70,000 people, all quarantined together in a fucking mudpit, rumor has it a highly contagious virus is spreading through the festival grounds and festival goers are walking around barefoot in the mood and are going to get all sort of nasty foot diseases. There’s food and water rationing in effect and really the only co conclusion I can get from this is that somebody is probably gonna die from this.
Like since covid I think we as a society realized but haven’t yet actually accepted is that large social gatherings are a societal danger and we shouldn’t be doing them for fun. Yes I never went out in college, my friend group consisted of my dnd group, normalize that instead of super spreader crowd crusher mass gatherings. My opinion on this is the same with guns and cars, abolition would be a good thing. Now I’m a realist, the people want their treats, sometimes a mass gathering like a protest is necessary. Can we at least all agree that there needs to be some change in the way we as a society do huge fucking events like this?
In conclusion burning man sucks, hippies aren’t communist.
you're not gonna stop mass gatherings of people. COVID isn't going anywhere, we just have to live with it like we do the flu. Are we just going to cancel having fun for the rest of time? I'm not gonna hole up in my house for the rest of my life.(unless youre immunocompromised and cant get vaxxed, which that just sucks).
Ive been to multiple music festivals this year, and ive been going to them since 2005. They actually restock soap and hand washing stations now. I've definitely seen changes in behaviors.
Now the main issue is having the festival in a desert 60 miles from the nearest gas station. That's just fuckin stupid.
We shouldn’t have to live with influenza either, and we could totally drive influenza to extinction if we fucking tried.
you're wrong, influenza isnt the same as polio. It mutates so like HIV/AIDS that makes it tough to eliminate. If you have a source that says otherwise though please provide. My light searching came up with many "no" answers for that.
Easy peasy, let’s vaccinate every man woman child bird, mammal, and fish on the planet.
You are talking out of your ass
There are better vaccines and anti-viral coming out against COVID, so this is just wrong.
im confused about which part of my post youre talking about. im not saying dont get vaxxed or don't get new vaccinations.
There are sterilising vaccines and better anti vitarals on the way, so it'll definitely get better in the next two years. Also lots of us are living with vulnerable people. I'm definitely reading between the lines of what you're saying, and not talking your literal word. But please don't go to festivals, putting yourself at an infection risk, and then unmask at shops and mass transit where vulnerable people cannot avoid.
If you're one of those rare people that parties hard like COVID is over, yet masks everywhere else, then you're a champ.
it only gets better when vaccines are mandated, and that aint gonna happen. Flu vaccine isn't mandated either, so that's why it's still around. If the polio vaccine had been an option that would still be around too. America at this point will always have 40% of the population proudly unvaccinated. COVID will keep mutating and stay around. I do everything I can and that's all anyone can do until we start tying people down and vaccinating them forcefully.
Multiple BM attendee here; it was amazing for a while. Stopped going in mid-‘00s, when the population crossed the 30K threshold, as rules started being imposed on everything, and LA industry people and VCs started showing up in plug-and-play camps. Even at that size, BRC was like the 5th largest city in NV for that week.
The size and attendee/intent composition is the issue. I would spend months thinking up what I would bring to share or show. I made a motorized art playa skateboard one year, before rugged motorized skateboards were commoditized, 2,000 cookies another year. But, there started to be a lot of what we called “tourists”—people who brought nothing to share, neither art nor stuff, and who were just there to experience Tweaker Disneyland for a few days.
And, the BORG that runs BM lost all sense of proportion and chased cultural cachet and thus scale, with all of the banality that comes with it. The first time I had to go through a bunch of hassle to get a tiny art vehicle officially registered with the Department of Mutant Vehicles signaled that we had clearly left the heaven of creators and entered the hell of bureaucracy.
Finally, the uploading of shitloads of photos and videos was getting annoying, and that was even before the arrival of smartphones, YouTube, and Insta. Instead of being free to do and say whatever, wearing whatever, and on whatever drugs, for some of us in corporate jobs, it started to be a concern that our BM extracurriculars would be immortalized and shared.
This is why I stopped going to pretty much all music festivals. The types of people that go to those large gatherings just don't get it. They use the PLUR free spiritedness as an excuse to be selfish and act like a jerk a lot of the time. Everyone is such a vulture at those things anymore.
We used to note in the mid-‘90s that ravers who kept mentioning PLUR were the often people who created the most drama around them.