To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Malvolio in Twelfth Night, some men are born idiots, some achieve idiocy, and some have idiocy thrust upon them.
Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik took 1,500 words to prove that it was possible for all three conditions to be true at the same time. Being a business writer didn’t stop him from engaging in some of the most obscene COVID-19 death porn seen to date, as he tried to pass off the cruelty and barbaric glee shown by the left at the death of unvaccinated people as “necessary.”
Related: Your Weekly COVID Death Porn Update: Left Celebrate’s Laura Loomer’s Illness
“How should we react to the deaths of the unvaccinated?” asks Hiltzik. Rather than the usual human response that compassion and good taste might dictate, Hiltzik tries to bring us down a level on the human evolutionary ladder to bathe in the blood of people he disagrees with politically.
On the one hand, a hallmark of civilized thought is the sense that every life is precious.
On the other, those who have deliberately flouted sober medical advice by refusing a vaccine known to reduce the risk of serious disease from the virus, including the risk to others, and end up in the hospital or the grave can be viewed as receiving their just deserts.
Needless to say, Twitter exploded.
This walking comorbidity https://t.co/5xnPOQBqOH
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) January 10, 2022
I’m gonna laugh and mock you when you die. I might take an ad out in the LA Times specifically laughing at your death. https://t.co/ZNedi58rZ8
— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) January 10, 2022
“Imagine mocking someone’s death and then having the audacity to suggest you’re doing it for other people’s safety,” wrote Alana Mastrangelo of Breitbart. “The sanctimonious people who claim to care about you, don’t. They just like to pretend because it makes them feel superior.”
Hiltzik took up the case of the recent death of Kelly Ernby, a prominent Orange County Republican and deputy district attorney who advocated against vaccine mandates. It should be noted that Ernby never urged anyone to refuse to get vaccinated. But Hiltzik is so besotted with partisanship that he can’t tell the difference between someone advocating against vaccine mandates and someone who advocates against vaccines entirely.
It should be clear that opposing vaccine mandates as a substitute for opposing vaccination itself is a fundamentally incoherent position. It’s little more than the garden variety small-government Republican ideology. That’s what it was in Ernby’s hands.
“I want small government, I want lower taxes, I want to protect our freedoms,” she said during her discussion of vaccine mandates at that town hall.
Contrary to Ernby’s assertions, however, mandates do work. Requirements that people provide evidence of vaccination before attending public events or entering restaurants or bars have been associated with heightened vaccine rates abroad. Employer mandates in the U.S. have raised vaccination rates at workplaces, as United Airlines has shown.
This is where Hiltzik’s rank idiocy comes to the fore. “Garden variety small-government Republican ideology” is shorthand for “all that stupid talk about the Constitution and other stuff.”
It shouldn’t surprise us that Hiltzik comes down four-square on the side of the authoritarians.
As for whether a vaccination mandate is a slippery slope to more government control, as Ernby maintained, government mandates have been with us for untold decades. We require drivers to wear seat belts, cars to be equipped with air bags and drivers to observe speed limits and avoid pedestrians. We ban smoking in public places.
While what Hiltzik claims is absolutely true, it’s a false equivalency with vaccine mandates. No one is going to get fired for not wearing a seat belt or getting caught speeding. And nothing mentioned by Hiltzik as a “mandate” forces a citizen to put something in their bodies against their will.
The massive amount of vaccine disinformation from anti-vaxxers and conspiracy loons as well as the backing and filling by federal health authorities about exactly what the vaccine is supposed to do has made it easy for louts like Hiltzik to mock the unvaccinated as well as those who may have died even after being vaccinated.
Hiltzik kinda sorta forgot to mention that.
Stripped of all the good, decent, and humane impulses that should have brought us together during this pandemic, Hiltzik and his friends in the Democratic Party are standing on the backs of dead people to advance their political agenda.
It’s as obscene as any pornography on the net.
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