Well, he’s a better man than I. I spent an hour on Facebook arguing over Covid-19 with my first cousin who’s a vegan anti vaxxer yoga instructor (oh the stereotype) with a hammer and sickle and “smash capitalism!” tattoos.
She’s still posting her usual communist and Antifa drivel only it’s interspersed with “operation gridlock” and pro Michigan militia stuff.
“Stay at home you pu**y” and “my rights don’t end where your fear starts” memes with militiamen holding AR-15s are posted back-to-back with praises to Chairman Mao.
And apparently after going down the rabbit hole of her Facebook friends (among others, her boyfriend, a didgeridoo musician who never held any paying job) it seems that it’s not an isolated behavior pattern.
Insane. We have some swap and talk and local news Facebook groups for the area that I read for the hilarity. Most people can’t get close to spelling and I’ve seen people on government assistance argue against other people on government assistance because they didn’t understand it was under a different name. Like seriously people who would post that Obama doesn’t think people not paying income tax is a problem while they didn’t pay income tax.
I just have a lot more access to red state loonies than liberal ones. Only liberal loonies I get to see much of on Facebook are my cousins on the east coast who are batshit far lefties.
But I’ve never put a political thing ever on social media. Mainly use Facebook to see pictures of my nieces and nephews.
I completely agree with you, but in this case I had to unleash my impotent keyboard rage because such dumb posts could potentially harm some of mine (and hers) elderly relatives who use Facebook and believe that everything that’s posted on Facebook is true.
Also, it’s worth noting the Swedish paradox - people and media outlets who six months ago vilified “socialist” Swedish government for it’s policy towards migrants, alleged sharia no-go zones, gun control, knife and rape crime suddenly fiercely believe that that same government found the only way to handle the Covid-19 pandemic.
I spend much less time logged into Facebook over the last number of months, as compared to previous years.
It is so bloody insidious. I can purchase something online and god damn an ad for the same thing or a near product gets lambasted in my feed, and quickly too. The extent to which it is influential and can figure out a lot of who I or anyone else is is unsettling.
that and I have fewer friends over the last few years.
This is why on-line advertising is a big fail. It waits until you already bought it to show options to you. Last time I bought a truck I got ads for about 4 years. How often do they think someone is going to buy a new truck?
It is a crammed place with much public transportation, including a large subway system. Many of its inhabitants live in enormous buildings, sometimes with many people living in one apartment. Many New Yorkers have comorbidities that make them vulnerable to symptoms and have them going to the hospitals and being confirmed cases.
Many people in NYC are routine rule breakers and find laws and rules constraining or that we shouldn’t have them at all. So it’s likely many don’t wear PPE or stick to self-quarantining. (I’m not being sarcastic.)
I lived in NYC and now live on Long Island, and of the reasons I left was the utter congestion of the place and its high volume of problem makers. And I’m not talking about the upper-class places of Manhattan, but most of all the other areas.
I’m just making things up as I go along here, but since a greater proportion of European flights come into NYC than LAX, that may have something to do with it.
When you look at the difference between NYC and LA or San Francisco I think one of the things that was different was the response of the Mayors. de Blasio was slow to respond and telling people to go about their daily lives normally around the same time that his counterparts in CA were taking steps to mitigate the spread of the virus.
Just got off a zoom call with my family and my best friend’s family. My best friend’s mom, who I’ve known for 28 years, has been a physician for 35 years, and is at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn right now. She says there are hundreds of coronavirus cases there, and 150 people on ventilators. As long as she’s been in her profession, she’s said that any more than 5 people on ventilators in hospitals she’s been at has been a rarity. She has never, ever seen anything like this at all. And yes, she is furious that anybody could conceivably compare this to the flu at this stage.
