Re Abbott

Guy Benson notes the same thing about some of the reaction to Texas governor Abbott’s removal of all state enforced Covid restrictions in Texas the same way I did:

My theory: there is a sizeable population for whom Covid is their claim to relevance and authority, even authority of even the most venal and petty variety.

Not just officials like the once-obscure Andy Slavitt, who owes his re-found prominence to Covid’s role in deposing Trump.

I’m talking about every mask-shaming, disinfectant-wipe-hoarding Karen who has found this past year to be an endless cafeteria of options for imposing their need for internal drama on those around them.

When Covid fades, then like the high school football hero the day after graduation, they are just another bunch of annoying non-entities.

I can’t imagine they will confront that with any more grace than the high school football hero.

65 thoughts on “Re Abbott

  1. But the science of epidemiology is human behavior dependent, therefore it is not a real science at all (though it has aspects that DO NOT depend on human behavior that can be described as science).
    Scientists ain’t gonna give you workable instructions on managing a pandemic. Might as well ask them how to stop your daughter from marrying that no-good drop out guitar player.

    When I was a kid I was taught what most kids in public school were taught about the Scopes Monkey Trial.
    On trial was science in the public realm, symbolized by the theory of evolution. Clarence Darrow represented the powers of science and progress and evolution, Williams Jennings Bryan represented the powers of the past, ignorance, and religion.
    What I was taught was that Darrow represented the good guys and Bryan the bad guys.
    But the reality, I learned, was more complicated.
    The trial took place in 1925. That was the high water mark for institutionalized racism in the US. Don’t believe me? Read about the history of the KKK, Virginia’s “Pocohantas exception,” the origin of the anti-miscegenation laws in the US, and especially the history of the science of eugenics in the United States.
    You’ll find yourself smack in the middle of the 1920s, when the scientists believed that evolution described natural progress, not merely change over time. Mammal were more advanced than marsupials, monkeys were more advanced than cattle, and whites were more advanced, by nature, than the other races of man.
    And you’ll sldo find that Darrow’s biggest intellectual backers — the people who talked Scopes into breaking Tennessee law by teaching evolution — were big backers of racial eugenics as well as evolution. They merely wanted society to follow the science.
    Because science is a creation of man, science cannot manage man.
    But man can manage science. It is disastrous to let the servant become the master.

  2. emery snarked “golfing was Trump’s idea of work.”
    and apparently also obama’s

  3. Well pig, we can be sure we will not see Bidon on the golf course anytime soon. The old demented coot would not know what to do with the club and the ball. And besides, it would interfere with his naps – he has to get his 16 hours a day in to look as chipper and alert as he does.

  4. Hidden away in his deep exile in Miralago, forbidden to communicate by Twitter or Facebook, Trump continues to haunt both the dreams and the waking moments of those afflicted by TDS.

    “Where is the peace, the joy, that thou has promised me, Saint Joe!” they cry at the empty sky. “In my mind’s eye I see, on a golf course in a semi-tropical land, the Bluebird of Happiness that was avowed to me. It spreads its wings, it makes to leap into the air, to wend its way here to me in bleaker climes! But lo, an orange duffer approaches! The Bluebird of Happiness, that sweet azure deliverer of well-deserved bliss, turns its eye yonder and sees the sun eclipsed by the heavy end of a Big Bertha golf club! Downward swings the instrument of endless night! A single terrified ‘chirp’ and the Orangeman has dashed the Bluebird’s brains out upon the green! Oh, disaster! It is the end of the joyful aviator! Never will the blessed chick fly to me, never will I welcome the evengelion’s sweet chirrups of bliss, never will the drafts of its tiny wings cool my distempered brain!
    Oh, misery, oh, life, oh, spirit, now drained forever of restful calm! It is a sin to think so, but I would join the ghost of the happy little flyer, now met with his brother birds in the joyful choir of eternity!
    Help me, Saint Joe! Help me!”

  5. Regarding golf, it just boggles the mind that people who are against the politics of a sitting President get bent out of shape when he “doesn’t do his job” and hits the links. There are many things I didn’t (and don’t) like about Obama, but wasting time on a golf course was one of his better qualities.

    Really, if we got government back a tenth of the way to its Constitutional limits, there would be so little for the President to do, he’d have to golf or go on long bike rides every day. And if a President managed to persuade Congress to get to that point, I’d write my Congressman asking him to give the President a big raise.

  6. The trick with burning the Reichstag is that you can only do it once, Emery.

  7. It seems his followers/worshippers have a much deeper and way more unhealthy obsession. Just what I’ve observed.

  8. Observed?
    I am conservative. I do not know any conservatives who are as obsessed with Trump as you are, Emery.
    But you, a Trump hater, are surrounded by Trump obsessed conservatives?

  9. Meanwhile, in California, one of the places that is under lockdown, under a mask mandate, and, of course, ravaged by covid to a far greater extent than Texas, Newsom endorses wearing two masks.
    Yes, the mask people are really that insane.

  10. MO, regarding you 3/5 at 8:34:

    Its amazing isn’t it, they can’t stop talking about Trump. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.Are there support groups now for this kind of thing.

    Oh, and my friend J Nolte points out: the only people who ever talk about “Q” are the left and the mediots (birm).

  11. Regarding the notion of letting the scientists manage the epidemic, are we going to listen to Fauci when he said not to wear a mask, or when he did?

    Same with Osterholm: Last May, he recorded a video saying “You can wear a mask if you want, but anything less than N95 won’t do any good”. Then he got governmentized and started reciting the gospel of mask=good, no mask=heretic.

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