My neighborhood Facebook feed is not much nuttier than usual. People are jumpy about groceries, but not too much. There's some of the argument we're seeing nationwide over whether we're over- or under-reacting. Less D-vs.-R quarreling than usual, I'd say.
It's a different story at the sole Project Gutenberg forum devoted to politics, which are ruthlessly repressed elsewhere on the site. It turns out that PG devotees are about 95% hair-on-fire socialists with a terminal case of TDS. For a few weeks I've been conducting an experiment to see whether civil discourse is possible, which wasn't going well even before the virus panic started. In the last few days I've been posting the occasional semi-good-news story about potentially encouraging approaches to treatment regimens or re-tooling production to focus on medical shortages. The response is a nearly unanimous blast of close-minded hostility.
An interesting aspect is the level of proof demanded, depending on the story. The initial reaction to reports that chloroquine studies were surprisingly hopeful was to attack the "right wing" sources. A moderately sane member was kind enough to find palatable French-media sources confirming the essential story, but the dominant message then became that Fake News was a horrifying scourge to be avoided at all costs, and we won't know a single thing about treatments until every bureaucrat on the planet has had time to commission lengthy studies. To say otherwise is to be a science-denier who jumps to ignorant conclusions, like you-know-who.
When news hit about the senators who dumped their stocks before the DOW collapsed, however, a different standard of truth came out. Suddenly suspicion was as good as proof. Even odder, when I posted a link to a Reuter's report about Novartis donating 130MM doses of chloroquine, the responses ranged from an assumption (definitely no proof needed) that Trump had bought stock in the company, which was cynically trying to buy good PR by giving the drug away, to a worried concern about all those poor people who already depended on chloroquine to treat their rheumatoid arthritis, and were immunocompromised so were at greater risk of contracting the virus.
I could point out that all those poor RA patients may find that they've inadvertently been taking an effective virus prophylactic, but why bother? It's clear to me now that this PG crowd are among the people I've recently come to understand as being more wedded to their problems than to their solutions. It's what Eric Fromme used to call the "yes, but" conversation. I decided a couple of years ago that you can only help so many people, and the first ones that need to be triaged to a quiet, dark corner of the ER are the ones who don't really want an improvement, only a subjective validation of their own rage and disappointment.
19 comments:
I see this reaction amongst conservates such as baen author sarah hoyt and elsewhere, when seeing alternative views on geoscience and astronomy. These are not random commenters but the hosts themselves.
Everyone that 8s welded to identity beliefs, can get triggered when thise beliefs are challenged or undermined.
It's what Eric Fromme used to call the "yes, but" conversation.
Or, as I call it, having a case of the "yabbuts".
That level of closed mindedness is a bit frightening, to put it mildly.
Just imagine them as judge or juror,vcop or HOA president.
It comes down to crime being dependent on perpetrator.
No longer what, but who.
And the weird thing is that if asked, they will all assure you they are the most open minded of individuals. I find it telling to ask them who the last republican they voted for was. Or, indeed, if they ever had voted for one. Almost always, the answer is never. I know lots of conservatives who occasionally vote for a democratic, if they believed they were the better or more honorable of choices. Not so on the left - their statements of belief allow no divergence, as you noted.
Close minded hostility is from the ego mind self feeling threatened. Labels of us vs them make people feel better. A better geoscience, a newer version of astronomy, those have historically been high cost to heretics and mavericks. People may know about a translator of the bible into english and how he was burned as an unrepentant heretic for disobedience to human church laws.
The founding fathers exercised divine reform by separating church from state church.
But most do n9t know nor want to kn9w how many current western beliefs are as orthodox and obsolete as that was accepted in state religions.
Stem is not immune. In fact, most of the persecutions against individuals such as ohms was due to the scientific consensus and orthoduo status quo.
Therr is no red or blue tribe flag that makes one immune. Such an immunity requitres an enlightened state of beinh, the ability to de tach from world values and emotions.
Or, as I call it, having a case of the "yabbuts".
To which a junior high school classmate of mine would respond, "That's an animal with long ears that hops around."
Separately and closer to OP, it's been interesting to me where on the sociopolitical spectrum the most closed minded are.
Eric Hines
To which a junior high school classmate of mine would respond, "That's an animal with long ears that hops around."
Apparently your classmate writes spell-checkers because that's exactly what spell-check wanted to change it to.
To go back to the original point, it took me a long time to realize that my left-leaning friends did not want to be reassured about Trump. When I pointed out that he didn't hate gays or wasn't going to make contraceptives unavailable (don't where that one came from given it's Trump), I thought I was helping by easing their fears. It turned out what they really wanted was for me to agree with how awful Trump was. It was very odd and, as I say, it took me a long time to figure out why our conversations seemed to be a cross-purposes.
To agree is to belong. Over the past week I've discovered that in times of stress, people want to belong more than they want anything else. So those who are not getting frantic, or who point out the low numbers of fatal cases compared to total cases (Diamond Princess, Iceland numbers), or who talk about treatments are 1. seen as discounting the honor and truthfulness of those who fear and 2. don't belong.
It's a bit like the Great Fear in France in 1789, plus modern politics. I'm just hiding and shaking my head at it all.
LittleRed1
I'm not among the frantic, but that's not to say that I'm not extremely worried, both about the virus and about the economic damage. The virus I see as a little spark far too close to a pile of explosives: it's easy to be impatient with people who don't take it seriously. The economic damage I see as someone shutting down a very complicated engine, in the apparent belief that it will always be easy to get it running again. It may--I still hope for a rapid turnaround if we get a handle on the medical crisis--but we're in uncharted waters here.
I'm very encouraged, however, by the Trump polls. People don't seem to be bolting to socialism, as far as I can tell.
I'm in one of the vulnerable cohorts--old, but healthy--and I'm not at all worried about the virus. Even if I get the virus, the odds are very strongly in my favor. What worries me is the economic damage that could ensue, and the international threats against us by our enemies in the effluvia of that damage.
As for shutting down a complicated engine expecting I can restart it easily and at will, I do that with my car every day. All I have to do is push a button; I don't even have to turn a key anymore. Surely an economy is just as easy....
On the other hand, a free market economy is much easier to restart than a centrally planned or command economy.
Eric Hines
I'm heartened that Gov. Abbot set an end date to his semi-shut-down. I don't like it, because it complicates my Day Job to the Nth degree, but I can deal with an end-date.
LittleRed1
Anonymous said "To agree is to belong. Over the past week I've discovered that in times of stress, people want to belong more than they want anything else." I think this strikes at the heart of the matter. It has been one of my recurring themes over the last fifteen years. It is tribal, and I used to write about the Arts & Humanities Tribe, which I sprang from.
Tex, that crew sounds a lot like social workers and psychologists - or even worse.
That was LR1, who signs at the bottom.
Philosophers have a harder time letting go of thinking things through, but there are a lot of philosopher-adjacent people who are like that. I can talk with all my friends about it on Facebook, say, but some of their friends go frothing-at-the-mouth. "You must be a racist! A supporter of war criminals!" Etc., etc.
It's really tiresome.
I find it leaks out even among the reasonable. People say what they really mean eventually, though they know it not.
AVI, the crew at Gutenberg, you mean? I take them to be ivory-tower types, the sort of people who enjoy reading all these old books and nitpicking over grammar and so on. I'm in that group, too, of course. There are a handful of others who show up on the Politics forum and clearly agree with me, so obviously not all ivory-tower types are alike. Still, I suppose a hobby like this isn't the sort of thing that draws a lot of entrepreneurs. The atmosphere is a bit like a university faculty: a hothouse atmosphere, a lot of residents who rather wish their leisure activities were so valued by the public that they could be supported in comfort while they carry them out. After all, aren't we the educated elite? Don't we deserve compensation for our rare skills, without regard for whether other free people find them valuable enough to part with their own savings in return? There's a strong current of "all smart people are socialists" thinking, along with the usual "money is evil (because I can't get enough)."
The Progs tend to have a very stereotyped view of their opposition: all uneducated, poorly-paid, rural, Evangelical Christians. I've seen a Jewish blogger stridently told that her political views are entirely due to her Evangelical Christianity.
Stereotyping and underestimating the opposition is a good way to loose a battle, as American pilots who were shot down by Zeros...after being told that their opponents would be nearsighted men flying obsolete equipment...could have testified.
The tendency is not as strong on our side, but it's not nonexistent, either. I've seen a lot of people assuming that Leftists are all people who can't make money, yet I know successful entrepreneurs who have gone all the way over to the darkside.
I'm finally starting to see the "stop giving false hope about chloroquine, you're just cheerleading for the OrangeBadMan" theme on Facebook--but locally, at least, it's confined to a minor fringe groups of trolls who proved their loathsomeness a long time ago. Not opinion leaders, in other words, which is a relief.
Well, these treatments will either work or not, and the number of cases is getting big enough now that we'll have pretty decent data sets soon. I try not to get into arguments with people about what may happen, as long as their views aren't obstructing potentially helpful action today.
This sure is an interesting contrast to the Global Warming approach of "try everything, no matter how disastrous or unproven," though it lines up fairly well with the "if it saves just one life, why not destroy the economy" tactic.
Notice how nobody is talking about global warming now?
Interesting how some things seem to focus the mind.
Au contraire, Pelosi and Schumer just shut down the emergency act for things like facemasks over demands for more collective bargaining and tighter controls on airline carbon emissions.
And for quotas on corporate boards, and on and on. Pelosi's list of demanded inclusions is up over 1400 pages, now, and she's forced her subordinate Senate Minority Leader Schumer to block all recovery efforts until the Progressive-Democrats irrelevant wants are included.
Eric Hines
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