To be upfront, I’m not OP of the Lemmygrad thread. Masking obviously is important and a good thing to do for your community. Personally, however, living in a place like Texas where almost nobody still masks though, 54 months (4.5 years) after the initial declaration, and everybody says COVID is relatively a non-issue like the flu, I understand why the OP would be demoralized.
クロスポスト: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5723508
Basically, wanted to know where people are at with mask wearing (as it relates to containing covid and all), I know it’s been a while since it started. And I’ve seen people who say covid can still be threatening, like through long covid and such, even if the initial impact doesn’t tend to be as bad. Being in the US, it’s especially hard to tell what makes sense because the gov sorta gave up on containment a while back and only ever half-assed pushing mask wearing. And wearing a mask alone was a controversial thing in some places, even in the very beginning. Then there’s vaccines, which of course help, but seems to be a thing like the flu where you have to get boosters to be fully covered for variant strains.
So in general, I’m wondering stuff like:
Do you still wear a mask or not and why? And do you have distinctions like large crowds or anything like that?
How does mask wearing compare by country, from what you know? For example, I’m sure China has a more pro-mask-wearing culture and policy overall, but I’m not clear on where they’re at this late into it.
Partly asking cause I want to re-assess my own position on it, see if it makes sense to change it at all by now. I’ve still been doing it, in part out of inertia, but the US management of it is such a mess, in gov and culture, it’s hard to tell when it makes sense to stop vs. just caving to peer pressure of people who were never acting responsibly to begin with.
For the record this is why I migrated my lemmygrad account to hexbear, eventually. Y’all got your fair share of libs here too but I still get a generally better vibe here. The mods over there removing the pushback but none of the anti-social, anti-science shit tells me all I need to know, anyway, and is at least vindicating.
I’ll say the same thing I said there: I don’t care how much of a struggle it is to mask in public anymore, because I do not get a choice. My immune system has been fucked up for the last 20 years due to biological lottery. I mask, or I die. You’re not saving the world by masking alone, but you are saving every sick person who has to go to the grocery store and brave the odds again for the 1500th day in a row (if they’re one of the lucky ones) from getting it from you, another potential risk vector. If your actions could swing the pendulum even slightly, if they could marginally tip the odds toward saving even one life in a tidal wave, why wouldn’t you do it? When you tell me your masking does nothing in the face of an apathetic society, when you tell me masking is “virtue signaling”, you tell me you are not serious. You tell me to my face that you are throwing your lot in with my enemy; you are ok with leaving me behind, for them. So I will treat you with the seriousness — and vitriol — you actually deserve, a grace not given to me or people like me as you kill us.
Maybe I should just make the switch too. There’s a lot of “I’m an edgy teenager” vibes from there. Sucks because I like the more serious tone of a lot of the comms. But when you got people saying that “only anarchists mask because they’re concerned about optics” you are playing team sports. You are a liberal at that point. I’m so fucking embarrassed.
Getting angry over the tone of ‘plague rats’ but not the actual eugenics rhetoric is pretty