I have also seen people just absolutely enraged that anyone would dare talk about being happy their lives can start getting back to normal now that they've been vaccinated.

— 🚩Shepherd🏴 (@NeolithicSheep) March 15, 2021

A lot of people at their core — on the conservative and alas on the liberal side too — are just pretty evil. They are irredeemable and just garbage humans. But unfortunately ethically we cannot just throw them in the bin.

As crises do, the pandemic revealed the true colors of all too many. And those colors were not pleasant to behold at all.

Good luck coming for Gen X- every last one of them can fight. They put them into training at age 2, handed them the keys to the house at age 4 and had them cooking by 7 and with neighborhood jobs at 9.

— Shanelle Little (@ShanelleLittle) March 16, 2021

Look our parents were either too busy working 8 jobs to survive or too busy snorting coke – we didn't get supervision. We ran feral through the streets and fields. https://t.co/nm78x6tRWd

— 🚩Shepherd🏴 (@NeolithicSheep) March 16, 2021

I’m Gen X, and can confirm. My mom was literally snorting coke during the 1980s, and I was dressing myself and getting myself ready for kindergarten at age 5. This is partly because of where I grew up, but also the generation I am from. It was common for kids to be left alone at home then starting around age 10, to go places alone, and to not be constantly surveilled.

Also, yes, I was harvesting pecans for money by age 9.

I’ve written about this transformation in me before before, but this is what changed me from being frustratedly amused by my fellow Americans to actively detesting all too many of them.

If you are a person who thinks that you have a right not to wear a mask, that philosophy cascades: I couldn’t give a darn about the cashier in the supermarket or the train driver because I don’t care about anyone. I will go into the bar, and I will do what I will do.

This pandemic has shown us who we are, at a level of clarity that is shocking to most people

Masks work and despite my hatred for them, they aren’t hard to wear. They save lives and they prevent others from infection and thus long Covid. And, they protect the wearer, too. It’s a net win for everyone. Yet many of the people of this country have such a fucked-up idea of freedom that they’d stoop to harming others and even themselves to express it. Before, I thought it was exaggeration, but now I know it’s not: this is a death cult of sorts, that worships such a perverse and contorted conception of freedom that it’s indistinguishable from the exaltation of annihilation itself.

This is not a sane country; this is not a sane society.

The pause in AstraZeneca vaccination based on dubious associations makes me think of 👇: a randomized trial where the treatment was… nothing. By random chance, the treatment group, who, again, had nothing done to them, died much more. You need to have a theory as well as data. https://t.co/Y0kUsqebfs

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) March 15, 2021

With a low background rate, doesn’t take much of anything to skew results. People have a lot of trouble reasoning about things like this.