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Notes -
https://archive.ph/IWYc8
A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose.
There's some real gems in here, and I feel bad for the one remaining owner and wish they/them the best, now that they've seen how positive, supportive, and inclusive their chosen subculture isn't.
This is also an example of the Internet showing me exactly what I want. Even when I'm browsing substack not logged in, it can somehow target me and my hobby horses.
A "Lesbian" Bar (which seems to really be a Queer Leftist establishment ridden with trannies) was until recently a Masks Required establishment; they planned to allow some days each week in which masks were optional rather than mandatory. Histrionics ensued. You'd think the article was a hit-piece from a right-wing rag, but the Boston Globe is only conservative if you're standing near the Left Pole.
I post it here at the risk of it being Boo-Outgroup, but I'm actually slightly gladdened. The neighborhood where I do most of my socializing is ridden with queer leftists who still mask, but "enforcement" is limited to the occasional DIY show or rave that's specifically targeted at maskies. However bad it is here, it's not as bad as a small town in Massachusetts.
Western society is easily more absurd at this point than what parodies looked like 15-20 years ago.
You can't rightly call this Western society.
This reads like satire. I'll grant you that such people exist but they're not mainstream. They're not even mainstream among LGBT people. This is the fringe of the fringe. It's like pointing at the Branch Davidians and calling it 'Christianity'.
Are you sure about that? Are they getting disowned and purged from the tribe?
Yeah, they’re definitely fringe-of-the-fringe. I have some variously-queer friends and acquaintances IRL and none of them act like this, even the truly far-left types aren’t this far out there.
IMO, you can think of people like this in relation to the left the same way as, say, wignats in relation to the right. They do exist, some of them really are closer to the halls of power than is comfortable, and you could be forgiven for reading their outsize online presence as real influence (they probably think of themselves that way)… but in truth they are a tiny extremist fringe of a much larger movement, and you are very unlikely to run into one IRL, even in spaces associated with their general political tribe.
The left’s unique problem is that left-wingers are pathologically afraid of the great sin of “looking mean.” Right-wingers have a much easier time telling someone explicitly to shut up and fuck off. For the progressive media, this is compounded by the long-running semi-conscious strategy of never ever using the phrase “far-left” to characterize anything.
Publishing this article is itself a (gentle) attempt to disown them. The Globe is very left-leaning, I’d say firmly left of the NYT, and this wasn’t even an opinion piece. The anthropological tone is kind of a way for progressive but more establishment-friendly lefties to say “look at these other people doing this wacky stuff.” It also lets them ring the “electoral liability” alarm under the cover of a human interest piece, without having to make any firm statement of such.
I think a bigger problem was the decision of a lot of major employers to endorse these idiots by effectively putting them in charge of hiring/firing choices for a decade plus.
People take "we can kill you any time we want" seriously, and that's what the Times blowing up prominent reporters means for a lot of the little people out in real life who need work to eat.
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