masks

wv wrote:

But should local or fed govs FORCE it on people?

I dunno. Is the fact that it would ‘save an unknown number of lives’ enough to win the argument about gov.power? I dunno.

Any thoughts?

Well, several supreme court cases have already established that states have the power to require people to take reasonable steps necessary to mitigate an epidemic. So according to the supreme court that’s a constitutionally grounded state power (though interestingly not federal.) To me it’s not “oppressive government” when it’s an epidemic. Freedom in an epidemic is a dangerous illusion. Same reason we have speed limits when driving.

Here’s the thing about masks–they work. Studies show they do. They slow the spread down. Places that masked up (Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria) had much lower infection rates.

Places that did not mask up (Sweden) had much higher death rates. And Sweden tried the “protect the vulnerable while everyone else runs free” routine but it did not work. The elderly were just as vulnerable if not more.

And it doesn’t have to be “forcing.” You can say that all businesses require masks and there are no exceptions. Then the businesses enforce it. You can also just simply say crowds of certain kinds are disallowed (eg. pool parties).

But yes they can require it, they should require it, it works to require it, and I don’t buy the idea that wearing a mask imposes on freedom. I don’t see it as being any different from lower speed limits in a school zone. It’s just public safety.

I’m in the left-libertarian, libertarian socialist, left-anarchist camp too, with some other stuff thrown in. But mostly that. In general, I’m not much for “mandates” either . . . but in this case?

I’m in favor of mandating masks for all public places, without exception, at least until we have a vaccine. And even when we get one, I think all public officials should strongly encourage masks every flu season, without fail. Year after year. I think it should be a national, “normal” habit, promoted vigorously through all forms of media. People should want to do it, to stop the spread.

I also think it’s important to remember we have long had all sorts of “mandates” for public safety, and most people don’t see them as some sort of grounds for armed (don’t tread on me!!) revolution. Waterfield has mentioned speed limits in school zones, for instance. Would any of these people (shouting to the rooftops like they’re waging war against the British King) suggest we should assert our “freedom” and drive as fast as we want near elementary schools?

Who knows? But I’m guessing they don’t want that to happen, especially if their kids go there.

To me, wearing masks is just common sense, common decency, logical to the max, and, ironically, one the fastest ways we can open up “the economy.” If everyone buys in, we can (close to) safely open up commerce in this country. In fact, I think if we had a national buy-in, we could have done that back in late January.

One would think that lovers of capitalism would be all for it. It’s really quite nearly the ONLY way to open up to the public again without having mass deaths.

(I’d also love to see a Manhattan-like project to retrofit all public spaces to be as touch-free as possible, tech-wise, especially bathrooms)

wv wrote:

I was thinking about Cigarettes. Cigs kill what, half a million Americans. But the Gov can make laws about ‘where’ you can smoke.

I guess the mask-thing is a bit like that. You are free to not-wear-a-mask in your home, etc, but when it will affect others, its different.

Obviously, the folks that have a deep distrust of the system, are worried that this is a slippery slope, and the Gov is coming to get their guns and blah blah.
So much fear. If we’d actually ‘had’ a more honest Gov all these years, people might not be so distrustful nowadays. Ah well.

w
v

Cigarettes — that’s an excellent example. Cuz they kill roughly 400K smokers in America a year, and 40K non-smokers. It’s not just a matter of “Well, I’m going to do what I want with my body,” which I’m fine with. Cigarettes literally kill those around the smoker. If memory serves, the cigarette sitting in the ash tray, burning down, is even more lethal to people in that room than direct intake.

Worldwide, they kill several million, and we exported that death, for profit!! Capitalism did that. Capitalism kills, directly and indirectly, millions and millions of human beings each and every year.

Anyway . . . I bumped into this article today, and it makes me want to weep, and it makes me want to beat the shit out of the people threatening health officials. Both. This country is sick well beyond Covid-19.

Amid threats and political pushback, public health officials are leaving their posts

On another Rams board that will go nameless, more than a few right-wing wackos have been all too busy demonizing Fauci, trying to turn him into the devil. When this kind of thing gets a big enough audience, it tends to lead to death threats. They should be deeply ashamed of themselves and stop it.

Aside from being right on the issue, pretty much from the start, Fauci actually has no power to implement policy. None. So it’s insane that people are blaming him for anything. He can’t take away the football season, even if he wanted to.

All he can do is advise. That’s it. He has zero control over national, local or state policy. Zero.

Anyway, the above article goes into detail of all kinds of cases where health officials and their families have been run out of their jobs and threatened with death. Trump could put a stop to this instantly. Instead, he’s actually egging it on.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Billy_T.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Btw, the WaPo lets you read one article before its paywall kicks in.

You can read the Washington Post at any time through Incognito. Just copy the URL to Incognito and you get the article in question just fine. (Incognito does not work with the LA Times though.)

It might just be Firefox that triggers this — haven’t checked out other browsers in some time — but the WaPo blocks private mode there too. Its software recognizes that.

I have Firefox set to clear cookies and all data automatically, so I can read more than one article by closing it, reopening, or clearing history within browser, etc. etc. Another way to go is to have, say, Firefox open, and Chrome, and then you at least can get to two in a row without clearing. More browsers, more articles, if folks want to go to the trouble, etc.

On my phone, I do most “surfing” via Duckduckgo and have that set to auto-clear. It doesn’t collect our data . . . at least they say they don’t . . . so it’s better than Google for privacy.

It can be annoying, but WaPo wants us to pay for viewing more than one article consecutively. Understandable, I suppose. Though Bezos certainly doesn’t need more money.

;>)

Regardless, hope people read the article. Really pizzed me off.

wv wrote:

I was thinking about Cigarettes. Cigs kill what, half a million Americans. But the Gov can make laws about ‘where’ you can smoke.

I guess the mask-thing is a bit like that. You are free to not-wear-a-mask in your home, etc, but when it will affect others, its different.

Obviously, the folks that have a deep distrust of the system, are worried that this is a slippery slope, and the Gov is coming to get their guns and blah blah.
So much fear. If we’d actually ‘had’ a more honest Gov all these years, people might not be so distrustful nowadays. Ah well.

w
v

This needs some examination. I don’t know what else to conclude other than that the deliberate framing of masks as a civil rights issue is…you know…mass murder.

I fully understand that there is legitimate concern and debate about the economic consequences of a “duck and cover” policy, and I understand that finding a balance between the health concern and the economic concern is difficult.

But this administration isn’t just encouraging people to “go back to work” and keep the economy ticking. It is deliberately not promoting simple safety precautions, and refusing to do anything to limit the spread of the disease.

We have:

1. A president and vice-president who refuse to wear masks.
2. The framing of masks as a civil rights issue (which is ridiculous, imo)
3. A refusal to continue financing tests
4. No effort to do any contact tracing
5. Not only a neglect to gather data, but an active effort to distort data – and this one is pretty big because it would be pretty easy to require daily data input of positive/negative tests, demographic information, and severity/symptoms information that could be instantly pooled.
6. They suppressed the CDC guidelines for re-opening
7. They have muzzled Fauci and other health experts

So…not only are they remiss on encouraging basic precautions to slow the spread of the virus while telling people to go back to work…they are suppressing efforts to fight the disease.

Zooey wrote:

wv wrote:

I was thinking about Cigarettes. Cigs kill what, half a million Americans. But the Gov can make laws about ‘where’ you can smoke.

I guess the mask-thing is a bit like that. You are free to not-wear-a-mask in your home, etc, but when it will affect others, its different.

Obviously, the folks that have a deep distrust of the system, are worried that this is a slippery slope, and the Gov is coming to get their guns and blah blah.
So much fear. If we’d actually ‘had’ a more honest Gov all these years, people might not be so distrustful nowadays. Ah well.

w
v

This needs some examination. I don’t know what else to conclude other than that the deliberate framing of masks as a civil rights issue is…you know…mass murder.

I fully understand that there is legitimate concern and debate about the economic consequences of a “duck and cover” policy, and I understand that finding a balance between the health concern and the economic concern is difficult.

But this administration isn’t just encouraging people to “go back to work” and keep the economy ticking. It is deliberately not promoting simple safety precautions, and refusing to do anything to limit the spread of the disease.

We have:

1. A president and vice-president who refuse to wear masks.
2. The framing of masks as a civil rights issue (which is ridiculous, imo)
3. A refusal to continue financing tests
4. No effort to do any contact tracing
5. Not only a neglect to gather data, but an active effort to distort data – and this one is pretty big because it would be pretty easy to require daily data input of positive/negative tests, demographic information, and severity/symptoms information that could be instantly pooled.
6. They suppressed the CDC guidelines for re-opening
7. They have muzzled Fauci and other health experts

So…not only are they remiss on encouraging basic precautions to slow the spread of the virus while telling people to go back to work…they are suppressing efforts to fight the disease.

Eight members of the Trump staff left the Tulsi rally with Covid-19. They got it there. Trump was enraged that this came out in the media. We’ve also learned that dozens of secret service agents have been told to go into quarantine after that rally as well. One would think this means they’ve tested positive too.

Dozens of Secret Service officers and agents told to self-quarantine after Trump’s Tulsa rally Carol D. Leonnig 13 hrs ago

So, Trump is not just endangering countless lives via his stance on masks, he is proactively putting his own staff and his fans in danger, all to stroke is oh so fragile ego.

And, of course, the irony of ironies is this:

If America had had a national buy-in for mask-wearing in late January, we could have opened up, in a relatively safe manner, months ago. But that would have taken Trump, his admin and all “leaders” to lead by example.

treat a mask like car seat belts… get a ticket and pay a fine if you don’t wear a mask or strap on a seat belt.

Cigs are kind of different because you have a tobacco industry making money but they still banned flavored vape pens under the tobacco company umbrella…… No one is making money if you don’t wear a mask, unless you get sick where Rx companies make money.

Just wear a fucking mask, stay the fuck away from me, wash your fucking hands and quit touching your fucking face.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by joemad.

It’s hard not to see this as a deliberate culling of the population, actually. Someone please tell me I’m wrong.

From the beginning, it was believed that elderly populations would be hit hardest. And what better way to free up Social Security payments, and better yet…Medicare expenditures? The other hard hit group will be the “essential workers,” who will be hit hardest in urban areas, and frankly, they are disproportionately minorities. So fuck them. And they penciled it out…estimates of 1 – 2 million killed…most of whom fall in one of the above two categories…and that works out as a win for sociopathic oligarchs. That’s not enough deaths to create a labor shortage and put upward pressure on wages, so…no downside to just letting the coronavirus rip right through those people we see as more of a liability than an asset.

Carry on, America.

In January 1919, San Francisco residents received some bad news: The second wave of the influenza pandemic was rolling through the city, and masks were mandatory once again. Not everyone took the announcement in stride…https://t.co/82LPhNZfNN

— Mental Floss (@mental_floss) June 27, 2020

Wasn’t really sure the best place to post this to not start a new thread.

This makes me ask, for the billionth time, what will it take for people to finally, absolutely condemn, reject and rid themselves of this evil, sadistic, little sociopath?

Workers removed thousands of social distancing stickers before Trump’s Tulsa rally, according to video and a person familiar with the set-up

Excerpt:

By
Joshua Partlow and
Josh Dawsey
June 27, 2020 at 3:05 p.m. EDT

In the hours before his rally in Tulsa, President Trump’s campaign directed the removal of thousands of “Do Not Sit Here, Please!” stickers from seats in the arena that were intended to establish social distance between rallygoers, according to video and photos obtained by The Washington Post and a person familiar with the event.

The removal contradicted instructions from the management of the BOK Center, the 19,000-seat arena in downtown Tulsa where Trump held his rally on June 20. At the time, coronavirus cases were rising sharply in Tulsa County, and Trump faced intense criticism for convening a large crowd for an indoor political rally, his first such event since the start of the pandemic.

As part of its safety plan, arena management had purchased 12,000 do-not-sit stickers for Trump’s rally, intended to keep people apart by leaving open seats between attendees. On the day of the rally, event staff had already affixed them on nearly every other seat in the arena when Trump’s campaign told event management to stop and then began removing the stickers, hours before the president’s arrival, according to a person familiar with the event who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

In Texas, our idiots are world class. https://t.co/AdI7sgVeo6

— Richard Justice (@richardjustice) June 27, 2020

Anti-masker in Alaska gets kicked out of Walmart & has a public meltdown pic.twitter.com/wymrh10XZk

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) August 30, 2020