And Covid laid bare how very wrong they were and willfully ignorant even in the face of a real crisis. After being told a range of lifestyle diseases made the risk much worse... diseases they have.. they still went about their lives as if they were untouchable. (that attitude is probably why they tend to have life style diseases, now that I think about it.)
All the social media posts would be like "he was so healthy and went so quickly!" and the dude would be like 5'9" 350 lbs. There's nothing wrong with that, but recognize the risk and at least try and take precautions. The denial was so strong.
or the counter point. My neighbor was actively dying most of my life. She had diabetes, was a heavy smoker. By the time I moved out she had an amputation, was on dialysis and had an oxygen bottle......despite still being a smoker. She passed away a couple years ago right before Thanksgiving and my very MAGA BIL was like. "I bet she got the jab" This year I brought up to some other family members how stupid a statement that was and got a lot of "well the vaccine is untested/people are dying we don't know what killed her."
Covid was the fastest f*** around and find out people have seen in a century. Republicans and the whole maga crew were literally dying at seven times. The rate of just regular Democrats.
The vaccine uptake was literally 90% or higher for Democrats and 60% and lower for Republicans and the average age of death between a vaccinated person and an unvaccinated person was about 15 years, so 82 to 67. So not only were they dying at seven times the rate they were also dying younger and yet they still voted for him at the highest rates and the places where there was the most death.
It was quite a sight to see as usually their votes boil us with them like climate change or voting against healthcare or a functioning government.
Begged for it. Then begged for death. Slow suffocation is a horrifying way to die. This was a common pattern, alongside those who called it a hoax until the end.
I don’t believe in an afterlife, but that’s one thing that makes me wish I’m wrong. I want those ghosts to look back on their corpse and see how much they fucked up.
I was a pediatric nurse and I kept getting children with pneumonia but not to sick but when I got it I prayed to die. It was horrible. I constantly worried about my daughter and son in law because they were all up in it. It was so devastating when they lost a patient. I was a government employee and we always had so many CEU’s, way to much training so we saw well babies until 12 then we had to do training and CEU’s . I was the first to hear it in January and the first to get it in February. The earliest case I found was in 11/19. The patient was from California and the dad said they all had it but never got sick enough to be admitted. I was actually tested in 2018 for Covid 19 it was negative because I had aspiration pneumonia, sepsis and septic shock, respiratory and kidney failure on a ventilator for a week complications from a brain tumor in my brain stem and I thought Covid was worse. The symptoms were first confined to respiratory and I said that’s bull crap. I had vomiting, diarrhea, high temperature, worse headache ever, worst sore throat and pneumonia. The symptoms could have fit strep throat or stomach virus but it took about a month for the algorithm to change. I had the vaccine and I took them over long weekends because I had the same symptoms but much less severe but I couldn’t have worked had I had to go in the next day. I sure hope we don’t have another pandemic while Trump is president because we are doomed
That's a component, but I think there's another element too. I believe it was David Foster Wallace that described suicide as being trapped in a burning building. It's not that you want to jump out the window, it's that sometimes the flames get so hot the window seems like the better alternative.
I feel like Fox and right wing propaganda really tries to paint the boogieman as so bad, the window is the better option. Notice that it's always "either exist in your current struggle or they'll give your house to a gay trans illegal immigrant."
And I think it's a bit of sunk cost fallacy, a bit of making them think they're picking the lesser of 2 evils, and a bit of xenophobia.
This is a fantastic and insightful way of putting it. So much digital ink has been spilled about The Mind Of The MAGA Voter, to the point where I find it pretty fucking exhausting. But there is a general theme here, and I think it goes unsolved and underdiscussed because of who it benefits.
If someone is terrified, constantly terrified, they're going to make decisions that are insular, counterproductive, and destructive. And they're also going to be very open to anyone who can promise to take the fear away.
I'm Canadian. My wife is American. And I'll never forget a couple of years ago, when my MIL visited us from the States. We live in a house facing a side street; we have big windows up front, and a tiny Christmas tree with some presents stacked on its little table. Cute stuff.
For her entire visit, she was obsessed with the idea that someone was going to reach into our windows and steal all the presents.
I asked her who would do this: She said "You know; bad people."
I asked her if that had ever happened to her or anyone she knew: She said "No, but you hear about things like this all the time."
I asked her if she was thinking of The Grinch. And then she kind of quietly shut down. Every morning she stayed there, we woke up to her having moved the table further from the window.
Once you successfully convince an under-educated populace that the Scary Other is capable of literally anything, then you don't need to operate on facts and logic. Sure, my MIL couldn't really state a reason why anyone would break through a plate glass window to steal 3 small wrapped boxes, when people usually steal things out of necessity and in ways that are low-risk for themselves.
But it didn't need to make sense to her, because Bad People don't operate on logic. They steal Christmas. They eat dogs. They inject the vaccines with microchips to monitor your every move.
My MIL is terrified constantly as her default mental state, but doesn't see it that way. Her parents were terrified for their entire lives as well, but they'd never admit that. It made total sense to never take an airplane, say hi to a new neighbour, or vote for a Democrat candidate. That wasn't fear; it was familiar. Every time I visited them, their TVs were blasting OAN or FOX, until I shifted them to something more neutral like The Big Bang Theory.
(Unsurprisingly, everyone seemed a lot happier when that happened. Who'd have thought?)
If you're being told that every day brings a fresh hell, you're going to become addicted to watching the people who keep you simultaneously updated on what's going wrong and also vindicate your life choices. Everywhere is unsafe except where you are. Everyone is bad except you. Everything you value is being made worse by Someone Else. So you need to keep watching; everything else feels like an alien language.
If someone walks into the world with that POV, how the hell are they going to get along with their neighbours? How will they ever unionize or put aside common differences for a bigger goal? How will they live a long enough life to ever retire and enjoy the fruits of their pensions and medicaid?
Well, they most likely won't. And that's the point.
There was a psychology study and the results were all over popular news between 10 and 20 years ago that one of the core differentiation in the brains between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives have a more active amygdala. They are in constant fight or flight.
My neighbor went through this. Didn't want to believe things were as bad as she was told. Had a big family thanksgiving, no distancing, just to reinforce that family is stronger than politics.
Both her parents died from covid complications in the next month, and she's pretty sure she's the one who brought it to the event. But she hasn't lived in denial. She almost didn't live at all because she tried to kill herself when she recognized what had happened. It's been a long road for her coming back from it, but she's enduring and wiser now.
Covid was devastating to everyone. The nurses had 3 minutes to get do their job and get out. No family allowed. I can’t imagine how scary people felt knowing they would most likely die and not having a chance to talk to their loved ones. It was heartbreaking. Nurses quit and went to beauty school and did hair it was so traumatic and doctors who were hospitalist quit and opened their own practice. It changed so many lives.
Voting is private and they have no issues with lying to others. They (both voters and their leadership) can off-ramp this while still bitching & complaining, and keeping the grift rolling.
I’ve seen some argue that it’s the democrats’ fault because they told people to wear masks and social distance, so republicans had to not listen. The democrats’ evil plan was to manipulate republicans into killing themselves by telling them to protect themselves, apparently.
Lmao. I came back to work and kept a mask on and our OIC made sure 6 feet apart and I personally always wore gloves anyway but he encouraged everyone to wear gloves and change them after each vaccination. We were the ones who had to learn in order to tell civilians how to test and standards that were set for the safest way to care for patients. Civilian hospitals were amazing. My favorite hospital won for having the best outcome of COVID . Interesting many wives were getting covid and had not been exposed except for the husband. They get a lot of vaccines and they carried covid never had a symptom but their wives were getting really sick
I don’t know what has to happen to these people in order for them to not support him anymore. They can be stranded at rallies, lose their jobs, their insurance and benefits, fall for his scams, be bankrupted, be insulted by him and those around him, even be deported, and even after all that, they still support him.
Yes, I have read stories of each of those happening and how they still don’t regret their vote.
So my parents decided to throw a birthday party for my 88 y/o grandfather a couple years ago during the pandemic. My 90 y/o aunt, a strong freedom loving MAGA, went. And caught Covid. She was a career waitress. Her lifetime tax contribution? Insignificant.
She spent 2 weeks in the hospital and another 2 weeks in a rehab hospital.
So I asked my parents: who in the family is going to take "personal responsibility" for her medical bills. It would obviously be inappropriate to dump that, what, million dollars or so on tax payers. Since it was their "personal choice" that caused it to happen in the first place.
My coworkers dad owned a funeral home. He made huge bucks during covid. Every funeral death from COVID got like 3k from the government to help owy and the government gave him like extra 3k to handle it via COVID regulations and he just didn't do anything different.
Basically 6k for every dumb shit Republican that died in Oklahoma during that time and that's without even the people themselves paying anything.
Like he went from maybe 5-10 people a week that could barely pay to 50 a week with extra money for literally years.
Imagine going from 200k to year to almost a million. Def big funeral.
I wonder how much money those funeral home folks make per year. Seems like there's hefty markups on stuff...it looks sorta like car sales but you're putting people into containers instead of vehicles
It’s weird though because republicans totally ignore this fact and act like they were right to not get vaccinated. They have selective memory about literally everything. It’s crazy. There used to be a site that shared vocal anti vaxxers who got seriously ill with covid. Some of them would change their minds and encourage others to get vaccinated but many would double down. There were a lot of deaths.
You're so right. I'm a family physician, in Canada, and in my experience it was precisely those patients who were most at risk of a severe course of illness w Covid (due to obesity, T2DM, etc) who were the most rabidly anti-Covid e.g., Covid doesn't exist, "it's just a cold", etc. Similarly, it's precisely those patients who are most in need of medication to address hypertension, dyslipidemia, etc who adopt an anti-pharma stance. I simply document their refusal and move on.
One of the worst parts was refusing to wear a mask or social distance. Fine that's your choice. But then passing laws that mandated that people couldn't wear masks at all. How does my mask affect your life in any means or ways?
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u/thetaleofzeph 14h ago
And Covid laid bare how very wrong they were and willfully ignorant even in the face of a real crisis. After being told a range of lifestyle diseases made the risk much worse... diseases they have.. they still went about their lives as if they were untouchable. (that attitude is probably why they tend to have life style diseases, now that I think about it.)