Pessimistic take: if omicron *is* mild, many people will assume it means we can declare victory.

But lethality could re-emerge in an omicron-derived strain, and if everyone gets omicron there'll be more of us incubating mutations, so it'll happen sooner rather than later.

/1 https://t.co/lRN5Uw60NP

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) December 12, 2021

And also, the dinosaurs might come back and eat us all as we sleep. Could happen. And also, plants could sprout arms and throttle us until we all die.

Also, penguins could peck us to death. Yup.

Everyone should read this thread to show how fucking nuts we’ve gone.

Dems are going to lose so very hard in 2022. It’s going to be an utter bloodbath. And you know what? They deserve it. Just look at that bullshit.

“it’s worth remembering that the point of those measures is to maximize people’s health and well-being. And maximizing health and well-being is not the same thing as minimizing Covid.”

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) December 10, 2021

Fuckin’ right. And we especially shouldn’t be enacting restrictions on everyone so the unvaccinated can cavort and caper at will. Makes no goddamn sense.

Fingers and toes crossed this holds up, because omicron is going to be everywhere. Lockdown, no lockdown, masks, no masks, high vax rates, low vax rates. None of that is likely to matter very much for most of the world

— Mason ‍♂️✂️ (@webdevMason) December 13, 2021

I agree with Mason. I disagree here with Zeynep. So far it doesn’t look like Omicron is milder just due to prior exposure; it seems to be less virulent apart from that. But we’ll know for sure soon enough.

Zeynep is someone I can disagree with without feeling like she’s an idiot, though. The difference is that even when I disagree with her great and amazing brain, I trust that she’s considered all of the evidence and weighed it well but has merely come to a different yet still-justified conclusion. Most people do not do that so I have no respect for their pretend ratiocination. Zeynep Tufekci and Brit Marling are two among a very few people whom I will always respect greatly even when I disagree because they’ve done the fucking work.

This is a stupid and irresponsible headline

It was not a superspreader event

You get vaccinated/boosted, mask indoors when possible, etc, and continue living your life (unless you plan to live indefinitely without society) https://t.co/1w3jA3zSQs

— Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy (@trishankkarthik) December 11, 2021

When you look at it from the perspective of the new anchorite asceticism developing, though, it makes perfect sense.

2036 Summer Olympics: Feminists succeed in banning women as their participation at all is seen as “sexualization,” because it makes use of bodies, which are inherently sexual in nature.

Male stand-ins participate in all sports in the place of the missing women, because biology and gender don’t exist.

The Pandemic of the Vaccinated Is Here.

Ha. No. 95% of cases in those under 60 will be asymptomatic. You’ll only catch those infections with random testing or sampling sewer water. In older people, yes, it will indeed be a larger problem however, because their immune systems are not as good often.

But the libs want us to get back to lockdown and social isolation because Bezos, Musk and Zuck don’t have quite enough money just yet. That is what this is all about, really.

“Butter scraped over too much bread” is underrated as an emotional descriptor line.

Like people want to make Tolkien out to be all about the academic linguistics & worldbuilding & epic battles but that’s a stellar fucking line by any measure & I come back to it a lot in extremis

— Christmas Valente (@catvalente) December 12, 2021

Tolkien was a very good writer who achieved exactly what he intended in his works. That much of it wasn’t in a modern mode is what people object to — it was designed to feel like Old English and Old Norse works feel if you were reading them in those languages, which most people cannot. So Tolkien attempted to make LOTR have that sense of foreignness, except in English.

It’s amazing to me that people are often ecstatic about their own lives and experiences being made worse, and then how fervently they will outright lie about it. But first, someone says this about modern Firefox and is thoroughly downvoted on Ars Technica despite being 100% correct:

And then one commenter comes in and says something that is absolutely not possible to do:

That’s the whole fucking point. It’s impossible to make Firefox behave like it should anymore; you can’t alter the browser itself at all any longer and soon, you’ll barely be able to alter what it does to pages — which, you know, is the fucking point of extensions in the first fucking place. And then to have disphit busted-brain mooks lie to you about it is what is particularly galling.

I remember when computers and browsers worked how the user wanted, not how the advertisers in control of them wanted. It wasn’t that long ago, but apparently most people have completely forgotten this and want you to expel it from memory too. I was dispirited by how easily people bought the “we must harm you for your own good” security lie about why XUL had to go with no similar-but-more-secure replacement. It doesn’t even pass the sniff test but people are extremely, extremely susceptible to even very obvious propaganda, especially if they are paternally told they must be harmed because it’s for their own good.

That’s why those extensions were worth a damn! I could control what happens with and to my browser. Now it’s all in the hands of advertising and marketing companies in the ever-present liberal “for my own good.”

Fuck all y’all.

i also don’t have student debt, and some people cannot seem to comprehend that I *still care* about people who do have it and want to help them https://t.co/Rog6ulGoa7

— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) December 12, 2021

Was just discussing this phenomenon with my partner and another friend the other day: the vast majority of people cannot even seem to conceive of anything that they are not currently directly experiencing, or to understand that you might care about something that does not apply to you personally at that very moment.

Have most peple become goldfish? What’s going on here?