Filthy Lucre
Adventurer
The problem will solve itself ;D
D&D and the rising pandemic
- Thread starter GreyLord
- Start date
BookTenTiger
He / Him
I'm not sure this kind of judgment is useful. As much as I may disagree with the politics of communities who are refusing vaccines, celebrating their deaths isn't helpful.
I think a lot of people in these communities are victims of false information. While we have always known that disinformation can be damaging, but I think we are truly seeing now how deadly it can be. I'm hoping this helps us see misinformation as an equality issue, not just a partisan issue.
Filthy Lucre
Adventurer
I'm not "celebrating" their deaths - I just don't care.
I may be more pessimistic on this issue than you are: I do not believe this divide we're seeing can be bridged, ever. Victims of false information or not, there are certain communities that are clearly more susceptible to it than others and I do not believe there is anything we can do to change people's predispositions.
The observed pattern is not the result of fundamental lack of access or opportunity - these folks have as much access to CNN, Reuters, and NPR as they do to Fox News, and nothing is preventing them from choosing differently. So isn't very analogous to most inequalities we see, and the usual approaches to inequality do not apply.
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BookTenTiger
He / Him
So just to be clear, putting a winky face after talking about people you don't agree with dying is usually interpreted as celebrating their death.
BookTenTiger
He / Him
The fact that COVID deaths are tracking along political lines makes me wonder if we do need to treat this as an equity issue, though. If higher death rates are linked to a lack of a resource (information or education), at what point does it become analogous with other inequalities?
I don't have any finalized ideas about this, but I think it's interesting to think about, and also perhaps a more humane approach.
Filthy Lucre
Adventurer
You can be amused by something and not celebrate it. And to even couch this in terms of 'agreement' is absurd and dishonest. This isn't a "disagreement" about whether 5e or 3.5 is the best edition of D&D. It's over objective, demonstrable facts.
When people who huff bleach to own the libs die, it's funny. That doesn't mean I think that they deserved to die, or that I'm glad that they're dead.
We should note, "linked to," and, "is caused by" are not equivalent, and that can muddy the question of how to deal with the issue. Correlation does not imply causation, and all that.
Anyone who can watch FOX News can watch CNN, and so on - so it is not a matter of lack of the information resource.
What analysis I have seen suggests that economic status and education levels (which are not independent) are not strong predictors here. Yes, we get the image in media of uneducated folks not getting vaccinated, but that's anecdotal, and ignores how many uneducated or lower-income folks do get vaccinated, when the vaccines are made available.
That leaves the strong suggestion that "freedumb" as it has been called here, is mostly a political problem, and not an access issue.
A lot of stories about schadenfreude in the media lately...
It's not that weird to feel schadenfreude when COVID-deniers get COVID
Media scolds are lambasting a forum that celebrates COVID skeptics getting COVID. They're missing the bigger picture
www.salon.com
Is it immoral if you feel schadenfreude about Trump’s Covid-19?
The ethics of feeling smug about another’s misfortune, explained.
www.vox.com
After a COVID skeptic falls to the disease, people ask an awkward question: Should we care?
As the COVID-19 deaths now occur almost exclusively among the unvaccinated, who certainly were forewarned, a hardness is seeping into society, writes Danny Westneat. "The pandemic ... is making me a colder and more callous person," one reader notes.
www.seattletimes.com
So, as we look at this, we should remember that it isn't just simple schadenfreude.
Generally speaking, the people we are talking about aren't just rejecting vaccines now, for example. They have broadly been resisting and eschewing any and all approaches to controlling the issue - masking, avoiding group gatherings, lockdowns, and so on. So, these people are not just victims. They are not just victims of their own bad choices. Many of us, and our families, and our economic situations, are victims of their choices. The entire pandemic would have been under better control if not for their recalcitrance. A great many of the nearly 700K deaths in the US were preventable, but for them.
Basically, in aggregate, they have been committing a kind of assault against the rest of us. Pardon us if we don't care much when they commit assault against themselves too.
