Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
when Bergstrom came to campus last year, he mentioned that he wargamed a pandemic response with vaccinations for the Bush administration, and they were worried enough about people raiding vaccine trucks, mad max style, that they planned for all these armed escorts.
… instead we get to live in eddington.
I’ve been rewatching ReGenesis and you can sorta see a similar background to it (it being of the same vintage): bio attacks are the Big Bad, there’s actual mobilisation against viral spread, etc
kinda whiplash just how fucking rapidly the antivaxxer movement (and general anti-science) managed to spread and become popular in the years hence (and specifically circa the ~2016 mark)
As a counterpoint, there’s a local outbreak of meningitis in Kent (UK) and panicked kids are lining up for vaccinations there.
COVID mostly hit the invisible elderly. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if kids 0-6 were the most vulnerable.
Over here, measles hits mostly kids, but if anything, the new measles epidemic seems to have made antivaxxers double down.
Yeah it’s tragic, but I think it can be “explained” in that incorrect idea that measles isn’t that bad, really, and it was “natural” to get it. I don’t know the exact lethality differences between the diseases in question - just that for an otherwise healthy 20 year old university student, being forced to stay at home because of a disease mostly killing octogenarians is easier to protest against than something that’s killing you and your fellow ravers.
People are trying to get vaccinations for that here in .nl (as in one other country it already spread to a university iirc, so not totally unwise)
oh sure, I didn’t mean to imply that good isn’t happening, more observing on how far and popular the whackjobs have managed to come