Posted on 03/31/2020 3:55:14 AM PDT by Kaslin
If there is one thing on which you'd think left and right could agree, it would be the proper response to the present coronavirus. After all, COVID-19 doesn't distinguish between left and right: Conservatives and liberals are just as likely to contract and even die from it.
Yet, it's amazing how consistently left and right differ on even this issue.
Virtually every opinion piece in The New York Times, The Washington Post and every other mainstream, i.e., left-wing, journal share two characteristics: a sense of foreboding (millions will die) and an unshakeable conviction that to prevent mass death, the world's economy must be shut down.
Meanwhile, virtually every opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal and on just about every conservative website contains less foreboding and asks more questions about whether the cure may be worse than the disease. To cite some examples:
March 11: Ben Shapiro published a piece titled "Our Fears About Coronavirus Are Overblown."
March 16: The Hoover Institution published a piece by Richard A. Epstein that's thesis was: "I believe that the current dire models radically overestimate the ultimate death toll."
March 16: City Journal published conservative thinker Victor Davis Hanson's piece that's thesis was: "Our response could prove as harmful as the virus itself."
March 17: My column titled "Why the Remedy May Be Worse Than the Disease" appeared on many conservative sites.
March 19: The lead Wall Street Journal editorial was titled "Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown."
March 19: A column titled "Will the Costs of a Great Depression Outweigh the Risks of Coronavirus?" appeared on The Federalist's website.
March 24: The Wall Street Journal published a column by two Stanford professors of medicine titled "Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?"
Meanwhile, the liberal and left-wing media published hundreds of articles warning us of millions of deaths if we don't shut down the American economy.
Or take the example of President Donald Trump's announcement at a press conference on March 19 that hydroxychloroquine had "shown really good promise" in helping to cure COVID-19.
Virtually every left-wing news medium mocked him for making that claim.
March 21: "AP FACT CHECK: Trump's Breathless Takes on Drugs for Virus."
They implicitly or explicitly blamed the president for the death of an Arizona man who ingested a fish tank cleaner because it contained chloroquine phosphate (because the name sounds similar to hydroxychloroquine).
March 24: CBS News published a story headlined "Arizona Man Dies, Wife Ill After Taking Drug Touted as Virus Treatment: 'Trump Kept Saying It Was Basically Pretty Much a Cure.'"
March 24: The left-wing site BuzzFeed simply lied about that story in order to blame the president: "A Man Died After Self-Medicating With a Form of a Drug That Trump Promoted as a Potential Treatment for the Coronavirus."
March 24: The left-wing St. Louis Post-Dispatch did the same in its headline: "Man Dies After Taking Chloroquine Phosphate, Additive in Drug Touted by Trump as COVID-19 Treatment."
March 24: The Democratic governor of Nevada, Steve Sisolak, issued an order that, in the words of the Nevada Health Response, "prohibits (the) prescribing and dispensing chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for a COVID-19 diagnosis."
A particularly egregious example of the left-right divide on the coronavirus response appeared in The Washington Post on March 27. One of its columnists, Max Boot, wrote:
"Radio host Dennis Prager bemoaned our unwillingness to sacrifice lives as we did during World War II, saying 'that attitude leads to appeasement' and 'cowardice.' The United States lost 418,500 people in World War II ... but it would be far worse to lose 2.2 million civilians -- the worst-case estimate of the U.S. death toll if we let the novel coronavirus spread unimpeded."
On my radio show and in my weekly PragerU "Fireside Chat," I criticized New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the way he defended shutting down his state: "I want to be able to say to the people of New York: I did everything we could do. ... And if everything we do saves just one life, I'll be happy."
It is hard to imagine a more morally absurd sentiment. Anyone who thinks rationally knows it is not worth depriving millions of people of their incomes, forcing thousands of companies to go out of business, causing recovering addicts to lapse back into addiction and much more economic and social damage to "save one life."
As we are fighting a "war" against the virus, I used a war analogy to make my point. I noted that if we had fought World War II with the attitude that we cannot lose one life, we would never have fought the Nazis or the Japanese. I further noted that we do not make any social policy based on saving one life. For example, every time we raise the speed limit, we know thousands more people will die.
But the left went nuts. Max Boot in The Washington Post is only one example.
So, then, why this left-right gulf?
One reason, as I have written previously, is that hysteria is to the left what oxygen is to biological life. Leftists pride themselves on being rational. But the further left one goes, the more feelings displace reason.
A second reason is hatred of Trump. On the left, damaging Trump is more important than truth and more important than the welfare of the American people. If Trump believes hydroxychloroquine offers hope, let's debunk its usefulness.
A third reason is leftists are afraid -- of life and of death. Fear of life is why they build "safe spaces" on campuses for students who cannot handle a visiting speaker with whom they differ. And they are afraid of death. They undoubtedly find Patrick Henry's famous cry, "Give me liberty, or give me death!" incomprehensible, if not downright foolish.
Even COVID-19 has brought no cease-fire in the ongoing American civil war.
It’s just crazy anymore. Everybody insisting the drugs are the answer. They are GREAT drugs. The drugs may help but they certainly won’t meet the expectations people seem to have for them. Anytime someone offers you a drug for your problem, “...but first you have to get a blood test and an EKG” you might want to hit “Pause” briefly, at least. These are terrible drugs. Some times a crappy tool is the only one to hand.
In fact this has got me wondering, especially after reading Raoult’s paper. The big benefit of the drugs isn’t even to the patient taking them but to reduce contagion. This is THE difference between America and most of the world. WE had a Flexner Report that cemented THE PATIENT as a priority over the community. The Chinese, not so much. Did they even do the blood tests? Or did they even care that as much as half of their fatalities may have been the damn drugs. But they didn’t care because their priority was “The Community?
The Left filters everything through the lens filter of ideology (i.e., how is this crisis useful to the cause of socialism/communism...let's not "let it go to waste") and the Right looks at crises as, well, problems to be solved rationally, logically, effectively.
Hear, hear!
“as much as half of their fatalities may have been the damn drugs. But they didn’t care because their priority was “The Community?”
Is smoking crack back in style or or is this a running gag?
There’s plenty of countries using the HCQ therapy with Zpac and Dr. Zelenoko has treated hundreds successfully adding zinc to the mix.
France and Italy saving lives with the same inexpensive and well known drugs.
Must have missed the joke.
No, I’m actually very familiar with these drugs. Like I said in the beginning, if this is the cure we had best pray for a better one.
How is it you believe these drugs will be used?
Yeah. Even in this “crisis” family members are at odds. My niece is a Trump hater but I love her dearly. But she’s testing my patience. This divide is literally tearing our country apart. The left,my niece included,is nuts. They are both intentionally lying and are stupid on the facts. Don’t expect them to see the light anytime soon.
Italian health workers CV test positive 8300
Italian health workers dead from CV 61
Symptomatic death rate about .7%
Per Pew, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they feel comfortable proceeding with a variety of activities despite the coronavirus outbreak. For example, 69% of Republicans and people who lean toward the GOP say they would be comfortable visiting with a close friend or family member at their home, compared with 55% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Along these same lines, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say their lives have changed in a major way as a result of the virus.
They live in an echo chamber.
When a brain is infused with the same message over and over again--morning, noon, and night--it becomes sort of hypnotized. A person becomes like a robot.
That is what has happened to our friends and family on the Left.
It certainly started with the communists among us, but then it became self-fulfilling.
Frankly, I don't know what can be done to awaken those people from their insanity--and it is a form of insanity.
One thing though is certain. We cannot expect them to wake up merely because they see their ideology is unworkable and ineffective.
We have seen that forever with socialist and communists. When the failures of the USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, etc., etc., etc., are pointed out to them, they just ignore them.
I don't really think it is because they rationally believe the blame is due to poor leaders (i.e., "Venezuelan communism would have been great if only Bernie had been in charge...all we need is a benevolent dictator"). I think they don't give up on socialism/communism because they are hypnotized/brainwashed.
Their brains are conditioned so as to simply refuse to accept rational arguments against their ideology. It's similar to (but still different from) Battered-Wife Syndrome or Stockholm Syndrome.
“How is it you believe these drugs will be used?”
As a treatment successfully in Italy, France and the US, you know, like to save lives and beat back disease.
Well patients? Asymptomatic? Mild? Very ill? Seriously ill? Just how do you think these drugs will be deployed?
What? You hadn’t thought of that?
Well said.
Exactly. These “both sides” are fighting and wrong arguments fall flat with me anymore. The country is divided because of exactly what you said. The Left views EVERYTHING, including mass death that comes from a pandemic, through the lens of how do we advance our totalitarian agenda. Although I wouldn’t necessarily give the leaders on the Right as much credit as you do. For the most part, you are right, but the right also gets herded along with a lot of Leftist nonsense on the mistaken belief that it might work, or that its too much trouble to fight it.
Multiple uses: in Undia and across the globe. Look it up.
The Left is allied with a Communist China that is waging biological warfare on all of humanity.
Talking about how left and right are “divided” appears to be an intentional obfuscation of the fact that 100% of the division is due to the Left hating America and adhering to its enemies - even in wartime.
How do you heal a divide with someone who wants to kill you?
That’s a good description of the main difference between leftist liberals and conservatives. A related difference on the left is more impulsiveness and tendency to decide in favor of instant gratification. You also mentioned logic. It’s illogical to neglect thorough considerations of consequences.
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