Keeble

"the bird"

left wing bird, online and trying this " alternative social media" thing again. recently unionized barista. Weekly wikipedia streamer. ❤ @proxy ❤30. Avi: me!

last.fm listening


Keeble
@Keeble

this is a pretty revealing window into the flip most liberal and left of liberal westerners did after trump left office/when vaccines became available: they went from going all "believe science! its our duty to make the world safer for everyone!" to "well i don't have to think about covid anymore, because its over and there are vaccines which means i wont get infected again. and if i do i wont die or get long covid. oops i cant hear you im going into a tunnel byeeeeeeeeeeeee".

to me this logic is pretty South Park-y for someone nominally "left": the position that caring about stuff beyond a certain level is vaguely cringe and not something to be proud of. as sean o'neal put it in the av club in 2017:

South Park’s influence echoes through every modern manifestation of the kind of hostile apathy—nurtured along by Xbox Live shit-talk and comment-board flame wars and Twitter—that’s mutated in our cultural petri dish to create a rhetorical world where whoever cares, loses. Today, everyone with any kind of grievance probably just has sand in their vagina; expressing it with anything beyond a reaction GIF means you’re “whining”; cry more, your tears are delicious. We live in Generation U Mad Bro, and from its very infancy, South Park has armed it with enough prefab eye-rolling retorts (“ManBearPig!” “I’m a dolphin!” “Gay Fish!” “…’Member?”) to sneeringly shut down discussions on everything from climate change and identity politics to Kanye West and movie reboots. Why not? Everything sucks equally, anyway. Voting is just choosing between some Douche and a Turd Sandwich. Bullying is just a part of life. Suck it up and take it, until it’s your turn to do the bullying. Relax, guy.

see, covid was a crisis, an undeniable one. but the second you have the ability to slink back into that above logic its very comfy to do so.

another interesting thing about that tweet: it has the famed "cowards' ratio": it has an order of magnitude more likes than it does retweets. Generally, this indicates opinions that are widely agreed upon but that people are afraid of sharing bc their potentially taboo nature. THAT's what makes this attitude so interesting in total: because it shows that this south park-y apathetic return to 1980-2001 era normalcy argument is still really effective in some peoples minds, and why its so hard to get people to start masking again.

thankfully ive seen a big return at least temporarily to masking from people whove foregone that approach. maybe it will stick. but if the above tweet's attitude remains, and there are no large trustworthy institutions that get people to act in our collective best interest (rather than "well the only thing i have is keeping up appearances so if i wear a mask that fails" or whatever) im not holding my breath for a societal awakening as soon as it becomes convenient to abandon that


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