~From the film Idiocracy.
People are trying to use Ivermectin, an animal deworming medication designed for livestock, to treat COVID-19.
DAFUQ?!
Listen, y'all. For the past 17 years and ten months I've worked as a custodian in a kitchen in a casino. It's not the most exciting job but the pay is OK and I have good days off. So I've been there way longer than I thought I would.
Rule #1 of my job is USE CHEMICALS ONLY FOR THEIR INTENDED PURPOSE.
Rule #2 of my job is DO NOT MIX CHEMICALS.
Rule #3 is READ THE FUCKING DIRECTIONS
Not necessarily in that order, but I've heard and repeated countless variations of this theme in my time.
It was the same when I was a cook. Hell, it was the same when I was an Airman. If a thing is intended for a specific purpose, you use it for that, according to procedure and repetitive training, or people can die. You do it the right way the first time, because if you don't it can get people killed...including when they aren't supposed to be.
Most jobs, especially jobs that middle- and working-class people do, have some variations of this. Why is this hard?
The fact that I feel the need to write a blog post about this sort of bothers me.
Not least because anybody who's ever had to fill out a goddamned job application should damned well not need to be told about things like workplace safety.
So why is it any different with medication directions, or public health?
Let's look at this logically: COVID-19 is a respiratory virus. That's your lungs and stuff like that. An animal deworming medication is intended to, basically, make a critter shit so hard it gets rid of intestinal worms.
How in the hell did anybody conflate or confuse these two obviously massively unrelated things?
Why does "BUT I SAW THIS ON TUCKER CARLSON!" suddenly trump what it says on the side of the package.
To paraphrase my Grandmother "If Tucker Carlson told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?"
And specifically, as regards this whole political tribalism thing. You're an American. Being a Democrat or a Republican is a party affiliation, not a tribe in the sense that, say, being a Native American or a Pashtun or a Zulu is.
Even if it was, what is the damn point of denying common sense, education and hell, the damn directions on the package in favor of metaphorically dancing around a fire shouting "Unga Bunga" because some smarmy trust fund asshole with a TV show on cable told you to?
It's nothing but, to use one of those tired terms that I don't like, virtue signaling.
And potentially at the cost of your health and life. I mean, come on, what's the point of this bullshit?
We've all spent the last week watching a global primer on the perils of extremist religion and tribalism watching the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, and domestically we had a huge reminder the other day of how that dovetails with political extremism when American conservatives suddenly started praising the fucking Taliban, who they essentially considered an existential enemy until they didn't, despite the fact that the Taliban in no way threatened the existence of America or conservatism.
But even if you're a Republican or a Trump Supporter...you're not a Pashtun, no matter how extreme you are you wouldn't be part of the group. For one thing people are born into an ethnicity, you're educated into a culture, a people, a tribe. You accept or reject a religion. Political affiliation is a choice, and in spiritual terms a profoundly agnostic one at that. So is terrorism.
There are many Afghans, many Pashtuns, who are extreme Fundamentalist Muslims who agree with the Taliban on most things, but they are not Talibs. They may even hate the Taliban. You don't have to buy the whole damn cow, every time.
In point of fact, until the last five or six years most Americans defined themselves as the opposite of that type of shit.
Even when there's a massive, plainly visible pile of evidence that screams the entirely opposite point right to your face at full volume.
It's puerile and tiresome. Come on, people, we are not the Borg. You're a human being, not a goddam fire ant beholden to a fucking hive mind. Act like it. God or evolution or your revered genetic heritage gave you a brain and some measure of intelligence, why aren't you using it?
Why does What You Saw On Tucker Carlson overrule what your eyes (or the pain in your guts) is telling you?!
And why do you fuckers keep doing this to yourselves?
The Me-hadism of the present political moment in America, just like the Jihadism of the Taliban in Afghanistan...is doing nothing more than causing fools to blow themselves up for the greater glory of Somebody Else.
And how fucking stupid is that, really?
Ignoring that you have a problem, pretending that it's not a problem, or refusing to see it does not make it go away.
And partisan tribal loyalty does not change the composition of chemical compounds that might kill you. No matter how much you believe it, you're not going to be the first one that Ivermectin works on differently than it says it will on the side of the package and you will not bask in glory for taking it.
You're not a goddamned bull.
But Ivermectin is designed for a thousand pound animal, for a bull or something like it. So it might cause you to shit yourself to death if COVID-19 doesn't kill you first.
Look with your eyes, people, read the goddamned directions. This isn't a game, and it's not that hard to figure this out.
Stop screaming about how great you are and show that you have the basic intelligence to read and understand that you don't put stuff in your body that's not supposed to be there...if that's even really what you're so worried about.
Of course, in a lot of cases that's not really it, is it?
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