A growing measles outbreak in Gaines County, Texas—24 cases so far in a county that voted 91 percent for Donald Trump—illustrates a grim irony.
Senate Republicans plan to vote today on anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be the secretary of health and human services. If they seat him, it will be Republican families that suffer.
Will suffer. We all will. He was just confirmed by the Senate.
At this point, my response is “good”.
The only time conservatives seem to give a shit about a thing is if it happens to them, so I guess that how it needs to go. I know there will be splash damage. I know people will be hurt and killed. But for fucks sake, I can’t force myself to care about people who so consistently and constantly work against their own interests unless they’re hit in the face by an object lesson on the point in question. So yeah; this’ll suck, but maybe conservatives will slightly pull their heads out of their asses after enough of them die.
Whole towns got wiped out by covid and it didn’t seem to matter.
When they get what they voted for, my heart will go out for them.
I’ll send my prayers
(i’m atheist)
THEN LET THEM. First time around we coddled them. Let them suffer the consequences this time.
THEN LET THEM.
Its sort of an all-or-nothing affair. RFK Jr isn’t just going to be HHS Secretary for the Republican-leaning parts of the country.
Also sort of neglects how the people who suffer the most under these policies are poor people not conservative voters. A general retraction of public health services hits the low-laying populations first.
Let them suffer the consequences this time.
The thing about infectious diseases is they don’t pick and choose by political affiliation.
Weren’t COVID rates fairly different based on party affiliation?
Yes, when we had Fauci allowing vaccines through. Without the health secretary allowing and pushing vaccines out and you know, not actively hiding a pandemic as I’m sure RFK will. I think rates would have been much higher on both sides.
We’re never going to make things better without Trump voters coming to their senses. So it’s a sacrifice that we unfortunately have to make.
Good.
I just feel bad for the people who live in red states who are good people and have just been stuck through poverty with no way out.
I lived in Louisiana for five years. It was a hotbed of Linux users and developers surprisingly.
I knew a lot of good people living by a shoestring. A lot of people who never had the funds to make it out. I only made it out because I wasn’t from there originally. If I had gotten stuck, things could be pretty bad.
I have an old friend from there with a daughter who will never function on her own and needs a feeding tube. It’s already been so hard for their family. This will probably kill his completely innocent daughter and leave him and his wife devastated.
I’m in a red state and have spent my life holding my tongue when these people start spouting their bullshit.
I’m done being nice. Unfortunately, they are taking us all down with them, but you can bet your ass I’m going to be reminding them of that the entire time.
I’m also shoe-stringing it, I’m posting this from an extended stay hotel at $60 a day because my credit is shit. My biggest gift is my ability to read and take instructions, so watching the mouth breathing red hats getting laid off is a small, but sweet, consolidation to all this crap…
Hats off to you, and I wish you the best in these trying times. Folks like me are rooting for you.
i wish i could endorse this sentiment but red america is fully entrenched and who’s going to die off are the people in community with red america who warned about this. red america won’t recognize their mistakes until there’s no one left to guide them to liberation from the system
Luigi showed their ire can switch on a dime, the only thing keeping them stupid is a daily media diet and listening to the dumbest person they know every day at work.
all the more reason the woke folk around them dying off is not great. they are reachable, but we’re losing our ability to reach them
I second the sentiment.
After the last election, I have zero faith in the American public’s ability to learn any lesson. We’ve got a whole propaganda ecosystem dedicated to keeping that from happening. The lessons will have to get more painful than covid was.
If you cannot listen, then you will feel.
If bird flu takes off, it will literally be a real-life version of The Stand.
That might be a bit too much lesson for everyone.
Oh, well.
I am surprised to see Cato institute bring this up. They are pretty much open about their support for oligarchs, authoritarianism and hatred of human rights. I wonder if this is 4D chess of sorts where they worry RFK Jr.'s lack of PR skills and relative volatility could result in some plebs starting to wonder if the whole system is a ruse that plays them for suckers.
That’s a much bigger danger to the people who bankroll Cato than some deaths/suffering due to mass viral outbreaks.
They’re silly libertarians, but even they can see the authoritarianism that’s on the rise.
From what’s I’ve read from Cato, I don’t think they actually believe in what they write. Some of the younger analysts (who lack life experience) maybe, and I am sure they keep a few “true believer” types to keep up appearances.
But at the end of the day their copytext about “freedom this” and “freedom that” doesn’t pass the basic smell test. A bunch of oligarch funded think tank analysts by definition cannot know anything about freedom.
If they were solely a propaganda piece of Oligarchs, I would have imagined they wouldn’t have the US keep dropping on their index of freedom lists and not have all the European nations listed as high: https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2024
I think they believe their own bullshit.
I would disagree, considering the nature of Cato it makes sense for them to keep up appearances. Propaganda can show nuance when needed.
Consider russian propaganda, even they don’t openly admit to being genocidal imperialists. On the contrary you often hear narratives around how they are helping Ukrainians and if not for the CIA, Ukrainians and Russians would be enjoying life together as brotherly nations.
I just find it difficult to take something like this seriously:
For more than 40 years, Cato has led the charge for liberty in our nation and around the world. The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates. Our mission is to keep the principles, ideas, and moral case for liberty alive for future generations, while moving public policy in the direction of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
This reads like some sort of communist propaganda or something similar (especially the bit about “for future generations”). From my perspective, this is pretty typical copytext for Americans who work on corruption enablement. Lots of pomp and tedious bullshit, but when push comes to shove, there is always algniment with oligarch goals.
CATO is a classic case of only ever doubling down on how much you hate the government.
I don’t care how many times a day a stopped clock is right. FUCK THE CATO INSTITUTE.
A lot of these cases seme to be children and that’s shite. They did not decide against the vaccine, but their parents did, leaving them to suffer through measles and possible long term effects like immunosuppression or SSPE.
Let them eat cake I guess
Texas leading the way in thinning their own human herds, attaboy!
Related note: I nevertheless feel bad for those who never wanted, or were powerless to stop this. They don’t deserve it.
Texas leading the way in thinning their own human herds, attaboy!
The most vulnerable populations tend to be the poorest. Migrants, children, and other broadly disenfranchised peoples will suffer for these policies. Upper class white men insulated in their country clubs and gated homes will be the last to see any comeuppance.
We’re doing Masque of the Red Death IRL. Prince Prospero makes it all the way to the final page.
