i'm someone who managed a third space. it became successful.

then I gave up, because it became nothing but people shoving their personal politics down everyone else's throats and demanding the space ONLY be for 'people like them'. I straight up quit, because all I could see was people who wanted to turn our third space into a space for them and theirs, and exclude anyone who didn't look/speak the way they wanted, including myself.

this is the problem with 'inclusivity' and all that. there is no such thing. all there are is different versions of exclusivity, and people will get violent and hostile if you try to take their exclusivity away.

because it's not about social justice, it's about their own weird egotistical power trip.

Lived in a few states, with MA being one for about a year. MA pretty much is the strawman in right wing political cartoons made real. Shit, even doing the state taxes took longer than my federal taxes and the state taxes from the next state I moved to, combined.

Like if half the reactionary folks out there were honest with themselves, they'd realize they don't hate liberalism or leftism, they just hate Mass.

I think the mistake was trying to run a bar instead of perhaps renting an event center or something a few nights a week. You just don’t have a community large enough to sustain that kind of space, which is the endless tragedy of queer spaces that aren’t in like New York, Los Angeles or London.

Yeah, this is 100% right.

My State is full of people like this. They scream and moan about things not catering to them... and when what they want does cater to them they won't support it, and they don't understand that businesses need customers to exist...

they just seem to want business to exist that cater to them... but don't actually want to ever patronize to such businesses. but the second that business decides to try and make itself more appealing to more customers... it's EVIL. And if you patronize this business... YOU are evil now too.

And if you try to point this out to them... they just go mental. They don't understand that businesses have costs, they think the notion of profitability/sustainability is also EVIL.

Same with housing. They protest for cheaper housing. OK, we need to build more housing then. And then when more housing is proposed to be built, they protest it too. The same people most of the time.

Generally here the people who scream the loudest are the most hypocritical. They screech at everyone we need more small independent businesses... but they all shop at Amazon and Target exclusively.

It's one night. You think it's acceptable for the community to hold the bar hostage like petulant children, for attempting to save itself from closing? The last owner is living in her car.

There were and likely always will be diseases out there that kill people or significantly degrade their freedom in life. It's not just Corona.

Numbers going down to levels comparable with numerous other diseases is very much the pandemic "ending." By your logic, the Black Death never went away. Some people still die from Yersinia pestis each year.

It's one thing to mask up in a real pandemic. It's another to advocate for a position where humanity will have to remained masked from now until the end of time.

That is call an endemic disease. Which is where most pandemics wind up. Diseases didn't suddenly come into existence in 2020, it is myopic to think that covid is exceptional. To the immunocompromised all transmittable diseases are dangerous and there are thousands of them that are endemic. The people claiming there is still a covid pandemic are uneducated conspiracy theorist on the same level of the anti-vaxxers.

Some conventions (mainly furry ones) still require masks in their dealer halls.