Noam Chomsky: The GOP Is a "Group of Radical Sadists"
By Donna October 16, 2021 1:59 pm Category: Horror (0.0 from 0 votes)
Rules of the Post
Nothing anyone says is apt to change our political situation. Nothing Congress tries to pass that will help working class people will ever get passed as long as the Senate represents a small minority of Americans (and actually even those people aren't represented well,) a situation that won't change anytime soon if ever.
Noam covers a lot of topics in this interview that won't change anything, but IMO it's interesting reading.
Here's the first question followed by Noam's response:
DB:
In the United States, COVID-19 has resulted in more than seven hundred thousand dead. Globally, the death toll is in the millions. Vaccines have been effective, yet there’s a significant resistance to getting vaccinated, particularly in the United States. Why? What makes some people susceptible to conspiracy theories about getting vaccinated?
NC:
We should look at exactly what’s happening. If you look at global maps, like the kind that the New York Times posts every day, the United States stands out. It’s the main global hot spot outside of Mongolia and a couple of others. If you look closely, it’s not the United States. It’s selected parts of the United States. Overwhelmingly, it’s the old Confederacy and a couple of outliers like Idaho and Wyoming, which are rock-ribbed Republican states. There’s even been analysis by counties by now, and it turns out that there’s a quite sharp difference between counties that voted for Joe Biden and counties that voted for Donald Trump. So, to a very substantial extent, it’s a partisan issue.
Parts of the Left have bought into this, too. They’re not statistically significant as compared with the mass refusal on the part of Republicans. And, in fact, the last poll I saw showed that over 50 percent of Republicans said they were not going to get vaccinated. So it’s not just that the country is refusing — very substantially, it’s a Republican issue.
It’s very serious. The hospitals in Republican areas like Idaho and Alabama are being crushed by COVID cases. Some states have had to stop providing regular services in hospitals because they have no beds. (Actually, in a minor way, that happened to me, too: I couldn’t get to a hospital that I needed to because they had no beds. It wasn’t terrible. I survived.)
Apart from the social cost, which is huge, they’re endangering people. The unvaccinated are endangering others. They’re severely endangering children who can’t get vaccinated yet. They have no protection. They’re even endangering the vaccinated. I mean, the vaccine is very effective, but not 100 percent. So they’re endangering the vaccinated, too. And on top of that, they’re creating a pool in which the virus can mutate freely, maybe leading to variants that might not even be treatable. It could be a raging, untreatable pandemic.
Why is this done? Liberty? There’s no such liberty. There’s no liberty that allows you to drive through a red light because you feel like it and you don’t want to be inhibited. Nobody’s ever claimed such a liberty. It’s outlandish. You want to hurt people? Okay. Go find a plot of land somewhere, sit on it, don’t take any benefits from the government, and don’t take any responsibilities. The whole libertarian thing is pure nonsense.
Furthermore, we’ve had vaccine mandates — strict ones. Much stricter than now, for years. You can’t send your kid to school without a vaccine, and rightly. Why should you be able to endanger other children? That’s been in place for a long time. There are no real mandates now. What’s called “mandates” have an alternative: you can agree to get tested every week or two. This is, I think, a symptom of severe social disorder — social collapse of a party that has simply gone rogue.
That’s not just my opinion. Recently, the Financial Times — the major business newspaper in the world, sober, conservative — their leading correspondent, Martin Wolf, a highly respected conservative analyst, wrote a column in which he said it’s just indescribable. He said the Republican Party has become a group of crazed radicals dedicated to reactionary policies.
The Republicans have been holding the country hostage by refusing to agree to the perfectly normal procedure of raising the debt ceiling to account for things that have already been done. When Trump was in office, he made a huge increase in the deficit with his lavish gifts to the rich; the Democrats went along with it, raised the debt ceiling every time it was necessary. Republicans won’t do it. In fact, they finally just now agreed, as long as conditions were imposed to block any form of mandate for small and medium-size businesses.
In other words, you want to harm the employees in a restaurant? Feel free to do it. It’s your right to harm them. That’s the Republican Party. They also tried to cut off funding for Afghan refugees. I mean, the political leadership is just a gang of sadists. And the shamelessness is indescribable. Take the hearing for Milley.
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