Have you chosen what you are for instead of against? Have you sweated and sacrificed in support of that? Sacrifices of time, money, sweat, even blood?
If so, what is it you are working for? A true democracy? A socialistic (in /any/ of the versions including utopic) government? True anarchy?
Or are you only words? Wind, with a bit of noise attached?
I have spent, by the way, sweat, tears, money, time, and blood in support of the American system, and with the exception of blood I’ve spent the same in support of various members of the current democratic party. I have and will listen to those who have spent the same, giving them the consideration they have purchased.
I will spend a little time listening to those who spend only wind. But there comes a point where they have to show they’re willing to spend more, or I cease listening.
Pay the price or be satisfied with my pity.
Kay
The “pro life” movement and five justices of the supreme court banned abortion in Texas and they’re too chicken shit to tell the truth about their own law, so they’re playing these clever little games.
Defend your abortion ban! Stop lying to people.
JoyceH
Has any research been done about the lethality of Delta versus the original strain? We keep talking 1% but that was the number in spring 2020. And just anecdotally, Delta seems to be taking a greater toll. News story about a young woman who died of COVID, her mother was arranging her funeral but then died of COVID herself and the aunt took over the double funeral arrangements and then died of COVID a couple weeks later. I mean…. geez.
And it does seem like when Delta kills you, it does so faster! Last year we’d hear of people who’d be home with COVID for a few weeks, gradually getting sicker until admitted into hospital, then weeks in hospital, then move to ICU, ventilator, etc – and overall be in the hospital for several months before dying. Now you read these obits of people who die within a week of testing positive!
Kirk Spencer
@burnspbesq: I’ve read, recently, that in an argument Democrats want to be right and Republicans want to win. I’ve found that explains so very, very much about people like Abbott.
Kay
What the “pro life” movement won’t tell you is they absolutely intend to force rape victims to carry a pregnancy to term, because their “movement” doesn’t make any sense unless they do. They declared life begins at conception. Allowing any woman (or girl, let’s be clear) to terminate any pregnancy contradicts the basic claim of the whole “movement”.
Why not just tell people? They’re going to find out. The lying isn’t even necessary at this point- they know they have five justices who will rubber stamp anything they submit.
burnspbesq
@Kay:
So essentially what Abbott is telling women is “if you’re two days late, don’t wait for test results. Just do it!”
It’s surprising, to say the least, that a married man could be so ignorant of how women’s bodies work.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
For him to understand how women’s bodies work, he would have had to pay attention to someone else. Never underestimate the power of narcissism.
Kay
@burnspbesq:
Look at his face- he knows he’s lying. Texas Right to Life feeds him his script and he recites it.
They’re going to have a case where they force a rape victim woman or girl to carry to term. How long do they think they can lie to the public? Texas is a big state. They’ll have at least one in the next year. The sickly-sweet “pro lifers” will give her a used car seat and an expired coupon for formula and feel good about themselves. They support the moms! Here’s a 2 dollar onesie. Be grateful to them and cast your eyes downward when accepting their charity.
Captain C
@burnspbesq: Ben Shapiro’s response to WAP might suggest that a nontrivial number of them have no clue.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Felanius Kootea:
Some of them understand this. Some of them are telling themselves it was God’s will or that the vaccine would have been worse or wouldn’t have worked.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: The highlighted part says hey, if you don’t have a speech or something you’d like to say, that’s okay. we’ll give you a speech you can read!
Un-fucking-believable.
different-church-lady
I can hardly wait to find out how dead kids of anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers are Biden’s fault.
And Rose Twitter will probably be the first to explain it to us.
cintibud
One would think. I would guess for some first responders it’s the lag between cause and effect. They see the bleeding – stop the bleeding, cardiac arrest – AED. However you don’t see the virus floating around you so one can believe it doesn’t really exist.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@burnspbesq: The one and only conservative I dated back in the day thought you took the birth control pill before sex like it was a spermicide that worked from the inside. No, they have no clue.
IMHO, they have way too much of a love-hate relationship with women’s bodies to have any interest in figuring it out.
The Pale Scot
Long aggravating day. So I’m having ice cream delivered and listening to some tunes
Sesame Street: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
No C is for Cookie so far
billcinsd
@Citizen Alan: Yeah, the sheep are those that get rewarded in heaven. Even a quick read will get you to that
33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
dopey-o
this is a great mystery to me. Covid deaths are significantly down, yet hospitals are full, with many patients being turned away. ICUs are at or above full capacity. 95% of covid-related deaths are unvaccinated patients.
53%+/- of Americans are fully vaccinated. Here is my Scientific Wild-Assed Guess.
The elderly, who are most vulnerable with their weakened immune systems, have a high rate of vaccination. I think 85% in some cohorts.
the young, whose immune systems are more robust, are refusing vaccination. when they are exposed to Delta, they sicken, and many of them end up in the hospital, where they linger. Most return home, and some die. But whereas an elderly patient might die after a week in the ICU, the young monopolize their beds for weeks.
but my SWAG is really based on ignorance, and i would appreciate any insights or corrections. I myself am in the group that is old, triple-vaxxed, and probably going to die from exposure to covidiocy anyway.
Subsole
@taumaturgo: Dedthred, I’m sure, buuut…
You really, truly cannot – I mean CAN NOT – get over not getting your way in 2016, can you?
Serious question: how old are you? I’m trying to figure out just how charmed your life is.
I mean, look at what your words reveal about you.
You cannot see a difference between a party that is openly white supremacist and a party whose black caucus pretty much elected our candidate?
You don’t see the difference between the democrats who legalized gay marriage and the GOP that tried to outlaw trans people?
No difference between the party of the NRA and the party of gun control?
The party that took our tax dollars and handed them to billionaires is the exact same as the one handing out cash to single mothers and forgiving school debts?
The folks taking school lunch away from poor children is the same as the one expanding food stamps??
You do not see any difference between Biden getting us out of Afghanistan and Trump, who increased drone strikes 500% above Obama?
You see zero difference between the folks who opened literal concentration camps and the people actively shutting them down?
Do you not see how sheltered that makes you look?
How hopelessly, wretchedly clueless that sounds?
You don’t sound wise, or cool, or savvy, or whatever you’re going for, m’friendo. You sound spoiled and petulant and badly in need of some horse wormer.
Because if you really mean to tell me there is no difference between the parties I described above, then you are utterly full of shit.
Subsole
@scav:
This.
If they cannot blame the devil, they’ll just blame God.
dopey-o
What
DigbySubsole said.Subsole
@Cameron: They don’t even love Trump. He’s just the instrument through which they hurt us. If Jeb had done the same shit with the same sneering nastiness, they’d love Jeb.
There is no GOP. There is only a prolonged, shrieking temper tantrum that has figured out how to put on grandpa’s suit.
Their church, their faith, their politics, their music, their cars and art and everything else, is all just flailing in rage at the rest of us for being here.
It’s one of the only funny things about all this. The only people that ever loved that useless fuck were just using him to hate on us. He was entirely optional.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: Still unclear, but there are a number of preprint studies that seem to show that Delta is more likely to cause severe disease and is somewhat more lethal:
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/08/421171/how-dangerous-delta-variant-heres-what-science-says
Of course, vaccination still helps a lot with this.
dnfree
@lowtechcyclist: I served on a school board. It’s a common misconception that the board should engage in back-and-forth discussion with the public. It’s a public meeting so that you can observe what your elected representatives are doing. It’s a meeting held IN PUBLIC by the board, not a meeting with the public. Aside from the public comments (which at least in my experience the board is glad to hear), there is no interaction between the public observers and the board. Try to imagine how it would go if the board did start responding to comments, possibly arguing with members of the public and each other. It wouldn’t be helpful.
I was surprised to find, way back almost twenty years ago, that the biggest issues that commonly got public comment were weather-related school closings (kids are wimps these days, they never would have closed schools in my day day for 0 degree weather) and letting high school kids take a half-day to go downstate if a sports team made the state finals (those kids should be IN SCHOOL!). Major educational issues drew little comment or attention.
J R in WV
@Suzanne:
How can that be? Millionaires and hoboes alike are not allowed to smoke in high-end joints and Waffle House alike — anywhere I want to be.
Was horrified to learn the hard way that one can smoke and spread toxic fumes anywhere in MO… no thanks!
Subsole
@Kay:
Even stupid people don’t like looking stupid in public.
And these folks are the stupidest people on earth. They cannot admit they are wrong. They cannot reflect or evaluate. They cannot learn from error, because they cannot admit error.
It’s not that they cannot think – they REFUSE to think. They have gelded their minds.
Asking them to be honest is asking people obsessed with not looking foolish to stand up and admit they did something foolish.
Kay
Here’s some information on rape that the Texas governor and the national anti-abortion movement don’t want you to know:
So when they say they took out the exception for rape understand that the people who will be denied an abortion after a rape are 1. not women, but girls 2. who were raped by a “known, often related, perpetrator”.
So when the Texas governor and the national anti-abortion movement say they’re going to take rapists off the street and fix this problem that is just another lie. They’re not “on the street”. The girls (who in this study were as young as 12 years old) know the rapists.
They took the exception out so it wouldn’t cover statutory rape.
Subsole
@burnspbesq: Just ’cause he married one doesn’t mean he cares about ’em.
Lotsa guys’ wives are basically like their “black friend” but for gender instead of race.
Roger Moore
@dopey-o:
I think what’s happening is that this outbreak shows great regional variability depending on local conditions. The national numbers aren’t as bad as they were last winter, but they’re worse in places that have been lax about vaccination and have discouraged mask wearing. Similarly, the problems with overcrowded ICUs and hospitals turning people away are largely limited to those places.
Looking at the numbers, it does look like the CFR is a bit lower this summer than it was last winter. That may be because we focused vaccination on the most vulnerable population, or it may be because we’re still getting better at treating people.
J R in WV
@Subsole:
Yes, utterly full of shit — pie the poor incel boy and let him go by himself.
Bobby Thomson
@Suzanne:
Suzanne
SEPTEMBER 7, 2021 AT 12:41 PM
Can you summarize? Because that sounds very – wrong. Cigarette smoke kills rich and poor alike, and service workers are disproportionately likely to be exposed to public cigarette smoke, as are those relying on public transit. If the argument is based solely on who is doing the smoking, and the uber-rich being able to create their own private spaces and/or flout the law, it’s a dumb argument.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Early on it looked to me as if vaccination wasn’t bringing CFR for breakthrough infections down at all, and somebody here pointed out that that was almost certainly selection bias, with vaccinated people less likely to attribute mild symptoms to COVID. When something could bring down both the apparent numerator and the apparent denominator, weird things can happen with the ratio.
evodevo
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes..this…it’s why fundagelicals cling so tightly to creationism…if there wasn’t a real Eden, with an authentic Adam and Eve, then the doctrine of Original Sin disappears, and so does the theological reason for Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, and the whole underpinning of their religion…
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
Vaccination won’t affect the overall CFR very much if the majority of cases are in unvaccinated people.
evodevo
@Hildebrand:
Yep… and two out of the three firefighters I have known personally were rednecks and dumb as a box of rocks…I always wondered about whoever was partnered up with them…I would hate to have somebody that stoopid as my backup in a bad situation…