Editor’s Note: Last Redoubt always gives us some good material to chew on for a while.
I was recently pointed to a video by Russel Brand discussing “who won COVID” for Trump getting contracting and healing back from getting COVID-19. In truth – though I don’t strongly recommend taking the time – Brand, for all that what he is saying is filtered through a leftist lens, at least a) understands rhetoric, and b) how much the press is lying.
Of course, he considers Trump’s rhetoric to be lies, and the “calm, dialectic” stuff (a bit of a misapprehension on the “calm”, chap) from the left to be truth. Like I said – leftist lens.
What caught my attention though, was the bit where he discussed Trump’s statement about not letting COVID dominate your life. In part, because while he “got” the surface rhetoric level, he failed to get the deeper level of truth and legitimate wisdom.
COVID dominates the lives of those on the Left.
By this I mean that it has become the leading metric of virtue, living, and safety. Lives lost, or major health issue due to canceled appointments and treatments? Not really a factor – at least we didn’t kill grandma with COVID. You have to wear a mask! I can’t wait until they decide that, now that the WHO has declared lockdowns are not helping, that lockdowns were always a bad thing (no matter what they were last week).
The nuance is lost. Instead, I’ve been directly told that Trump getting sick was a good thing – not because they wished him ill – but because it would finally show the unbelievers that winnie-the-flu was to be taken seriously. Anyone not as constantly in a panic as they are “isn’t taking it seriously”. For the Left, the mantra “safety first” is not only a focus of every minute, but COVID safety first.
For those who’ve read my notes on “safety third”, you already know how dumb I think that is.
The point being that, while we should respect the fact that COVID-19 appears to be worse than the usual flu and we want to reasonably avoid catching it, we need to get on with our lives and be with people again. No matter what the idiots I know think, Trump isn’t saying to ignore COVID or pretend it doesn’t exist, he’s saying that, factoring in reasonable precautions, get on with your life, especially the important stuff like friends, health, livelihood, and family.
You can’t ignore the flu, any more than the dangers of slipping in your tub, or getting in an auto accident – but you cannot make it the focus of your life.
As to the person thinking that stupid right-wingers would finally take COVID seriously, I literally stopped and looked at the person telling me that for a while. He was one who literally can’t let go and almost uncontrollably have to hunt you down days later to show you some article that, if read with 100% faith in the oversimplified headline, kind of means what they think it does. “Sure, I’m positive you can find someone who thinks the existence of the virus is a hoax, but where the hell did you get the idea that there’s a large percentage of people who feel that way?”
I forgot that person had thought Trump had called the existence of COVID-19 a hoax, vice the hay the democrats would try to make of it.
Speaking of stupid articles – I had also walked into a client’s office, and they’d posted an article on five myths about COVID and flu shots. The first myth was that “flu shots make you sick”.
It of course went on to note that, while the majority of people were just fine, so it is a myth, there was a small percentage that had moderate to strong flu-like symptoms in response. I’m one of those – though the flu shot is so far the only vaccination I’ve had a reaction to, so it caught me by surprise. By three flu shots/ years in a row in the military I grew to hate that time of year.
The rest of the article was similar bullshit, arguing against the colloquial through pedantic hairsplitting. You see, it’s “not just the flu” because more people died – though not an order of magnitude more, so it’s a nastier flu, but we’re not talking black death or other similar end-of-civilization stuff we got through without extreme measures. The very next bit glosses over how, though infectability lasts longer, and see previous death rates, wuFlu is a coronavirus (like may influenza strains), and does have similar symptoms and treatment – it’s just worse (read: less well adapted to humans).
I think someone was counting on the fact that this information was in two different sections, that we wouldn’t notice the contradictions between them.
Also – Bradford Walker at Empires Must Fall quotes Wokal Distancing to examine how postmodernism leads to no objective truth as to why people seeing the same thing watch different movies re: Trump and COVID. It’s all about power man.
Postmodernism denies that there is objective truth. Postmodernism says that the only thing we are able to fully grasp is our own experience. That’s it. Postmodern thinking says that since everyone of us has biases so deep that we can never get around them. That means that we can’t ever get to the objective truth about reality. We can only see what we are trained to see through the interpretive lens that we get from our culture. It also believes that there is no lens which is better or more true then any other lens.
Postmodernism says the lens that says Trump is healthy is no better or worse than the lens that says he isn’t. The lens that says science is the best way to know truth is no better or more true then the lens that says feelings and emotions are the best way to know truth. Postmodernism also says that who decides what is true is about power. The postmodern philosophers say the person who determines what a society thinks is true is a person who gets to have a tremendous amount of power. That is partially true. However, they go further.
They think that because the person who determines what society thinks is true gets power, that anyone who claims that anything is true, is only doing that as a way to try to access the power that comes with deciding what is true. In other words, they think anyone who claims to know the truth is only making that claim so they can get power for themselves. This means they trust nobody, and consistently accuse other people of hiding their true motives. As such they dismiss any claim they don’t like as just another lie meant to control people.
The result is exactly what we see in this thread. Everyone thinks that they can use whatever lens they want to interpret whatever facts they want and come to whatever conclusion they want. Whoever says otherwise is accused of having ulterior motives. They act like truth is a matter of opinion, and the goal is to get “your truth” to be declared the official opinion of society.
This is nonsense. Reality is what you run into when your beliefs are wrong, and it does not care about “your truth” or “official opinions.” We need to bring back the idea objective truth and start acting like serious people again. If we don’t, if we keep going like this, we are going to run into reality very quickly, and it is NOT going to be fun for us.
Needless to say, these positions are not in line with bridges staying up.
These people also believe in objective reality when facing the prospect of falling from said bridge. The more clever may tell you that they decided not to disbelieve the majority opinion that it’s a long way down with a painful and sudden stop.
