Watch how Trump fan reacts when cornered with facts

My partner and I work with animals (and insects, like our bees).
We have been a steward of many.
Even the domesticated animals we work with, and share indoor and outdoor spaces with, have these things in common:

  • ability to parse my body language;
  • ability to smell my pheromones (including various flavors of stress, such as fear);
  • ability to parse my tone when I speak; and
  • fantastic situational awareness [when awake].

I really have yet to meet an animal, wild or tame, whose instincts are not more or less intact.

They draw their own conclusions, which often successfully support their survival.
Unsuccessful understanderers of humans do not usually live to reproduce.

I think humans are unique in our ability to come at facts–real, honest, verifiable facts–from an emotional place, and then, with all fantastic computing power our brains have, turn our backs on the facts, and stay in our emotional comfort zone.

As I write this, I have three dear older friends with cancer, some with very advanced stages of it. They are hoping against the odds, they are pushing themselves through all the modern western medicine can throw at them, to see if they can turn things around. They want to live. That is their emotional comfort zone… facts (and prognoses) be damned. They–heck, I–want medical miracles.

To come at closely held convictions from an emotional place is to be human.
Staying there, despite all evidence to the contrary, is understandable.
It’s probably even an evolutionary advantage, some days.

And… some days… not.

My guess is that the programming that started with the Christ kernel, with its various IRL instantiated, organized applications religious sects, is running its Book of Revelation subroutine, having been infected (suborned?) for the umpteenth time by The Greed Community. My guess is that all true believers of all stripes do not want to hear or believe they have been sold out (please do not construe my guess as a wall-to-wall indictment of all Christians; it is not).

Tennessee health official says she was fired after outreach efforts to vaccinate teens

July 14, 2021 / 6:49 AM / CBS/AP

Tennessee’s former top vaccinations official said Tuesday that she couldn’t stay silent after she was fired this week amid scrutiny from Republican state lawmakers over her department’s outreach efforts to vaccinate teenagers against COVID-19.

Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who was the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health, said the state’s elected leaders put politics over the health of children by firing her for her efforts to get more Tennesseans vaccinated.

She said the agency presented her with a letter of resignation and a letter of termination Monday, but no reason for why she was being let go.

After choosing the termination letter, Fiscus penned a blistering 1,200-word response published in The Tennessean in which she said she is ashamed of Tennessee’s leaders, afraid for her state, and “angry for the amazing people of the Tennessee Department of Health who have been mistreated by an uneducated public and leaders who have only their own interests in mind.”

“I am not a political operative, I am a physician who was, until today, charged with protecting the people of Tennessee, including its children, against preventable diseases like COVID-19,” she said.

The changes to Tennessee’s vaccination strategy will impact the majority of the Volunteer State, which lags behind most of the nation in the race to immunity. Only 38% of Tennesseans are fully vaccinated, and at the current pace the state won’t be 50% vaccinated until March, according to health department estimates. The agency holds responsibility for public health in 89 of Tennessee’s 95 counties, excluding major metropolitan areas where local agencies wield more authority.

‘No proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines’

After the health department’s internal COVID-19 report was circulated on Friday, the rollback of vaccine outreach was further detailed in a Monday email from agency Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tim Jones.

Jones told staff they should conduct “no proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines” and “no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV vaccine.”

Staff were also told not to do any “pre-planning” for flu shots events at schools. Any information released about back-to-school vaccinations should come from the Tennessee Department of Education, not the Tennessee Department of Health, Jones wrote.

“Any kinds of informational sheets or other materials that we make available for dissemination should have the TDH logo removed,” Jones wrote.

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At this point I’m less interested in the woman and more interested in what the daily show audience gets out of watching this stuff. Yes, these people are stupid hypocrites. And then what? I suppose it’s cathartic to laugh at your enemy or whatever, but we’ve been laughing at them since since Iraq and things have only gotten worse.

The planet it burning to the ground, but at least we caught the stupid people acting stupid, on camera!

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Standard household joke: “Wait, there’s a NEW Mexico?” (Best said over a mouthful of taco salad.)

Facts are a mugs game in MAGAland. Outrage is the new black, er, “fact.”

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I kind of just did that: not sure what the contact was soaking in, but somehow it had become quite astringent which of course my eye did not take kindly to.

And yet, that was so much less damaging, and so much easier and quicker to fix, than this venomous army of MAGAts. I think we just have to keep diluting their influence by surrounding them with more and more civic-minded citizens until their corrosiveness is neutralized.

Which is exactly how I dealt with the contact situation, come to think of it.

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Me, too! It makes my brain explode when I try to figure that out. :exploding_head:

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I don’t even mind whataboutism when there’s a valid argument there… for example someone calling out Biden for being a bit creepy around women when their good buddy Trump is a Grade A, Gold Star champion creep. Pointing out that Trump is worse is very definitely whataboutism. But when your whataboutism consists of lesser offences, or total fabrications, that’s where I have a problem.

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The problem is that if they hear one thing from one group, and something else from another, they will decide that there’s no reason to believe the one whose views they don’t like. Why should they think that other side is telling the truth. They could fact check, but their own side is telling them that fact checkers are liars.

It’s never a matter of taking one side over the other. It’s not a matter of trusting commentators or politicians or trusting science blindly. If they spew out nonsense about vaccines, I know they are wrong not because other scientists tell me so but because I understand biology. I understand how cells work and how RNA works. I understand how each ingredient in the vaccine works as part of the process and what the body does with it. And all that is independent of what any politician says, and I don’t need to be a virologist. I just need to understand what’s been known about mRNA for four decades, how all this has been done in laboratories for decades, and how it was only a matter of getting it to the cells without the mRNA falling apart. It might take me five hours to explain, and those people don’t want anything that won’t fit in a tweet, and even this comment will challenge their tl;dr mentality.

Fact check everything, even if you agree with it. There’s no shortage of liberals spewing misinformation. The only difference is that my experience with liberals is that when I call them out, they will be slightly embarrassed, apologize and take down their post. Conservatives will double down and refuse to accept that they are wrong.

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Can’t speak for everyone, but for me it’s hilarious when the side-ism is so baldly exposed. Not because I think they’re too stupid to acknowledge their hypocrisy but because it’s where most of the country are right now and have been for a while. These people are (one of) the extreme(s) on the right, but it’s self-serving to believe there isn’t anything similar on the left. This is all of us, even if it isn’t necessarily any of us in particular. It’s absurd, frightening, sad, but also eye-opening.

This clip represents the alternate reality Trumpers live in. Not only does she think Trump is cooperating with investigators, she still thinks Obama’s birth certificate was fake, and I’m sure there are hundreds of other easily dis-proven myths she buys into.

If we can’t agree on ground rules for what constitutes reality then there’s really no way to have any kind of meaningful productive debate. It would just be a verbal tug-of-war. And it usually is.

“What would it take for me to prove to you my version of reality? And using the same criteria, could you prove your version to me?”

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Stunned look of incomprehension, inability to parse imparted information, automatic rejection of facts, childish “I don’t care” rebuttal. Yep, we got our selves a typical Republican/Trump idolater.

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P.S.: I like what that guy is doing, I am amused, but also disgusted and saddened that there are people like that woman, wandering around, voting with only part of a workable brain.

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Textbook gaslighting, which is really just the Qpublican Playbook really. This brief interaction had all of the hallmarks.

  • Denial
  • Diverting
  • Trivializing
  • Countering
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Whataboutism is a bad-faith attempt to distract and de-rail from the topic at hand. It doesn’t matter whether the other guy is worse or better, it’s a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy.

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This gom jabbar [fails to humiliate] fascists

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In their case, it doesn’t take much in the way of washing.

Now, how can it be a fact, if they don’t agree with it?
ETA:

It’s a tactic used by children & it would be nice if these people were called out on it:
‘Well, kid… you & the neighbor kid got caught breaking windows with rocks. What do you have to say for yourself?’
‘The neighbor kid broke a lot more windows than I did, & besides, it was their idea, so why am I in trouble?’

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Fuck both sides-ism.

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That word ‘prove’. It does not mean what they think it means.

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How many millions of democrats spent 8 months denying that trump won the 2016 election?

The democrats don’t flatly deny reality the way republicans do.

To say so is at best extremely ignorant, and at worst just spreading conservative “enlightened centrist” propaganda. ie being a republican but too embarrassed to admit it.

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It appears to be orders of magnitude worse on the right. And hence, it is not “similar.”

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This is why attempts to point out hypocrisy among Republicans over the last—oh, let’s say 12 years, but especially the last four—are generally futile. The people who see the hypocrisy don’t need to be convinced: they know it already. The people who don’t see the hypocrisy will never see it because they either don’t believe it’s true, or if they do, they don’t care because when “their team” is doing it, it’s okay because it’s a tactic in pursuit of their side’s just, moral, and righteous crusade (as the woman in the clip has done).

And Republican politicians couldn’t care less if some journalist points out they have inconsistent positions depending on who’s in charge. Does anyone really think Mitch McConnell is going to have an internal crisis of confidence when someone points out his hypocritical position on, for example, the rule he invented to prevent Merrick Garland from getting a SCOTUS nomination hearing? Of course not: McConnell’s view is that the ends justify the means. If he were internally consistent, he wouldn’t have gotten what he wanted.

And, finally, you need to have a sense of shame to view hypocrisy as a bad thing. These people have no sense of shame. As the woman in the video says, “I don’t care.” It’s not about logic or facts or reason or empiricism or morality or anything else. It’s about “if it gets my side a ‘win,’ then I’m all for it.”

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