Why People Are Acting So Weird

Maybe in your bubble.

CDC guidance on masks and other preventative measures are data-driven, based on number of cases in the area, ICU utilization, and other metrics. You can see the guidance for your are here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/covid-... Most places are low risk, meaning the guidance is to, "Wear a mask based on your personal preference, informed by your personal level of risk"

> Fear mongering by the media and our government is gone.

COVID-19 is still in the news. YouTube still has a section dedicated to it, it's still a "special coverage" section in Apple News and it's "front page" news on the New York Times. The President is still actively talking about COVID every day, and is pushing people to get their second boosters (that's fear mongering, right?).

Granted, Fox News hasn't published a covid article in a while.

I could be wrong, but wasn't this the stores setting those rules and not the central government?

And if I did manage to be correct there, that'd be capitalism at work. Customers could choose to do business with companies setting those rules. And if enough people voted with their wallets, stores wouldn't have those rules. The people I see "raging" about these things are the same ones I see promoting free markets and things like that.

If I was incorrect, well, ignore me.

Missouri never had any rules about travel or super market isles (wait... did any state make laws or regulations about super market isles?!). I visited extended family throughout the spring of 2020 and I wasn't breaking any laws.

More importantly, MO's government is comprised of a conservative governor, a conservative super-majority in the legislature, and conservative courts, all of whom have been aggressively anti-lockdown, and any of whom could reasonably have authored your exact post. The only credible threat to conservatives in Missouri is from the right. Who exactly are these woke baddies in the state capitol?!

My fundamental point is a scientific observation. The only substantive claim you're making in your post that is related to the article is about the source of this rage. That claim is a good one because it is possible to test by running an experiment: put restrictions on one population but not another and determine if levels of rage are elevated in one or both communities.

Your assertion is empirically denied by the fact that people are still enraged at elevated levels even places where these restrictions never existed, or existed for trivial treatment periods several years ago.

The rest of your post sort of reaffirms my belief in my hypothesis.

For example, in God's name, what role does wokeness play in this discussion other than to serve as an associated angry-tickles trigger word?

You managed to blame an aggressively anti-lockdown state government for restrictions that literally never existed and then went on an entirely unrelated rant about wokeness in your first post on this topic -- unprovoked and apropos of absolutely nothing in the article or the comment section.

This reiterates my belief that the rage is manufactured and that propaganda is a likely root cause for the state of the public's mental health. Just keep throwing all those angry words in the angry word soup.

Angry trigger words associate. It's all related by cortisol and negative emotions; the substance of the conversation doesn't matter. Just be angry at all the baddie stuff. The more the better.

(BTW, I'm going to take this opportunity to reiterate the link between stimulus checks and substance abuse, which is apparently less fun to think about than wokeness or whatever trigger word, but is definitely an important root cause for increased rage levels.)

I disagree. I think some of the outrage is "artificially" inflamed by our connectedness and some is intentionally inflamed.

I say the outrage is "artificial" because, people would be a lot less polarized if their only information on the topic was their personal experiences, but they were already primed by many stories about the worst offenders from the opposite group. For example, when they actually interact with a someone who is adamantly for or against masks in real life, they are already angry and fed up from reading stories online.

On the intentional side, political groups and MSM absolutely played up the divisiveness for their own benefit. Politicians used it to smear their opposition, and companies used it to drive clicks.

This polarized, divided, and radicalized communities and made it very difficult for them make reasonable compromises on acceptable behavior

The case of Australia (and New Zealand) conclusively demonstrates it was in all ways feasible to eradicate at minimum the early Alpha strain of Covid with a relatively low-tech, low-effort approach:

Shut. TF. Borders.

Had America simply paid people to _stay home_, and closed its borders — all of them, international, interstate and even intra-state where necessary — they would’ve entirely halted the spread of Covid early on, sparing countless lives and curbing untold amounts of general insanity and hysteria.

IIRC the longest consecutive lockdown in Australia lasted just under four months. Said lockdown applied only to a single major international city of 5 million. Rural areas essentially got away from all forms of lockdown unscathed.

> The majority of the people here are conservative

Strong borders and border security are traditionally conservative values, or so I hear.

For instance, you’d be wrong if you thought an 80 year old couple living off the land they’ve been farming for decades would be in support of opening the borders out of some sense of duty to the word “freedom”.

From the Australian rural conservative perspective, the only people who stood to gain more freedom in a situation where Covid had been eradicated thanks to closed borders were cosmopolitan travelers and urbanites.

Selfish, entitled, without a care for their community or fellow man.

Oh and my comment was heavily upvoted before it was flagged, so keep reporting my stuff anti-vaxxers. You aren’t on the right side of history.

Then there was the legal over-reach. This isn't a dictatorship; it's the rule of law. People in power don't get to just issue orders; they have to have the authority to issue those orders. A lot of people giving orders didn't seem to care. Worse, they didn't even seem to understand the concept of limited government. They just acted like they could order whatever they wanted. Well, in a country where a fair number of people actually care about freedom and limited government, of course there's going to be pushback.

It is interesting that both the legislature and the voters seemed largely willing to accept government by executive order (and sometimes bizarre orders as you note) for much of the pandemic.

Let's be honest, your statement of "For me it was a shock to see the power the state had or at least claimed to have over my life." can apply to all of our politicians of both parties at every level.

A decrease in rights of all kinds as both parties expand the scope of government into regulating personal lives and choices.

Fiercer competition and extremism as everyone has more to loose depending on who is in power (because of fewer rights and increased scope).

More people will feel that they do not consent to the social contract and view the government as illegitimate, if not hostile to them.

One party spent the last two years going full-bore authoritarian in the name of "safety" and "saving lives". They cheered on closing beaches, hiking trails, basketball courts, schools, churches, boat launches, hockey rinks, playgrounds, parks, campgrounds, public restrooms, drinking fountains, you name it. They cheered on police arresting people who attempted to do those things. The cheered when schools were closed for more than a year, leaving those in the lowest socioeconomic groups completely screwed. They cheered when massive amounts of wealth got transferred from the working class and underprivileged to the upper class tech workers and beyond. They cheered on closing small mom & pop businesses and cheered on everybody ordering all their shit from amazon.

Said party claimed to be backed by "science and data" but took dramatic actions that were backed by neither.

The political party I used to belong to betrayed me. They tossed every single thing they claimed to value right out the window. All political parties are hot garbage. The best you can hope for is both parties having enough sway to balance out the extremes of either one. It took the last two years to wake me up to that. Never fall in love with a political party... It's not "us vs. them" it's just "us".