#extremely online

[wat3rm370n]

Jay Bhattacharya is anti-vax.

He's anti-vax for the same reason that Florida Man Ron Desantis is anti-vax even without Joe Ladapo.

https://wat3rm370n.tumblr.com/post/768897389699432448/florida-man-is-anti-vax

Being anti-mandate is anti-vax because vaccination is a community level public health measure. High uptake is what stems transmission. It’s how vaccines work best for everyone. So being against vaccine mandates is anti-vax. Being pro "natural infection" is also anti-vax.

Jay Bhattacharya AND Marty Makary also cavort with all sorts of anti-vaxxers, and someone pro-vax would not do that. If pushed, these people will go with the anti-vaxxers, because they already have, after all.

https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/trucker-convoy-adjacent-symposium

They all seem to be funded by the same big money too. All connected to fossil fuel at the heart of everything on the right and the money could explain a lot of that.

https://heated.world/p/ai-is-guzzling-gas

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ifcx5e6vwjvy2oqoynshleqv/post/3ldppcl2gpc2k

The connections are truly dizzying, and I've spent way way too much time connecting these dots, and most people do not want to hear it.

https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/lefty-zine-promoting-right-wing-pseudoscience-protocols-of-an-expensive-concierge-clinic-f73b758dbbff

https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/vaughn-what-team-is-he-actually-on-c4df1a3a8ae8

Generally eugenics is also anti-vax, because of pseudoscience fantasies about "evolution".

https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/eugenics-as-an-ideology

The pain point here is that there are MANY Republican politicians and conservative voters who want vaccines and do not buy into anti-vax nonsense and want protection for themselves and their family.

Some of these pro-vaccination conservatives live in my neighborhood in Scranton Pennsylvania in fact. I remember many loud conversations in my neighborhood over hedges back in 2021, in fact. The average Republican who voted for Trump didn't vote to get rid of vaccines, they're not even paying attention to that extremely online crap. They just thought none of it mattered anymore because they're steeped in pro-biz disinfo and didn't think more broadly than "covid is no big deal anymore" (not realizing that it's partly because of vaccines that most Americans got initially but which wane in effectiveness over months and certainly years, and also partly because the entire political spectrum decided grandma had to be sacrificed to the false god The Economy, to appease violent anti-maskers, or at least in order to justify Fridays at the packed nightclub).

https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/journalist-trusts-right-wing-covid-denial

But one of the biggest problems is that the coalition is not so much a coalition of cranks, it's a coalition of high demand authoritarian groups (aka cults), many which favour eugenics ideology, and many that are anti-science unfortunately, and even worse, are run by a lot of people making money on selling quacky products linked to anti-vax disinfo. And these people are clearly ready to to sell their own snake oil.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-fbi-director-kash-patel-vaccine-detox-supplements-rcna182434

MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy - Thinker-Fest: Session 1 - Fireside Chat - How to Fix the “Splinternet” Mar 3, 2023

But as they say, online is not the totality of real life.

People need to start talking about vaccine uptake with their neighbors over the hedges again. We need billboards more than we need tweets or facebook ai slop and interacting with bots on bluesky while trapped in info cocoons and echo chamber silos created by manipulative block and subscribe lists.

https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/grass-is-not-much-greener-on-blue-sky

https://www.rauhauser.net/p/blueskys-bubble-blues

https://sci-hub.se/10.1086/225469

Trumpism’s healthcare fracture-lines

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/20/clinical-trial-by-ordeal/#spoiled-his-brand-new-rattle

There was never any question as to whether Trump would implement Project 2025, the 900-page brick of terrifying and unhinged policy prescriptions edited by the Heritage Foundation. He would not implement it, because he could not implement it. No one could. It's impossible.

This isn't a statement about constitutional limits on executive authority or the realpolitik of getting bizarre and stupid policies past judges or through a hair-thin Congressional majority. This is a statement about the incoherence of Project 2025 itself. You probably haven't read it. Few have. Realistically, few people are going to read a 900-page group work of neofeudalist fanfic shit out by the most esoteric Fedsoc weirdos the world has ever seen.

But one person who did read Project 2025 was the leftist historian Rick Perlstein, who was the first person to really dig into what a fucking mess that thing is:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Perlstein's excellent analysis doesn't claim that Project 2025's authors aren't sincere in their intentions to wreak great harm upon the nation and its people; rather, his point is that Project 2025 is filled with contradictory, mutually exclusive proposals written by people who fundamentally disagree with one another, and who each have enough power within the Trump coalition that all of thier proposals have to be included in a document like this:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

Project 2025 isn't just a guide to the masturbatory fantasies of the worst people in American politics – far more importantly, it is a detailed map of the fracture lines in the GOP coalition, the places where it is liable to split and shatter. This is an important point if you want to do more about Trumpism than run around feeling miserable and scared. If you want to fight, Project 2025 is a guide to the weak spots where an attack will do the most damage.

Perlstein's insight continues to be borne out as the Trump regime makes ready to take power. In a new story for KFF News, Stephanie Armour and Julie Rovner describe the irreconcilable differences among Trump's picks for the country's top public health authorities:

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/trump-rfk-kennedy-health-hhs-fda-cdc-vaccines-covid-weldon/

The brain-worm-infected-elephant in the room is, of course, RFK Jr, who has been announced as Trump's head of Health and Human Services. RFK Jr is a notorious antivaxer, chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a notorious anti-vaccine group. Kennedy's view is shared by Trump's chosen CDC boss, Dave Weldon, a physician who has repeated the dangerous lie that vaccinations cause autism. Mehmet "Dr Oz" Oz, the TV "physician" Trump wants to put in charge of Medicare/Medicaid, calls vaccines "oversold" and advocates for treating covid with hydroxychloroquine, another thoroughly debunked hoax:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/12/17/hydroxychloroquine-study-covid-19-retracted-trump/77051671007/

However, other top Trump public health picks emphatically support vaccines. Marty Makary is Trump's choice for FDA commissioner; he's a Johns Hopkins trained surgeon who says vaccines "save lives" (but he peddles the lethal, unscientific hoax that childhood vaccines should be "spread out"). Jay Bhattacharya, the economist/MD whom Trump wants to put in charge of the NIH, supports vaccines (he is also one of the country's leading proponents of the eugenicist idea of accepting the mass death of elderly, sick and disabled people rather than imposing quarantines during epidemics). Then there's Janette Nesheiwat, whom Trump has asked to serve as the nation's surgeon general; she calls vaccines "a gift from God."

Like "Bidenism," Trumpism is a fragile coalition of people who thoroughly and irreconcilably disagree with one another. During the Biden administration, this resulted in self-inflicted injuries like appointing the brilliant trustbuster Lina Khan to run the FTC, but also appointing the pro-monopoly corporate lawyer Jacqueline Scott Corley to a lifetime seat as a federal judge, from which perch she ruled against Khan's no-brainer suit to block the Microsoft-Activision merger:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

The Trump coalition is even broader than the Biden coalition. That's how he won the 2024 election. But that also means that Trumpism is more fractious and off-balance, and hence will be easier to disrupt, because it is riven by people in senior positions who hate one another and are actively working for each others' political demise.

The Trump coalition is a coalition of *cranks*. I'm using "crank" here in a technical, non-pejorative sense. I am a crank, after all. A crank is someone who is overwhelmingly passionate about a single issue, whose uncrossable bright lines are not broadly shared. Cranks can be right or they can be wrong, but we're hard to be in coalition with, because we are uncompromisingly passionate about things that other people largely don't even notice, let alone care about. You can be a crank whose single issue is eliminating water fluoridation, even though this is very, very stupid and dangerous:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-fluoride-debate

Or you can be a crank about digital rights, a subject that, for decades, was viewed as by turns either unserious or as a sneaky way of shilling for Big Tech (thankfully, that's changing):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

Cranks make hard coalition partners. Trump's cranks are cranked up about different things - vaccines, culture war trans panics, eugenics - and are total normies about other things. The eugenicist MD/economist who wants to "let 'er rip" rather than engage in nonpharmaceutical pandemic interventions is gonna be horrified by total abortion bans and antivax. These cranks are on a collision course with one another.

This is on prominent display in these public health appointments, and we're very likely about to get a test of the cohesiveness and capability of the second Trump administration, thanks to bird flu. Now that bird flu has infected humans in multiple US states, there is every chance that we will have to confront a public health emergency in the coming weeks. If that happens, the Trump public health divisions over masking, quarantine and (especially) vaccines (Kennedy called the covid vaccine the "deadliest" ever made, without any evidence) will become the most important issue in the country, under constant and pitiless scrutiny, and criticism.

Trump's public health shambles is by no means unique. The lesson of Project 2025 is that the entire Trump project is one factional squabble away from collapse at all times.

[robbies-treehouse]

Who up awakening they union?

[punishedsaints]

[decreeofthedeeps]

so apparently tiktokers are currently debating whether lesbians have it worse than bisexuals. man am i glad i deleted that app

[totally-a-wizard]

The Tumblr/Twitter urge to describe extremely difficult moral actions as the easiest thing in the universe to do.

We're allowed to acknowledge that attempting to fight personal failings and entrenched systematic issues is, like, extremely difficult to do. They're worth it, of course, but that doesn't make them easy. I think everyone should keep that in mind, "Is this hard to change? Sure, but it would still be worth the effort."

[adjectivenounnumber]

Anyone else notice how dismissive insults like “please go outside” and “touch grass” get leveraged almost exclusively at autistic people for caring about things “too much”? Maybe it’s time to retire those phrases js

[cartoonscientist]

[obstinaterixatrix]

ok we’re on the plane for our 13 hour flight (😔) I was also a fool and didn’t load up on series to watch. well this weekend I’m doing nothing but watching shows, I accidentally jumped ship halfway through kaito yamaneko years ago so might as well actually watch it for real

[arathyputhillam]

✌🏽back to my roots ✌🏽

[cloudbrooksblog]

I know this is just how the internet is, but like

i hate the internet so much sometimes. this was a child who was trying to escape a bad place. the kid died. we arent desensitized, people just fucking suck. people say a lot "oh we're desensitized to tragedy we make jokes about it" but like. yeah maybe you can make that argument about the kids who made fun of the shooter, but thats kids making jokes about an event THEY were a part of - that's happened forever. this isn't the same thing, and im already sick of it. It happens IRL too, i hear people making shitty jokes about tragedy like that (even terrifying and heartbreaking ones like the one above, which would usually be sobering if you bothered to process what you were looking at for five fucking seconds). i'm only a kid, i'm only 17, and i know older people will look at me and scoff or whatever. but i'm already sick of this place. i've had adults tell me "well MY generation turned out fine" but the thing is... that's survival bias. the teen suicide rates show that the jokes about tragedy and this whole suffocating atmosphere of making fun of people who are already in bad positions... it doesn't just "not affect people", yknow? like, sure, maybe a lot of suicides are because of other reasons. but you have to admit a decent amount of common suicidal thoughts are about "nobody will care" and "if i said something, nobody would care". nobody does care, and when tragedy happens, the most heartbreaking kind, you go "this looks like an album cover tee hee" like god im so sick of this. im sick of this place. a 19 year old dies in a submarine he didn't even really want to be on, and my friends are like "its fine though cause his parents were rich" like what. no. thats such a terrifying death, right? imagine dying like that. one of the worst i can imagine, you know? a nightmare. and i think back to hearing that a teenager dived in the pool and hit his head and needed CPR and shit. i never found out if he was ok, but people get stabbed and overdose around here all the time. all my parents do is laugh and say "that's why they say not to dive!"

i'm so sick of it. i want out of here, but there's nowhere to go except inwards. to "sanctuaries", where the people are more like me. yknow, i hear that the cool (gay) people are around the "sex, drugs, and rock n roll". but they've always died around me, so i guess i'll just look for more silver linings. the main reason i'm not dead is because if i survived an attempt and became paralyzed like someone else in my family, unable to even speak. That would be the worst possible ending. and a large part of me thinks it could happen. and everyone would just laugh! say silly things about it, meme on it. and if my friends died, people would laugh. and if a teacher dies at the school nearby, will they laugh if the teacher wasn't well-known? will they find any pictures "aesthetic"?

i once went to a crisis stabilization center. for the fifth or sixth time. the place was bad, but its the only one nearby. anyways. we met a kid who was 9 who we nicknamed the gravedancer. he fortnite danced on peoples graves. hilarious, right? i feel sick.

[crumbthethrowable]

Not explaining the context for this just let me know if there’s anything I should add or change (also my writing/reading comprehension is ass so let me know if there are any grammar mistakes)

⚠️=this is just my opinion, I don’t hate you if you say this/disagree

[llendrinall]

I knew a lot of the anger had to do with my critics’ being Extremely Online, a condition where social media compels us to read thinly, strip out all context and get to the part where we can be insulted as efficiently as possible. - Tressie McMillan Cottom

This, oh my, what a way to put it. To be able to be insulted, because that's the end goal. To feel attacked.

From a NYT opinion here

[oh--jeez]

i love that the uplifting SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP has become the yin to the yang of a much older and pejorative RED NUDE AND MAD ONLINE

I thought “screaming crying throwing up” had entered common vernacular but then I heard a podcast collab where one of the hosts was like “yeah it’s crazy one of our fans said they were so excited for this collab they were screaming crying and throwing up” and the other host was like “wow is she okay?”

I literally forget that random common-knowledge phrases online do not translate into real life at all.

[misterjt]

“Whiteness, masculinity, and Christianity are becoming more tightly yoked in the public imagination, with people hyper-invested in one category apprehending a need to invest in the others outwardly. These are historically knotted categories, the very concept of race an outgrowth of gendered Christian thinking about Jews. As scholars like M. Lindsay Kaplan, Willie James Jennings, Magda Teter, and Tudor Parfitt have shown, conceptions of Jews as dark, weak, fleshy, and fated to servitude were extended to debase people of color and authorize their enslavement. American legal arguments about the inferiority of Black people, such as the Dred Scott decision, echoed European arguments about the inferiority of Jews. So it’s ironic that Candace Owens, a Black woman, would seek to “own” Shapiro, a Jewish man, with the phrase “Christ is king.” It’s also a sign of just how badly some right-wing influencers will contort themselves for acceptance by the white boys online.”

—Audrey Clare Farley on the rise of “Christ is king” as an anti-Semitic slur

[arathyputhillam]

my roommate was watching euphoria the other day and when the end credits rolled to still don’t know my name… I got a pandemic whiplash 😭