Authorities in Boise, Idaho are at a loss to explain why St. Luke’s McCall hospital had its signs defaced with swastikas overnight. From U.S. News:
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Police are investigating after a central Idaho hospital was vandalized with spray-painted swastikas.
Three outdoor signs at St. Luke's McCall Medical Center were vandalized late Saturday or early Sunday morning, hospital officials said.
"It is very troubling, to say the least, to have such a hateful act occur on our campus,” said hospital spokeswoman Laura Crawford.
Crawford said the hospital's security team is working with local police and an active investigation is underway.
“This act is incredibly troubling,” said Amber Green, St. Luke’s McCall chief operating officer and chief nursing officer, in a prepared statement. “We know that this hateful act does not reflect the community where we live and serve. We will continue to cooperate with law enforcement so whomever is responsible is held accountable.”
That pretty much sums up the information in the news reports I’ve looked at so far: authorities don’t know why it happened, don’t know who did it, and it doesn’t represent their community. (They should talk to David Neiwert.)
The Idaho State Journal adds this information as a seeming afterthought:
The graffiti comes as the state remains under “crisis standards of care” because hospitals are overwhelmed by an influx of COVID-19 patients. The crisis standards of care designation means hospitals are allowed to ration health care if they are unable to treat everyone normally, giving scarce resources such as hospital rooms or intensive care unit beds to those patients who are most likely to survive.
Shall we connect some dots?
Hospitals in Idaho have so many people coming in due to Covid-19, they have run out of ICU beds and staff to support them. Triage is now in effect — there are three categories of patients: those who can survive without immediate medical attention, those who will survive IF they get medical attention, and those who will not likely survive despite medical attention.
Triage is necessary, if unpleasant to contemplate. When medical resources are limited, Doctors have to decide to put them where they can save the most lives. (Christopher Reeves discusses triage here.) It can happen when there’s a mass casualty event, like an explosion, a fire — and now mass shootings. Or a pandemic.
The reason hospitals are filling up with Covid patients now is largely because of the unvaccinated. That’s it. People are going to hospitals and dying because they’ve swamped them.
That would be bad enough all by itself — but we also have to add Covid Conspiracy Theories into the mix. Newsweek reports that hospitals and doctors are being sued because they refuse to administer quack cures like Zinc, Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Betadine gargles and whatever the latest ‘Miracle’ cure is among the anti-vaxxers. They are now convinced that hospitals are deliberately allowing people to die. Kos has a look at how crazy it is among the ‘purebloods’.
Add this to the ‘reasons’ for being anti-vaxx: it’s unproven, it has microchips, it changes your DNA, it makes you sterile — and multiply with the paranoia about what Liberals and Big Government and China are really doing… Add in the Culture War side of this too. The right wing has been hearing for years that Liberals are out to kill them and destroy America.
So, we’ve now reached the point where some unknown person has become convinced hospitals have become Nazi death camps, where doctors and other figures lurking in the shadows decide who will live and who will die — that’s my guess on what just happened in Idaho.
[Update: MDGluon 16 suggests in comments that a vaccine mandate for hospital employees could also explain it.]
I’m also going to guess there’s a chance it won’t end there — and that it could escalate.
If you think this speculation is a little too crazy or paranoid, consider this example of what’s being floated out there right now.
They’d Rather Be Right
In 1954 Mark Clifton and Frank Riley published a serial story about an advanced cybernetic device called “Bossy” that had been loaded with every provable scientific fact — and the ability to make correlations between them all. The story is set in an America where there’s a certain amount of paranoia (Cold War era after all), a nation losing its way, cynical media manipulation of a gullible public, a problematic celebrity billionaire, Academia under attack, and other things that are suddenly seeming very timely.
It was the second novel to win a Hugo award, and generated mixed responses at the time. The ‘science’ is used to drive the plot, which explores the nature of human rationality, intelligence, science, politics, and so on. It’s a “What If” story. The title “They’d Rather Be Right” comes from the essential dilemma in the story.
As the setup for the story has it, Bossy can answer any question for which it has sufficient information, and the answer will not be shaped by human bias; it will be entirely objective based on proven and provable facts. (Please don’t quibble about this — as I said it’s a what if story.)
Among the answers Bossy can provide is that it can direct a kind of medical treatment that can restore a person to perfect youthful health — effective immortality. There’s one hitch...
To be successfully rejuvenated, a person needs to undergo a kind of mechanical psychoanalysis that allows the body to rejuvenate itself by resolving all of the conflicts and contradictions within their thought patterns that affect them down to the cellular level — including strongly held beliefs that conflict with reality.
They’d Rather Be Right — and die is the reason the therapy will not work for people who refuse to give up their beliefs in the face of facts that they refuse to accept. We’re now seeing a real-world example of this taking place in real time.
As far as I know the book version, published in 1957, is currently out of print although used copies are out there. (I got my copy via the Science Fiction Book Club years ago.)
[Update: Several commenters found links to “They’d Rather Be Right.” Squeeze the Weeze found it in a Mark Clifton story collection. beverlywoods found it in an online lending library. RhodeIslandAspie found an e version online.]
Clifton and Riley were able to come up with a happy ending for their story. We still have to work on ours.
Wednesday, Sep 22, 2021 · 2:04:11 AM +00:00 · xaxnar
UPDATE: A further comment on the vandalism from East Idaho News:
McCall Police Chief Justin Williams said vandalism like this is rare for the region, but there is no indication that the graffiti was part of a hate crime targeting any specific person or that it is related to the coronavirus pandemic. Idaho’s hate crime law requires the actor to have the “specific intent” to harass someone because of the victim’s race, religion, ancestry, or national origin.
“The community is outraged that something like this would happen but to make the assumption that the hospital was targeted because of COVID is a leap at this point,” Williams said.
He said the case remains under investigation, and people with information are encouraged to contact the police department.
Nothing to see here, move along...