I find that I'm having a difficult time following covid-related arguments now. When somebody upthread mentioned "radical authoritarians," I thought "Oh, he must be talking about those videos coming out of Australia." It never occurred to me that he might be referring to mandatory vaccination in schools. That's not meant as a criticism of that poster, which is why I'm not calling him out here. It's just that people's opinions on this topic are now officially so all-over-the-place that it's hard to tell what people are talking about based on just the little snippets that get posted.
Back in the olden days of, say, six months ago, this was easy. Everybody was -- to a rough approximation -- either a covid hawk or a covid dove. The former took covid very seriously and were broadly supportive of masks and lockdowns, while the latter didn't view it as a major threat and generally opposed most mitigation measures. Now, though, there are a bunch of different camps that overlap with each other on some topics but not others.
Like people who are pro-vaccination but disagree on whether vaccination should be mandatory. When you add in the existence of people who are anti-vaccination, this conversation becomes a lot more difficult to keep straight.
Or like people who are vaccinated but disagree on whether masking makes sense. Again, adding in the anti-vaccination folks complicates this discussion, as does the technically separate issue of whether masks should be mandated or not.
Or like the various overlapping discussions about mitigation measures in K-12 schools vs. mitigation measures in adult spaces. (This one tends to get me -- I often find myself typing up an "anti-mask" response to a poster only to realize that they were just talking about masking in schools, which I don't really have a stance on).
Not sure if anybody else has noticed this or not. Just that the conversation seems more chaotic to me than it was just a few months back.