4 ms·

The article mentions nurses in Missouri, a region where I have some first-hand knowledge. Rural Missouri was locked down for... maybe a month? I guess more lik

The article mentions nurses in Missouri, a region where I have some first-hand knowledge. Rural Missouri was locked down for... maybe a month? I guess more like 3 weeks. And nothing like the NYC or SF lockdowns, mind you. Masking was always optional, even when it was mandatory, and most people didn't. In many parts of Missouri, pandemic restrictions amounted to not much more than a couple months of remote learning and have been over close to 2 years at this point. I think we were even doing in person summer school in 2020. But you still see the same level of rage. IMO a lot of it is intentionally manufactured. People really believe they're being forced to mask and get vaccinated even though they haven't been doing either since May 2020. It's utterly bizarre. The stimulus checks mostly just feeding increased alcohol consumption didn't help, especially in a region where endemic and generational substance abuse problems are probably the strongest headwind.

bequanna 5y ago
I don't at all buy that the rage is "intentionally manufactured". I also live in a rural area. The majority of the people here are conservative, see themselves as individual family units first and members of a community second. They understand how to operate mostly autonomously and have no need to hide in a crowd for comfort. I understand that many people need the security of a strong authority when they are scared. But please understand that not all of us need some sacred decree from the State Capitol telling us when we can visit our grandparents or which direction we should walk down the aisle in the grocery store and strongly resent that anyone thinks they have the authority to do so. Of course, these people instinctively "rage" against anything that encroaches on their rights as individuals and they should. And now that is clear those decisions were mostly arbitrary and the people making them so obviously doing so because "woke" or just to consolidate power, I think they have a right to be angry. The backlash should be interpreted as a warning that the populace was pushed too far. Too much power was seized using fear and people noticed.
- jghn 5y ago
  > which direction we should walk down the aisle in the grocery store I could be wrong, but wasn't this the stores setting those rules and not the central government? And if I did manage to be correct there, that'd be capitalism at work. Customers could choose to do business with companies setting those rules. And if enough people voted with their wallets, stores wouldn't have those rules. The people I see "raging" about these things are the same ones I see promoting free markets and things like that. If I was incorrect, well, ignore me.
  - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
    > I could be wrong, but wasn't this the stores setting those rules and not the central government? The majority of those stores were reacting to the hysteria and outright propaganda being pushed by the political class and their allies in the media. Do you not remember the cries of "You're killing grandma" and the "naming and shaming" for questioning the orthodoxy promogulated by Fauci et al?
    - jghn 5y ago
      Sure. And that's the free market at work. Those companies chose to take the actions they did. As I said, the people raging about masks have a high correlation with people who talk about free markets, corporate rights, etc. It's the inconsistency that irks me here.
  - c22 5y ago
    I went to a shop near the beginning of the pandemic that had a bunch of stickers splayed across the floor in a confusing array and an employee who was militantly yelling at confused people for standing on the wrong stickers. It was very off putting and I stopped going to that shop, preferring others that also had stickers on the floor but with clearer labels and calmer staff. I noticed that the first business was boarded up about 6 months ago.
    - jghn 5y ago
      I agree. My shopping habits did shift due to the pandemic. Some places suited my preferred variables more than others and I chose to give them my business instead of places I had been frequenting. Between that and the supply chain issues I found a silver lining. There are several full size grocery stores and another dozen or so specialty markets within a couple of miles of me. And now I have a good sense of their relative pros & cons. These days I tune my shopping to optimize for my shopping list.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > State Capitol Missouri never had any rules about travel or super market isles (wait... did any state make laws or regulations about super market isles?!). I visited extended family throughout the spring of 2020 and I wasn't breaking any laws. More importantly, MO's government is comprised of a conservative governor, a conservative super-majority in the legislature, and conservative courts, all of whom have been aggressively anti-lockdown, and any of whom could reasonably have authored your exact post. The only credible threat to conservatives in Missouri is from the right. Who exactly are these woke baddies in the state capitol?! My fundamental point is a scientific observation. The only substantive claim you're making in your post that is related to the article is about the source of this rage. That claim is a good one because it is possible to test by running an experiment: put restrictions on one population but not another and determine if levels of rage are elevated in one or both communities. Your assertion is empirically denied by the fact that people are still enraged at elevated levels even places where these restrictions never existed, or existed for trivial treatment periods several years ago. The rest of your post sort of reaffirms my belief in my hypothesis. For example, in God's name, what role does wokeness play in this discussion other than to serve as an associated angry-tickles trigger word? You managed to blame an aggressively anti-lockdown state government for restrictions that literally never existed and then went on an entirely unrelated rant about wokeness in your first post on this topic -- unprovoked and apropos of absolutely nothing in the article or the comment section. This reiterates my belief that the rage is manufactured and that propaganda is a likely root cause for the state of the public's mental health. Just keep throwing all those angry words in the angry word soup. Angry trigger words associate. It's all related by cortisol and negative emotions; the substance of the conversation doesn't matter. Just be angry at all the baddie stuff. The more the better. (BTW, I'm going to take this opportunity to reiterate the link between stimulus checks and substance abuse, which is apparently less fun to think about than wokeness or whatever trigger word, but is definitely an important root cause for increased rage levels.)
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  >I don't at all buy that the rage is "intentionally manufactured". I disagree. I think some of the outrage is "artificially" inflamed by our connectedness and some is intentionally inflamed. I say the outrage is "artificial" because, people would be a lot less polarized if their only information on the topic was their personal experiences, but they were already primed by many stories about the worst offenders from the opposite group. For example, when they actually interact with a someone who is adamantly for or against masks in real life, they are already angry and fed up from reading stories online. On the intentional side, political groups and MSM absolutely played up the divisiveness for their own benefit. Politicians used it to smear their opposition, and companies used it to drive clicks. This polarized, divided, and radicalized communities and made it very difficult for them make reasonable compromises on acceptable behavior
  - MrMan 5y ago
    there is no MSM at this point - social media stirred up the misinformation, and it worked very well.
- vangelis 5y ago
  Rural Missourian here, COVID restrictions essentially weren't a thing.
- atweiden 5y ago
  Coming from a rural, conservative farm community in Australia — which seems quite culturally compatible with your own as you describe it — I beg to differ. The case of Australia (and New Zealand) conclusively demonstrates it was in all ways feasible to eradicate at minimum the early Alpha strain of Covid with a relatively low-tech, low-effort approach: Shut. TF. Borders. Had America simply paid people to _stay home_, and closed its borders — all of them, international, interstate and even intra-state where necessary — they would’ve entirely halted the spread of Covid early on, sparing countless lives and curbing untold amounts of general insanity and hysteria. IIRC the longest consecutive lockdown in Australia lasted just under four months. Said lockdown applied only to a single major international city of 5 million. Rural areas essentially got away from all forms of lockdown unscathed. > The majority of the people here are conservative Strong borders and border security are traditionally conservative values, or so I hear. For instance, you’d be wrong if you thought an 80 year old couple living off the land they’ve been farming for decades would be in support of opening the borders out of some sense of duty to the word “freedom”. From the Australian rural conservative perspective, the only people who stood to gain more freedom in a situation where Covid had been eradicated thanks to closed borders were cosmopolitan travelers and urbanites.

bequanna 5y ago

I don't at all buy that the rage is "intentionally manufactured". I also live in a rural area. The majority of the people here are conservative, see themselves as individual family units first and members of a community second. They understand how to operate mostly autonomously and have no need to hide in a crowd for comfort. I understand that many people need the security of a strong authority when they are scared. But please understand that not all of us need some sacred decree from the State Capitol telling us when we can visit our grandparents or which direction we should walk down the aisle in the grocery store and strongly resent that anyone thinks they have the authority to do so. Of course, these people instinctively "rage" against anything that encroaches on their rights as individuals and they should. And now that is clear those decisions were mostly arbitrary and the people making them so obviously doing so because "woke" or just to consolidate power, I think they have a right to be angry. The backlash should be interpreted as a warning that the populace was pushed too far. Too much power was seized using fear and people noticed.

jghn 5y ago
> which direction we should walk down the aisle in the grocery store I could be wrong, but wasn't this the stores setting those rules and not the central government? And if I did manage to be correct there, that'd be capitalism at work. Customers could choose to do business with companies setting those rules. And if enough people voted with their wallets, stores wouldn't have those rules. The people I see "raging" about these things are the same ones I see promoting free markets and things like that. If I was incorrect, well, ignore me.
- lp0_on_fire 5y ago
  > I could be wrong, but wasn't this the stores setting those rules and not the central government? The majority of those stores were reacting to the hysteria and outright propaganda being pushed by the political class and their allies in the media. Do you not remember the cries of "You're killing grandma" and the "naming and shaming" for questioning the orthodoxy promogulated by Fauci et al?
  - jghn 5y ago
    Sure. And that's the free market at work. Those companies chose to take the actions they did. As I said, the people raging about masks have a high correlation with people who talk about free markets, corporate rights, etc. It's the inconsistency that irks me here.
- c22 5y ago
  I went to a shop near the beginning of the pandemic that had a bunch of stickers splayed across the floor in a confusing array and an employee who was militantly yelling at confused people for standing on the wrong stickers. It was very off putting and I stopped going to that shop, preferring others that also had stickers on the floor but with clearer labels and calmer staff. I noticed that the first business was boarded up about 6 months ago.
  - jghn 5y ago
    I agree. My shopping habits did shift due to the pandemic. Some places suited my preferred variables more than others and I chose to give them my business instead of places I had been frequenting. Between that and the supply chain issues I found a silver lining. There are several full size grocery stores and another dozen or so specialty markets within a couple of miles of me. And now I have a good sense of their relative pros & cons. These days I tune my shopping to optimize for my shopping list.
throwawaygh 5y ago
> State Capitol Missouri never had any rules about travel or super market isles (wait... did any state make laws or regulations about super market isles?!). I visited extended family throughout the spring of 2020 and I wasn't breaking any laws. More importantly, MO's government is comprised of a conservative governor, a conservative super-majority in the legislature, and conservative courts, all of whom have been aggressively anti-lockdown, and any of whom could reasonably have authored your exact post. The only credible threat to conservatives in Missouri is from the right. Who exactly are these woke baddies in the state capitol?! My fundamental point is a scientific observation. The only substantive claim you're making in your post that is related to the article is about the source of this rage. That claim is a good one because it is possible to test by running an experiment: put restrictions on one population but not another and determine if levels of rage are elevated in one or both communities. Your assertion is empirically denied by the fact that people are still enraged at elevated levels even places where these restrictions never existed, or existed for trivial treatment periods several years ago. The rest of your post sort of reaffirms my belief in my hypothesis. For example, in God's name, what role does wokeness play in this discussion other than to serve as an associated angry-tickles trigger word? You managed to blame an aggressively anti-lockdown state government for restrictions that literally never existed and then went on an entirely unrelated rant about wokeness in your first post on this topic -- unprovoked and apropos of absolutely nothing in the article or the comment section. This reiterates my belief that the rage is manufactured and that propaganda is a likely root cause for the state of the public's mental health. Just keep throwing all those angry words in the angry word soup. Angry trigger words associate. It's all related by cortisol and negative emotions; the substance of the conversation doesn't matter. Just be angry at all the baddie stuff. The more the better. (BTW, I'm going to take this opportunity to reiterate the link between stimulus checks and substance abuse, which is apparently less fun to think about than wokeness or whatever trigger word, but is definitely an important root cause for increased rage levels.)
s1artibartfast 5y ago
>I don't at all buy that the rage is "intentionally manufactured". I disagree. I think some of the outrage is "artificially" inflamed by our connectedness and some is intentionally inflamed. I say the outrage is "artificial" because, people would be a lot less polarized if their only information on the topic was their personal experiences, but they were already primed by many stories about the worst offenders from the opposite group. For example, when they actually interact with a someone who is adamantly for or against masks in real life, they are already angry and fed up from reading stories online. On the intentional side, political groups and MSM absolutely played up the divisiveness for their own benefit. Politicians used it to smear their opposition, and companies used it to drive clicks. This polarized, divided, and radicalized communities and made it very difficult for them make reasonable compromises on acceptable behavior
- MrMan 5y ago
  there is no MSM at this point - social media stirred up the misinformation, and it worked very well.
vangelis 5y ago
Rural Missourian here, COVID restrictions essentially weren't a thing.
atweiden 5y ago
Coming from a rural, conservative farm community in Australia — which seems quite culturally compatible with your own as you describe it — I beg to differ. The case of Australia (and New Zealand) conclusively demonstrates it was in all ways feasible to eradicate at minimum the early Alpha strain of Covid with a relatively low-tech, low-effort approach: Shut. TF. Borders. Had America simply paid people to _stay home_, and closed its borders — all of them, international, interstate and even intra-state where necessary — they would’ve entirely halted the spread of Covid early on, sparing countless lives and curbing untold amounts of general insanity and hysteria. IIRC the longest consecutive lockdown in Australia lasted just under four months. Said lockdown applied only to a single major international city of 5 million. Rural areas essentially got away from all forms of lockdown unscathed. > The majority of the people here are conservative Strong borders and border security are traditionally conservative values, or so I hear. For instance, you’d be wrong if you thought an 80 year old couple living off the land they’ve been farming for decades would be in support of opening the borders out of some sense of duty to the word “freedom”. From the Australian rural conservative perspective, the only people who stood to gain more freedom in a situation where Covid had been eradicated thanks to closed borders were cosmopolitan travelers and urbanites.