I would add that a lot of the public anger at the lockdown may not necessarily be over the lockdown itself, but the way it is communicated. Fairly or unfairly, it has come across to many people as, “Who cares if you lose your jobs or go bankrupt, you need to be locked down for the good of society overall. Suck it up and deal with it.”
Because their orange leader wants it.
Who said that?
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.”
In a way, I would feel much more comfortable if I could attribute this to some kind of grand master 4D chess where Republican leaders are cynically killing off the poors to pad their bank account.
But malice wouldn’t explain why Rand Paul thinks he got it and then went and worked out in the Congressional Gym while waiting for test results. Malice wouldn’t explain how Boris Johnson managed to get infected and got put into the ICU. Malice wouldn’t explain why top US officials refuse to social distance themselves in public scenarios that are blatantly unsafe given what we know about presymptomatic spread.
The simple, parsimonious answer is that Republicans are living in a world of alternative facts because the conservative media had a vested interested to make the virus “an attack on the president” and now can’t go back on their original party line.
I said all of that two posts before yours using only six words. Now that’s parsimonious.
Read through Fucking idiot coronavirus-loving rednecks in Michigan and you’ll see it paraphrased numerous ways.
Fair enough.
How much of the public has seen that Pit thread? I haven’t heard any of the governors who have impose the lock downs conveying that message. If it’s coming across that way to the public then it’s coming from dishonest sources or they aren’t listening at all.
This is anastroturfed movement that basically proves that it’s trivially easy to get the republican base to do anything you want if you feed them outrage. Liberals are for keeping people safe, liberals hate freedom, you have to be unsafe to have freedom, go block off a fucking hospital and cough on everyone you see just to own the libs.
If one of these astroturf groups told them that liberals secretly put something in the water to make all young children permanently liberal they’d strangle their own kids. If you told them liberals were pro-buildings they’d burn down their own house. That’s all they are now. Outrage and spite.
Any or all. But indeed that is at the core, like I said before: the distress they are feeling is the *economic *distress. They can feel, see, touch THAT.
Many of them simply may be thinking *“I can’t believe this supposedly most advanced society in history can’t control this health scare without costing me my job. I demand they do.”
*
Also in some of the RW cultural circles there has for a long time been a certain “what’s the matter do you want to live forever?” attitude about mandatory cautionary measures, it’s not something brand new to our day.
Which seems to be at work in many of the cases where the President seems to speak against what he said the day before – if the other side doesn’t immediately slam it, there must be *something *wrong with it!
Nobody but it is what they *are *feeling and perceiving. Regardless if it has been engineered to make it so.
You’ve seen my opinion of their feelings and perceptions. We have to make sure the result is put on them.
This is true, but you can’t seriously deny that Republicans in the USA
- Lead the Western world in wanting to end lockdowns early, and
- Seem to be buttressed by a lot of conspiracy theory.
Tilting at strawmen of his own manufacture is Sam Stone’s métier.
As for the question of the o.p. and responses so far, I don’t see evidence of must long term thinking among Republicans, or indeed, from most elected officials in general. Republicans (who are pretty much ideologically neoconservative by definition at this point) want “a return to normalcy” where they can go to church, watch professional sports, et cetera, and believe that the COVID-19 pandemic has been exaggerated to prevent this. Of course, other, non-Republican people want a return so some kind of normal life as well, but Republicans in particular have been conditioned by their leaders to ignore reality in favor of Fox News propaganda and “alternative facts”, a worldview you can thank John Ehrlichman, Lee Atwater, Elliott Abrams, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, et al. In their view, reality is something that you choose to believe, or in the words of Karl Rove: That’s not the way the world really works anymore…We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
This has worked well enough in geopolitics, where one can “create other new realities” by feeding an all-too-gullible press incorrect facts and claims (which administrations both Republican and Democrat have done as a matter of course) but that strategy doesn’t work so well against a foe that isn’t in some remote part of the world and over which you have no control. The people who have promoted and are accepting this notion that we should just get back to work, let the “corona virus” situation work its way out as God intends, and everything will just go back to “normal”. That this is essentially magical thinking is not a difficulty for them because they are already well acquainted with the idea of ignoring facts.
I do have to admit, however, in the dark places that my mind goes during every-more-frequent bouts of insomnia, that the reason countries like Japan were so lax about responding to the pandemic was that it helps to reduce their top heavy demographics in which retirees are going to outnumber working citizens. I would like to believe that is not a part of the calculus (especially since it is clear now that while this virus attacks older people with greater incidence it also affects much younger and healthier people as well) but you rarely go wrong betting with cynics because they know to bet with the house.
Stranger
That mentality is the wrong one for dealing with this crisis. This is not a problem you can react to. The best way to address it is before it happens. So the governor was correct in locking down counties that didn’t have any known cases. If he waited until a county had a consequential amount of cases, it would mean having people die unnecessarily. And ironically, if his policy is a success, the county will avoid having a major outbreak because of the lockdown and then some people will argue that the lockdown wasn’t necessary.
The short, short and overly generalized answer is that the left has a positive view of government. It is a tool to achieve social equality and do good.
The right generally views government with suspicion as a tool that oppresses unless it is kept at a bare minimum.
It’s pretty scary to me that the government has claimed the power to force you to stay in your home, unable to assemble or to go to church.
Your right to [del]throw a punch[/del]assemble/go to church ends at [del]my nose[/del] fucking lungs.
Does that make it fucking clear?
To answer the OP, it might help to look at Brazil’s Bolsonaro, who up to early April had taken a rather globally extreme line of denial about the hazards of coronavirus (asserting for instance, “that Brazilians are resistant to infectious diseases and said that those who are athletes, like him, will be fine.”)
From the New York Times:
And from the Wall Street Journal:
Oh this tired argument again. These rights are fundamental. The core of these rights are not subject to balancing tests.
If he had waited until there were a “consequential amount of cases”, then the reality is that there would be an order of magnitude or more number of cases given the general lack of availability of antigen testing and the large number of asymptomatic or presymptomatic cases.
Well, that is an ideological fear. But what about the fact that a large assemblage of people, at church or elsewhere, can result in a local outbreak of infections which could then be spread back to households or other assemblies.
In other words, the pathogen doesn’t give a good whore’s fuck about your ideology, or your religious faith, or your need to hang out with friends. It will infect whomever it can come into contact with, and because so many ignorant people believe that they are somehow uniquely immune to being infected and passing on the pathogen, either by the grace of whatever god they worship or just because they are too narcissistic to believe that a virus can infect them just as it will everyone else, it is necessary for governors and municipal leaders to issue what are largely voluntary “stay-at-home” orders. If people weren’t so ignorant and would willingly take the recommended steps to minimize the potential for transmission, and if we were better able to protect people in critical roles who cannot work from home, this epidemic would be put paid to in a few weeks. But because self-absorbed assholes and conspiracy-swallowing idiots decide that they need to go to mass congregations and out to the beach, we’re going to be living with waves of epidemics for many months.
Stranger
That equation fails to take into account that after that several weeks in the hospital some percentage of people will be left with permanent damage to their lungs and possibly other organs including heart, liver, and kidneys.
Would you rather be unemployed for a year, or left with permanent body damage for the rest of your life?