There's a morbid reason why red states are encouraging the spread of covid. They are angry because they lost the election (see polls). In retaliation they want people to suffer.
This mirrors the draining of the public pools. Many places in the USA favored draining and closing down their public pools over the possibility of races mixing together and enjoying the benefits of the pool. amazon.com/Sum-Us-Everyon…
Many are willing to suffer just as long as the people they hate also suffer with them. It's an ugly mindset, but it's surprisingly true of many policies in many states in America.
It's related to another ugly behavior that is borne out of a lack of resources. In many poorer countries, there is what is known as 'crab mentality'. That everyone tries to pull you down when you are seen as successful.
This is a consequence of seeing the world as a zero-sum game. Where someone who succeeds is interpreted as someone who takes away from you. The southern USA has always been poorer, and racism is an ugly extension of this mentality.
You see the racist emotions are attenuated when one sees a person of color that is more successful than you are. It's not the poor colored people that people are angry about. It's the CEO that is colored that riles them up. Yeah, the CEOs of color that are in the tech sector.
It's the black president of America that riled people up. Because people of color are not supposed to be successful and people of color are not supposed to be calling the shots. It's not the natural order of things.
This of course doesn't stop at one's pigmentation. It also extends to one's gender. Women aren't supposed to be calling the shots because it's not the 'natural order' of things.
Conservativism at its core is driven by an imagined notion of the 'natural order' of things. Preserving the natural order of things is synonymous with maintaining the status quo. That is, those with the wealth today keep the wealth for tomorrow.
In a civilization with hierarchy entangled with its core machine code, it should be no surprise that inequality is an essential feature of what drives the machinery. Absent inequality, who will the wealthy exploit?
The argument that wearing masks for the good of other people and not yourself does fall on deaf ears. That's because people do not care about the suffering of others. That's because the feeling of superiority requires that everyone else suffers.
To understand crazy, you have to begin first by identifying the underlying axioms. One can be perfectly logical when you start off with crazy axioms.
What you find with right-wing pundits is the beaming pride in their logical thought processes. Unfortunately, the problem isn't in the logic, but rather the axioms that they start from.
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