Conservatives are trying to downplay an insurrection at the United States Capitol that is documented by extensive film footage and happened less than six months ago. OF COURSE they will try to pooh-pooh the pandemic once the visible signs – masks, social distancing, travel bans, banned indoor dining/group events – are in the past.
I saw a statistic that at the present time (mid-May) only 43% of all Republicans, and only *60% of Republicans over 65 years old,* have been vaccinated. I am fucking fuming, because these assholes are 1) going to try to piggy-back their own safety off of everybody else’s vaccinated status, and 2) the next variant that emerges – and it will, viruses mutate to survive in a partially vaccinated population – will come out of red states, but we will ALL have to mask up/socially distance again for up to 6 months while we wait for the new formulation of the vaccine to be developed/distributed. And Republicans will have the ignorant gall to tell us the new variant is a hoax as well.
In the old days, the conservative media were essentially cheerleaders with an occasional influence on policymaking. Donnie amped that up a couple of magnitudes, allowing the media to dictate policies. Result is that Donnie didn't just legitimatize the media but also legitimatized the insanity (not that Donnie wasn't always pathological). So sure, insanity is acceptable and, for that matter, echoed by the mainstream media.
But I gotta confess, I've been with the conservative bros for months. If I'm outdoors in the low density 'burbs, I don't wear a mask to combat the effect of an aerosol virus. On the other hand, I also sort of conflated teeny weeny droplets with aerosols so, again, why a mask? (Indoors, mask, of course. Then again, I'm still traumatized by learning the sort of hard way that HVAC systems in office buildings is let's say not maintained as well as one would like to think so I of course extrapolate that to retail spaces of all kinds.)
Anyway.
We're vacced and heading west on a road trip next month to a couple of places in the heartland of the Homeland, more particularly to some of the light green states there:
where I won't mind if I'm a carrier to those death cult members who are happy to die for their freedom to ensure that we never do better than getting the 'rona under reasonable control as opposed to, you know, having crushed it. Then again, it's not just the states of the US fucking up; a global crisis lacks a global response. (Also, because it bothers me, let's credit Bill Gates for going above and beyond in fucking things up.)
Over a half million Americans died from natural causes, doctors listed coronavirus on the death certificates to get more money, the vaccine causes disease, masks don’t work, the Chinese created the virus, Fauci created the virus, Democrats created the pandemic to hurt Donald Trump, Donald Trump is the strongest and best president ever, Donald Trump won the election, Joe Biden isn’t the real president, peaceful Republicans visited the Capitol on January 6th, there is no racism in America, Black Lives Matter burned down Portland, George Floyd died from drugs/heart disease, Climate Change is a hoax, guns don’t kill people. I know there are other tenets of Republican faith, but I slept through a few of the catechism classes.
"Remember when people thought COVID conspiracy theorists were all nestled in the gulches and hollers and weren’t welcome in classy conservative circles?"
I do not remember this. What I DO remember is the President of the United States going on live national TV to ask why we don't shove UV lightbulbs up our asses or hose down our lungs with chlorine bleach. What I do remember if President Donald Trump saying that the Deep State was preventing people from taking hydroxychloroquine because it was a miracle drug. What I do remember is Senator Ron Johnson (he comes from Wisconsin!) holding hearings a mere 6 weeks ago into why the FDA would not let people take all these miracle drugs.
Also: "slinging pieces of dirty cloth across their faces.”
Yo, Chuck! Most people opted for disposable masks, but some made their own masks from cloth. It's notable that most people who did so did NOT use their old underwear as material. And even the few who did most likely washed those wears before they made their masks.
I don't know that Cooke's idea conservatives are generally despised and shunned really qualifies as a paranoid delusion so much as a rare instance of self awareness.
My brain autofills Charlie Cook's two middle initial affectation as " Cock Wobble" for some reason. Weird. And that "hygiene theater" guy - I bet he does a lousy job wiping his butt.
It doesn't get any worse than covid denial/ antivax bullshit.
Had an interesting experience yesterday late afternoon. I went to Lowes, the big-box hardware store, to pick up a few things. Since the mask mandate in NC was gone, and I was vaccinated, I decided that I too would "go commando." I walked in and pretty much everyone except for three people were still wearing masks. I started to feel self-conscious and ended up going back out to the car to get a mask. And I'll be honest, it was because I got stares. I fit the physical description of a Sean Hannity watcher, and the few other maskless ones in the store looked pretty much the same. It was clear that the social pressure was still to be cautious and careful, and look out for each other.
I think this will slowly go away as people accept that we really are ok, but it was another COVID moment in this year+ of moments.
Even with your assistance and the comments, I struggle to keep the contradictions in the wing-nut worldview straight. When they say COVID was a hoax, they mean it was blown out of proportion. The Chinese and Fauci are still evil, but Jesus and clean living will spare those who love freedom and fear God more than a disease. Only the elderly who would've died anyway died, and the media just created this overreaction. People in other parts of the world, well, you know they just die all the time anyway, that's the whole idea of being a Judeo-Christian American in the first place. I think with your help I now have these things clear and will be able to pass for one of them when the purges begin.
If there were a readily available marker of my moral cowardice in the face of the largest natural disaster to strike the species in a century, and a giant flashing sign pointing to my fundamental unseriousness as a citizen, I'd be pretty eager to take it down and hide it away too.
The joke "I have to wear a mask so people don't mistake me for a Republican" isn't really a joke. It really does concern someone like me, who's got both shots. Do I want to be confused for an emotionally-immature conspiracy-theorist who's ready to follow a treasonous clown off a cliff? If I wear a mask for a while longer then people won't associate me with those people.
That's why the Right are so determined to force everyone to take off their masks: They're hoping we forget they all acted like assholes.
Yeah, I'm holding my breath for What Happens Next now that everything is back to norbal (I stole "norbal" from and old Mad Magazine bit about one of the Usual Gang Of Idiots documenting taking LSD (that's how old it was) at the office. It was a notepad that gradually turned to scribbles, then back to text. The last line was "Everything is back to norbal").
And I'd pay serious money to hear Charles Country & Western Cooke be forced to explain the science behind how he "knew" that masks were no longer necessary.
"Hi Friend, I’m Claudia Tenney –– I’m the Republican Congresswoman for New York’s 22nd District and a champion for Election Integrity."
Each of the remaining 20 sentences also contains the phrase "election integrity," except for the one where she calls herself "a Champion for Election Reform, Security, and Integrity!"
I'm beginning to suspect it's some kind of talking point or something.
Conservatives are trying to downplay an insurrection at the United States Capitol that is documented by extensive film footage and happened less than six months ago. OF COURSE they will try to pooh-pooh the pandemic once the visible signs – masks, social distancing, travel bans, banned indoor dining/group events – are in the past.
I saw a statistic that at the present time (mid-May) only 43% of all Republicans, and only *60% of Republicans over 65 years old,* have been vaccinated. I am fucking fuming, because these assholes are 1) going to try to piggy-back their own safety off of everybody else’s vaccinated status, and 2) the next variant that emerges – and it will, viruses mutate to survive in a partially vaccinated population – will come out of red states, but we will ALL have to mask up/socially distance again for up to 6 months while we wait for the new formulation of the vaccine to be developed/distributed. And Republicans will have the ignorant gall to tell us the new variant is a hoax as well.
In the old days, the conservative media were essentially cheerleaders with an occasional influence on policymaking. Donnie amped that up a couple of magnitudes, allowing the media to dictate policies. Result is that Donnie didn't just legitimatize the media but also legitimatized the insanity (not that Donnie wasn't always pathological). So sure, insanity is acceptable and, for that matter, echoed by the mainstream media.
But I gotta confess, I've been with the conservative bros for months. If I'm outdoors in the low density 'burbs, I don't wear a mask to combat the effect of an aerosol virus. On the other hand, I also sort of conflated teeny weeny droplets with aerosols so, again, why a mask? (Indoors, mask, of course. Then again, I'm still traumatized by learning the sort of hard way that HVAC systems in office buildings is let's say not maintained as well as one would like to think so I of course extrapolate that to retail spaces of all kinds.)
Anyway.
We're vacced and heading west on a road trip next month to a couple of places in the heartland of the Homeland, more particularly to some of the light green states there:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations
where I won't mind if I'm a carrier to those death cult members who are happy to die for their freedom to ensure that we never do better than getting the 'rona under reasonable control as opposed to, you know, having crushed it. Then again, it's not just the states of the US fucking up; a global crisis lacks a global response. (Also, because it bothers me, let's credit Bill Gates for going above and beyond in fucking things up.)
Over a half million Americans died from natural causes, doctors listed coronavirus on the death certificates to get more money, the vaccine causes disease, masks don’t work, the Chinese created the virus, Fauci created the virus, Democrats created the pandemic to hurt Donald Trump, Donald Trump is the strongest and best president ever, Donald Trump won the election, Joe Biden isn’t the real president, peaceful Republicans visited the Capitol on January 6th, there is no racism in America, Black Lives Matter burned down Portland, George Floyd died from drugs/heart disease, Climate Change is a hoax, guns don’t kill people. I know there are other tenets of Republican faith, but I slept through a few of the catechism classes.
"Remember when people thought COVID conspiracy theorists were all nestled in the gulches and hollers and weren’t welcome in classy conservative circles?"
I do not remember this. What I DO remember is the President of the United States going on live national TV to ask why we don't shove UV lightbulbs up our asses or hose down our lungs with chlorine bleach. What I do remember if President Donald Trump saying that the Deep State was preventing people from taking hydroxychloroquine because it was a miracle drug. What I do remember is Senator Ron Johnson (he comes from Wisconsin!) holding hearings a mere 6 weeks ago into why the FDA would not let people take all these miracle drugs.
Also: "slinging pieces of dirty cloth across their faces.”
Yo, Chuck! Most people opted for disposable masks, but some made their own masks from cloth. It's notable that most people who did so did NOT use their old underwear as material. And even the few who did most likely washed those wears before they made their masks.
Isn't M. Walsh satire? or does he seriously mean that?
I can't tell anymore.
I don't know that Cooke's idea conservatives are generally despised and shunned really qualifies as a paranoid delusion so much as a rare instance of self awareness.
My brain autofills Charlie Cook's two middle initial affectation as " Cock Wobble" for some reason. Weird. And that "hygiene theater" guy - I bet he does a lousy job wiping his butt.
It doesn't get any worse than covid denial/ antivax bullshit.
It's the little nuggets -- "which suggested fully-vaccinated people can more or less go commando" -- that are really needed on Mondays.
Had an interesting experience yesterday late afternoon. I went to Lowes, the big-box hardware store, to pick up a few things. Since the mask mandate in NC was gone, and I was vaccinated, I decided that I too would "go commando." I walked in and pretty much everyone except for three people were still wearing masks. I started to feel self-conscious and ended up going back out to the car to get a mask. And I'll be honest, it was because I got stares. I fit the physical description of a Sean Hannity watcher, and the few other maskless ones in the store looked pretty much the same. It was clear that the social pressure was still to be cautious and careful, and look out for each other.
I think this will slowly go away as people accept that we really are ok, but it was another COVID moment in this year+ of moments.
They're better than screenwriters - they just invent their own reality out of whole cloth - see Jan 6.
Even with your assistance and the comments, I struggle to keep the contradictions in the wing-nut worldview straight. When they say COVID was a hoax, they mean it was blown out of proportion. The Chinese and Fauci are still evil, but Jesus and clean living will spare those who love freedom and fear God more than a disease. Only the elderly who would've died anyway died, and the media just created this overreaction. People in other parts of the world, well, you know they just die all the time anyway, that's the whole idea of being a Judeo-Christian American in the first place. I think with your help I now have these things clear and will be able to pass for one of them when the purges begin.
the republicans must be secretly loving that one year loss in the learning pace of children. aren't the unlearned a big section of their base?
If there were a readily available marker of my moral cowardice in the face of the largest natural disaster to strike the species in a century, and a giant flashing sign pointing to my fundamental unseriousness as a citizen, I'd be pretty eager to take it down and hide it away too.
The joke "I have to wear a mask so people don't mistake me for a Republican" isn't really a joke. It really does concern someone like me, who's got both shots. Do I want to be confused for an emotionally-immature conspiracy-theorist who's ready to follow a treasonous clown off a cliff? If I wear a mask for a while longer then people won't associate me with those people.
That's why the Right are so determined to force everyone to take off their masks: They're hoping we forget they all acted like assholes.
Yeah, I'm holding my breath for What Happens Next now that everything is back to norbal (I stole "norbal" from and old Mad Magazine bit about one of the Usual Gang Of Idiots documenting taking LSD (that's how old it was) at the office. It was a notepad that gradually turned to scribbles, then back to text. The last line was "Everything is back to norbal").
And I'd pay serious money to hear Charles Country & Western Cooke be forced to explain the science behind how he "knew" that masks were no longer necessary.
OT, but I just got an email that began:
"Hi Friend, I’m Claudia Tenney –– I’m the Republican Congresswoman for New York’s 22nd District and a champion for Election Integrity."
Each of the remaining 20 sentences also contains the phrase "election integrity," except for the one where she calls herself "a Champion for Election Reform, Security, and Integrity!"
I'm beginning to suspect it's some kind of talking point or something.