Ask A Genius 583: “History doesn’t care about us”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/08
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Rick Rosner: It’s the worst day ever again.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, is it at 9/11 levels, yet?
Rosner: Yes, we have a 9/11 every day.
Jacobsen: What’s the conservative reaction to it?
Rosner: They think we’re babies for wearing masks and being concerned and opening up the schools. They think it’s tyranny to make people not do stuff and to shut stuff down.
Jacobsen: For almost 3,000 people that have died every day…
Rosner: Who’ve died from it?
Jacobsen: What’s the number of people who have had some physical or mental decline from it?
Rosner: So what, 15 million Americans are known to have or confirmed to have had it and in estimates what the multiplier for the number of people who’ve actually had it is. Like Trump was bragging that, maybe, 15% of the population has had it, he’s thinking that that’s some achievement.
But anyway, conservatively, say 20 million Americans have had it, which is certainly an underestimate. 20 percent of people are who’ve had it. 20% is the number they think might suffer lasting mental debilitation. So, that’s 4 million Americans who might have their brains fucked up from it, which is 1.2% of the whole population.
Jacobsen: How rich is the denial over there?
Rosner: Well, it’s huge. So, nobody puts it in the right perspective, which is roughly one American in a thousand has died from it. Right now, it’s the leading cause of death. But 3,000 people, close to 3,000 people a day might be dying from it.
But 5,000 people die from other stuff every day. The other stuff is the end of life stuff, the cancers and the heart disease and all of that. So, both sides could probably use some perspective, but certainly the denier side is much more stupid and inaccurate in its denial of what’s going on.
The deal is, it’s a deadly thing. It will certainly overtake a World War Two to become the third leading, third deadliest event, in U.S. history. But the other deadliest events, the Spanish Flu and the Civil War, happened when the US population was a lot smaller.
So, the percent killed by the other events was much higher. I’m thinking, the population under Spanish Flu was probably a third of what America is today and probably in the Civil War, it was the fourth or fifth.
So, you’re looking at more than one percent of the population being killed in each case or at least in the Civil War. then almost a percent dying in Spanish Flu. Two thirds compared to, by the time we’re done with this will be, as many as one fifth of one percent, which is a lot, and probably one in 100 seniors killed by it, which is just some horrible shit.
But certainly not as devastating as 1918. But neither should be as devastating as 1918. It’s one hundred years later, lifespans are double what they were in 1918. We shouldn’t have one percent of the population die and losing half a million people to this.
It isn’t acceptable. It’s a staggering number of U.S. dead compared to 553 Covid dead in South Korea. They have 1/80th the per capita death rate. It’s almost entirely because they have competent leadership. We have Trump, who’s just one of the most stupid and evil guys in history.
Jacobsen: What is the state of affairs in terms of white Evangelical America? What is this disease? It’s a virus. What is the reaction to it?
Rosner: The white Evangelicals have been tenderized for forty years, have been mobilized and fed bullshit both from their media and from their leaders, from their pastors and from their communities that has left them belligerent, uninformed, and stupid.
They’ve been preyed on and they’ve allowed themselves to be preyed on. They’ve allowed themselves to embrace denial of reality in the service of some political agenda. The anti-abortion stuff that they’ve allowed themselves to be told of outweighs everything else.
So, they’re both the perpetrators, victims of their horribleness. They should be the most charitable to fellow human beings in America because of the obligations of their religion. Instead, they’re some of the biggest assholes in America.
That won’t be fixable until, at the very least, we fix our media and until enough time goes by that this generation of horrible Evangelicals is supplanted by, one would hope, their kids, who are to a large extent, one would hope, are just as disgusted with the hypocrisy of their parents as the rest of America is.
I’m sure it’s not maybe 40% of their kids are disgusted and won’t embrace their religion or their flavor of denial.
Jacobsen: Do you think fundamentally their whole theology is just untenable? The way they live their lives, the way they preach, the way that they have this male worship of their pastor, things like this.
Rosner: Well, I mean, in the longer term, all of us lie on the ash heap of history. We all die. We all become immaterial. History doesn’t care about us. Our ideals may or may not be carried forward. Certainly, their ideals won’t be carried forward because, yes, what they believe and how they act is too contradictory. But that becomes true for us all a little, just becomes true or faster for those assholes.
Jacobsen: The end.
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