Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Tuesday, January 4. 2022

Covid and your nutty aunt

Amusing whether you agree or not, from Z-Man at Taki:



 Up until fairly recently, it was possible to get along with the crazy aunt or the old left-wing college buddy by avoiding certain topics. The cost of tolerating these mentally unstable people and keeping them from going berserk was to walk on eggshells around them in normal conversation. If you avoided their trigger topics, their insanity was for all practical purposes a private affair. It stayed in their head.


Social media changed this... 


Posted by The News Junkie in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 12:52 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

If you are among the sane, how could you NOT agree with it?
#1 ruralcounsel on 2022-01-04 16:03 (Reply)
Finally, someone calls me sane.


Yours trufully,

Rennie
PO Box 0ICU-812
Carfax Abbey
Purfleet, London
#2 R. M. Renfield on 2022-01-04 18:37 (Reply)
Starting again from the reminder that I worked with actual mentally ill people for over forty years and thus lose respect instantly for people who try to equate that with people who disagree with them and they are absolutely sure they can prove wrong quickly. Not that they ever engage. They just preach to the choir and accept the accolades from the other Dufflepuds.

But as usual, no one considers the possibility that their own side might be just as unhinged. Again and again here at MF, we see people making declarations without even a polite nod to considering the possibility they might be wrong. Because it is always those other people.

This is not theoretical. I read it here every day. I don't make people say these things. And I am harsh, but I don't call them mentally ill. Words have meanings. Conservatives used to be the last people who remembered that. They also used to be able to do arithmetic, or at least care about it.

I have tried to steer a course along the available data for almost two years and have modified my views several times, sometimes one way, sometimes the other, mostly a little, occasionally a lot. I have given up I sites I used to like (on many sides of this issue.) MF is my remaining one where I am hanging on because people show good sense on other issues and I think they will eventually draw a breath and say to themselves "Let me acknowledge what answer I hope is correct and try to scrupulously correct for that. Now, what do we actually know for sure, know for mostly sure, know for probably sure, etc" If you are doing that, you at least ain't showing your work. Or even pretending to show your work.

Fauci and the CDC are floundering, true. That doesn't mean that anyone who criticises them must automatically be right.
#3 Assistant Village Idiot on 2022-01-04 19:20 (Reply)
I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the author isn't equating abnormal or subnormal people with dysfunctional schizophrenics. I might be wrong, but I think you should lighten up a little.
#3.1 jack walter on 2022-01-05 07:44 (Reply)
I took the terms "mentally unstable" and "going berserk" as roughly equivalent to that. He may indeed have meant them rather poetically or as hyperbole for dramatic writing, but I don't mind discouraging people from attending to folks who play that fast and loose with language, throwing out insults they can't defend and then retreating to more reasonable language. It's motte and bailey arguments.
#3.1.1 Assistant Village Idiot on 2022-01-05 22:05 (Reply)
Consider that you are somewhat delusional in your desperation to pretend that steering a middle course will allow your life to return to "normal." You sound like someone who chooses to be willfully blind (ignoring much of the "available data") so that you can imagine your life returning to a comfortable status quo.

And you make far too much of people using the common phrases "crazy" and "insane." A failings of narrow "experts" trying to defend their "expertise." Pedantic and petty.

I've given up on your site because it seems desperately blind and ill-informed. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.
#3.2 ruralcounsel on 2022-01-05 09:56 (Reply)
All you mean is that I won't agree with you about covid. Think about it.
#3.2.1 Assistant Village Idiot on 2022-01-05 22:00 (Reply)
In the last sentence, I believe you intended "...If you aren't doing that..." Thus amended, I tend to agree with you. In situations where one is trying to figure out what is going on, it is best to review explicitly what we know and what we don't know, and to double-check what we think we know. The problem comes when people have an emotional commitment to a point of view and brook no disagreement in defending it. Just another one of the endless ways in which people can be annoying. Being ready for it and adjusting one's expectations accordingly is the best way of dealing with it, I think.
#3.3 Hairless Joe on 2022-01-05 11:00 (Reply)
It was a funny article, but I think the author makes too much of the idea that most humans are irrational, as if it were a brand-new phenomenon and no one in human history had ever been called on to bear it before.

Does it really make sense to argue that we didn't know that much about each other's irrational thoughts until we got social media? Did we never have conversations before, never live in a village and talk to people all day? Where do we imagine all the wars and social collapses came from, if not from common human failings that were always with us and always will be? If we're shocked, it's because we've been living in unusually prosperous and peaceful times for many decades now.

I have to agree about the COVID and non-COVID states, though. I read these articles about social collapsing under the weight of the pandemic, and all I can say in, not in Texas. it's weird.
#4 Texan99 on 2022-01-05 10:46 (Reply)
I live in a travel trailer and have for a year now. So I travel. I've been to most states this year alone and would have gone to Alaska but for the border/covid problems. Everywhere I go it's different. We wear the mask if that's required, sometimes we take it off right away when we see that the sign is still up but no one is wearing them. I have my vax info on my phone but no one has asked for it yet. We are mostly in the South West but stay out of California, even though I really want to go there, because of their mandates and crazy government. It is really weird to spend weeks, even months in various places where no one is masked and then suddenly find yourself in a state or county where there are social and legal penalties for simply forgetting it. I certainly hope we get past this mass hysteria and back to normal soon.
#4.1 Anon on 2022-01-05 15:17 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.