There's a fantasy that once climate apocalypse begin to directly affect comfortable deniers they'll realize the truth and be ashamed, but the fact that during devastating fires people went out hunting for fictional antifa arsonists shows what will actually happen instead

— Gautham Thomas (@gautham_t) September 10, 2020

This is somethng I was very wrong about: years ago I thought that once climate change really started fucking places up, as it’s doing now, people would grasp its reality and change their minds and their behaviors.

I was utterly delusional. That’s not what people will do. What they will in fact do is to look for someone else on which to pin blame, still downplay the actuality and effects of climate change, and then live in denial until they die. This is the reality. They’d willingly sacrifice themselves and their own children rather than recognize any reality.

I hope evolution does better on the next round than this whole Homo sapiens thing. Total failure there.

We see with the pandemic that states committed to the liberal conception of freedom are stuck curtailing actual freedom (i.e., to do what we normally do) because they refused to take decisive action. But consider that this is likely true ALL THE TIME, not just during a pandemic.

— scientism (@mr_scientism) September 10, 2020

There are sorts of freedom we don’t even have words for because of the collapse of all conceptions of freedom into the rubric of atomized individualism over the past 500 years.

Viewed this way (which is the most accurate), the anti-masker and the (pseudo)liberal fetishism of never going outside and mask-wearing even in environments where it makes no sense are all parts of the same corrupted whole, designed to obfuscate and obliterate the possibility of greater freedoms beyond.

The serpent feeds on itself in a room filled with sustenance, while denying its presence.

People have forgotten the media environment in February. I was begging journalists to take this seriously, being lectured that we should worry about the flu instead—and top newspapers were publishing articles saying we should continue traveling and masks were just superstition.

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) September 9, 2020

To come back to this, it is very interesting to me how quickly so much is forgotten, then becomes “conspiracy theory.” In such an environment breeds monstrosities like QAnon.

Zeynep as usual is right. In February as my partner and I were stocking up our larder to prepare for what we knew was coming, we were being told by nearly all media sources that masks were superstition, that social distancing was racist, that the flu was far worse, and there was nothing to worry about.

People are forgetting all that now — many of them because they have no wish to examine how very wrong they were and why. As usual, we will learn nothing.