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The all-new "US Politics and coronavirus" thread

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BobTheCoward said:
Just as I don't think drunk driving should be a crime,
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You have got to be kidding.

so clearly I think one should only be in trouble if they actually spread the virus from themselves to someone else.
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And just how would the authorities know this? Does the virus come with an identification that says "My origin is BobTheCoward. I live at......"
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
I used to talk to a libertarian on another board and I swear to God he absolutely 100% could not understand the concept of giving a **** about anybody other than yourself. And I don't mean "oh, he was a horrible, mean person", I mean the idea was completely alien to him.

As an example, he once expressed the opinion that people should not be allowed to wear revealing clothes in public unless they are good-looking. Odd position to hold for a libertarian, I know, but there you go. If you were overweight (he hadn't given consideration to disabled people or people with deformities or blemishes of some kind and handwaved that away without actually saying that it was okay for them to go out in public) you had to cover up, no matter how hot it was outside. I advocated for the position that people should be able to wear what they wanted and if he found other people bad-looking then that was his problem and not theirs.

And for about a day of discussing this he kept assuming that I must be fat to be arguing for the position that I was and that I didn't understand how hard he worked to make sure that he looked good enough to go outside wearing revealing clothes. I told him numerous times that I wasn't overweight and, due to working out for an hour a day, running 4 miles a day, and working a job that involved a fair bit of heavy lifting and carrying, I was actually not unfit at all. And it simply didn't sink in. I was arguing for fat people, so therefore I must myself be fat. Because why would I argue for a position that didn't benefit me personally?

And on and on and on it went, every single conversation with him he assumed that if you held a position it must be because it benefited you personally, and it was almost impossible to get it through his head that other ways of looking at the world existed. It always took page after page of repetition before he got it, and he never, ever learnt. It was always straight back to square 1 every single time.

He simply couldn't understand the idea. Again, I don't mean that in a nasty way, it's just that you might as well have been telling him that you were a sentient rice pudding as far as his ability to wrap his head around the concept went. His brain seemingly just wasn't wired that way at all.
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And what have we learned from this? Maybe don't try and have a rational conversation with an idiot? Remember, you can't fix stupid.
 
Stacyhs said:
And what have we learned from this? Maybe don't try and have a rational conversation with an idiot? Remember, you can't fix stupid.
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The thing is that sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's stupid or ignorant. Ignorant can be fixed.
 
Bob001 said:
The thing is that sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's stupid or ignorant. Ignorant can be fixed.
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The person Squeegee Beckenheim was referring wasn't ignorant; he was stupid.

Ignorance can only be fixed if the person wants to learn.
 
Stacyhs said:
You have got to be kidding.



And just how would the authorities know this? Does the virus come with an identification that says "My origin is BobTheCoward. I live at......"
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Just because it is hard to prove someone injured another is not justification to punish people who are not injuring others.
 
bruto said:
I'm surprised you go even that far. Isn't spreading the virus a consequence of the freedom being exercised? You're just changing a constraint to the past when it's too late anyway. I would have thought a true libertarian would place the entire burden of protection on the recipient.
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Infecting someone with a virus violates the non aggression principle.

This all fits into the bigger picture that the problem with libertarianism is too little pollution, not too much.
 
Stacyhs said:
And what have we learned from this? Maybe don't try and have a rational conversation with an idiot? Remember, you can't fix stupid.
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The thing is, he wasn't stupid. He really wasn't. And it wasn't him being obstinate or obdurate.

He was just of a very particular mindset and found it very, very difficult to understand that anybody else could actually think in a different way. He really, literally, just couldn't understand the concept of caring about something that didn't affect you directly. It would just never occur to him that that could actually be a real thing.

It was truly extraordinary to witness.

Once you got through to him, you could actually have productive and interesting conversations, though. It just took a lot of work and patience and drilling down.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
The thing is, he wasn't stupid. He really wasn't. And it wasn't him being obstinate or obdurate.

He was just of a very particular mindset and found it very, very difficult to understand that anybody else could actually think in a different way. He really, literally, just couldn't understand the concept of caring about something that didn't affect you directly. It would just never occur to him that that could actually be a real thing.

It was truly extraordinary to witness.

Once you got through to him, you could actually have productive and interesting conversations, though. It just took a lot of work and patience and drilling down.
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In your first post you said

"It always took page after page of repetition before he got it, and he never, ever learnt. It was always straight back to square 1 every single time."

Your first post describes a stupid and narcissistic man. Your second describes a man who is rather narcissistic, but not necessarily stupid.
 
There's no contradiction there. It'd take pages of discussion before he understood that you really, genuinely cared about something that didn't affect you directly and once he got it you could actually discuss the subject at hand in an interesting and fruitful fashion. The next time you had a discussion with him where you expressed an opinion on something, he'd be back to believing that to be because it affected you directly.

He wasn't being stupid, it was just a completely foreign concept to him. It simply didn't compute.
 
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