Wuhan virus reveals leftists’ apocalyptic hysteria
Leftists respond to the Wuhan virus with a mindless fear that resists logic and makes them believe death is appropriate for those who challenge their fear.
I have to admit that, for the past few weeks, I’ve found fascinating perusing my real-me Facebook page because it gives me a chance to see how differently people from opposite sides of the political aisle are responding both to the fact of the Wuhan virus and to the heavy-handed tactics some areas are using to slow the virus’s spread. Here are a few of my observations — with illustrations!
1. Leftists have glided effortlessly from demanding that we “flatten the curve” to insisting that “there can’t be any virus at all.” Here’s a poster that just about every leftist I know has put up on social media:
Do you see what’s wrong with the analogy? It took me a minute and then I suddenly realized where the logical error is.
An accurate analogy would say that, before the shutdown, the parachute (i.e., the virus) was plummeting into a vat of boiling water (i.e., overwhelming the healthcare system). The purpose of the shutdown was to cool that water so that the parachute landed in an America prepared to receive it. We’ve achieved that. Indeed, as of now, we’re over-prepared for the virus’s eventual landing. We have too many ventilators, our hospitals are empty and going broke, and the emergency hospitals constructed in convention centers or on Navy ships stand unused. It’s time to let the parachute touch ground so that we can get on with our lives.
Leftists, though, are thinking along different lines, because they now treat the phrase “the curve is flattening” to mean “we will stop the virus entirely.” That’s the only way to make sense of their stupid analogy. In their world, the parachute must remain forever suspended in air because it cannot land until the virus is completely gone.
The poster immediately below makes the same point, which is that any lessening of restrictions (that is, any return to constitutional liberties) means we’re all going to die:
This poster ignores something that leftists know but cannot viscerally process: It’s probable that about 0.1% of people who get the virus will die. I wish it were zero percent, but 0.1% is pretty good.
Also, that poster ignores the fact that the medical community has had a steep learning curve. Doctors now know to give the hydroxychloroquine cocktail early, they’re pretty sure that Remdesivir will work on people who are sicker, and they have little tricks such as placing people on their stomachs if they have to go onto a ventilator. It’s all getting better, not worse.
The Democrat power brokers understand the difference, but they don’t want their base to share that knowledge. If the leftists at the top of the pyramid can destroy the economy by morphing from “flatten the curve” to “no virus,” that’s just great. Riding the panic out as long as possible will do two things: Harm Trump’s reelection chances and make desperate and newly impoverished people dependent on big government. As Bill Maher said, if it takes a recession….
2. Leftists see things in apocalyptic terms. We already know that leftists subscribe to apocalyptic worldviews because they keep embracing the most extreme climate change models without regard for the fact that every previous climate-change apocalypse model has proven to be wrong. There’s something in the leftist psyche that embraces this kind of end-of-the-world hysteria.
A perfect example is this interview with Noam Chomsky. I did not listen to the whole thing. I only found it because an uber-Progressive Facebook friend recommended going to the 8:37 mark to understand why people should vote for Biden
Go to 8:37 and listen to Chomsky’s reasoning. Within seconds, he goes from the rational (a person who might have voted for Biden but instead sits out the election is essentially voting for Trump) to the end of the world, complete with a nuclear holocaust:
Because the 91-year-old Chomsky, who looks like he’s already getting started on decomposition, is hard to understand, here’s a transcript highlighting my point:
Failure to vote for Biden in this election in the swing states amounts to voting for Trump. It takes one vote away from the opposition same as adding one vote to Trump. So if you decide that you want to vote for the destruction of organized human life on earth; for the increase, a sharp increase, in the threat of nuclear war; for stuffing the judiciary with young lawyers will make it impossible to do anything for the generation, then do it openly.
Wow! Who knew that we’d dodged an Armageddon-esque bullet during Trump’s first three years. I guess it will take a second term for him to get around to “the destruction of organized human life on earth.”
What Chomsky said is risible, but it’s also the language in which leftists traffic. This is not how conservatives think. They are more grounded.
When conservatives imagine a Biden presidency, the first thing they do is point to the Obama years, because Biden has promised more of the same. These were years in which the economy was sluggish; the government grew ever bigger; extreme political correctness grew; the government threw its weight behind promoting transgenderism, including using the military as an experiment for gender policies; Obama involved our military in three wars and used drones to execute people in places where we had no official presence; our border was a joke; Obama tried to socialize American medicine; we handed the Middle East over to Russia; at Kyoto we promised to slow our economy even further in the service of climate change models; we turned our back on Israel; and we handed cash to Iran in exchange for nothing. In other words, when we look at Biden, we point to things that actually happened and that we don’t want to see happen again.
The same is true for Bernie’s socialist visions. To counter them, we kept pointing to the socialist experiment in other countries. We argued that in every single one of the countries that openly pursued socialism, bad things happened. This is certainly true for hard socialist countries such as North Korea, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. It’s also true for soft socialist countries such as Europe, which are basket cases now that America is no longer flooding them with Cold War monies — a problem they exacerbated when they began to offset their socialist preference for zero or negative population growth by importing Muslim immigrants.
It’s also the case for China, which has morphed from a communist country to a fascist one. Remember, fascism is still socialism. It’s just that, instead of the government owning the means of production, it allows for private ownership provided that the government still controls the economy. Think of China as the new Nazi Germany, complete with massive concentration camps and a lust for world domination, and you’ll be pretty accurate.
In other words, when conservatives contemplate a Biden presidency, they point to what actually happened in America just a few years ago and to what has happened and is happening in many countries around the world. Conservative fears are grounded in reality.
Chomsky, though, says that Trump’s second term will lead to “the destruction of organized human life on earth.” Where’s that come from? Chomsky’s no fool. He knows that his statement is nonsense. But he’s also a linguist and he’s intentionally using words that will appeal to the lizard brains of ordinary leftists. Chomsky is deliberately stoking mindless panic to incite urgent action.
That hysteria is the same thing happening with the Wuhan virus models showing millions dying. It’s those models that see leftists reacting with visceral panic when they even think about easing the shutdowns in their communities. “People will die,” they scream, just as Chicken Little did. There’s no rational thought involved. Just fear.
3. There’s the sheer vindictiveness of the leftist lizard brain. Because leftists have locked themselves into a zero-sum game everyone will either live in lock-up or die out of doors, they are truly angry at those whom they courting death. They cannot conceive of a laissez faire attitude towards those who are willing to take the risk of resuming normal life to prevent economic and societal breakdown; instead, they desperately wish for the pragmatic and adventurous souls to die. Leftists consider death a righteous punishment in the zero-sum game of virus or no virus. This poster illustrates that mindset:
4. And finally, as always, there’s that lack of imagination and overpowering response to visual images that we see in leftists. Because they’ve been told that the Wuhan virus is the next Great Plague, their imaginations have gotten stuck on that visual. They cannot grasp that there are also downsides to an extreme response a possible plague (especially an extreme response based on fallacious models). Because they’re stuck on the visuals of piles of dead bodies in the streets, something that will not happen, they have lost sight of the economy entirely. They don’t care about broken businesses, lost savings, depression (both national in an economic sense and individual in an emotional sense), suicides, increased addiction, stress-based deaths, etc.
Ultimately, the problem with allowing leftists to run anything is that reality is never as important as the leaders’ power grabs and the mindless panic of the masses