Not to be a dick, but it kind of sounds like you all need to refine your approach to talking to people about masking and figure out how to develop a lot more patience because pushing people to change is really hard.

We have had 6 years and many, many events to refine and tailor our approach. I can tell you with confidence there is no approach that works better than any of the others. If there was something, anything that worked, we would know and would be doing it by now. We’ve tried being militant, we’ve tried being patient, we’ve tried “meeting people where they are,” and all of this has had the same efficacy and staying power: zero. We provide everything along with guidance, and we are ignored while business goes on as usual. We give the means to independently assess and handle risk to each individual or group, and we are ignored while business goes on as usual. I am all ears for any actual experience you may have with this!

Are you telling me or American Society in whole? I mask, you think you’re gonna tell me something I don’t already know?

Did you know that? By the rest of your posts you seem more concerned about “scolds” on the wrong side of the fence correctly criticizing a blind spot in your movements than the fact that these cadres exist and do this work you are now telling me is impossible and also not happening. Are you helping to make it happen?

Well you better hope that’s not the case, cause if it’s a battle between your will and the dumb atomized mass of American society, then you’re gonna lose

…and they say I’m a “doomer”! Then what’s the point of any of this? You’ve proven the scolds right.

And the reality is that masks are easily procured and distributed where it is possible, which is a fair amount of places! You can read my other posts in this thread about what this looks like “in reality” if you are actually curious about this and not just doing the abrasive internet argument thing, which I am not hopeful is the case. Just about every urban center in the US and then some has a COVID-aware mask bloc very eager to help any group or demonstration with logistics, supply, and education when it is wanted. Guess when it is wanted, and by which organizations? The answer is never, and none. That is not a matter of logistics and lack of holistic analysis, but a matter of will. None of you think this matters enough to do something about it when the doing is indeed very doable. When’s the last time you wore a mask, or did anything to help mitigate the spread of COVID in your organizing? I can probably make a good guess: not anytime in the last…I’ll say 4 years, at least? But nothing has materially changed since then, except that disease has gotten even worse around the board, which sounds like even more of an argument in favor of being militant about the prevention of its spread. Respirators are in fact easier than ever to come by. They practically give them away surplus now, and there’s nothing functionally wrong with them. Where is your analysis? Where is your action?

“Society doesn’t do it so we can’t be expected to either” is not the justification I would use when talking about supposed groups of revolutionaries.

What forest is being missed for what trees by saying “I am not safe and cannot participate if you, the movement of the people, do not do anything to prevent the spread of a virus among the people that does cumulative, permanent damage to the whole body and at present has no cure or treatment”? Please tell me.

Fixating on this disappointment is counter-revolutionary and I don’t see anything useful coming from a Reddit post complaining about “leftists” writ-large, telling people that fighting is useless, telling people to stop showing up to the organizations in which they participate.

This would be something worth expanding on if the simple act of merely showing up was accessible, but it’s not, and it’s due to the actions of the masses which refuse to change! That’s the point! For someone like me who is immunosuppressed, who is very vulnerable to severe complications from this virus (though no one is immune, is also the point), I am effectively locked out of participating in a movement that is supposed to be my movement until everyone else gets their act together. “We keep us safe,” after all, but do you really? Do you see the problem? Should I just sit at home, then? Does your movement truly speak for me, among the lowest of us, if this is the case? No one can answer these questions. I am already being told not to show up, but not by the Reddit libs.

E.g. fund free masks, mandate masks within leftist organizational spaces, inform without distancing oneself from the masses.

Have you tried doing any of this? Because I have, frequently, along with a bloc of like-minded people, a “mask bloc” if you will, and for 6 years very consistently the attitude among individuals attending protests, demonstrations around my city, and the various organizations that participate in them has been that I am secretly a fed trying to sow discord, I’m bougie for still caring, or that I’m simply a wrecker to be disregarded, and at best, they will tune me out. What other conclusion am I to draw from this reaction? This poster in the linked thread has the right of it:

… the left has always been shockingly terrible on disability awareness/advocacy, and there’s a large overlap between that and paying attention to COVID.

We’re propagandized from birth to essentially ignore everything related to public health unless you’re “at risk” - it’s blatantly eugenics propaganda, but the reality is that most people aren’t going to confront that until it tangibly personally affects them.

and as everyone loves saying, you are not immune to propaganda. Someone else in the thread posted this, which I also agree with:

Ableism is the most acceptable discrimination …

Not a single person or group I have worked with IRL that has not already made masking and mitigating COVID a core foundation of their praxis has budged on this in the last half-decade, and it’s not because I’m wrong. I wish I was! Thankfully, I believe everyone will come around eventually whether they want to or not, because this level of reckless disregard for health and the constant spread of illness not materially sustainable. The trends since 2020 are consistent and there is a single throughline: COVID negligence. I just wish people would stop being complete nobs about it in the meantime, to put my feelings very, very lightly.

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Documentation, bug reporting and troubleshooting is often done through Discord now! It’s absurd! The worst format possible for important archival and discovery. We can (we did!) do better.

What is to be done, then? You can accept the corporate product that does this or the alternatives that exist today, and anything else is…unhelpful. Nothing I’ve said is false. You can do everything Discord does with libre tools; where it gets to the “feature parity” point is an all-in-one package, in which case Discord has a significant decade and several billion dollar venture capital advantage, and not even that will always be the case. What are these critical features available only to Discord that we cannot live without? How did we live without them before 2016? This is just nonsense.

To be honest I’m pretty tired of being vindicated, when do people start listening?

It’s really frustrating to see the discourse surrounding this when libre software that does what Discord does exists and has for a long time but it’s “a pain” to migrate to or it does not have 100% feature parity so let’s phone our representatives (email…Discord support?) instead of just ripping the bandage off and using already-existing software that works and respects you. The stakes of digital life are raising in this era and it’s time to start acting like it. It isn’t going to be easy and I’m sorry, but I do not know what else to say to it anymore. We have the tools to resist this. It will be difficult at first, and then it won’t be.

To be fair to you I think you are still on to something, sort of! My wife reminded me that they do hammer it in pretty frequently that Big Business is coming and pushing out the local customs and culture of Inaba… I just think it’s kinda low-hanging fruit anyway.

I think you are giving far too much credit to a director who himself admits not knowing how to write women because he has no women friends or relationships.

HASHINO: When you make a true friend, it’s possible to meet up with them after ages of being out of touch, and still pick up exactly where you left off. Thinking about maxed Social Links in this way sounds about right.

THAT CERTAINLY MAKES ME FEEL BETTER. COME TO THIN OF IT, IT SEEMS LIKE YOU CAN ONLY FORGE THAT KIND OF FRIENDSHIP WITH SOCIAL LINKS OF THE SAME GENDER. OPPOSITE GENDER SOCIAL LINKS WILL REVERSE QUICKLY. DOES THIS MEAN TRUE FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN PEOPLE OF OPPOSITE GENDER DO NOT EXIST?

HASHINO: I’ve never successfully forged a true friendship with a girl in real life.

SOEJIMA: Neither have I.

HASHINO: I guess that means we couldn’t implement it into the game because we don’t know what it’s like. (laughs)

I like your conclusion here, it’s fun for many reasons to retroactively fit themes and messages like this into works that do not deserve it (and believe me, Persona 4 does not deserve it), but I also think sometimes it is fine to call a spade a spade. Persona is a pretty reactionary series. It’s fine to like it anyway. I don’t. Nocturne and SMT4 are more subversive with their writing than any Persona game I’ve ever played, and Nocturne barely even has a narrative.

You wonder if anything will ever be done, or will the baseline just keep going lower and lower while the masses ostracize and/or kill anyone trying to do anything about it.

Princess Bubblegum looks a bit unhealthy these days…

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I am agitated because indifference like yours kills people like me, and continues to do so to this day. Block me yourself.

I do but I can’t conduct a public health response by myself

How do you think movements start? Someone’s got to do something or nothing changes. Why can that someone not be you?

Also no

I’m not putting words in your mouth, you’re telling me here you have noticed but don’t care enough to do something about it. If you think this is an insurmountable wall to action, I have some bad news about any other sort of political revolution.