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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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I admit this could be my bubble but nobody I know still cares about covid, or what people did during covid, despite me knowing several people who were very covid paranoid.

I see young Leftist Maskies every day.

The last time I went to a speed dating event (2025 summer) they required proof of vaccination and "encouraged" masks.

😑

All of your stories of your life are so fucking bizarre, man. Its like you have made it your life's mission to only interact with the insane.

I don't care much about Covid. I care a lot about what people did during Covid, to the point that I think people who claim they don't are lying to themselves and/or to others. Covid measures were too draconian, too partisan, and too clearly divorced from anything approaching neutral process or objective standards to be handwaved with an appeal to unspecified "systems" or generic "society". The pandemic response and related events permanently altered my relationship to my government and my nation.

The pandemic response and related events permanently altered my relationship to my government and my nation.

I gathered that. What I'm saying is, this isn't the case for the normies around me ("nobody I know still cares much about... What people did during covid"), so I am skeptical that it's driving the vibecession.

You don't have to actively care about something for it to have profoundly affected your life. In fact, I would guess that often the most disruptive things are the ones that people move on from, because that's how you get past it and move on with your life. But it will still have affected you!

Trauma reactions, both health and suppressed, can support this.

Healthy trauma survivors may be changed, but they don't think on it because they're trying to move on and focus on the rest of their lives instead. They can be physically / mentally scarred, but scar tissue isn't something you necessarily pick at.

Suppressed trauma survivors are also changed, and also don't think about it because avoidance is easier than the void in the sense of self/control/understanding. So they bottle it up and do not think about the bottle as much as possible.

I think it's not that COVID itself is still an issue, but that it carved paths in the sand that still have relevance today. Anecdotally, I don't know a single person who was partisan during COVID who didn't get much more partisan. Those changes in attitude didn't disappear once mask mandates were lifted.

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