They've played an interesting game where they called Trump illegitimate from the beginning of his presidency, entertained the idea of flipping electors, entertained conspiracy theories about him being a Russian agent, and now he's the evil one for trying to "subvert democracy".
Likewise with the pandemic, essentially any observation was weaponized against him. My favorite is the ventilator crisis which has been essentially lost to history now. He was cast as a murderer, only for us to find out that ventilators were leading to more deaths.
Is it a stretch to imagine that the same country that created a news spectacle from their rocket falling back to earth uncontrolled, can't manage their bio research?
I have a hard time rationalizing or disproving the Malmstrom base incident, along with other stuff that's allegedly happened around nuclear facilities.
On top of the growing noise about government records surrounding UAP/USO phenomenon, I'm not sure why you're so confident.
> if there was anything else that was dismissed or treated with disdain simply because of pure contrarianism to anything with Trump-adjacency
It's blindingly clear that you can (remarkably this should raise eyebrows, but in this case it's shamefully close to reality) paint with broad brush-strokes that the entire media/tech/creative class making more than the avg household, that lives in cities, etc. effectively out-sourced their judgement to Trump.
I can't wait to see the ahistoric revisionism reacting to stuff like this, the same people that did the instant downvote brigades acting as arbiters with complete "scientific" certainty.
> He basically lets the Trump administration off the hook
That's pretty loaded.
Should we let the entire liberal political establishment off the hook for screaming at the top of their lungs that Trump is evil for not going gung-ho with a WWII mobilization for ventilators? Only to later find that ventilators in many cases were not only ineffective, but leading to death.
This frustrates any discussion about the pandemic and government response (and more broadly practically any question about govt policy & history), namely that these assertions always resort to counterfactuals.
So what happened and what could have happened with different policies is essentially unfalsifiable.
> seem to treat their agoraphobia with the same fervor and source of moral purity as a religion
Oh yea, I'm gay and it clicked to me recently that the gay clubs I go to are basically just monasteries now. It used to be that gay people were known for unabashedly saying what couldn't be said (the profane) - it's now the complete opposite, gay people largely are enumerating an endless list of what's considered profane. Constant pearl-clutching, tip-toeing, hushed gossip, forced repentance and excommunication.
It's hard not to see the illiberal attitudes on the left (which at least in recent history were concentrated on the right, a consequence of their rigid sense of morality and tradition) as nothing more than rule-book fanatics evangelizing and prescribing a sacred morality.
John McWhorter calls these people The Elect, and I think correctly identified that this is fundamentally a religion. It spans all sorts of topics, but maintains the same character, for instance, in something like anti-racism:
Isn't this precisely the type of comment that goes against site guidelines? Curiously, because of the ideological bent of many in the SV crowd, a comment like this evades the downvoting that the OP gets.
It seems to me that there's a de facto ideological standard around flagging and downvoting, where certain people are allowed to pearl-clutch and pose opposing viewpoint as plainly absurd and lacking the dignity of intellectual consideration.
Yea I largely agree with all the stuff you're saying. Regarding Trump though, I think he did do himself a massive disservice giving space to people like Fauci and Bolton. Although, with a generous interpretation, he certainly seems to be able to listen and platform people he diametrically opposes, which is something I don't know can be said about his opposition.
Yea I think back to generations past, where you'd find yourself being sent to Normandy or something or stationed on a ship that just got hit by a torpedo. Chance of death - >>1%.
Now healthy people with a fraction of a percent risk of hospitalization, much less death, act like agoraphobes - apparently willing to do so indefinitely.
Far removed from the experience of the world as it is, dependent on the comfort of advanced human technology, people have become debilitated by the mere idea of the challenges that their ancestors overcame and readily coped with.
Courage is gone, and it's perhaps the most important virtue that allows one to get through life and face the insurmountable challenges that all of us will encounter.
Likewise with the pandemic, essentially any observation was weaponized against him. My favorite is the ventilator crisis which has been essentially lost to history now. He was cast as a murderer, only for us to find out that ventilators were leading to more deaths.