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Notes -
Biden: Pandemic is over
Of course, for all important purposes, pandemic has been over in most of the Western world for most of this year - ie. sure, there's a disease going around, but the "pandemic mentality" is gone, and so have at least the most visible and onerous restrictions - but this sort of a declaration, offhand and qualified as it is, seems like a point in the general development.
It's already evident in social media that COVID doomers - the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions etc. - are angry and frustrated, as they've been for months, but I also wonder how the sort of "reverse doomers" who declared a year ago that Western world is never going to declare the pandemic over and give up restrictions, either out of stupidity or out of a malignant conspiracy, are interpreting it.
Honestly it's shocking how sticky some of this stuff is, even if the vast majority of people have just moved on with their lives.
Got asked to take a RAT test to attend a 29th birthday celebration in which nobody is immunocompromised or over 30. Some people just seem to want to live in COVID zero mode forever.
High status respected people have to lead and these people will follow. Once the avocado toast people can be sure that being unworried about covid doesn't mean you're a Nazi or Qanon or anti-science guy, they will go along. At this point some are still very afraid of being seen as part of that "misinfo" cluster if they aren't worried about covid enough, the cluster that includes things like climate change denial, Russia stuff, etc. But once it's announced that The Science now actually says XYZ, they will accept it too. They are just taking a bit longer, like that Japanese soldier on that island who "fought" WWII even decades after it ended.
But high status respected people have led. Both implicitly - how often do you see masks worn by people on the telly? - and explicitly, like Biden did just here, or numerous "pandemic influencers" have done in recent months.
I've seen some people lump all mask-wearers, Covid-doomers etc. to some "sheeple" category of people who just do what they're told and follow trends, but the trend-following normies have actually ditched the masks and social distancing a long time ago. This remnant really consists of true believers who don't follow the trends and often actually adopted Covid distancing measures before they became the social norm; in many ways they at least can consider themselves equally headstrong and dissident types as the Covid skeptics do, or have done.
Of course "normie"/"contrarian" is a sliding scale, many of them will probably eventually succumb to the social pressure, just as many Covid skeptics did - but still, it's different than described here.
The maskers I see where I work are only about 5% of everyone. I see them as hardcore redguards. I know that they will likely be among those who interrogate me a few years from now before sending me to the gulag.
The Covid episode is mostly passed for now but the radicalized among us remain like sleeper agents, ready to coerce us into ever more experimental medical treatments at the slightest pretext.
I understand the anger, I feel a lot of it myself. But this is too boo-outgroupy and inflammatory for what is supposed to be a discussion group. This isn't a place to vent, it is a place to discuss, and you should speak as if everyone is reading/listening.
You are assuming “everyone” is just the Americans here. Many places around the world (ranging from most of Asia and Latin America to Germanic/Francophone Europe to former white British colonies) had experiences with covid which very much justify that depiction. Indefinite house(or proper) arrest, and mass firings of people not going along with the hysteria was a reality less than a year ago. There was a very credible possibility that even worse would come, as anyone who saw the news coverage in places like Austria could easily deduct.
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Not sure how inflammatory it is compared to just describing reality... Australia had quarantine camps and Canada as well had guarded mandatory "hotels"... wasn't even for confirmed cases, you could test negative but if you met requirements (daring to leave the country while unvaxxed, filling out a form wrong) you actually were physically detained without trial.
Contracts were awarded to build vastly more expansive versions of these COVID prisons, the conspiracists weren't making up the contracts and the preparations... they were just always pork contracts for the politically connected or the governments were forced to back off by the political push-back.
Its incredibly difficult to state just how much true totalitarianism was implemented in the name of COVID restrictions and how many people were demanding that they be expanded to truly horrific extents.
Canada mandated a phone app to leave and reenter the country and for a while pursued regulatory reprisals against those who deleted the app. People were calling for the fines and prison terms to be applied to everyone who tried to reenter the country without downloading the app.
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I'm merely describing my lived experience.
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