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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat.

Do they really?

One thing the pandemic taught me is that people's experiences vary a lot by the country or state or city, but still, do they really?

Here, we had everyone masking in shops etc without much grumbling, like, all right, why not. But I remember exactly one case of a guy asking me to keep the distance and it was so weird, like dude, you actually take it that seriously? And he was apologetic asking me to step back, rather than frothing at the mouth.

So: it's entirely possible that my experience is completely different from your experience. But on the other hand I can't help but suspect that my IRL and online experiences respectively are actually very much the same as yours, but I'm better at discriminating between the two and dismissing online crazies as not representative of the people.

I actually had someone ask me from across the street, “Where’s your mask?”

I said back, “It’s in the car. I didn’t expect to encounter anyone between parking my car and my front door.” He apologized and walked on.