What? No. I’m trying to suggest talking points people can use when talking to trumpians they can’t avoid, like relatives. This particular talking point is obvious to me as I spent most of the last 6 months in Europe.
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First of all barbers and small shop keeper had to pay bills and buy food. So, closing a shop when not necessary it’s a big problem for the owners and in turn for social security.
Now there are shops that aren’t important if there’s a month long lockdown, but if it’ becoming longer, problems arises. I could delay to buy a pair of trousers or a ream of A4 paper for two weeks but for two months is becoming a problem.
About the scissor fun, it could be feasible if you are a man in the 50s and don’t mind to show your grayness, or like the capt. Picard hairsytle. But if you re more to the capt.Janeway style you need the hair salon.
No - his point is quite salient.
The rational of the relative is the virus is not bad, that’s why the other countries are getting better already. And that we are actually getting better, and the virus is not that bad. Whats happening here is inflation of numbers to make it look bad here, inflation of the story by the Fake News media, all for political reasons, to harm trump.
The question - why was the improvement in other countries proceeded by a lengthy shut-down and shelter? If that was not needed, as they are saying it is not needed here, that would mean that all the other countries in the world fabricated and executed a shut down - just to make trump look bad. A preposterous allegation.
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They have a built in justification for that, other countries are cowards who don’t value freedom, so they overreacted.
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Perhaps. But how are these people drawn in so readily, and why do they resist when it becomes plainly obvious they’ve been lied to.
I understand at the beginning - the NY Times is Left Bias. I get that. I get not trusting their opinions. I am left, and I don’t like the NY Times.
But then they are told the NY Times is “Fake News”. Its total fiction, made up to advance the left agenda. Since I already did not trust them, I’m open to this. Now the void can be filled with all kinds of right wing propaganda.
4 years down this road, its a long way back to reality. They just don’t want to let go and admit they’ve been hoodwinked the entire time.
Is it possible to offer them a gentle out? Or is it hopeless? Am I at least close in characterizing it this way?
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Please drop the “Oops. Nevermind.” Yes, really. Anyone really paying attention from the beginning knew, and was saying, that the US wasn’t going to contain and eradicate covid. That was never what “flattening the curve” was about. It was always going to be a lot of people making hard decisions under tremendous uncertainty about what tradeoffs were worth making among all bad options. Pandemics kill people. Overwhelmed medical systems kill people. Lack of routine medical care kills people. Poverty kills people. Police states kill people. Fear and anxiety and mental illness kill people. Many of our so-called leaders have done extremely badly at this, while some have done reasonably well.
Either way. if we don’t let people gracefully recognize when policies need to change, or when changes need to be reversed, we’re just refusing to let people learn from data and making it not worth their while to try to do better.
Edit to add: Yes, I’m saying that any successful covid-fighting strategy necessarily includes removing and sometimes reinstating restrictions as needed. This Medium article from March was spot on then, accurately listed the key unknowns, and given those and how they’ve changed is still spot-on now: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
A lot of people have defined their identity in terms of conservative politics in general and Trump in particular. It is deeply jarring to come to terms with a failure that large. It is hard enough to wrap my mind around the scale, and I can’t stand these people. If you had a hand in supporting Trump and the policies that landed us here, that emotional burden is larger. If you’ve defined yourself in terms of support for him, it gets larger still.If you’ve defined yourself in terms of him and there is an entire media apparatus dedicating millions of dollars to providing an alternative explanation, it is an incredible burden. Our current situation isn’t a short term aberration, but the results of decades of cultivation.
There is a path, but not a nice, easy, or good one. Each of them needs two things to begin climbing back to reality, a shock that causes a reexamination and a face saving way to avoid their responsibility. If they have to face the fact that they help kill 100,000+ people, it might be cognitively easier to keep riding with the fiction. That might be the only way to crawl back from the brink peacefully, but it leaves a lot of the underlying rot in place. People have tied a huge part of their self identification to an entire apparatus of lies and that isn’t going to be pretty. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a society this deeply in love with reality denial climb back to reality without a really massive trauma, and if covid isn’t enough to do it, I’m terrified of what is. There are still non-violent ways back, but they aren’t easy, or quick. We’re in for a few decades of organizing and tough conversations to get back to a reasonable political culture, and that is if we are lucky.
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