The Observation Deck

Tragedy of the assholes:
History showed up, and we’re chained to these selfish jerks

"The car analogy is useful to extend here, because we don’t each drive on our own personal highways, we share the road with other drivers, and I hardly need to tell you that many of those drivers are certified assholes. Sometimes drunk drivers — assholes, as if I really need to point that out — cause fatal accidents. Maybe they survive in a cruel and ironic twist of fate.

Assholes have been conditioned to disclaim collective responsibility for society’s ills in the name of individualism over so many other contexts, so it should come as little shock that a pandemic would be no different. Gun deaths? My gun only defends the innocent against tyranny and bad guys. Racism? Don’t look at me, it was like that when I got here. Plastic straws? My straw isn’t going to be the one that breaks the earth’s back. Most people want fewer gun deaths, equality, and a stop to daily catastrophic weather events, but sadly not enough to override what a minority of assholes want instead."

Read the entire story here:
https://tonyortega.org/2020/05/26/trage ... fish-jerks

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Thanks for the link. Just thought I’d pop my head out onto the deck and add this to your point.



Which is not to say that vigilance elsewhere isn’t warranted. E.g., while the covid threat is real, I don’t automatically find comfort in the actions of autocratic billionaires.

It’s too bad there isn’t a rational body politic that can accept the seriousness of the situation and also openly discuss strategies to prevent both regulatory overreach by bureaucrats and regulatory capture by commercial interests.

So the divide and conquer crowd has made a simple mask (that surgeons and lab technicians wear for a reason) into an inane political statement.

*sigh* As Linus once said, “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand!”

At the risk of being a "Debbie Downer", Snopes has researched the above picture/caption an has said it is "Miscaptioned". It is not a picture of a WWII solider carrying a donkey to avoid mines. It is a picture from 1958 of a French Foreign Legion soldier carrying a starving donkey back to base.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/soldi ... ng-donkey/