The Unbelievable Grimness of HermanCainAward Subreddit
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COVID denialism has a lot of overlaps with other anti-intellectualism, such as climate denial and evolution denial. But you can deny climate change and evolution without it ever really affecting you. It doesn't matter if the arguments are absurd and easily refuted: the conflicts are too distant to really come back and bite you. At least, not in any way you can directly connect.
I believe that this is about more than just the difficulties that come from a disease we should have been able to beat. It's about a longstanding series of overlapping arguments where no amount of argumentation -- no matter how kind, reasonable, or thorough -- can ever make the slightest bit of progress.
These are in areas not of value judgments or different interpretations, but where the science is absolutely overwhelming. And there have been social arguments, such as same-sex marriage, where the continued to make utterly baffling arguments and would not be persuaded by any amount of reason.
At last, here is an argument they can't Gish Gallop away from.
Many people (including me) would agree that the schadenfreude is unworthy and unhelpful. But it's been a very, very long time coming, and that's going to make it hard to resist.
It attributes everything everything you don't like into a an undefined outgroup "they". "They" are beyond reason, kindness, logic. Then it concludes that "they" had it coming.
I don't see this as a a valid justification. If you turn a person into a 1-dimensional strawman that is responsible for decades or centuries of social conflict, of course it will seem like they are a waste of skin. This seems to a common problem with this line of thinking.
That outgroup is pretty well defined: arrogant and stubborn anti-intellectuals.
I'd much prefer if they gained some self-awareness and put facts before their feelings before killing themselves with a preventable disease, but at this point I'm flat out of tears and empathy. The rest of us will be paying for their "fuck you I've got mine" mentality for generations to come.
A common format is:
[Person makes a post about how they aren't wearing a mask or getting vaccinated because their immune system is great] [Person's relative makes a post about how person died]
It's literally just a COVID-themed Darwin Award. There's nothing special or particularly horrific about it. It's just a vaguely boring place for people to vent their anger.
If it wasn't so, wars would be so much rarer in human history.
Nor is that the point of the HCA. Rather, it's to collect the ever-growing number of cautionary tales of people who stubbornly and arrogantly refused a $0 prevention of their very demise.
Frankly, when that stubbornness and arrogance places them in hospital beds at the expense of everyone else - thus putting said everyone else at greater health risks regardless of their relation to COVID - rational people tend to have a harder time caring about whether harsh criticism of that stubbornness and arrogance might hurt someone's feelings.
But this subreddit seems to be celebrating the death of people who are not famous, not well-known, and (at the risk of sounding cruel), not globally important. It's a lot harder to explain this behavior.
This is why the violence didn’t go away with trump and will only escalate from here until ultimately it rips this country apart. Forums like this serve to dehumanize any who might disagree. It differs only from alt-right forums in size and scale.
Politicians are both the seed of this problem and using their social network to fan the flames. The current Vp said that she would not take the vaccine if President Donald Trump recommended it. Trump has refused to be vocal about vaccines despite funding and accelerating them.
The problem at the end of the day isn’t the “in” or the “out” populations. It’s the mechanism drawing us into ever greater hatred of “the other”..
In the future, maybe we will named genocides and political violence as Facebook or Reddit awards.
Lest someone think that I am being overly dramatic - it has already happened once.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
Allows people joking about death
It detailed the gradual death of a woman from her perspective and then her husband's perspective based on Facebook posts.
Someone took the time to screenshot each of them and create an image gallery, then everyone went wild laughing and denigrating these people. "Bible study is OVER" was one that stood out to me as petty and cruel.
I couldn't help but think of how ironic it was that these people railed on about others' deficiencies (of which, if they were present at all, were clearly not a deliberate choice or desire of the victims) were clearly revealing their own different yet still disturbing deficiencies.
I think I'd prefer a vaccine-avoiding person with misguided convictions over someone who publicly denigrates the deceased about their culture, appearance, family, etc. over poor decisions about a vaccine.
I refer to a couple quotes when ignorance in others is a problem:
> Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)
> For if one shows this, a man will retire from his error of himself; but as long as you do not succeed in showing this, you need not wonder if he persists in his error, for he acts because he has an impression that he is right. (Epictetus, Discourses, II.26)
While we may be physically injured by ignorance of vaccines (through unnecessary spread of sickness), I think the general point stands. There's no need whatsoever to pour hate on these people after they've suffered and even died.
Even me.
Even you.