If liberals "believed the science" we'd have re-education camps for these assholes. But no, it's just freedom of speech to spread the plague.
if liberals believed the science they'd stop citing the CDC guidelines cause the CDC ain't been on the side of science this entire pandemic lmao
When they changed the isolation time before a sick person has to go back to work from 10 days to only 5 days, because Delta fucking Airlines asked them to, that was the final nail in the coffin for any belief I might have held that we live in a society and not a business.
That's definitely the point where everything completely broke. Started with Biden declaring mission accomplished July 4th 2020 (weird how he had to declare mission accomplished again this summer lmao).
CDC's first fuck up was claiming N95s were unnecessary. Don't care what justifications libs give for this, there's still people wearing cloth masks and surgical masks thinking they're protecting themselves and others when the evidence suggests they're doing the bare minimum above free balling it.
It was even worse than that, they spread FUD on masks not doing anything at all
These sorts of studies always take into account the millions, possibly billions, of dollars spent on manufacturing consent, right? :padme-1:
Right?:padme-2:
This one kind of does, for once:
"Interestingly, right-wing media consumption, by itself, was unrelated to COVID-19 health behaviors, empathic concern, and perceived pandemic threat. However, right-wing media consumption was indirectly associated with riskier pandemic lifestyles via heightened authoritarian beliefs.
"Although perceived pandemic threat has been emphasized to explain the risky pandemic lifestyles of political conservatives, processes related to empathy and authoritarian belief systems are also at work,” Hill explained. “We were unable to observe any effects of right-wing media consumption on pandemic beliefs and behavior after political identities were taken into account. This suggests that right-wing media merely echoes the prior political beliefs of viewers."
It's funny, but that kinda emphasizes what bugs me about these sorts of studies. They're comparing two groups of people who are basically arguing over a line in the sand while people like us aren't even on the beach. Sure, Fox News and Newsmax happily pushed narratives questioning the pandemic, but more "liberal" outlets still platformed those relatively small groups of well-funded protests to make them appear much more popular than they were and regularly shifted their narratives towards Covid Denial-lite as the right wing media made room for them.
Anecdote: I'm down here in Florida and watched liberals, in response to anti-lockdown protests, rabble rabble about how conservatives didn't care about the health of workers. And then, less than 3 months after DeSantis opened Florida back up, those same liberals were out at the Theme Parks patting themselves on the back because they were wearing masks as they put workers in danger side by side with anti-maskers. And then of course, after months of media normalizing the anti-mask protests, it didn't take long for those masks to disappear.💁♂️
Definitely check out this essay on the subject. Propaganda obviously matters but it's not the whole story.
@barrbaric's quote here also confirms the thesis presented in this essay, which is basically that people choose to brainwash themselves.
Lol, I'm gonna pass on getting into a debate about Free Will today, friend, but thank you for the opportunity.
“Our findings should not be interpreted as causal,” Hill added. “The veracity of our analyses is contingent upon replication in future studies. More research is needed to better understand why political conservatives have engaged in unhealthy pandemic lifestyles. It is also important for future research to pay attention to the ways in which political liberals continue to follow expired public health guidance (e.g., requiring masks and vaccines to attend school). How much of the pandemic behavior of political liberals was driven by ‘science’? How much was driven by ‘culture war’?”
Except liberals aren't doing this anymore. It makes a study like this seem odd. I suppose liberals are more likely to mask than conservatives, but neither group is masking very much at this point.
In politics, there are basically three sides—communist, liberal, and fascist. There are varieties within these groups (Trotskyists versus MLs for instance, or polite conservatives versus ravening Nazis), but this is basically the way it is. Fascism as we know it originates toward the end of the 19th century as a sort of revolutionary monarchism meant to more effectively take on rising communist movements, particularly as a mafia-driven reaction to unionization in Italy. It's a revolutionary conservatism with its roots in feudalism. I want to say that, once upon a time, it was easier to tell liberals and fascists apart—even though I'm well aware of how many liberals supported the Nazis until doing so became unfashionable—and that the contradictions of capitalism are forcing them together so that it's growing more difficult to tell one from the other. At the same time I'm aware that ever since capitalism began, it's had a liberal versus a fascist side, even if these terms themselves did not yet exist. The liberal side says that it's good for productivity to drive all these lazy peasants off their ancestral lands, and that if they work hard they can be landlords too one day; the fascist side is just driving these people off their land without any excuses and laughing gleefully if given the opportunity to slaughter anyone who resists.
