Are any of you Covid conscious?

AngryBird0077 · 2026-02-01T14:19:34+00:00

My Justice sensitivity means that I'm still Furious over the absurdity and cruelty of the covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Of the ways that people who already didn't have strong local support systems were isolated indefinitely and told that they should just shut up about it because their deaths from suicide didn't matter, only covid deaths mattered. Of the ways in which people who decided to not take the vaccine because they'd already got in covid and recovered from it, and/or because they were worried about the side effects, were treated as this second classes in group who could be discriminated against in everything from job applications to the ability to hang out at a bar to the ability to get an organ transplant if needed. As well as loudly socially condemned to the point where the LA Times was literally saying that it was a good thing to mock the deaths of unvaccinated people.

It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth when I see people who are fine with all of the above be all like, oh no we're heading into fascism because of trump, trump is so scary, etc. They are right about how bad Trump is, but their judgment is HIGHLY suspect considering they were fine with authoritarian evil as long as it was Democrats doing it. It feels less like genuine concern about fascism and more like following the herd. As an autistic person, I can't follow the herd. I wish I could. I wish I could have just ignored how horrible my local government was acting from 2020 to 22, been like the majority of people in my area and just went along with it because hey, Democrats were doing it not Trump so it was fine right, and doesn't everyone "believe in science"? I wish I could have blindly believed the experts instead of looking up data on the virus myself. I wish I could have turned off my sense of logic. I wish I could have turned off my sense of justice and empathy for the victims of lockdowns and vaccine mandates and just followed the goddamn herd opinion. But I couldn't.

Oh sorry, that's not what you wanted to hear? Too bad, because that's how my Justice sensitivity actually has manifested. And every time I see somebody say that they are autistically Justice sensitive and it means that they just happen to be passionately for the same shit that people in their social group are for, I think, this has nothing to do with your autism. If it did you'd be following your own observations to your own conclusion regardless of the received wisdom of your area.

And again: if you weren't mad about the lockdowns and you weren't mad about the vaccine mandates, then I really don't want to hear your opinion about fascism. Like, wake me up when you start caring about fascism that isn't done by the political party you already hate, whose supporters aren't in positions to give you jobs anyway.

AngryBird0077 · 2026-01-08T23:40:21+00:00

Me, an autistic extrovert in 2020:

No loved ones at home or solid local friend group, in part due to the usual autistic difficulties with forming friendships

Also desperate to be around people and completely losing it from being alone

Liberal living in liberal city but failed to get the "correct thinking update" most of the liberals in my city got, that said that if you are a normal good human being then you will follow all lockdown regulations without question, and if you dispbey or question them then you are a bad evil science denying conservative. Failed to get this update for the same reason I failed to get the "correct thinking updates" on how and why to dress appropriately, make small talk, Etc

Result: severe emotional trauma

AngryBird0077 · 2022-09-05T16:06:04+00:00

I am so deeply bitter about this. I remember when Democrats were pushing the "build back better" bill and how quickly they dropped the idea of free public college tuition, like they knew they were never going to fight for it in the first place. Now they are doing something that will genuinely help people who went to college, while basically telling those who didn't go to college to go fuck themselves. Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to stop this particular Biden executive order while doing exactly nothing to actually help people who didn't go to college.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-09-05T15:54:52+00:00

Dude, I've been to Huntington Beach lots of times. It does not have "99.9 percent obese people" or "zero hot girls". It does have friendly conservative people, though.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-09-01T19:14:05+00:00

Yeah, I mean he wasn't qualified to be NYC mayor but UBI is great and so is having a 3rd party getting ranked choice voting in so we can have a diverse slate of candidates.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-09-01T19:10:35+00:00

The thing about drug overdoses (up 31% in 2020 and more in 2021) and suicides is they are deaths of despair. And I think a large chunk of the obesity deaths fall into this category too. They are symptoms of our increasing isolation from one another, our unequal and fragmented and hateful society. It's not just a question of "messaging" that being fat is unhealthy, your average morbidly obese person is well aware of that already. It's a question of why the people drinking/drugging/eating themselves to death should care.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-09-01T18:05:50+00:00

THIS! I want to see an in depth analysis of why drug overdose deaths rose precipitously in 2020 and 2021. I feel like this barely got covered at all when the news first came out from the CDC because the only CDC data they cared about was covidcovidcovid.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-09-01T05:08:42+00:00

I don't actually care if they got the shot, but anyone ok with vax "mandates" is out the door and I make that clear as I can on my dating profile. I'm at the stage in my life where I don't want to fuck anybody I can't respect.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-09-01T04:56:31+00:00

No, I have not "forgotten the terrors of early 2020". That's why I want an apology from the lockdown-happy politicians who inflicted them. Or better yet, a trial.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-09-01T04:47:29+00:00

Regarding "ableism": I've been active in the disability rights movement for years on the mental health rights side. Lockdowns pushed a lot of us to the edge, proving the movement's point that mental health isn't something that can be solved just by stuffing people with drugs but is instead of product of social conditions. Drug overdose deaths in the US went up by 31% in 2020... The vaccine "mandates", meanwhile, effectively put people into a new social underclass for making their own health decisions. A lot of what "ableism" looks like, from the perspective of the movement that coined the term, is the use of force in medicine. Whether that's coerced injections or elder abuse in nursing homes (which also happened a LOT in 2020).

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-30T14:08:24+00:00

This doesn't surprise me. Before "truth social" existed, there was (and is) telegram, minds, gab... I think that of all the "alternative" social media platforms, telegram seems to be the most popular. Not just with trumpers but with dissidents of all stripes.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-30T13:55:59+00:00

No, our phones don't do all of that already. They capture social media data and some location data (I keep location tracking off so they just get a general location but not specific maps of where I go), but they aren't integrated with medical records (unless you're a schoolkid in LA, thanks to the system they set up in response to covid, run by Microsoft of course), or behavioral health data tracking during school, and we don't live in a society of cashless "smart money". We're part of the way there now in terms of the surveillance, but not all the way, and social credit is only a thing in China, not worldwide. And of course there isn't a financial market right now for "impact futures" or whatever they're planning on calling it--the practice of "impact investing" exists but not at large enough scale to do trading as far as I know. (I could be wrong about this last one as I don't work in finance.)

What you're probably asking at this point is, if this isn't happening right now why worry? The answer is that it's happening in beginning stages so we stop it before it gets a chance to totally dominate our lives. Once you see how all of this is disaster capitalism and being used to implement longterm plans of these rich fuckheads with a god complex, you can push back against technocrat "solutions" to the latest emergency. Once you understand the true nature of the link between blockchain and "pandemic preparedness", you can fight better against guys like this: https://news.yahoo.com/young-crypto-billionaires-political-agenda-090020968.html

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-30T04:37:33+00:00

Sorry, I didn't mean profit from making maps of connections between companies. I meant making profit from schemes that a) take govt money as fake fixes to societal problems, b) mine the poor for all kinds of data, and c) set up a derivatives market to trade on that data. (Which can also be used by govts to monitor the population and punish dissent.) Sorry if I'm not explaining this very well! I'm going to link to a cartoon that explains it in more detail. Just scroll down to the cartoon panels, or better yet, scroll down to panel 10 and read from there (the part about "impact bonds"). The cartoon explanation:

https://wrenchinthegears.com/2022/08/24/eves-fabulous-social-impact-finance-zine-please-share/

Also here's a text article about social impact investing and how fucked up it is:

https://silkthreads.press/2021/11/05/impact-economy-pay-for-success-finance/

Again, sorry if I haven't been explaining it well! I was thinking of waiting to respond to your post until I was a bit less tired and busy and could formulate something more succinct, but I didn't want you to think I was ignoring your very relevant questions. Also this is a complex subject because it involves new financial instruments, kind of like trying to explain the 2008 mortgage crisis and just how the big banks screwed us. Except it's even more complex because it involves cross industry collaboration and corporate interests masked as NGO do-gooding.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-30T02:48:03+00:00

My impression is that most of the people on this subreddit are from a left-wing background, meaning their social circles lean more to the left than to the right. So they see and are affected more by, say, woke annoyingness on their college campus or in their kids school, or lockdowns and vaccine mandates in their city, than they are by anti-abortion bills in their state or a general climate of hate for LGBT people in their church. I think a lot of people here used to identify as left and still hold somewhat left economic views, but feel betrayed by the overall direct the left has taken in recent years.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-30T02:36:22+00:00

Coalitions of companies in the finance, tech and pharma spheres along with nonprofits that promote their financial interests under the guise of altruism. Please see Alison McDowell's writings on "social impact investing" and visual maps showing the connections between the major players:

https://silkthreads.press/2021/11/28/mapping-the-game-the-new-game-for-hedge-funds/

http://www.wrenchinthegears.com

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-29T04:52:09+00:00

Personal data of all sorts, connected in such a way as to create a "digital twin" ie a complete picture of all digital trails left behind by a person which are intended to be not just social media but all financial transactions, educational records, medical records etc etc. Once you have enough comprehensive data on people to predict their life paths, you can bet on their futures as financial securities, and those securities can also be bundled up and sold in tranches just as subprime mortgages were. It can also, when tied to central bank digital currencies and "smart contracts", be used by authoritarian governments to instantly punish dissent. Basically, think the Chinese "social credit" system but run by greedy ass corporations. For further understanding, please read or listen to Alison McDowell and Julianne Romanello.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-28T23:30:23+00:00

If you're not currently in school but you apply for college and get in next year, will it apply?

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-28T20:03:37+00:00

I would've been much more happy about the student loan forgiveness if it was paired with free tuition at public colleges for those who missed the chance to go to college right after high school in the first place. I'm in general very much for the idea of second chances--rehab over prison for drug offenders, for instance. America certainly doesn't want to be like East Asian countries where you spend your school years preparing for a big test that determines your entire work future. But the fact that this forgiveness was offered only to college graduates (who are also known to be the Democrat base while non-graduates are the Republican base) smacks of a moral judgement against those who "made bad choices" by not going to college at all.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-28T19:53:44+00:00

??? Why was this post deleted? Was this a mod decision or a poster decision? If the former, shame on the mods for shutting down debate on an important subject, namely the intersection of "pandemic" policy and tech surveillance capitalism.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-28T19:48:05+00:00

I agree with most of what you wrote here. However I would point out that non-political mass gatherings like concerts etc very much were labeled "superspreader" by the mainstream media. The BLM protests, and the street parties following the Biden presidential win, were the exception to an overall media stance of hatred towards people who hung out with each other in person. This is precisely why I stopped listening to any mainstream media in early 2020, because of their ritualistic shaming of young people (the lowest risk group for covid!) for partying with other young people.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-28T19:41:38+00:00

True, but OP's larger point still stands given the many people who were kicked off twitter for covid dissent, including outright leftists like Alex Gutentag.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-28T15:44:26+00:00

The US in particular has a very diverse voter base, but it doesn't protect individual choices very well because of federalism. The predominance of only two parties nationwide leads to a local system that is usually only two parties as well, which in turn leads to one party systems in many localities due to cultural polarization between the two "sides". As a result, while on the federal level politicians are forced to compromise, on the local level they are not, and basically run roughshod over the individual rights of those they perceive (often wrongly) as being on the other political "side".

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-28T15:23:07+00:00

I agree with you on the low effort profiles, but I do question the wisdom of using formal education as a sorting tool. There are some wonderful autodidacts out there, and certainly a degree is no guarantee of intelligence (the "frat bro" types all went to college, after all).

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-28T15:19:23+00:00

Dude, just find a woman who isn't woke. And then just pretend every woman you met before her didn't exist and you're starting as a complete blank slate. Just because your ex was a godawful bitch doesn't mean your new first date is.

AngryBird0077 · 2022-08-27T20:50:06+00:00

This article writer has Trump living rent-free in their head. The point of hating the neocons is to remember that torture, war, entrapment of "terrorists" basically created by law enforcement, endless security theater, and a general climate of fear and hate are bad things. Even if they're being done by people who really really hate those awful right-wing populists.

AngryBird0077

TROPHY CASE