And now we've given up

Quote from Robin Williams.

Years ago, someone got modded on these boards for quoting it, because it was seen as an insult, outside the Pit.

Canadian Dopers rushed to defend the user, saying “no, it’s social commentary!” :smiley:

I think it’s entered the vernacular now.

Apparently, Douchey has now decided that treating unvaccinated children who have been exposed to COVID differently than vaccinated children is discriminatory and will not be allowed. Ducey's office tells districts to change COVID-19 quarantine policies

Delta is here, today over a thousand new cases were reported.

I am watching the health department vaccination page and as soon as there are sign-ups for the booster, I will totally be there.

I cannot process the thinking behind the right wing’s drive to deny the seriousness of the pandemic. It’s not just in the U.S. either - we’re seeing it with Bolsonaro and other right-leaning politicians. It’s like they want to communicate that the inherent strength of mankind - emphasis on man - is enough to defeat this invisible killer and that to rely on vaccines and masks is fundamentally weak.

It’s just mind-bogglingly stupid. But apparently popular.

I really don’t get it either. And I have a Trumpist brother who refuses to get vaccinated. In New York City, where last year the bodies were piled up in refrigerated trucks and funeral homes weren’t even answering the phone.

Anyone here read Neal Stephenson’s Fall, or, Dodge in Hell? There’s a subplot in which right-wingers (who, like the Trumpists, have a weird love for “tactical” clothing) believe that terrorists have blown up Moab, Utah with a nuclear weapon. And nothing will change their belief, including the fact that, well, Moab is still there and people can actually go there. It’s all part of the cover-up, of course.

It feels all too real now.

That would suck. I"ve been to Moab, and it’s a really nice place. Pretty lefty for Utah too.

that’s why it got blown up, of course. For sharing that liberal bias with reality.

It’s the problem that is inherent with authoritarian or authoritarian leaning governments: deep down, they lack legitimacy and they know it. Therefore, they have to keep the good times rolling. All news has to be good news. Otherwise, they’re afraid, people will start saying “Hey…why are these guys running everything, anyway?”

5 year plan to get best potatoes is GOOD PLAN! Best plan! Does not matter that potatoes do not grow. Is fault of bad Democrats! There are many, many potatoes - just are somewhere else!

More than this; authoritarians are disturbed by anything that they cannot control; it makes them look ‘weak’ and undermines their claims to have full control over everything at all times according to plan. As such, the reflex is to deny anything that they cannot control, be it insurgency, economic downturns, epidemic outbreaks, the severity of natural disasters, industrial accidents, et cetera. The former Soviet Union is a seven decade long case study in this, with a continuum of denials of successive failure of their economic and political system; once they ‘opened up’ and started acknowledging failures under Gorbachev (most notably the Chernobyl Disaster, which the Soviets tried ineffectually to conceal), the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact came apart like a cheap gold watch far faster than even the most critical projections.

Stranger

Indeed; unfortunately, they also provided incentive for future authoritarians to double their efforts to deny what is plainly obvious.

Well, isn’t this what drives a lot of the right in this country as well? They worry/know that if all (or even any) of America’s shortcoming and failures were just out in the open, it would all fall apart?

Isn’t that what drives the resistance to Critical Race Theory?

I mean, if America wasn’t really founded to offer freedom to everyone, if America wasn’t really founded on the notion that all are created equal… what is America? Just a giant lie that’s been used to prop up our oligarchs for all these years?

The problem with lying isn’t the initial deception but the spiraling rationalizations for everything that stems from it. It is not difficult to lie; the difficulty is maintaining the lie over an extended period of time that isn’t immediately obvious to anyone with critical thinking abilities. Which doesn’t stop narcissistic politicians and sociopathic CEOs from thinking they can get away with it.

Well…yes. If we were really trying to live up to the supposed ideals of the nation (that “all men are created equal”), we’d acknowledge these failings on the path to addressing them. Instead, the United States–one of the last industrialized nations to renounce human slavery–has an entrenched position in denying them, and while that is deeply rooted in the conservative movement, it isn’t as if the supposedly “liberal” Democratic party as a whole has made it a mission statement to address them, largely because it would mean undermining the economic powers that support a “two party system” that presents the appearance of choice.

And is isn’t as if the extreme left is innocent of this as well; the Marxist-leaning left wants to deny the evident harms that have occurred in the implementations of that ideology, and then you have the anarchists and Libertarian-Objectivists who live in fictional worlds of their own creation. When it is so easy to construct and promote a worldview based upon ideology or demogoguery instead of objective evidence, it makes sense to just make up whatever story best suits your interest and gaslight everything into accepting it. That is literally the art of politics.

Stranger

Agreed; the only problem is that the last several years of American history have indicated to me that CTA are in staggering short supply for a not-insignificant portion of our population.

Getting back on topic though: what are things going to look like by the end of this year? It’s plainly obvious that the red states are not going to do much of anything further to try to mitigate the disease.

Well, you can look at Great Britain but multiply the hospitalizations and deaths by a factor of vaccinate acceptance. The ‘Delta’ variant has taken over and will shoot through the population, vaccinated and unvaccinated, like a hot knife through butter. The difference is that the vaccinated populations will suffer relatively mild effects (and hopefully low levels of post-acute sequelae) while the states with low vaccination rates are going to be rapidly overwhelmed, which also happen to be the states that are least equipped to deal with massive outbreaks. Regardless, the front line responders and medical personnel are going to be dealing with another seemingly endless wave of critical patients with little recognition or support.

Stranger

Bingo - and if they can’t absolutely slam the door shut on something like a pandemic, then they go into full-on denial mode. Illiberal authoritarians don’t do nuances the way liberal (d)emocrats do.

Sure; I was just pointing it out so it wasn’t unnoticed amidst everything else.

And the thing is, we really don’t have a problem with leftist extremists in the US at the moment, so I didn’t bother to bring them up.

Back to the pandemic: aye; this is gonna be brutal again, I fear.

tsk Why are you guys all worked up? There isn’t anything to worry about, we haven’t gotten over the acceptable death levels yet, time enough to worry when that happens.

Of course, we are all getting more and more jaded, acceptable death levels are going to be higher than any reasonable person would like. The percentage of reasonable people in Arizona is just about 44.12%. IMHO.

A perfect example of this is Turkmenistan, even moreso than Russia. Last year, I wondered why they weren’t reporting any cases or deaths and looked into it a bit. It seems they were in such denial that it was apparently illegal to mention the coronavirus or COVID in public. Any cases in Turkmenistan were diagnosed as pneumonia and they had a lot of pneumonia cases. Have not looked into it since then, so don’t know if they’re still in denial or not.

If the Republicans have their way, that will probably happen here.

Who says we can’t learn from other nations?