Image Credits: Reuters.
The always-delightful Balloon-Juice contributor known as Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix had a scathing post yesterday scorching Slate’s Lili Loofbourow, who wrote an execrable piece throwing shade at those of us who read the Herman Cain Awards on Reddit.
Yesterday, Lili Loofbourow wrote a piece at Slate where she churned out a bunch of words about the Herman Cain Awards subreddit…
There’s a lot of talk, including in the Slate piece, about how the Hermies are “dark” and the goal of the HCAs is not to change minds so they’re somehow bad. Yes, it is dark to see a bunch of idiots sharing and re-sharing the same cookie-cutter memes that compare Fauci to Hitler, Fauci’s penis size to the size of Hillary Clinton’s penis, etc. Seeing those lies followed by tales of suffering and death is even darker. Still, if anything is clear from weeks of looking at Awardees, it is that these minds are not easily changed. Gentle persuasion is not going to do a fucking thing for a bunch of idiots stubbornly ensconced in a Facebook bubble.
I realize that the HCAs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But I refuse to be bullied into being the “responsible liberal” who has to work harder than Dr. Doolittle to talk kanga to these kangaroos, simply because their precious fee fees might be hurt when they learn that people are documenting their needless, stupid deaths (after personally identifiable details are blacked out). This god damned country has been catering to the hurt feelings of a bunch of undereducated, overprivileged white folks for 20 years — all we’ve gained is a clown President and wannabes like DeathSantis who wanted to kill liberals, but now are killing their own.
It’s hard to take Ms. Loofbourow’s complaint seriously, and as a regular reader of the HCAs, I have no sympathy at all for the nominees and award-winners. They are 100% responsible for their predicament, and on top of that they seem to be the nastiest, meanest, shittiest people you could hope to (not) meet. But my hostility to them is amplified because, as Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix writes, “they are hogging resources and causing others to die.” Now, the New York Times gives us an idea of what that looks like.
In chronic pain, Mary O’Donnell can’t get around much. At most, she manages to walk for a short time in her kitchen or garden before she has to sit down. “It’s just frustrating at this point,” said Ms. O’Donnell, 80, who lives in Aloha, Ore. “I’m really depressed.”
She had been preparing for back surgery scheduled for Aug. 31, hoping the five-hour procedure would allow her to be more active. But a day before the operation, at OHSU Health Hillsboro Medical Center, she learned it had been canceled.
“Nope, you can’t come, our hospital is filling up,” she said she was told.
Faced with a surge of Covid-19 hospitalizations in Oregon, the hospital has not yet rescheduled her surgery. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” Ms. O’Donnell said, worrying that her ability to walk might be permanently impaired if she is forced to wait too long.
I added the italics to drive home the point: some 80 year-old lady might lose what little independence she still has because of these selfish shits. Lili Loofbourow says we’re being MEAN and “rejoicing at death.”
In Columbus, Ga., Robin Strong’s doctor told her a few weeks ago that the rising Covid caseloads there would delay a procedure to repair a vocal cord that was paralyzed in a previous surgery.
Because of her condition, she chokes easily and has a hard time breathing. “I just cry all the time because of my situation,” she said.
Compounding the physical discomfort is her frustration that so many people in her state won’t get vaccinated against Covid, and they are getting sick and taking up hospital beds…
“They are punishing people like me,” Ms. Strong said.
A bunch of fools got themselves sick on purpose with a deadly disease—and are now insisting on every possible effort to save their miserable lives while someone who presumably did the right thing and got the jab has to wait for necessary surgery. But don’t say that—it’s “heartless and unrepentant schadenfreude,” according to Lili Loofbourow.
With precious few available intensive-care beds, Idaho hospitals had largely stopped providing hernia surgeries or hip replacements before the new order. Now they are postponing cancer and heart surgeries, too, said Brian Whitlock, the chief executive of the Idaho Hospital Association. The hospitals there “have been doing their level best,” he said.
People who refused to believe in science got Covid, and now folks with cancer have to wait while they take up the resources. The article goes on and on like this—and no joke, these delays, which are entirely the fault of willfully unvaccinated people demanded every single resource even though they’re likely to die, are having a negative impact on everyone else.
Some hospital officials say they have been assessing the effects of delayed care caused by the shutting down of elective procedures earlier in the pandemic. “It was very clear that many of these folks had decompensated or were more acutely ill than they would have otherwise been,” said Dr. Bryan Alsip, the chief medical officer at University Health in San Antonio, Texas.
Again, I added italics for emphasis. Decompensation refers to “the functional deterioration of a structure or system that had been previously working with the help of allostatic compensation. Decompensation may occur due to fatigue, stress, illness, or old age. When a system is “compensated”, it is able to function despite stressors or defects. Decompensation describes an inability to compensate for these deficiencies.”
So what this means is that a patient—again, thanks to covid idiots taking up the beds—has a longer (and more expensive) road to recovery, if they recover at all.
Meanwhile, Lili Loofbourow at Slate is clutching her fucking pearls that Reddit readers aren’t adequately kind and sympathetic to these disease-spreading parasites, who use all the medical resources available in an effort to stave off the death they brought on themselves, while people with other, just as important, medical conditions are forced to wait. Sometimes until they die.
Maybe someday Lili will write about those people—the folks who are unfairly forced to wait for treatment til they die—instead of griping about those of us who are justifiably fucking sick of the pigheaded, disease-spreading, pandemic-prolonging, unreasonable, unpersuadable assholes who are causing these problems to begin with. Or is that not contrarian enough?