Snopes is full time debunking “empty store shelves” photos as dating from 2020 and/or from foreign countries.

— Gobble up your booster 🦃💉 (@cactusinsurance) November 17, 2021

Oh, so that’s supposed to be fake now, too, huh? Man, the libs have gone fucking nuts. I’ve seen empty shelves all over the place. This photo was taken September 6, 2021 and I was standing beside my partner as she took it:

Debunk that, you dipshit motherfucker.

#1. Moralizing
#2. Singular focus on low risk children
#3. Inability to weigh tradeoffs seriously
#4. Unhelpful culture war bullshit

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) November 17, 2021

Trade-offs and the philosophy thereof is something I’ve been thinking about lately. In their justified disdain for the trolley problem, liberals are almost completely incapable of dealing with the idea of real-world trade-offs. Not every choice is one that will inevitably harm someone(s), but in some situations this is in fact the case. In a pandemic and its response, many choices do in fact involve real, ineluctable harms to help and help to harm. Deny it all you want, but it’s like gravity: still present; the trade-offs still persist.

For instance: how many children is it worth harming so that older people might be protected from Covid? Or alternately, how many grandparents must be prevented from seeing their grandkids for years to protect the grandparents from Covid?

How long must kids remain out of school to prevent community spread, and how much future quality of life and earnings are we willing to sacrifice for that? How long should we wear masks and in what situations? How many businesses must we destroy to save how many people? How many women must we drive from the workplace permanently to save how many? You get the idea.

There are further second-order failure modes and consequences from these trade-offs, too. But the main lib strategy has been lying and denying rather than dealing with them honestly (and there are many more I could list easily). This has harmed the fight against the pandemic immensely and will continue to do so since trade-offs aren’t an idea many libs seems able to even understand, much less account for in their moral models of the world.

A lot of covid spread takes place at home. Among family. None of our "just mask at the grocery store!" sort of one-off approach really prepares people very well for that, imo.

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) November 17, 2021

Don’t have time to look it up today, but I think the stats I’ve seen indicate that about 70-90% of Covid spread occurs at home. That’s why lockdowns have to be incredibly, ridiculously draconian to have a more-than-negligible effect.

Great performance. Look at her eyes, though. Surely those are colored contacts? I’ve never seen anyone with eyes that color before. Either way, they’re beautiful, especially lit like that (there’s an interview that follows where it’s easier to see).

The first ten on today’s playlist:

When recording the experience becomes more important than having the experience:

I remember another world. I’m no Bon Jovi fan, but you can get a sense of that from this video:

How people related to one another and to the world was just very different then. No matter if you think it’s better now or was better then, there have been major changes that few really recognize.

It’s too bad that so much of the pandemic response had to be taken over by the scoldy fun police. This made it so much worse and more traumatic for everyone. The pandemic response rightly shuttered many places while the SFP made sure others that would’ve been sustaining were also not available: parks, beaches, safe outdoor visits with relatives, etc.

We did basically nothing right and just got lucky Covid wasn’t a worse virus.