I feel your pain. My family grew up on Long Island, NY. We are Hispanic family. My older brother moved down South he has become anti-immigrant (side note my husband of 19yrs is an immigrant from South America who just became a US Resident 3 years ago thanks to Obama) he said in a room with my husband that he hated immigrants. He he is a Prepper, Republican (but he does not like T), He loves Alex Jones, He worked for the election of Rand Paul and he loves conspiracies and he also said Covid was just a flu. He is a the opposite of everything my mom has taught us. He has no empathy. I had to tell my poor husband to ignore his ignorance. But my brother wrote a letter of support for my husband immigration case. He can sometimes be ok.
He was sending me videos of how the covid was a big lie and was sending me links to Alex Jones website. I don’t talk to him. It’s on a very rare occasions. He drives me up the wall. He called me when NY was having the high numbers. I thought he was calling me because he was generally worried for me since I am the last one left on LI. No he was calling me to say it was just the flu and that I should buy hydrated foods. He was trying to tell my parents not to be worried but thank god we already know he is NUTS. I usually ignore his craziness but I had to text him back one day that to stop sending me that crap since it’s not the dam flu. 3 months later Florida is the epicenter. Makes me want to text him that it’s ok it’s just the Flu. He will be ok.
Re Cohen and the retaliation ruling -- While I am happy with the judge's ruling and for that reason agree that Cohen should be released, there are thousands of prisoners who are still housed in Covid-infested state and federal facilities. Where is the compassion and justice for them? Money, power and fame wins out.
Thank you.
My brother has a tendency to wrap his nonsense in trappings of intellectual pursuit a la "the great rabbinical traditions." He claims to be "rabidly centrist" - meaning that what he does is accuse the left of running around saying the sky is falling, and accusing the right of outright lies, but he puts more weight on incompetence than malevolence and derides those of us who use the words nazi, fascist and gestapo when describing current events.
Important to remember that my bro is a total convert - was raised Episcopalian (his wife was raised Baptist), and he confessed to me that rather than become a Unitarian or Unity member, he wanted to become Jewish "to make a subversive choice". So what happens is that occasionally people who either a) are born people of color, or b) born Jewish, call him out, and I agree they are right to do so. He made a choice, and to go around correcting everyone else on holocaust or white supremacist terminology is disingenuous.
He's my brother, so I've put him on 30-Day-Snooze on FB, so I can ignore him til I calm down.
@laura-f My mother and sister are both toxically Catholic, and I live with my mom. Even though I've actually unfriended them both on FB so I don't have to deal with their crap on line, I still have to hear it at home, so I can completely relate. *sigh*
wow 30 days. You are much nicer then me. I just hid my brother page so I never have to see it again
If you wish to engage with your brother (and believe me, I totally understand if you don't want to), I would simply ask him sincerely, "Okay, hard data... what would you consider "hard data" in this situation?"
And listen to him. He may bluster, but in rabbinical tradition, he's supposed to give an answer. (I went to school and worked with MANY Conservative and Orthodox Jews).
Next question: "Okay, how would hard data be gathered in the situation in Portland?" Make him think through the steps of how this would operationally work: how it would be gathered, when it would be gathered, etc.
"And WHO would be doing the gathering?" "How would that information be consolidated into a data set? Who would be doing that consolidating? How long would it take to consolidate that information? When would it be available?"
Warning: Your brother may have a breakdown somewhere along the way, but the object is to nudge him into a real self-examination of whether there really is any "hard data" that he would accept here.
I did that, in different words, and other friends of his posted along the lines of "Aside from in-person videos, there is no hard data".
He shut everyone down, and deleted any discussions that didn't fit into his "parameters" even though everyone was on the same side and very civil.
My hubby tried too - he is born Jewish and was a Poli Sci major in college. The only point my brother would concede to him was "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
He's asking everyone to do this work for him - another friend of his pointed out how lazy it is, and kind of $h*t stirring, but then he's not allowing discussions on his query. No one has succeeded.
To my mind, it's as if he's asking us to quantify how many clouds are in the sky, and no links to partisan sites of any kind. OK, but what I tried to put across is that it's impossible for any of us to provide such data (e.g., the number of clouds in the sky all day today) because it's still today and no one knows yet how many clouds there were, nor do we know how much of the sky he wants us to look at.
Yes. They are using it to detect virus shedding before symptoms show enough to test and results are back. The reason I couldn't find the articles I was specifically looking for is because there are dozens of pages reporting on that on Google, as it is becoming a trend the last month or so. The issue with that is when signals are found, the issue is still too politicozed and people dug in too deep nowadays that it won't do anything to change behaviors in an affected community.
This issue has gotten to the point where I was speaking with my daughter's former teacher yesterday. This woman is in her 60s, an early childhood psychologist, and an excellent teacher. You would think there would be some sense used by someone educated(especially in psychology), but of course she did her damnedest to convince me that Bill Gates, Deborah Birx, and Tony Fauci were working together with the CDC and WHO to use covid as population control and then mask tracking chips as vaccines to keep tabs on people and easily kill them when they decided to. When I asked her where she was getting her info from, she refused to name any sources other than "news and websites" and wouldn't accept my disagreement, or logic for that matter' as a valid argument.