Take SO many seats! New Yorker writer lit the EFF UP for tweeting entire thread lecturing and shaming people about indoor dining

Somewhere along the line, Americans forgot how to mind their own business. Look, if you’re worried about catching a virus, stay home. This is not complicated. If you are not feeling well, stay home. Again, not complicated.

Shutting down our entire lives and destroying our economy because the government suddenly wants to keep us all from dying even though we’ve been dying since the beginning of time is literally one of the dumbest things we’ve ever allowed in the history of this country. And empowering harpies who think they have any business lecturing others about indoor dining is just a side-effect of that stupid.

Like this infuriatingly smug thread from the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner:

There’s no excuse for eating indoors at a restaurant right now that doesn’t ultimately boil down to “I really want to,” and that just isn’t good enough https://t.co/NwuenPH7kO

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

Indoor dining? School? Going to work? Interesting how taking part in these things makes us bad people now.

If you’re going to make a selfish decision, at least have the courage to own up to it. Don’t wrap it in personal exceptionalism or a weird veneer of altruism. Your desire to do this outweighs your concern about the consequences! That’s just how it is!

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

How dare you make your own decisions.

As with so much of the “how should we behave during covid?” conversation, opening indoor dining is the government contradicting itself — a desire for economic progress at odds with the urgent need for pandemic progress https://t.co/NwuenPH7kO

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

Maybe it’s just us but we don’t EVER remember having any sort of conversation about how we should behave during COVID or any other time in this country.

The problem with opening indoor dining is that it doesn’t actually help the ongoing economic disaster, AND it raises the risk of infection for *literally everyone* — restaurant workers and customers and everyone those ppl come into contact with https://t.co/NwuenPH7kO

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

The problem with allowing restaurants to function is that it doesn’t really help them stay in business.

What?

Must be nice living with such privilege, right Helen?

A particularly enraging way that the government has failed us during covid has been to create this narrative of individual responsibility: it’s up to customers to save businesses & jobs & communities. That’s impossible to do, it’s manipulative and hollow https://t.co/NwuenPH7kO

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

It is not the government’s job to babysit any of us.

Whoever is teaching this in school, please knock it TF off.

Thanks.

It’s a tautology: We cannot as individuals do the thing that government (ostensibly) exists to do, which is to protect people in a way that surpasses the capacity of individuals https://t.co/NwuenPH7kO

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

Ooh, big word.

The thing is, we know already how much we have been failed. We’ve already been through the cycle of indoor dining reopening, and then closing again.

We can’t save each other in the way the government should’ve saved us, but we still owe each other care. https://t.co/NwuenPH7kO

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

This has turned into a blame Trump thing, hasn’t it?

When NYC indoor dining first reopened in September, the 7-day average for new infections was in the 300s; on December 11th, when Cuomo shut it down, it was 3,391. On Friday, when he announced the Valentine’s Day reopening, it was 5,579. https://t.co/NwuenPH7kO

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

Democrats created a monster. They were happy to terrify the masses while Trump was president so they could put all of this failure on him and his administration. They don’t want Biden to be seen as a failure and they know the lockdowns were a gross mistake, so they’re trying to fix it.

But their monster-scolds are already in hysterics and aren’t playing along because they well and truly terrified them.

Some of the anti-scold scolds in my mentions are pointing to this @eater article as proof that indoor dining is A-OK. Sorry boo but this is a poorly written article with a dangerously misleading headline! https://t.co/ay7Qm5Rjqw

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

Yes, we’re anti-scolds because we believe people should make up their own minds.

The nerve.

For starters, it’s irresponsible in a headline to state single-study findings as fact. More deeply, contact tracing is the single least reliable data metric, especially in the US, especially in NY, where it’s both voluntary and self-reported pic.twitter.com/A0qvBfcvN0

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

Mobility studies of cell gps data — which track entire populations, not just self-reported infected people self-reporting their movements — show without a doubt that ALL indoor interaction contributes to spread. Restaurants, which by nature involve masklessness, are hotspots.

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

Kudos and thanks to @eater for updating the headline & content of this story to more accurately reflect the nature of the data it’s reporting on https://t.co/ay7Qm5Rjqw pic.twitter.com/1OtNZ8ArNw

— Helen Rosner (@hels) February 5, 2021

The hysteria the government and the media have created will have far longer-lasting implications on some people in this country than any virus. This thread is insane.