Just as an observation: the problem with saying “everyone knows” is that you end up sounding like Himself. Just settle for the announced numbers at the moment; they are horrifying enough. When the correct totals are established - probably in a few months time - they will clearly be even worse. But I think that suggesting that they are being suppressed risks heading into the same sort of conspiracy fever swamp that Himself has already got lost in.
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I wish Trump was that coherent and aware.
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When the official total US deaths toll only increases from 98,683 on May 23rd, 99,300 on May 24th, 99,805 on May 25th and manages to miraculously stay below 100,000 on May 26th (99,846 deaths), I think everyone with a functioning brain knows the death toll is much higher than is being stated. I do understand your distaste for the everyone knows trope, though.
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You have very wishful thinking.
This is the reason that these people got elected in the first place- liberals (of which I am one) continue to make the argument that facts will matter to these people, that rational arguments will always be listened to and weighted accordingly, that showing people irrefutable statistics will get them to admit it proves they were wrong.
In reality, it doesn’t work that way.
I have heard at least one person where I work say of everyone dead of Corona “fuck em, who cares”.
These are “men” that work in a Pennsylvania machine shop. I go out of my way when I need something from them to pander to their intelligence, because they are stupid enough not to know better- and get angry when you treat them directly like the idiots they often (not always) are.
They throw garbage on the floor and in sinks, when there is a garbage can right in front of them. They track horseshit into a clean aerospace shop while wearing a Trump 2020 hat.
These people can never be reasoned with, because I tried, for over a decade, and it cost me jobs. I gave up trying to reason with belligerently ignorant people I find on the job. They won’t listen to a rational arguement based on facts, they won’t listen to anything, period, that doesn’t reinforce their own twisted hollow view of the world.
You can’t win against these “men”. You can only out vote them, became they’re so busy ignoring anything approaching reason- they will never listen to you.
You’d get halfway through maybe your second statement before they walk away and curse you, while making up another conspiracy to cover whatever you’re saying.
And before you say “well, find another career or shop!”- don’t. This place I’m in is about as least toxic as it gets.
Welcome to the people who follow Trump’s logic of shifting blame eternally, and my own personal hell.
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THIS. To quote Patton Oswalt, “Those people are lost.” I learned the hard way to not even try to have a calm, reasoned, logical discussion with people who are purposely low information and lost to a cult.
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Yeah, I was doing an ironic Aaron S*rkin bit there. In reality, as you say, being unpersuadable is itself the win condition for this mindset. They mean to be assholes.
Still, letting them forget they even are assholes just makes it sweeter for them. Once in a while, I do think you can let the air out of their tires by casually noticing a particularly gaping chasm in their logic – ideally as if you were a dumb person trying to follow along – and leaving it to hang like a fart without pressing the issue.
I sometimes almost wonder if Proverbs 13:24 has a point, because I see a lot of people who weren’t spanked as children in clear need of spanking as adults.
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100,000 deaths is not great. While it’s a small number compared to the 2.8m deaths that occur annually. The concern arises when we consider if 100,000 is what we get when around 1.6 million people are infected, where will we be when 100 times as many people are enviably exposed?
Our leadership failed us. Our testing of the virus was a huge set back. Our free market turned out to be too inflexible to shift toilet paper and flour from commercial to retail channels. And in a several months we will find if our healthcare system can vaccinate hundreds of millions of people.
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And how many points from the Russian judge?
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I clicked on one of those “Official Trump Approval Rating” polls, gave them a fake email address/name, clicked “disapprove”, and was shown the number “93% approval” as the result of their not-even-slightly-scientific poll. Maybe that’s where he gets his ‘great reviews.’
(Then the fake email address got hit with six or seven emails a day asking for money to fight “sleepy Joe”, “the hateful left” and all their other favorite bogeymen. “YOU have been chosen, Hugh Jass, to help Keep America Great-- NEW PRODUCT ALERT, for a limited time only!”)
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Beyond the ability to attack government even as he sits at the apex of government in this country, the coronavirus has given Trump an easily communicated and self-validating rationale for a second term: He deserves the chance to finish the “swamp cleaning” job he was sent to Washington to perform, and to re-create the economic conditions that prevailed when the pandemic broke out. His remarkably consistent efforts to blame others (notably China, immigrants, and globalists) for the coronavirus, and uncooperative state and local governments for its economic impact, reinforce a sort of POTUS Interruptus case that he’s entitled to overtime extending into a second term.
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LIKE! Make it so
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Wouldn’t it be more like a shibboleth?
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That was one I had to look up. The definition I got was:
- a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.
- a slogan; catchword.
- a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.
I’m not sure that fits, at least not how I was thinking about it.
I thought of it like a litmus test. Ask someone about the current pandemic (dip them in the solution) and if they start talking about the “China Virus” they’ve “turned pink” no mater how non-racist they appeared before the conversation was started.
Nobody who isn’t an acolyte of the Church of Trump, or a basic racist, would call it that.
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It’s meaning number 1 I was referring to. A shibboleth is the linguistic version of a litmus test. How you say something (or pronounce something in the case of the original shibboleth) identifies you as a member of a group.
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