From Pine View Farm

Denial Is Not Just a River in Egypt 0

Two recent posts at Psychology Today Blogs offer insight into the intersection between political leanings and failure to take seriously–even to actively discount–the seriousness of the rapid spread of COVID-19.

Nassir Ghaemi offers a taxonomy of disease deniers:

. . . three kinds of deniers of a scientifically sound public health response to the coronavirus pandemic: a certain kind of political partisan, those who are medically uninformed, and those with a tendency to conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, Nigel Barber identifies an irony:

Recent survey data show that Republicans are significantly less likely than Democrats to view the coronavirus as a serious threat. This is surprising because Republicans are generally focused on fear and more concerned about contamination.

Given the confused and chaotic–often self-contradictory–response to the coronavirus by the current Federal Administration and tendency of many to, say, confuse a Facebook frolic with a fact, I commend both pieces as being worth the few moments it will take to read them.

Aside:

My grad school professor for early federal period history, Dr. Shade, was fond of saying that “history is irony.”

Far too often, history has proven him correct, as when the United States went from having its first black President to having the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson.

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