More Freedom Is the Whole Point of Vaccines.

Exactly. Seeing all those articles recently like, “Even after you and everyone you know gets the vaccine, you still must huddle inside, hiding, while coronavirus bangs on the windows, for the next 10 years” has been beyond annoying.

Taking away people’s hope will greatly reduce vaccine uptake. Why even bother getting vaccinated if you still can’t see your friends, hug anyone, or behave somewhat normally? You’d think liberals would be running out of feet to shoot themselves in but apparently they are some new species of millipede with a record number of them.

Advising people that they must do nothing differently after vaccination—not even in the privacy of their homes—creates the misimpression that vaccines offer little benefit at all. Vaccines provide a true reduction of risk, not a false sense of security. And trying to eliminate even the lowest-risk changes in behavior both underestimates people’s need to be close to one another and discourages the very thing that will get everyone out of this mess: vaccine uptake

This is how you know that masks and social distancing are more about virtue signaling for many people, and about punishing others, than about the pandemic at all. Well, hey, at least they are wearing masks. And of course there is the plute propaganda to contend with.

The real point of Baudrillard’s third order-simulacra is not that everything is fake or illusory, but that everything is undecidable; all facts are instantly subsumed into a fluctuating statistical model, generating a probabilistic array of constantly shifting interpretations.

— Geoff Shullenberger (@daily_barbarian) January 23, 2021

I see someone actually read and understood their Baudrillard. Almost never happens. I am legitimately impressed.

It’s so damn odd hearing people say things like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter that a bunch of old people are dying of Covid, they would’ve died soon anyway.”

Those are grandmothers, grandfathers, friends, neighbors. People.

Thinking about that, pondering the utter lack of empathy and humanity that entails, I wonder how I always thought I had little empathy and no surfeit of benevolence towards my fellow humans. Compared to me, these people are Hannibal Lecter. Who knew? They just hid it better until the cards were on the table.

Also thinking about how much I’d sacrifice to spend even a few days with my dead friend again, and how these people — and there are so very many of them — seem content to just toss people in the dumpster the moment they become inconvenient, and then to tell others who are mourning that it’s ok gramps died, he would’ve died soon anyway since he was so old and useless.

I thought I was heartless. These people, though, have shown their true face, and it’s something I can’t forget nor look away from. It’s a big part of why I want to leave this country. They are vile and terrible and deserve nothing but scorn, derision and utter contempt.

Here’s what I ate for breakfast today:

Know why you don’t see anything? Because I ate nothing. Not atypical for me at all. That’s why I don’t weigh as much as an elephant seal.

Cropping out the user name and all that because I don’t want to shame anyone, but this what constitutes a normal breakfast for some:

Each one of those mini sausage links is 170 calories. There are four of them. That’s 680 calories right there.

A bagel with butter is approximately 300 calories (assuming very light butterage).

A fried egg has 80 calories. There’s two of them, so that’s 160 calories.

And 8 oz. of chocolate milk has 190 calories.

All told: 1,330 calories for fucking breakfast. That’s about as many calories as I eat in the average day, and I work out hard most days. And Americans wonder why they are fat.

At my old job, I routinely observed people eat more at lunch than I ate in 2-3 days. I can’t understand it.

Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them.

Why do we value lies more than lives? We know that certain falsehoods kill people. Some of those who believe such claims as “coronavirus doesn’t exist”, “it’s not the virus that makes people ill but 5G”, or “vaccines are used to inject us with microchips” fail to take precautions or refuse to be vaccinated, then contract and spread the virus. Yet we allow these lies to proliferate.

I’d add to that the lies “masks don’t work” and that the “vaccine is unsafe.”

I’ve been thinking about this problem of misinformation and related topics nearly constantly. As I’ve already noted, I have less and less sympathy for those who believe and then spread such distortions. It is not just a societal duty but an individual one to do better, to be better.

And to add my own bit of (what will probably sound like) conspiracism: I wonder how much of this is sponsored and promulgated by the Croesus class to ensure that lockdowns do continue, and that the conditions that made them vastly richer persist for as long as possible.

You cannot search in Russian on IMBD. Yet I want to search in Russian on IMDB.

Whyyyyyy.