Comments

  1. kome says

    I wonder if this comic was in response to that one nurse’s viral tweets where she talked the patients she’s treated who, up until the very end, would apparently rather live in a state of an politicized anger and hatred than admit the pandemic is real.

  2. PaulBC says

    I’d have “respected his beliefs” before even admitting him to the hospital. Am I mistaken in thinking the people who believe it’s a hoax also believe it’s a Chinese bioweapon?

    And “healing”, yeah. I loved this quote from Georgia Trump voter Jeanie Smith in the NYT:

    ‘“Now you want healing … Now you want to come together. You have not earned it.””

    Let’s see, I watched Trump try to build a border wall, scare the piss out of some of my nice neighbors here in the Bay Area and actually deport a couple of our high school kids, stack the Supreme Court, assassinate Qasem Soleimani against military advice and nearly start a war just because he was in an ornery mood, get his buddies in the Senate to nullify an impeachment, and now go along with his strange delusion that President-elect Biden’s victory even falls into the range of dispute. Oh, and one of my coworkers had to leave right in the middle of a project because of H1B issues. That has happened with and without Trump (especially in the post-9/11 hysteria) but it still pisses me off.

    And I’m pretty sure you guys are still able to refuse to make gay wedding cakes and monitor who goes into which restroom, which appear to be your first and second policy priorities.

    So for fuck’s sake, how do I “earn it”? Should I just put a bullet in my head? Is that how I earn it? You’d still probably complain I was just a big liberal crybaby who doesn’t “respect” you and did it out of spite.

    So no, while President-elect Biden may disagree, I don’t want healing. I want you all the fuck out of my life.

  3. wzrd1 says

    Not totally accurate. As much as one may be tempted, when incubating a patient, they’re sedated first. Less chance of them biting the laryngoscope.
    Then, having to fish tooth shards from an already compromised airway. Given the short amount of time available for insertion, delays are bad.

    But, before sedation, yeah, they’re wasting breath and energy that they really can’t afford to expend.
    Still, were I to find myself in that bed, I’d be mad as hell – at myself for allowing myself to get exposed. I’d have had to breach protocol somewhere…

  4. raven says

    It’s getting to be an old story.
    Someone who claims the Covid-19 virus pandemic is a hoax, gets infected, gets very sick, and ends up in the hospital. Sometimes they die.

    From the news article about the South Dakota ER nurse.
    From the ER nurse.
    …”some COVID-19 patients spend their last moments refusing to call family and friends because they’re convinced they’re going to be fine, Doering said. “Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real,'” Doering recalled. In some cases, patients even insist they have the flu or lung cancer to avoid acknowledging the coronavirus.”

  5. raven says

    There is a phrase that describes people like these.
    Plague rats.
    A lot of them are fundie xians.

    Fundie xians died in higher numbers than the general population during the last pandemic, Swine flu 2009.
    They are going to do it again.
    Fundie xians are on track to die at higher rates of Covid-19 virus than the normal people of the general population.

  6. PaulBC says

    I like the fact that Bolling included the electoral vote map. With the addition of Arizona, it now has enough blue to confuse the people who are just certain that land area has something to do with electing a president and missed or ignored the first time this was hashed out in 2004 when better visualizations were widely publicized.

    Granted, it’s not quite enough, but I was watching Arizona steadily until the vote finalized. I am very happy to see a contiguous Blue West even if I know it is not meaningful.

  7. PaulBC says

    @6 I wonder if this will begin to correlate with opioid deaths.

    Though I am mostly just frightened to go anywhere near “red state America” I understand that there’s a lot of suffering going on. I would like to see policies that help them out. One of the most reprehensible aspects of Obama’s administration was neglecting or minimizing the opioid epidemic. Not nearly to the degree Trump has neglected COVID-19, but still, really turning it into a problem that was off the radar of Democrats.

    I don’t get any Schadenfreude out of it. It just seems completely hopeless if they refuse to see problems in ways that can be solved with policy. Opioid deaths are “punishment.” The pandemic is “God’s will.” The medieval view of things, and with that as a starting point it is very difficult to make progress.

  8. raven says

    @8
    It also correlates with new HIV cases, that other pandemic which is still creeping along.

    Why the South still has such high HIV rates – The Conversationtheconversation.com › why-the-south-still-has-such-hig…

    Jun 13, 2017 — Nearly 52 percent of all new diagnoses of HIV in 2015 occurred in southern states, even though only 37 percent of the U.S. population lives in the South.

    The red states score high in any social problem you care to name and low in access to health care.
    They also contain the two demographics showing declining average life spans, middle aged white men and rural older white females.

    I’d ask the fundie xians if they ever get tired of dying from sheer ignorance and stupidity, but they aren’t all that good at answering questions requiring…thought.

  9. says

    @#3, PaulBC:

    It has been pretty obvious to anybody with a functioning brain that trying to “compromise” with the right just does not work. They immediately demand concessions in exchange for nothing, and if the concessions are given, they just shift the goalposts so that the concessions are the new normal. This has been the case certainly since Reagan, but what passes itself off for the left in the US has insisted that what is necessary is to try again and again, keep treating people who have blatantly acted in bad faith as though they deserve to be trusted, and keep nominating people who actively campaign on giving the right even more ground. There has not been a Democratic nominee for President since at least 1972 who didn’t think that the way forward was “bipartisanship”, which has in practice turned out to mean “letting the Republicans do whatever they want while taking the blame for all their policies”.

    If you prefer a different example, look at the UK: as one of the most respected commentators on Brexit points out, at every point in the process leading to the current state of affairs (end of the “transition period” on January 1, apparent drop-dead final deadline for a deal the end of this week, and both the government and the public apparently unprepared for what will happen at that point even with a deal) the problem has been that nobody in power has been willing to stand up unequivocally against the Brexit hard-liners like Farage, no matter how obviously they were lying and how disastrous the consequences have been. And at every turn, the hard-liners have demanded concessions from the rest of the government, gotten them, and then pretended that they, themselves, are victims who have been cheated out of things that were promised to them. (The Brexit referendum itself was originally a bone tossed to them to try and get them to shut up, if you recall.)

    You can’t work with somebody who is acting in bad faith, and at this point the right wing has demonstrated very thoroughly, essentially everywhere in the world, that it never acts in anything but bad faith. So when are we going to stop trying to hand them olive branches and start being hard-liners, ourselves?

  10. PaulBC says

    Vicar@11 Hmm… no disagreement from me (maybe I need to read it more carefully).

    As JFK put it “We cannot negotiate with people who say what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” and that has described the Republican party since I have been old enough to know (which let’s say was 1972 when I was 7 and George McGovern was the nominee).

  11. DanDare says

    All this while new strains of the disease get worse.
    We just had an outbreak in South Australia. It was the strain from the UK that has shorter incubation times and lives longer on surfaces.
    There are a few dumb arses calling it a hoax in SA but they are being soundly ignored.

  12. unclefrogy says

    @14 almost unnecessary to be said. belongs on speakers corner with megaphone and a small crowd of hecklars

  13. jessem says

    One thing that does not really come across in written text about all the US insanity is the weapons. Against all the rest I’ve been desensitized to over the years of american news I guess. But the weapons, and their apparent normality, still shock me even in this cartoon. And some of the video clips in the news, my god. It just looks insane to see armed protestors, like an act of war or a coup in progress. If such a thing happened where I live the military and squad teams would be deployed and the area would be evacuated. If I would see someone with an automatic weapon in the supermarket I would either try to tackle them whilst fearing for my life (to prevent a massacre) or run like hell, as would the rest of the customers.

    And 17 comments here and the weapon is not even mentioned. The cartoon is not hyperbole is it? Talk about the new normal.

  14. seachange says

    Compromising with those who will not compromise is also an ecologic failure. It is a choice for the death of most life. It is not Global Warming it is Global Burning. It is not Climate Change is is a Climate Crisis. Obama, not a liberal, started his terms soaking his family in the oil-spill-comtaminated waters of Florida and ended it doing almost nothing about the Dakota Access Pipeline.

    The Vicar can piss you off all you like go ahead and soak your fingers in the Palmolive of your sunk cost fallacy all you rational logicians, but they’re still right.

    Good cannot unite with evil.

    Right cannot unite with wrong.

    …and yes I think she does think a gun might be acceptably involved in redemption. Saving her the effort are you?

  15. Rob Grigjanis says

    seachange @21: OK, I’ll bite. What should ‘good’ have done on Nov 3? Let Trump carry on for another four years? Violent revolution?

    Why don’t public masturbators like you ever actually offer alternatives?

  16. PaulBC says

    jessem@18 “Armed protesters” is an oxymoron. If you show up with weapons, it’s intimidation not protest. And it doesn’t seem “normal” to me either, speaking as a middle-aged American who grew up with neighbors who had guns for deer hunting and a farmer who used a .22 for pest control.

    In fact, it’s one of the big reasons I don’t really want to live here anymore. Something has totally snapped and I no longer live in a society where I can count on government to secure my rights. In other words, it looks increasingly like a failed state.

  17. whheydt says

    In the last panel, I think they should respect his beliefs by saving the respirator for someone who doesn’t reject their need for it.