For those who wonder about the broad capacity of covidiots to deny that there is a bona fide pandemic, Salon has provided an excellent public service.
You will certainly recognize them--they are all over a number of major sites on the Net. It is important, I think, to understand their thinking, in order to countermand it.
www.salon.com/...
A field guide to the pandemic deniers
Disinformation and immaturity regarding COVID-19 has manifested in a variety of forms
SOPHIA A. MCCLENNEN
Every day there is more data to prove the dangers of the coronavirus. Yet, bizarrely, the more proof we have of the damage of the pandemic; the more vicious and hysterical its deniers. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of uninformed, deluded ideas covidiots spew on a daily basis. We mourn not just the lives lost and the bodies damaged, but the collective intelligence of our nation. With international news consistently depicting the United States as the dumbest nation in the developed world, it is as if news of the covidiocy is almost as depressing as news of the virus's spread itself.
The trend to what is described as America's move from freedom to "freedumb" has sadly been a long time in the making. The pandemic only painfully reveals a process that was well-documented by Charles Pierce's 2010 book "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free."
The Eye Rollers... think that all of the news over the pandemic is exaggerated hype...
The Shoulder Shruggers... are your Ayn Rand-style covidiots. These folks get the numbers and the science. They have a full sense of the dead bodies and damaged lungs, but they simply don't care. They epitomize the "profit over people" worldview...
The Narcissistic Hedonists... simply don't want to be inconvenienced by the virus...
The Self-Proclaimed Scientists The self-proclaimed scientists are a unique strain of covidiot that derives from this nation's long resistance to expertise...
The Conspiracy Theorists One of the special features of conspiracy theorists is that they are found on both the left and the right, unlike a lot of the other strains of covidiots...
I track LinkledIn, fairly frequently, as an example. There are some genuine thinkers over there, as well as a crazy cabal of Trumpists who run in packs to support each other. One of the “neat” tricks there is to focus primarily on the count of Covid-19 cases, and claim that they are a conspiracy of lies or exaggerations—the eye rollers. This, they do as if hospitalizations, ICU overcapacity in some states, and a rebound in the number of deaths are either lies or don’t matter.
Remarkably, the Trumpian battle cry that we must open the economy and schools, even if it kills people, is rife over there from The Cabal. A lot of this comes back to the “Self-proclaimed scientists” on the author’s list of types of deniers. Expert epidemiologists and doctors leading ICU efforts just don’t matter to this bunch, because they “know better.” And then they get “likes” from other self-proclaimed experts with impressive seeming professional descriptions, and they gather in clusters to attack anyone who disagrees with them. It’s a sad use of a site that used to have some useful discussions, and still has some pretty smart people. The smart people have to duck, though, if the want to avoid getting attafcked by The Cabal.
Interestngly, one of the incessant leaders of The Cabal just yesterday posted an article which showed him to be a Young Earth Creationist, citing “proof” that Noah’s Ark “proves” the Bible to be inerrant. Heck, with an inerrant Bible, who needs masks?