04-17-2020, 03:56 PM
(04-17-2020, 10:41 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(04-17-2020, 05:49 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(04-16-2020, 11:05 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: CNN is reporting that Social-distancing deniers have arrived. The red pattern has always been to deny any problem that can only be solved be big government and big taxes. The Coronavirus obviously counts. The efforts to isolate by government order are considered tyrannical. Trump’s attempts to reopen the country and minimize these isolation are to be applauded. The old values favoring Unraveling selfishness and hedonism are thus continued. The post trigger dedication to the common good, to helping out the people on the front lines, is shunned.
Michigan had a protest recently, where the protesters ignored social distancing, flew Trump banners, and if there were any contaminated people carried the Coronavirus back home to their communities. More hot spots.
Cranks -- cornerstones of some authoritarian causes. See also young-earth creationists, anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers, "scientific" racists, climate-change deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and those who claim that the moon landing was staged on a Hollywood sound-stage.
They are more than just cranks. They value themselves and seek personal benefit at the cost of their country and those who are making considerable sacrifice for the common good. They are selfish and hedonistic. The time for that is now past.
A good part of what bugs me is the saying, “Make America great again.” Then we have this conflict between those like the medical community and first responders who sacrifice for the communal good, and the hedonistic selfish people who go their own way and make the sacrifices made all the more repeated and necessary. Want to know what made America great once, what greatness is? Look no further than that.
Hurt feelings about a loss of national pride is common in pathological nationalism. "Didn't we used to rule?"... Weren't we once kings here?
COVID-19 is a genuine Crisis, as if a Crisis war in fatalities alone.
Many of us have made voluntary changes to our lives out of a fear of pointless death, and if we do not get the point with public service ads and the appeals of politicians we find out that if we go somewhere we find that there is nothing to do there. One such trip is enough to convince us. Stay home. Flawed as our live can be, we don't want to get sick and die -- or even end up under medical care. Life is miserable under a ventilator. I need remind people of the contempt that physicians often have for alcoholics with advanced cirrhosis. An uncle by marriage was a heavy drinker almost all his adult life, and he had the most egregious liver that some medical students ever saw. As I understood (he was sedated or unconscious) the professor mocked what got him to his doom.
Even if I am not a Mormon, I am glad to have "Mormon lungs" and a "Mormon liver".
So if we get through this Crisis we will be able to make up for lost time. To do this we must survive. Surely we want loved ones to be around.
The bigger the death toll, the bigger will be the economic consequences.
But you know that already. We are coming to recognize that a reliable food supply is more important than anything else. As it turns out, a pork-processing place in South Dakota operating at full speed and with no protections of workers from the COVID-19 virus ended up a hot-spot. Much pork had to be destroyed so it would never reach the market.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.