The replies in the thread are really something. “Yes, they’re very angry and aggressive! And also acting morally superior! And they treat me like I’m a plague rat and don’t want me around!”
Hmm, wonder why, so mysterious.
I don’t know if I even know anybody who won’t get vaxxed — if they exist among my friends, they know better than to tell me, I guess.
It’s interesting, if you go a little ways down the rabbit hole there, you see a lot of anti-vaxxers going the Qanon route “everybody thinks I’m ridiculous and even my own family has started to shun me…
THEY’RE ALL SHEEPLE AREN’T THEY TELL ME THEY’RE THE SHEEP PLEEEASE TELL ME”
In a way it was predictable that the Cult of Qanon would become the Cult of Donald Trump would become the Cult of Antivax but it’s still kind of wild.
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This article lays out what I've started to suspect is the only possible *practical* reason for why Republican elites are against anti-disease measures: because they perceive that ending the pandemic would benefit Biden politically.
So their idea is to keep coronavirus infections, deaths, and general chaos as high as possible because they think this will hurt Biden, and Democrats in general, in a political way.
But also, DAMN, I thought I was cynical about Republican evil, but apparently I can never be cynical ENOUGH to really anticipate how straight-up evil they are.
This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about ever since my person run-in with the fetus cultists on Northgate Way: how to respond to them better.
How to shut them down, deflect them, keep them from harming people, neutralize their message, etc. — without melting down into sputtering rage, like MTG’s opponent does here. It’s obvious one of them is performing and one is genuinely angry. But —
The person who is GENUINELY angry is at a disadvantage. You get flooded with adrenaline, your fight instinct is engaged, you want to rip her fool head off, not make a coherent argument in response.
People will fight so hard just to hang onto a false narrative, it’s really something. The false story becomes more important to them than their own lives & the lives of their loved ones.
It’s a phenomenon we’re used to, sort of, in fringe cults like Jonestown, but it’s shocking to see it in something as huge and widespread as this.
Trumpism is a crisis in American democracy on par with the Civil War, but we tend to underestimate the threat because of things like survivorship bias and normalcy bias.
Same reasons we’re slouching toward the climate disaster, really.
There’s another problem I’m going to call the “absolute apocalypse fallacy”
Christian apocalyptic narratives have gotten rolled into secular apocalyptic narratives that have the same flaw: anticipating THE apocalypse rather than AN apocalypse.
Most people in the thread are picking on the "no true Christian" fallacy, but I wanted to point out the "unfair to blame American degeneracy on Christianity" -- as if Christians haven't been in charge the whole time?
White evangelical theology & practice was designed to serve the needs of colonizers & slaveholders -- this is a historical fact (Which Slacktivist talks about quite a bit. ) patheos.com/blogs/slacktiv…
You can say, "there are other ways of being a Christian" and you're right, but the historical fact remains that American history has been very much dominated BY the white evangelical tradition.
I've revisited the novel in my head a lot since the start of the pandemic, because it's a future SF novel that has "buncha plagues, collapse of the US as a political entity" as a backstory
Oh! Now that it seems like I'm sorta committed to Goth House Press as the resolve between my desire to be published and my rejection-sensitive dysphoria, you might get to read Minerva's Children someday even if I can't convince a different publisher it's worth the trouble.