No need to force social distancing rules on me anymore. After seeing hundreds of people wearing masks outside in a park on a sunny day, I am convinced the IQ of my cat exceeds the collective IQ of all of them. I don't even want to be around people anymore. Everybody is nuts.

— Juergen Amft (@jamft) April 10, 2021

Eh, most people don’t really know anything or think deeply about why (or how) anything is the case. They follow the cues of their friends and families, or what they see or hear on the news. Even this, though, they usually misunderstand.

Could humans be smarter and better thinkers? Maybe. But the reality is that right now in general we are not.

For immigrants, IDs prove to be a barrier to a dose of protection.

Wow, could be be any dumber as a society? Anyone who gets vaccinated protects everyone else. We should be jabbing random stray animals who wander through the fucking vaccination sites.

The Naked Sun.

I read this novel long ago, maybe when I was 8 or 9. I’d almost completely forgotten it. It presaged the liberals’ wished-for perma-lockdown future.

Asimov portrays in The Naked Sun a world focused on avoiding physical contact with other people. The Solarians practice physical distancing, and interact with each other largely through technology. They live far from each other, spread out across a sparsely populated planet. People are taught from birth to avoid physical contact, and live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Face-to-face interaction (referred to in the book as “seeing”) is seen as a repugnant chore….Sex is only practiced for reproduction when replacement of a citizen is necessary, and is considered a chore even more repugnant than seeing. A character remarks that to be in the same room with another person is “most unpleasant…. I feel strongly as though something slimy were about to touch me.”[3]:113 A doctor has to “get hardened” to it….The Solarians’ phobia against in-person contact is so strong that a character commits suicide to avoid it.

Sound like any people you know? At least a lot of them are moving that direction for sure. Not bad for 1956.

What’s particularly weird about the Fat Acceptance movement is that because I’ve been fat, I can say authoritatively that you feel like a fucking rusty garbage can when you’re fat.

You don’t need a goddamn doctor to tell you it’s unhealthy. It’s perfectly clear from living in your own body.

New in Bloomberg — Amtrak should focus on upgrading speeds in the northeast where intercity trains are useful and popular, not keep trying to add new routes.https://t.co/oJWgQbkavE

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 11, 2021

If Yglesias says it, you know it’s wrong. And this is! At least he’s half right. But where I come from, being half right is being all the way wrong.

What a doofus.

Larger point is that the "open web" is only being resurrected for people well-off enough to afford 60 subscriptions and for the rest, information is locked away. Which is a throwback, but to the 70s and 80s, without the shared experience of trusted over-the-air news

— David Dayen (@ddayen) April 12, 2021

The mega-project of the last decade has been to lock away all information again, to make it inaccessible, to leverage copyright to destroy fair use and free access, to make sure that the people do not and cannot know too much.

Makes ’em uppity, you know. Can’t have that.