Doug's Darkworld

You just can’t make this shit up: Trump demands boycott of Goodyear Tire — which employs thousands of US workers. Why? Because they asked their workers not to wear or display political slogans, endorsements, etc. A perfectly reasonable (and completely legal and constitutional) rule to keep political disputes out of the workplace. Especially reasonable during the most toxic election campaign in living memory. And Trump has worked very hard to make the election as toxic as possible, regaling the American people with the most horrific fear mongering about the Democrats. No, the Democrats don’t want to open the borders, take away people’s guns, ban Christianity, or turn America into a Stalinesque gulag. They just want a well run country, with justice and equal opportunity for all.

It’s all just effing weird. I’m really starting to see how magical thinking has permeated America from the beginning, even more so in recent decades. It started off when the founding fathers created this wonderful new country based on freedom and democracy! Well, with a few exceptions: Slaves. Indians. Women. Non-property owners. It was a great moment in history, our new lords and masters declared us free! Don’t get me wrong, the concept of individual human rights and constitutional democracy is a good one, it just needs to be more widely implemented.

So magical thinking. Another example of thoughts I have had recently. Trump’s claim that he has saved millions of lives with his response to Covid-19 is magical thinking. “If we hadn’t done it my way, the result would have been worse!” is a defense one could use to defend any course of action. There certainly are circumstances where it would be a valid claim, but when your actions consisted of mostly bragging, doing nothing, and blame shifting; and your country was hit far worse by Covid-19 than any other country, it’s a magical defense. It requires multiple layers of special pleading to be a valid argument, which makes it a weak argument indeed.

Trump’s claim to have saved millions from Covid-19 is the American way of thinking. Truman used the exact same argument to justify killing 200,000 civilians with nuclear weapons. We saved a million lives by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people! Wait, what? There are plenty of historians, not to mention contemporaries of the event, who thought otherwise. I don’t ask people who think the nuclear bombs on Japan attacks are justified to change their minds. I just ask them to think about the idea that their claim is no different than Trump’s claim to have saved millions of American lives through his actions.

I don’t expect many believers of either claim will change their thinking anytime soon. Once humans get a hold of an idea, it sinks in. Why yes, this is going somewhere. This isn’t just my obsessive need to write every day as my world ends. (OK, it is.) The idea that Covid-19 was “just a flu with a higher than usual mortality rate, mostly among the elderly and sick” really got established quickly and deeply. Even in much of the medical community. I hadn’t really realized the medical community was slow to pick up on it. The human brain is a pattern recognition sense. We slot new things into existing categories. So no surprise I guess.

Yeah. Reality is not required to conform to our idea of how reality should be. There will be tests. Covid-19 is one of them. So yes, this: Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19. Basically an article pointing out that a lot of people are having long term lingering effects from Covid-19, unlike colds or flus that one completely gets over in a week or two at most. Science is starting to pick up on it, a number of studies have yielded alarming results. Personal experience, I know half a dozen people plus who got Covid-19. One died, several were hospitalized, most still haven’t fully recovered.

Don’t get Covid-19. You or someone you love will regret it. Don’t spread Covid-19, you or someone you love will regret it. This is not a drill. This is not a hoax. This is not a nefarious Hollywood movie style plot. No, Covid-19 is like the thing in the Southern Reach Trilogy. (Don’t read it, you’ll never sleep properly again and Oumuamua will haunt your dreams.) Hopefully not as bad, but half a million dead Americans by year’s end is not outside the realm of possibility.

Jesus wept. I write to stay sane, not sure if it’s working. Stay safe everyone. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #MundiSolisOccasum

Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.

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