I don’t know man, but if I were an adherent of a religion which states I will be judged by my moral choices at the end of my life, I would be concerned that being a maskhole would have dire eschatological consequences.
But that’s just me.
Ha, Chinese Communist fellation going on there. What a tool! This is the total CCP party line that the new mRNA is “unproven” and therefore “suspect” compared with the traditional Chinese practice of using live or dead actual virus in the Chinese vaccines.
It wasn’t an issue of Trump’s followers being willing to sacrifice themselves. It was an issue of Trump being willing to sacrifice his own followers.
Trump screwed up early on and downplayed the crisis. After that, he didn’t want to admit he had been wrong. He decided that he’d rather send tens of thousands of people who were loyal to him to their deaths than admit he had made a mistake. (Decided probably isn’t the right word. I doubt Trump even considered the alternative of taking a blow to his ego in exchange for saving the lives of his followers.)
So it was a classic case of the kind of identity politics the OP discussed. But the relevant application here was that Trump was happy to harm people who weren’t Donald Trump.
The mistake his followers made was placing their trust in such a leader and not seeing that he did not return their loyalty.
This was more or less in a cartoon the other day, but maybe the “Liberal Media” could make a big deal of telling people not to jump off cliffs. Figure they’d be doing like lemmings do in the myth about them.
Given that these people are clearly seeing people from their communities getting sick and dying, this seems to be a case of cognitive dissonance being deadly.
It’s amazing just how many people are secretly crisis actors just waiting for that casting call.
You have to also remember, for all the sucking up some segments of the US Far Right do to Biblical literalism(*), they are the biggest Social Darwinists anywhere. If you suffer or perish, well, that’s just you not being fit to thrive in this particular situation. No injustice!
(*Sometimes I think their version for the poor or dispossessed is only the Book of Job. Don’t complain, it’s God’s will that you suffer and you’re nobody to question it, and if you just endure and endure and endure in the end He’ll make it up to you)
Little correction on this: while the CCP was initially skeptical about mRNA vaccines, they have long since praised the benefits of this form of vaccine and are developing their own.
And while this U-turn is no doubt because the Chinese-developed vaccines have comparatively low efficacy, the use of live or dead virus in vaccines is better referred to as the everywhere traditional vaccine, given that the coronavirus vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines to be approved.
Yeah, looking at vaccination rates by county here in Texas, I find what you say above to be extremely true in terms of the more educated, suburban Republicans. Collin, Williamson, and Fort Bend Counties are all three predominantly wealthy, white, and conservative suburban areas outside of Dallas, Austin and Houston respectively. Super-conservative, politically.
And yet despite that, those three counties all have some of the highest vaccination rates of any counties in the state- in the 62-66% range. So I’m thinking there is some merit to what you’re saying!
You have to admire their dedication to the craft, I suppose.
What is their motivation?
Pwning the libs – duh.
It has no motivation! It’s a rock!
– Captain Quincy Taggert
Generally true (Collin, Travis, and Fort Bend are among the most heavily vaccinated counties in Texas - and Williamson, Hays, Dallas, Denton, Harris, and Brazoria counties to a lesser extent), but one correction:
Fort Bend, where I live, is the most racially diverse county in Texas and one of the most racially diverse in the US. There’s a rather high percentage of Asian-Americans here (Indian-, Vietnamese-, Chinese-, Korea-, Filipino-Americans). Ethnic plurality only - no ethnicity has a majority in the county unless you group Hispanic-Americans with White people (and then it still only gets to 55%).
It’s generally very conservative, but due to the rather obvious racism of the current GOP, the county actually went to Biden this last cycle and if not for the heavy gerrymandering in Texas, likely would have flipped a couple House seats to the Dems as well. If the GOP ever regains its sanity, that would likely change.
Covid is the first time I’ve seen the far right sacrifice themselves at the alter of identity politics
Sorry, the grammarian inside of me has to call this one out: it should be ‘altar of identity politics’
Carry on.
Masks do provide significant protection to the wearer. I’m not sure of the numbers either (or if it even makes sense to assign a number), but organizations such as the CDC updated their guidance to clarify that, yes, the data shows that masks provide significant protective benefit to the wearer.
The whole thing with masks has been a complete clusterfuck in the West.
First health officials tried to suggest that masks should be reserved only for healthcare workers…Which is fine, but it immediately got misparsed in the media as “masks are useless, look at those dummies in other parts of the world wearing masks” (e.g. the truth about asia’s mask obsession).
Then for some bizarre reason they tried to sell it as some brave, heroic thing, because it would protect others but not the wearer. When in fact the data on whether the protection is 1 or 2 way was still equivocal and now plenty of studies are saying that (big surprise) it is 2-way protection.
And yeah, in the meantime, this way of trying to sell mask use completely failed for the selfish bastard demographic.
We have a thread on this board asking as to why membership is declining. Many conservatives are coming onto the thread saying ‘we find that this place is inhospitable to conservatives’.
It’s because the primary organization for conservative thought denies reality. Your leadership denies reality. Your fellow conservatives deny reality. And it’s to the point where I am quite comfortable calling modern-day, 2021 conservatives, evil specifically because they refuse to live in a fact-based reality.
Because who does this, if not the evil among us?
Really? My mom lives in Meadows Place (between Sugar Land, Stafford, and Houston- think W. Airport @ Kirkwood) and honestly I had figured all the Asian/South Asian immigrants lived in Harris County in the Alief area (where I grew up), not in Fort Bend County.
Even so, it’s kind of shocking to me that Williamson and Collin Counties are so vaccinated AND so conservative. And Comal and Kendall counties near San Antonio. Same sort of thing- heavily white, conservative AND highly vaccinated.
Not at all. The South Asians are out in Sugar Land these days or just outside in unincorporated Fort Bend waiting until it gets annexed by Sugar Land, like the New Territory subdivision of First Colony.
Your mom’s area is still fairly white but a bit older and close to Harris County for the ones looking at the newer developments. Meadow’s Place is only a few miles up Dulles/Kirkwood from my place. Katy, Sugar Land, and a lot of the big master plans abutting them but technically unincorporated (Riverstone/Cinco Ranch) have a lot of Asian Americans.
But it’s still true the more rural parts of the county, along with Richmond/Rosenberg are what you’d think. And many of the Asian Americans in the county really do skew conservative but aren’t so comfortable with the current GOP.
It’s confusing because it’s the party of altarnate facts.
Great thread, great responses mostly. Here’s another perspective:
So we’re hierarchical creatures and efforts to re-arrange the hierarchy tend to make reformers and opponents freak out. Because in the ancestral environment, being a low status member of the tribe led to far more offspring than being an outcast from all tribes.
As it happens Liberals have led the culture wars, not conservatives, according to polling. But over at the never-Trumpist Bulwark, another guy argues that the opposite is true if you consider political leaders - Republican politicos stir the cultural muck far more enthusiastically than Dem politicos do, on average. But wait, you shouldn’t focus the dozen or 3 nutcases in Washington. That’s just political entrepreneurs responding to incentives. Instead, go back to the source of sensationalist views on public policy: It’s all Fox News.