I had friends that we literally went through the worst shit together, and I have to drop them now, because they treat the whole pandemic thing like a farce. It’s sad.
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I had friends that we literally went through the worst shit together, and I have to drop them now, because they treat the whole pandemic thing like a farce. It’s sad.
Why drop friends over a disagreement on such a topic?
I mean, yeah, the virus is a serious issue overall, but it is just that. A single matter in the course of our lives. I do not see how or why that changes people’s relations so radically.
For example, the people I am playing basketball (just fellow villagers I’ve known for years, not really my actual friends) have kept playing through the pandemic and the laws against gatherings. I, on the other hand, just went there and trained 50meters away, alone.
I found their behaviour irresponsible, but I accepted that they just didn’t care or worry.
They found my behaviour funny, but they accept that I have relatives in the “endangered target group”.
They did their thing, I did mine. Why on earth would we even fight, let alone fight on such a scale as to “drop each other out” over one disagreement?
I try to steer away from such questions, but I saw something similar on other platforms and also for similar issues as well and I always wonder why and this is a far better place to get a reply than YT comments for example. Let’s say that they are now flat-earthers or anti-vaxxers or something similar. Why would that change what makes you friends ?
I really do not get it. 
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I would also drop them the second I learned about it. Anti-vaxxers are not just an opinion, they actively endanger other people’s lives.
As for flat-earthers, I don’t like stupid people as my friends, 
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I wouldn’t be friends with people who are misogynists, racists, homophobes. Also criminals. And criminal apologists. These things are not just differences in opinion; they go against my core beliefs.
Specifically about covid, it’s a mix of the above.
I don’t see why I should impose on myself people that are not good for me and my state of mind. I’d rather have one friend who is good for my soul than lots of “friends” that chip away at my character to keep them around.
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I would also drop them the second I learned about it. Anti-vaxxers are not just an opinion, they actively endanger other people’s lives.
Weeeell, that really opens a whole can of worms. A lot of people “actively endanger other people’s lives” like smokers or, even worse, people that are heavy drinkers, but we do not cut ties with people that smoke because they have polluted the lungs of others for some decades or drinkers because they might drive under the influence and his someone else.
Those people ARE INDEED having habits that easily fall in the “actively endanger other people’s lives” spectrum, but are totally normal and accepted, because their “bad habit”/“bad opinion” is the social accepted norm, while an anti-vaxxer’s “bad opinion” is fringe, so we are more eager to drop the book on them. The truth is though that there are some very bad double standards in such an idea.
If I were to take it one step further, were do all those cheap clothes and appliances and knickknacks that we buy for 1 euro come from? Oh, right. “Made in obscure countries” says on the label. By whom? Oh, we do not know, do we?
Of course we do know or at the very least we suspect, but we ignore it for various reasons that are worthy of in-depth sociological studies and are not the point now. The point is that our “buying habits” (internal or externally cultivated, it doesn’t matter) actually “actively endangers other people’s lives”, but people we will never meet, in countries we will never visit. Should I stop talking to my best friend because he bought a T-shirt for 5 euro from a street peddler ? Maybe someone got hurt at the factory that T-shirt was made. Is my friend the “enabler” of the people that out-source these jobs ?
So, is he a criminal? Can we claim that we never bought a similar T-shirt or cheap item? And even if we did, just because something is more expensive, that doesn’t mean that it was created in a safer and well monitored environment. So, are we all guilty? Should we all point fingers at each other or maybe we should step back a bit and look at the bigger picture? 
I don’t see why I should impose on myself people that are not good for me and my state of mind
Now that is a totally different thing and noone can argue with that.
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I think everyone has at least 1 dangerous belief or systematically don’t think about something easy. So if I will get mind reading superpower I will not be surprised and will not start to hate everyone.
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It’s a big warning that the person in question has other world views and opinions that are going to be disagreeable.
Far-right extremists don’t go from zero to 100, they don’t go from a generically happy and optimistic 12 year old to a kkk member that patrols with a gun looking for gang members to shoot. There’s a progression and an associated threshold where you are willing to leave someone when you forsee a potential problem.
COVID-19 is not a trivial issue, even the “low death rate” thing that people use to insist it’s being blown up by the media is a huge warning sign.
It’s also a question of what the ‘dangerous belief’ is, and whether or not the person is capable of listening to counter arguments. My mom has re-blogged some far right stuff on Facebook, but once I explain what it actually means she instantly regrets it and removes it. Often she just doesn’t have the “world experience” when it comes to the internet and extremism to be able to identify things.
It’s extremely easy to promote propaganda for things that you woudl otherwise disagree with, simply because propaganda works.
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It’s a big warning that the person in question has other world views and opinions that are going to be disagreeable.
“other world views and opinions” sounds pretty good to me. I wouldn’t like sitting around a table with some people and we would just nod to each other’s ideas since we are all from the same mold 
On a more serious point, I really do think that it is actually good to be friends with people that have different opinions and hobbies and worldviews than your own. Not only it helps you understand and be tolerant of other points of view, but it also might provide some insight or thought that you might have otherwise missed.
A very important issue is this that you mentioned:
There’s a progression and an associated threshold where you are willing to leave someone when you forsee a potential problem
This is exactly right, but I am starting to think that as they years go by, society as a whole is lowering the bar of that threshold dangerously and thus those people are sent faster to reside in their own bubble and have no more feedback anymore from any other source, because they were “dropped off” early.
So, they are left in their bubble with the people they believe that “understand them” and they are feeding off each other’s fantastic ideas and then you have an echo chamber that bounces every wacky idea: vaccines, 5G, holistic medicine that does not believe in viruses, flat earthers, people that think that Australia is a hoax and whatever else, because “why not?”
Those people believe that the “others” (the educated, the reasonable, the learned, the “mainstream” or whatever else they call them) are to blame for everything and as proof they have the disdain that those people show towards them, so, in their minds, they believe that they have been unjustly treated and they just reply in kind and so they start hating knowledge and call schools “indoctrination camps” and soon they start carrying slingshots to protect Moses that has come back to life from heaven and is living in Florida impersonating Elvis while waiting to intervene to prevent the apocalypse
I really wonder, were those people really dangerous or so “off the charts” since the beginning or did they become like that when other people just “dropped them” instead of fighting to win them back to the “reasonable side”?
Personally, every person that I have met that was really starting to sink into conspiracies and totally irrational stuff, had a sad story to accompany that downward slope, so I am worried that the latter choice in my question is the most likely answer for the majority of those people. So maybe we should persevere a bit longer than we do now, that is all I am saying. As the video from John Oliver made clear we live in a the age of “disposable merch” we are used to applying that behaviour and our minds want to do away with the old or the bad things and find new and good things fast, but is it really a good idea to apply that mentality to other humans and especially our friends and relatives? I highly doubt that.
Besides, what is the point of being right about an issue if we cannot argue in its favour and convince others of it ? Is knowledge just for the sake of it any use to anyone or does knowledge becomes useful when it is applied, explained and spread ?
P.S.
Maybe slightly off-topic, but all those are secondary rumifications of the coronavirus situation.
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Um, no. It’s the usual argument of those people to defend themselves. Literally millions of people are uneducated, “dropped” by the system, abused and whatnot. The ones that turn hateful and delusional choose to do so.
Someone who likes hiking while I like swimming is absolutely not the same as someone who votes for the neonazi party and me. People like that must be isolated, so they can understand that if they continue to have beliefs like that they don’t belong in society, society rejects them. The problem is that society actually doesn’t, because it hasn’t yet matured enough to leave those beliefs behind.
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This is definitely getting OT now, but I can’t resist noting that it is often isolation that leads to these beliefs in the first place. How to deal with people who have come to these views is one thing, identifying the cause of that happening and fixing it is another…
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This is the usual problem with freedom of speech, all voices must be heard, all opinions are equal etc…
No, not all opinions are equal and not all opinions must be respected. Me distancing myself from people who believe covid is a conspiracy from governments worldwide to monitor us and a cult member isolating themselves from family is absolutely not the same. Treating it like it’s the same is a problem.
Also, (this is actually on-topic ) seeing how governments fail to coordinate/ cooparate/ form a plan that makes sense in the midst of a pandemic, is the best argument against a global conspiracy if I’ve ever seen one. They can’t agree on what day it is, let alone world domination.
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You are right, this is getting OT. I will not reply any more not because I don’t respect other’s opinions, but because we really got off trail now.
Just a PS, in my own experience, people having to deal with friends/family getting fed up with their shit and distancing* themselves take it as a wake-up call, if they are ready for it.
*Wow, this verb will never sound the same to me after covid.
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I agree with Gia. There is a difference between “different world views” and “disagreeable world views”.
You can see this with the degradation of the quality of US presidents over time, the progression to over-reliance on credit to sustain lifestyles, and the change from investigative journalism to sensationalist journalism. People aim for the bare minimum that will get them through. Trump will create empty promises and say/do whatever he has to to get reelected. He has no actual long term plan for anything, as the president no longer needs to be able to run a government or plan ahead. Trump is the current representation of the slow march to death. We can only expect things will keep going downhill for the next while not only in terms of US presidents, but everything else that can make a sacrifice to quality and still run.
Believe me, some people do not want to be reasoned with. Conspiracy theorists and the willful ignorant prefer to live in their bubble. If you haven’t had to lead people in adverse situations or teach (not the easy go teaching, I mean actually teach in a school setting under stress) then it’s very easy to be vain and think everyone is special and “saveable”. There’s a very fine line between “naively hopeful” and “cautiously hopeful”, and the Western approach of “everyone is special, you can do anything you want, etc.” is very naive.
Everyone who has lived a little has a tragic story. The question is do you bring down others with you on your self-destructive path or do you try to hold others up even if you’re drowning?
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100%
Work with the government for more than a month and you’ll never be a government conspiracy theorist again.
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Welp, government here still doesn’t wanna help anyone financially. They know many people have no money and probably gonna lose their job if not yet. And still nothing, but we still have to sit at home and if we don’t they’re gonna fine us. They even have a special fund they founded just in case something bad is gonna happen. But I guess that’s only for banks and oligarchs. And I guess from their point of view normal people are going to spend the money on food anyway, so giving them money is basically a waste. As many people say “why do we even pay taxes”.
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Fuck man, I hope things work out for you…
Please don’t feel ashamed to ask for a bit of monetary help on here if you have to.
I’m totally fine, thank you for your concern. It’s just, you know, I can’t help getting mad after reading the news.
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I think you posted a video with people protesting somewhere upwards in the thread. I understand why people will defy a pandemic “stay at home” to protest under such circumstances. I can’t fault people for feeling desperate and abandoned.
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This is well worth a watch:
Chris Whitty is chief medical officer of England and a specialist in epidemiology. Skip the first half if you are in a hurry but who is nowadays?
ps how do I embed this?
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I think it needs to be in its own line, try pressing enter after the :
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Thank you Gia
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