While nowhere near as harmful as the denialists, it's still important to recognize the maladjustment of the continuists and push back on their dogmatic demand that the pandemic persists. For the most part, though, we roll our eyes and accept their insistence that it be spoken of in present tense.
As variants of COVID emerged in the past few years, they zealously prognosticated doom: the sheeple may have forgotten COVID, but COVID would soon show it hadn't forgotten them. Woe unto the sinners as the latest pestilence struck the land! Yet the vast misfortunes foretold never quite came about.
Balancing out the COVID denialists, in intensity, if not in harm, emerged a group of, I don't know, COVID continuists? People vocally and vehemently determined that 2022, then 2023, and now 2024 are still the darkest days of spring 2020. They've dwindled as normalcy persists, but aren't yet gone.
But the Biden admin WAS creating policy informed by data and science, it's just that this handful of critics had wildly different ideas on what policy to draw from them. Ideas many would say were fundamentally out of step not only with the political realities, but the very data itself.
I'm sure that each of these pain points can be mitigated by skills that can be built up, but the barrier to entry is too high for me to hurdle with limited time and mental bandwidth. Might just go back to a subscription service as the actual cooking and eating are fun!
Should behavioral change be the only avenue of change? Heck no—individual responsibility is often scapegoated to excuse inaction. But should we advocate for lower limits and, as drivers, obey them? Yes!
Do the soundtracks to Paradox games count? youtube.com/playlist?lis...
On the other hand, it sure looks like Israel is deliberately stoking the fires of conflict to bring Iran in and is not interested in letting things deescalate...
Not completely uncharted. This won't be the first batch of Iranian missiles fired at Israel in this round of hostilities: support from the US and others drastically limited that strike's impact, so both sides walked away from the brink proclaiming having gotten the upper hand.
The free fares remove the non-negligible cost of fare infrastructure and enforcement, plus the general in-person friction created by the need to pay (queuing; hunting for cash; etc.). Worth considering the hidden expense of the status quo and weighing against the alternative.