The delusional ones seem to be the ones that think it’s horrific to mock people killing themselves through their own idiocy. Especially when they are killing the people around them too. Wait till you hear about these guys! You guys should try and talk some sense into them! They didn’t even need a horrific global pandemic and millions dead to make fun of them!
Let me explain what’s going on.
The problem with the Democratic establishment isn’t necessarily that it isn’t ideologically left enough. The problem is that the establishment is not partisan enough. If Democrats acted as nakedly partisan as Republicans, we’d be in a hell of a lot better place. The key problem that eDems ultimately have is that they are a bunch of pussies. If they weren’t any more left but were partisan assholes who didn’t care about Republican feelings, that would do a lot more good than replacing a bunch of Dems with more Bernies and AOCs.
I represent the point of view that advocates more partisanship. The HCA subreddit argued about whether posts should be limited to anti-vaxx stuff or if standard Republican racism should be included. Reddit seems to be down right now, so I can’t check how that was resolved. Stipulating that some anti-vaxxers are not conservatives, it is nevertheless proper to tie conservatism and the Republicans to anti-vaccine movement and to point out the strong overlap with racism, Trumpism, and anti-democracy. This is an existential war we are fighting and these people are the enemy. We are justified in unleashing every propaganda trick in the book against them. Mocking dead anti-vaxxers is just one small part in a much wider struggle.
Hand-wringing over the feelings of these people is exactly the same thing as Joe Manchin’s bipartisan bullshit. If you feel that way then maybe you’re not a bad person but you’re still an enabler of bad people.
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I agree with this
So, the conclusion of the “Is it OK to mock Republicans who are dying by the thousands to own the libs?” is that the GOP’s negative partisanship is a superpower to be emulated?
Its because here right wing media has been a vehicle for ‘health’ grifts since the 1950s. Covid created like a perfect storm of right wing pathologies.
Anti-vax idiocy dovetails perfectly with the paranoiac style of the modern conservative/libertarian movement. You can’t trust the gubment or the pharma companies, or the scientists, but check out this bold individualist truth-teller on Facebook.
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You mean OOT?
Negative partisanship is a realistic description of how people think. It’s not some weapon owned by the GOP.
Tut tut. They only think that because of economic anxiety. You’re just attacking the out group. I am very smart.
It’s not a brilliant insight that human nature is bad. Everyone knows that (pace microbet)! It’s literally the foundational principle of modern political theorizing, Chapter 1 of Leviathan. This is why the book of history is filled to the brim with civil wars and massacres and genocides. The whole point of politics is figuring out some crazy scheme to get people (who are bad) to cooperate and work together for their mutual benefit (which is good). “Just hate your enemies harder” has been tried, and it doesn’t work very well. (I know that someone is somehow going to cite WWII as a counterexample to this point, which really pains me…)
People will deny it, but there is a definite attitude that the Republicans have figured out some secret political hack that’s letting them “win.” It’s explicit in your posting, but others do it implicitly (“It’s OK to laugh at deplorables dying because they would do the same.”). But Republicans are actually losing really badly. By your own account, tens or hundreds of thousands of them are dying unnecessarily to own the libs, while plutocrats plunder the economy and the fisc and destroy the environment. This is not winning! They are luxuriating in their political ids while they lose everything.
That is the problem with celebrating people dying of COVID, or more precisely justifying your base instinct to do so. It’s not that it hurts people’s feelings (btw: no one knows or cares how you feel about some fundie pastor in backwoods Alabama dying) or that these people don’t “deserve” death (although the conclusion that large groups of people deserve death is not a conclusion you should arrive at lightly), it’s that indulging in your base instinct to derive pleasure from the suffering of your enemies is a weakness, a vice. I’m not your mom, and I’m not here to tell you you can never indulge your vices, but deluding yourself into believing that vice is truly virtue is the thing that actually makes you a bad person. (Plus, it’s comical in the way that other people going all-in on their own bullshit usually is.)
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Did you find an old Philosophy textbook during your last stay at a Holiday Inn Express?
Do you want murderers punished? Is that “indulging in base instinct” or is it “justice”? Framing this all as “deriving pleasure from suffering” is simply assuming your conclusion. I might play the same game and smugly assert that your framing it this way is nothing more a self serving choice to INDULGE in your own feelings of superiority others. OH NO NOW YOU’RE THE BAD GUY!
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Yeah I’m still very comfortable laughing at dead anti-vax assholes.
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I think the question comes down to whether you believe there are such things as praiseworthy and blameworthy behavior and, if so, whether refusing to be vaccinated and discouraging others from being vaccinated is blameworthy. I think it is.
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Of course it is! The whole point is that these people are reaping what they’re sowing. That’s not laughing at someone’s “misfortune”, it’s acknowledging the justice of the situation. Some people are acting as though we’re watching antivaxxers dying of totally unrelated pancreatic cancer and delighting in their suffering. That is very much not what is happening here.
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Right. I don’t know if I’d characterise it as “indulging a vice” to laugh at this though. It’s just genuinely funny as well as tragic. Getting angry and spitting on their graves is indulging a vice.
No?
This a trick question?
Right, but it’s blindingly obvious, imo, that there isn’t. America has a greater concentration of people who are like this than, say, Iceland. The reason for this is not that American people come from worse genetic stock or something. It’s that they’re socialized into being like this.
Kind of. The point is that this all framing to arrive at preconceived conclusions, not any meaningful attempt to engage in the tough questions of morality. Looking at the fact pattern here and honing in on the moral obligations of people that oppose antivaxxers and not the moral obligations of the antivaxxers is gold star navel gazing.
Seems like a reasonable take to me. I get the humor and catharsis that comes from dunking on these people, but also it seems to open the doors to some toxicity.
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I dunno, disentangling justice from cruelty is actually tricky. We used to have public executions so that people could go out and enjoy the spectacle of criminals being killed. People still derive satisfaction from the idea that particularly heinous criminals will be serially raped in prison, but most people find that a little suss these days.
We don’t even need to talk about hypotheticals with murderers. Do you think vax refusers should be punished? I certainly do. It’s antisocial behavior that puts others in danger, and I think it’s just to punish people who behave that way. That said, I don’t think they should be killed–that would be extremely excessive.
I mean, every day, a thousand people die of COVID, and social media curates the one that looks the most like justice and blasts it in your face. 999 straight-up tragedies, one person who got a wildly excessive punishment for bad behavior and millions of wrong-doers walking around with no consequences at all, forged into an optimized bit of content to get a smug chuckle out of the lizard brain. Why are you congratulating yourself for playing along with that?
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