Post by ck4829 on Sept 30, 2021 15:01:29 GMT
I titled my first book of essays Reasonable Creatures, after Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous remark “I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes but reasonable creatures.” I’d never use that title now. Women are as rational as men, sure, but that’s not saying much. If Wollstonecraft came back to life, she’d have a heart attack. By comparison with her 18th-century day, we live in paradise, yet people seem as willfully ignorant and blinkered as ever.
The lack of progress has become staggeringly apparent since the onset of the pandemic. Is there anything less rational than people refusing vaccines that have been proved time and again to prevent a deadly disease? Well, yes—believing that the disease does not exist. If you’re feeling flu-ish, just follow the advice of noted medical experts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Joe Rogan and dose yourself with ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug you can pick up at the feed store.
I can just barely see how someone could think that virtually every doctor on the planet is wrong—after all, the medical consensus has been wrong before. But where’s the evidence that ivermectin cures Covid, let alone that the vaccines make you sterile, implant microchips in your blood, change your DNA, and magnetize you? What makes it possible to take the position that a virus that has already killed more than 650,000 people here and millions worldwide is a hoax that the government is using to scare you into submission? Billions of people have received the vaccines—if they prevented pregnancy or made spoons stick to your face, we would know by now.
It wouldn’t matter so much if these delusions affected only the believers themselves. After all, people do lots of foolish, dangerous things. But refusing to get vaccinated or to wear masks harms other people—that’s what “infectious” means. Yet one in eight nurses have so far refused the vaccine, as have many other health care workers, like the Kentucky nursing home worker who went on to infect 26 people.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. According to a PRRI poll last May, 15 percent of Americans believe in QAnon. Yes, one in seven Americans agreed with the statement “The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child-sex-trafficking operation.” The strongest predictor of QAnon adherence? Reliance on Fox and other far-right news sources. Another fun fact: 39 percent of all Americans—and 85 percent of QAnon believers—think Covid-19 was intentionally developed in a lab. Perhaps not surprisingly, 73 percent of QAnoners believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, as do 29 percent of all Americans.
www.thenation.com/article/society/covid-denial-irrational/
The lack of progress has become staggeringly apparent since the onset of the pandemic. Is there anything less rational than people refusing vaccines that have been proved time and again to prevent a deadly disease? Well, yes—believing that the disease does not exist. If you’re feeling flu-ish, just follow the advice of noted medical experts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Joe Rogan and dose yourself with ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug you can pick up at the feed store.
I can just barely see how someone could think that virtually every doctor on the planet is wrong—after all, the medical consensus has been wrong before. But where’s the evidence that ivermectin cures Covid, let alone that the vaccines make you sterile, implant microchips in your blood, change your DNA, and magnetize you? What makes it possible to take the position that a virus that has already killed more than 650,000 people here and millions worldwide is a hoax that the government is using to scare you into submission? Billions of people have received the vaccines—if they prevented pregnancy or made spoons stick to your face, we would know by now.
It wouldn’t matter so much if these delusions affected only the believers themselves. After all, people do lots of foolish, dangerous things. But refusing to get vaccinated or to wear masks harms other people—that’s what “infectious” means. Yet one in eight nurses have so far refused the vaccine, as have many other health care workers, like the Kentucky nursing home worker who went on to infect 26 people.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. According to a PRRI poll last May, 15 percent of Americans believe in QAnon. Yes, one in seven Americans agreed with the statement “The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child-sex-trafficking operation.” The strongest predictor of QAnon adherence? Reliance on Fox and other far-right news sources. Another fun fact: 39 percent of all Americans—and 85 percent of QAnon believers—think Covid-19 was intentionally developed in a lab. Perhaps not surprisingly, 73 percent of QAnoners believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, as do 29 percent of all Americans.
www.thenation.com/article/society/covid-denial-irrational/