kontextmaschine:

reasonableapproximation:

morlock-holmes:

understatedocelot:

isaacsapphire:

di–es—can-ic-ul-ar–es:

cop-disliker69:

kontextmaschine:

Maybe it was obvious to everyone else but it just occurred to me that a lot of the red/blue divides re: COVID is all living adults’ baseline acculturation of how to understand and relate to a plague came from AIDS

blue: panic, promote individual self-protection practices, exaggerate your own risk out of a perceived abundance of caution.

red: not only ignore but disdain the virus, tell yourself that everyone who died from it got what was coming to them.

This is fascinating. I know a somewhat-rightie who thinks it was basically a random variable which tribe would be for or against covid! That we could easily live in a world where trump came out pro virus mitigation strong and the blue tribe hated him for it and went anti mitigation out of spite.

I always thought this person was wrong because the history of climate denial, but this is a much much stronger reason why that person is wrong!

If the parties had realized quicker who’s base was more vulnerable to Covid, it would have been the other way around.

I’ll add that by now, the Blue attitude is getting pretty damn close to “if you die of covid you got what was coming for you for your lack of faith in Science! not getting vaccinated/being a Republican.”

i still think the party split could have gone the other way. In January 2020 the line was “coronavirus is just a bad flu and to say otherwise is anti-Chinese racism.” Now, of course, it’s anti-Chinese racism to argue that the chinese government’s zero covid policy is an overreach.

I don’t see how you get it going the other way.

I’m assuming we’re talking here not about actual government agents (Where the incentives are extremely different), but your cousin Bob and what he posts on Facebook.

Blue Tribe America generally has a higher faith in the basic functionality of institutions and of news media than Red Tribe America. The thing that unites all the positions held by your blue tribe Cousin Bob is that he’s been following the CDC really closely and taking their advice to heart, even when it changes, because he’s convinced that they are in some way connected to reality.

Red Tribe America has massively less faith in those institutions, and so when one of those institutions tells them something that they don’t like the sound of, they’re much more likely to decide that the explanation for this is a conspiracy to disenfranchise them specifically.

Basically, Blue Tribe Facebook was always going to follow the CDC, and the CDC was always going to be at least vaguely tethered to some kind of actual reality in the sense that they were going to notice that the pandemic exists and that it was bad.

You get some wiggle room; you could get the FDA to really drag their feet on an emergency authorization, and Blue Tribe Cousin Bob might think that’s justifiable caution, and people complaining about the time it takes are libertarians who just want to hand everything over to unaccountable private interests, but you won’t convince him that the CDC has made the pandemic up out of whole cloth in order to promote some Trumpian idea, there’s too much faith in institutional functionality in American Blue Tribe circles for that to catch as much as it can catch in Red Tribe circles.

I dunno. This may well be true, but my sense of the blue tribe mostly comes from Reddit. And I think of how Reddit feels about cops, the intelligence services, or the FCC’s decision to revoke net neutrality. I wonder if the blue tribe just happens to have institutions on its side more than the red tribe, and that’s why it seems to trust them more.

I set my sense of Reddit back in the creepshots era as the continuation of USENET and as authentic a font of the Old Internet as 4chan, whatever it is since then is a corruption

I mean Ellen Pao was bad but when 9gag first started Reddit barely outranked them

reasonableapproximation:

morlock-holmes:

understatedocelot:

isaacsapphire:

di–es—can-ic-ul-ar–es:

cop-disliker69:

kontextmaschine:

Maybe it was obvious to everyone else but it just occurred to me that a lot of the red/blue divides re: COVID is all living adults’ baseline acculturation of how to understand and relate to a plague came from AIDS

blue: panic, promote individual self-protection practices, exaggerate your own risk out of a perceived abundance of caution.

red: not only ignore but disdain the virus, tell yourself that everyone who died from it got what was coming to them.

This is fascinating. I know a somewhat-rightie who thinks it was basically a random variable which tribe would be for or against covid! That we could easily live in a world where trump came out pro virus mitigation strong and the blue tribe hated him for it and went anti mitigation out of spite.

I always thought this person was wrong because the history of climate denial, but this is a much much stronger reason why that person is wrong!

If the parties had realized quicker who’s base was more vulnerable to Covid, it would have been the other way around.

I’ll add that by now, the Blue attitude is getting pretty damn close to “if you die of covid you got what was coming for you for your lack of faith in Science! not getting vaccinated/being a Republican.”

i still think the party split could have gone the other way. In January 2020 the line was “coronavirus is just a bad flu and to say otherwise is anti-Chinese racism.” Now, of course, it’s anti-Chinese racism to argue that the chinese government’s zero covid policy is an overreach.

I don’t see how you get it going the other way.

I’m assuming we’re talking here not about actual government agents (Where the incentives are extremely different), but your cousin Bob and what he posts on Facebook.

Blue Tribe America generally has a higher faith in the basic functionality of institutions and of news media than Red Tribe America. The thing that unites all the positions held by your blue tribe Cousin Bob is that he’s been following the CDC really closely and taking their advice to heart, even when it changes, because he’s convinced that they are in some way connected to reality.

Red Tribe America has massively less faith in those institutions, and so when one of those institutions tells them something that they don’t like the sound of, they’re much more likely to decide that the explanation for this is a conspiracy to disenfranchise them specifically.

Basically, Blue Tribe Facebook was always going to follow the CDC, and the CDC was always going to be at least vaguely tethered to some kind of actual reality in the sense that they were going to notice that the pandemic exists and that it was bad.

You get some wiggle room; you could get the FDA to really drag their feet on an emergency authorization, and Blue Tribe Cousin Bob might think that’s justifiable caution, and people complaining about the time it takes are libertarians who just want to hand everything over to unaccountable private interests, but you won’t convince him that the CDC has made the pandemic up out of whole cloth in order to promote some Trumpian idea, there’s too much faith in institutional functionality in American Blue Tribe circles for that to catch as much as it can catch in Red Tribe circles.

I dunno. This may well be true, but my sense of the blue tribe mostly comes from Reddit. And I think of how Reddit feels about cops, the intelligence services, or the FCC’s decision to revoke net neutrality. I wonder if the blue tribe just happens to have institutions on its side more than the red tribe, and that’s why it seems to trust them more.

I set my sense of Reddit back in the creepshots era as the continuation of USENET and as authentic a font of the Old Internet as 4chan, whatever it is since then is a corruption