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jdnym's avatar

It's wild how the tribal dynamics are so self-reinforcing. Even putting emotion aside, nuance can feel like signal-weakening, so people over-signal to push the equilibrium. Like trying to do systems thinking, but without guardrails like trust and good faith.

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David Zager's avatar

I find the use of the Grim Reaper obnoxious, but to me it's not the salient metaphor that comes out of the pandemic. Rather, the anti-scientific metaphor concerns the science-denying anti-maskers who claim it's a matter of freedom; the people who believe COVID-19 is a Democratic hoax; the folks who associate the response to disease with the imposition of socialism on the US. These images are far more strongly embedded, a bizarre form of "Live Free or Die." Reading interviews with nurses in South Dakota who reported some patients' final words before intubation were that it was all a hoax turns my sense of rationalism to jelly.

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