Random Rant Thread

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The CDC is such a complete fucking mess, man. This pandemic has thoroughly ruined the potential fiction stories where the agency would play a major role. Hell, it has already ruined the ones that have already been made.

It really is one version of Never meet your heroes, because they're sure to disappoint you.

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Periodical reminder: Masks do protect you, the wearers, too. But you have to wear good ones for that. Loose ones, of any material, most certainly won't cut it. Loose is evil when it comes to masks. Make sure they fit.

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The anti-vaxxers/vaccine-skeptics are basically making the same mistake as the one made by those who assume that organic pesticides are less toxic to humans than synthetic ones. That assumption is just false, and it's all based on ignorance. I wouldn't even use the word "misunderstanding" because they are usually not even at the level where any kind of "understanding" is involved. They are just thinking and talking out of their asses based on their childish notion on nature.

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"Screw NPIs, screw the vaccines, let's get infected with Omicron, and get it over with. The pandemic will END with this variant!"

OK, I've heard this song before, not just once but three times. You parroted it with Delta too, a variant that is still killing tons of people every day.

No, we will not "all eventually get Omicron anyway" either. You said that even with Alpha. I kind of thought about it on Delta, but we are nowhere near any sort of collective immunity, laughably far away from any of that.

Can't we grow up, seriously? That kind of dramatic, reductionist thinking might impress 17-year-olds, but most of us are adults, aren't we.

You are a complete fool if you somehow still don't understand that we'll get through this mostly with vaccination no matter what. We are in fact on our way.

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If you get it you'll get it, but you really should avoid this virus as much as possible. I still regret that I got Covid even though fortunately it didn't make me too sick. This virus seems to have a lot of potentiality to mess with your organs and genes. It's not just about sickness.

This one isn't really like any other virus. The more you learn about it, the harder it becomes to accept lazy assumptions about collective immunity. The Great Barrington Declaration crowd are seriously talking out of their assholes.

I'm not an expert, but can confidently say that SARS-CoV-2 is virologically nastier than you think.

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You might wonder why many or even most of those Covid-skeptic/anti-lockdown/anti-NPIs people are also anti-vaxx since there should be no logical lineage between the two. If you want to get back to normalcy as quickly as possible, there should be no reason to hate vaccination.

Well, it's actually quite simple; They kept arguing vociferously that Covid-19 was no big deal, and that we were absolutely overreacting to it. It's just the flu, only a glorified coronavirus cold, etc. THAT was their central point, that we are total pussies for overreacting to a stupid cold.

That assertion is clearly NEVER compatible with a global mass vaccination campaign. So, yes, this is also about finding yourself too high up in the tree. Pride. Fee-fees. Narcissism.

You can't help but suspect that every fucking thing in this world is about that nowadays.

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Hey, vaccine-hating Florida Man, you got Covid seven months ago, most likely Delta, and went through hell to prove that you are not a pussy like a Brooklyn hipster, and that you can defeat the virus like a true Florida Man. And you love Joe Rogan, I know.

Now, I'm sorry about your reinfection. Thank God you are not getting hospitalized, but it's going to be a tough few weeks for you for sure. Can't help it, you know. Your hard-earned "natural immunity" is even more useless than the "outdated" vaccine against Omicron.

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France has scored a ridiculous number of new cases, likely mostly Omicron, a number that utterly dwarfs the UK's, and the non-French public reaction is "Oh that sounds bad" at best.

That's mostly because the UK/England has already done it. We are fresh out of "Wow, that's a huuuuge wave, man!" because of the English.

This has been the pattern between France and England, for centuries. France doesn't win even when she actually does. She doesn't lose outright either, but just can't win.

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"Boris Johnson will not introduce further Covid restrictions yet" is the new "General Franco is still dead."

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The era of SNS exacerbated this problem ten-fold, and I sometimes lose my mind. No one ever backs down anymore. You climb up a tree, whether by accident or after rigorous thoughts, and never, ever come back to the ground.

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Maybe I've been an insufferable name-dropper in this round of compulsive ranting, aka the Covid Round, but yes, I must inform you that I've talked to Harry Reid too... I mean, it's not like I've met tons of US politicians, but the ones that I have talked to tend to be fairly well-known, or would become well-known later.

I have a mixed feeling about Reid. He was pretty funny in a bit of a deadpan way. But if you really broke down what he's saying into the core bits, you'd realize that he was deeply, deeply introverted and pessimistic. Almost nihilistic even.

That's my memory/impression of that former boxer. Of course he couldn't beat pancreatic cancer. Who could? But he was a fighter for most of his career.

He was corrupt to a certain degree. But also this:

That's the world where he lived, a Las Vegas creature in many ways. At least I think that his enormous hatred of the ones who look down on the poor was genuine.

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I was asked by a certain Japanese magazine who I thought the worst (living) American was, and my answer was Madison Cawthorn. I listed the reasons too (there were 10).

The editor scrapped the idea of that magazine article, so I mention it here to let you know, as if you cared.

* I was specifically told to name someone that most people in Japan do not know, BTW.

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Soren Kierkegaard was one of my intellectual idols even though I'm as non-Christian as non-Christian can get, so I was definitely drawn more to the Protestant idea of Christianity, broadly speaking.

But I've had enough, really. Calvinism really is the worst of all religions, and the other branches aren't much better either. It's kind of ironic, but Catholicism makes far more sense in today's context.

I still love Kierkegaard, but if I were to be forced into Christianity now, I would definitely choose Rome.

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OK, so one out of 337 French people tested positive yesterday?

That's almost impressive, especially since it's the French bureaucracy actually working to count those during a holiday season that we are talking about here.

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Even in now-Omicron-famous Denmark it's overwhelmingly Delta that's been killing a lot of people recently. The current Danish wave started back in October, pre-Omicron.

I'm glad that a lot of prominent people remembered Delta and started mentioning it again, but it was breathtakingly stupid of them to forget Delta even momentarily like that. Europe is very different from South Africa, where Delta was on its way out when Omicron emerged.