Sunday, August 29, 2021

I HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT THE GOVERNOR OF MISSISSIPPI'S COVID COMMENTS AND IT'S NOT ABOUT COVID

The governor of Mississippi has thoughts about the pandemic.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves believes religion has a lot to do with the region’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During a Thursday, Aug. 26, fundraiser at the Eads home of Shelby County Election Commission Chairman Brent Taylor, Reeves spoke to several dozen Republicans.

“I’m often asked by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle about COVID … and why does it seem like folks in Mississippi and maybe in the Mid-South are a little less scared, shall we say,” Reeves said.

“When you believe in eternal life — when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things,” he said....
A day after the governor said this, statisics revealed that Mississippi has now had more COVID deaths per capita than New York State, which was slammed with the original virus surge, at a time when no one knew how to treat severe COVID. (New York's hospital system, unlike Mississippi's, is holding up fine in the summer of the Delta variant.)

I had a question about the governor's contention that God-fearing Mississippians don't fear death as much as we godless liberals do:



But Yastreblyansky had an answer:



That might be right. They say they're afraid of "illegals" and "gangbangers" and their own government (when it's run by Democrats), but they're probably just praying for the moment when society will endorse their desire to shoot people in these categories.

*****

They obviously have some fear of COVID, however -- otherwise they wouldn't be dosing themselves with hydroxychloroquine and zinc and ivermectin. Not the vaccines, of course.

Why not? I know why some Black people say they won't get vaccinated. This is from a CNN report:
I've been walking around the Atlanta community asking primarily Black people what they think about getting the vaccine. One guy had not yet decided to be vaccinated, and he was pretty sure he wouldn't be.

He said, "I have never seen anything good in this country be offered to poor people at the same time as rich people. I can't think of any example of something that's really good that poor people get to have, too. Not a school, not health care, not anything. So why should this be different? I'm skeptical of something that's being offered to me."
And there's this, from The New York Times:
... a civil rights activist in the Bronx said he grew suspicious when he heard last year that politicians were prioritizing minority neighborhoods for coronavirus vaccinations.

“Since when does America give anything good to Black people first?” said the activist, Hawk Newsome, a 44-year-old Black Lives Matter leader who is unvaccinated.
White conservatives seem to be saying a similar thing, even though most of the politicians, doctors, and pharmaceutical executives promoting vaccination look a lot like them. They think the vaccines comes from Liberal Deep State World, and they think we're trying to kill them with vaccination. Black people at least have some reason to be suspicious of a white-dominated culture. But I think white conservatives suspect we're trying to kill them with the vaccines because that's what they'd do to us if society would let them.

Maybe they just think everything we do is a calculated act of maximum evil because right-wing media tells them that everything we do -- giving gay and trans people rights, hearing immigrants' asylum claims, opposing police brutality, raising taxes on the rich to fund social programs and build infrastructure, attempting to transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy -- is a calculated act of maximum evil. The vaccines must be more of the same, right? They may not fear death, but they clearly want to win the war against us while they're alive. Getting vaccinated and wearing masks are acts of collaboration with the enemy.

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