Yea or like childhood chicken pox leads to shingles as a senior citizen.
Good luck. I have my parents down from “god no” to “maybe after some testing” to “ughh not the AZ one but I’ll probably get moderna/pfizer when it’s available to us.”
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Maybe I’m making progress? I’m not convinced yet but at least they responded back to my appointment link this time.
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There’s a chance you blew it by offering to bring your wife.
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I hear she’s beautiful.
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As always, David Roth absolutely nails it, but this paragraph in particular applies to so much of our political climate and discussions at this exact moment.
One of the defining aspects of the highly caffeinated conservative cable news sludge that Trump still chugs thirstily from morning until night is that it is hard to understand. It is intended to induce a state of heated clammy umbrage in the slack and softening minds of its consumers, and reliably does that, but it does this more through tone and frequency than by means of information. The point is to keep everyone watching both very upset and kind of curious about what exactly they’re upset about. This worked both on Trump and for him, but in no way can it be said to have made him more informed. Nothing on earth has ever really done that, but the idea is to repeat things enough that even passive viewers will be able to pick up the broad strokes, learn the heroes and villains and outrages and memes, get upset when they’re supposed to get upset and keep watching through the commercial breaks. Someone who watches enough hours of this will become not just familiar with but wholly conversant in all the salty phonemes that make up its language, but never quite know what the fuck they’re talking about.
It’s just so so apparent whenever anything politics or politics-adjacent comes up. I had my in-laws visit last weekend and my wife’s dad loves the drive by politics quotes. Some grumbling about how “Making fun of Charles Barkley for being stupid is really risque to put in an advertisement because he’s black and they’re treading on thin ice to broach that subject matter” or how “We’ve done the kids of America a great disservice by not opening schools immediately nationwide”… And so many of them are just tinged with these buzzwords and talking points that I’m sure that when he talks about them with his other FOX watching friends, they all nod along because he’s speaking a language that makes sense to them… But at no point do his thoughts actually form any sort of coherent political viewpoint.
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Honestly, I kind of get bamboozled a bit when engaging in serious discussion with my mother because I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. It’s like she’s telling me about a fever dream she had rather than something based in reality. Then my inability to respond is like a victory to her when it’s me attempting to make sense of the words coming out of her mouth.
Best to either change the topic or go “That’s nice. How are my sisters doing?”
EDIT: Here’s an example of what I mean. From The Villages Letters to the Editor
Even if you exclude the numerous grammatical errors, I understand almost none of this. It looks like something Charlie Kelly would write.
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The absolute impossibility of having a normal conversation with these people is what makes interacting with them so mind-numbing and enraging.
Like, if someone just comes out and says “I don’t want black people voting” or “I don’t really care about poor people” or whatever, I can deal with that! I won’t like or want to be around that person, but it doesn’t drive me insane or anything.
People with Fox News brain not only don’t say those things, they don’t really say ANYTHING that makes sense. They do drive-by references that barely make sense, even if you know what they’re referring to. You can’t even converse with them because they are so uninformed it is literally impossible to agree on a baseline.
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Sounds like you need to do your own research.
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Yup. I told some of my deplorable family members that I’d discuss political things so long as they were in sources that we both considered reliable and they discarded that idea. It’s clear that they just want somebody to scream at about immigrants and poor people.
You don’t get no lizard brain dopamine hit talking about facts and policy. That’s like trying to engage a person that is addicted to Candy Crush in a discussion about recent scientific findings related to excessive consumption of high fructose corn syrup.
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I actually find all of that very easy to understand.
Its frustrating for us, but I wonder if attempts at conversation are equally frustrating for the dwindling number of “smart” Republicans. Because there are some. I guess. At least there are people in high places that are Republicans. Its becoming an alliance of high-brow deplorables, middle-class highly confused people and straight up racist morons. They are drawn together by their whiteness. But any talk of policy is quickly drowned out by mindless babble, victimhood and misguided outrage. I’m wondering if this is a party that’s built to last.
You got the “killer diller” reference?!? Even I had to look that one up.
I spend a lot of time around highly educated Republicans and almost all of them have full blown Fox News brain. They’re basically the Thomas and Alitos of the real world. The current Republican platform is indefensible and incoherent, so by definition anyone going to bat for it has severe resentment-fueled lizard brain. The thing that is so odd about these folks is they are perpetually angry and scared despite having won the game. Like they spend hours a day in their gated communities and country clubs complaining about liberals, its truly insane.
The ones that don’t have Fox News brain, a distinct minority, just keep their mouth shut as they’re making a conscious decision to vote exclusively on taxes and they aren’t proud of it.
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Is it a joke, or do they think that stuff will happen? That’s the part I couldn’t quite get, but I wasn’t about to research it.
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It’s a joke. It’s like positing a scenario where Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz go on a double date.
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You probably know this, but Matt Christman of Chapo, who is basically the brains of the operation, likes to say that the defining feature of modern American politics is people getting exactly what they want and then being super mad about it.
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Lol, man I was just talking about this the other day with some attorneys that work for an environmental non-profit group. We were discussing Florida’s assumption of the Clean Water Act Section 404 (dredge and fill) permitting authority (which is typically the responsibility of the EPA at the federal level) and how all the wealthy/powerful groups who were pushing Florida officials to do this are now super pissed and complaining about the new process.