The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun | Hacker News Reader

The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun

theatlantic.com

22 pointseplanit10 comments

I have a friend who lives in Texas. He’s back at his parent’s house after schools closed, and says that his mother is making a point to go to the grocery store every day, bringing her 74 year old mother with her. He says that his mother often used to complain about having to grocery shop before this whole thing started.

I don’t see the perceived endgame. Very few people stand to profit from this whole thing, and at the cost of killing the economy for a long while.

A certain segment of republicans has been primed for decades now to accept haphazardly put together straw men and run with it as a push back against progressive culture. Unfortunately this sort of thinking applied to anything but the political sphere can be devastating.

>Unfortunately this sort of thinking applied to anything but the political sphere can be devastating.

It's wrecked the political sphere pretty badly, too, ever since they memed a president into office.

That's an inaccurate and narrow view of the President's source of votes.

Trump was widely known and popular with his supporters before the "memes".

He was considered a joke candidate, and not only by the mainstream media. He was a has-been celebrity host of a reality show best known for playing parodies of himself on TV and for his obnoxious attitude.

His quotability and memeability got him far more media coverage both in the mainstream and online than any of his colleagues, and one of the most devastating hits to Hillary Clinton's campaign was the result of well-poisoning efforts by his online supporters to push a viral conspiracy theory and implicate her in vague wrongdoings through the email leaks. Her own campaign even stated those efforts proved impossible to recover from.

It may be true that the "memes" weren't entirely responsible but I would disagree that their effect wasn't significant.

I think "segment" is the right word here--I'm not sure political affiliation isn't almost entirely orthogonal to one's take on the pandemic. Doomers, for example, are generally thought to be very right wing, and I read an early opinion piece in the NYT about the virus written by an obvious progressive that was essentially "stop worrying so much about it".

The idea is to pin the economic damage on something (governors' stay at home orders) that make it Not the President's Fault, even though it really wasn't the President's "fault" in the first place (as seen by systemic failure to weather this crisis mostly worldwide). But this overreaction is necessary to protect the President's strongman image.

It may not be all the president's fault, but he had a direct hand in making the situation worse than it had to be.

The entire point is that it "triggers the libtards", which seems to be the only goal of a select group of right wing people. They don't stop to think WHY people get so upset when they violate social distancing, or they genuinely believe this to be a mild situation, despite every warning otherwise.

These people's entire lives are based around being contrarian for contrarian's sake

My intuition is that this stems from a trust vs distrust of experts, which was already a major political articulation point in 2020 America, depressingly.

It's a twisted sort of fascinating to see just how far these political limbs reach these days. I heard someone the other day call Whole Foods/Central Market the "liberal/progressive grocery stores". Whatever that means. But anecdotally, the correlation is real. If I had to guess, it's something like "spending more on less-basal pleasures is a left-leaning thing because you're constructing artificial 'intellectual' layers on top of fundamental human enjoyment something something intelligencia".

Anyway. It's all very stupid and distressing, but as it becomes more pervasive I think it's getting more and more important for us to step back and start trying to understand it.

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