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Day 132: COVID-19 What Do You Fear More?
The events of the past few days have reshuffled the deck on the pandemic response. Social distancing is going out the window in many places even as masks are repurposed to disguise rioters. Lockdown? What lockdown? Law enforcement of social distancing is being disregarded without consequence. In an instant, our fear of disease is being placed in an entirely different context.
The evidence has been showing what the South Beach partiers in March knew instinctively: COVID-19 is a disease of the old and infirm, so let’s party, riot, tailgate, whatever. Where is the Karenwaffe to control the rioters? They are absent. They are gone. Maybe they have donned their masks and joined the crowd.
Somehow the disease was scarier than poverty to the Karenwaffe. That is because the Karenwaffe had financial resources (or promises thereof) not available to the barbers and hairdressers and nail persons and wait staff. But rioting against police brutality for something other than keeping people in house arrest, now that’s a cause that the Karenwaffe can get behind or simply let slide without comment. Those nasty shops and small businesses that should never be operating during a pandemic being burned and looted? Well, that’s just citizen action to enforce good public health policy.
The MSM has a new thing to push clicks and views, so scary pandemic numbers have disappeared. No time for speculation about how resuming businesses will make people ill when there are burning buildings and cars to broadcast. No debate about anything health-related. We’ve got something new to fear and fascinate.
Just as ordering us home to avoid a deadly disease promoted rethinking our priorities when the promised apocalypse was nigh, so now the riots and disorder promote rethinking the last apocalypse within the context of the new apocalypse. As Samuel Johnson is reputed to have said:
Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
So now that we have had our minds concentrated wonderfully, where are our minds taking us?
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
The rioting is alarming. We’ve been through similar periods, but hearing that police officers are being dragged through the streets is horrible. What is the matter with these governors? Why should we showing empathy with any person who uses violence, against person or property? The MSM has to be loving these activities. How will they find the time to cover all of it?
Excellent.
So now we move from quarantine lockdown to a curfew lockdown.
Terrific.
Russians, Caravans of illegals,
Wuhan FluCovid-19, race riots, it’s so hard to keep up. Okay wait, if I don’t wear a mask and socially-distance, I’m a selfish monster who wants people to die, but if I am looting a store I’m an understandably bereft minority person how dare you think of masks at a time like thi… oh wait I’m a white supremacist so I do have to wear a mas… I give up. Can someone please call me after the election.-edit typo dammit-
My son was joking the other day that last January we should have started a list on a long piece of paper posted on our refrigerator to mark the events of this year. It really got us laughing to think about how it would read. And when the riots started last week, he said, “Check.” :-)
Me too!
I don’t understand why my Facebook page is not showing me recycled public messages from the CDC telling me to “Stay safe, Stay home” in light of the deadly riots out there. Wouldn’t it make sense for the CDC to be telling people to stay home to avoid spreading the violence? :-)
I also don’t understand what is wrong with all of these businesses and government agencies posting and publicizing “We stand with the protesters” and “We’re sorry” (a letter from Target!) to the protesters. Does it make any sense to bargain with these terrorists? Or to give them what they want?
This seems to be the next step on the continuum from when businesses understood profit was the price of staying business to being embarrassed they were making a profit (and thus staying in business) to seeking forgiveness for making a profit (and thus staying in business) by touting how virtuous they were (by giving money to charities rather than discounting their prices to consumers) to focusing their virtues away from traditional charities to social justice charities and now to begging to be permitted to stay in business not from their real consumers but from extortionists and thugs.
I’m sure there are many fine people on both sides, I condemn the bad actors on both sides. The fundamental problem with protests is internal enforcement by leaders to keep outside disrupters and opportunists from hijacking the movement and message.
The evidence has been showing what the South Beach partiers in March knew instinctively: COVID-19 is a disease of the old and infirm, so let’s party, riot, tail-gate, whatever. Where is the Karenwaffe to control the rioters?
The Karenwaffe are in hiding because the rioting is spoiling their fun and making them look ridiculous. It’s just a coincidence that the rioting is greatest where the Karenwaffe are in control, right?
November can’t come soon enough. So much of what is happening will go away after the election. Or at least having passed that milestone perhaps the intensity will drop.
It’s like dozens of Mardi Gras going on across the nation at the same time. It’s totally horrifying to watch. Masks aren’t a substitute for distancing. All the yelling, chanting, coughing…virus spewing everywhere. Anyone who wouldn’t be literally petrified of going anywhere near these mosh pits deserves everything they get as a result, and more. Their defective brains are being selected for extinction. But the normal people they will spread the virus to later are just as much their victims as the owners of the businesses and cars they destroyed.
Here’s some great news that just showed up on my Yahoo News Feed. “New Coronavirus Losing Potency Top Italian Doctor Says”:
I’ll bet Dr. Fauci knows this and it’s why he said last week there may not a second wave. Fantastic news.
I’ve been wondering about this possibility that the virus has mutated, especially since it has been really quiet in Italy the last couple of months. Now we just have to figure out what is going on in South America. Is that the older first strain from Italy? It might be, in which case we wouldn’t necessarily escape a second wave next fall. It sounds as if it is unstable like the influenza virus.
Well, all these a$$holes are going to keep my county in lockdown red zone til kingdom come. Either that, or in 2 weeks no spike and fauci is a fool.
Either way, if my grocery store survives the impending second wave of looting, I’m wearing a mask.
And staying away from a$$holes as best I can.
My wife read some article that predicted major covid spikes resulting from this. If that doesn’t happen (and I suspect that it may not), that will be a pretty big real-time experiment having told us something important. But I imagine it will still be full steam ahead with the “new normal.”
One of the young guys I work with (well, back when there was work) is smart, a talented audio technician, and a decent musician. He’s also a late-20s black man.
His friends and roommates are, to put it mildly, criminals. They’ve been arrested while he was in the house, he’s come home to find police tape on the broken doors, and other fun things.
When I told him he needed to get out of that life, he just brushed it off with “I’ll be fine.”
There’s the problem.
I suggested this to some family members, and they were extremely offended. I’m not sure why.
Possibly—from their not very coherent reaction—they thought I was profaning the sacredness of the protests (which comparing them with previous anti-lockdown protests also does). Or maybe I was calling into question their belief in Monster Wuhan, which makes me a science denier?
You were “crossing the Ghostbusters streams” by conflating two scams with each other. Stop that!
This is truly hilarious. My daughter posted this last night (she is still pretty much confined to her Manhattan apartment):
Excellent!
From covid 19 to looting/rioting
Every day gets more surreal
My daughter donates her bone marrow Tuesday. My eyes are on that. Evidently, after her last blood test, the recipient underwent heavy chemo to kill his marrow, and now his life depends on her marrow. She has been worried, not having second thoughts but afraid she will get covid, preventing her from donating, afraid something could happen that would prevent the process, upset nobody can be with her because of covid for the long process….she is carrying the weight of an unknown man’s life on her shoulder, surrounded by human and viral threats. She has no regrets. I am back to my world, didn’t even check last night to see how blue city self-destruction was going. It is obvious that the leftie cancer can only go so far before it implodes. Haven’t made a new mask in days.