One of the aspects of the decline of the right wing mind that we are going to have to deal with for decades to come is the choice to remain proudly and defiantly stupid while insisting that you know as much as the experts. I have seen several posts like this by anti-mask imbeciles that proudly demonstrate the point:
It’s a microcosm of Republican thought the last few decades, and no different from arguing that the estate tax is actually a TAX ON YOU DYING and the other hundreds of similar arguments. It’s absurd and stupid, but reiterated and elevated to the point of being the received view among true believers.
This one is particularly maddening- yes, a virus is smaller than a cloth mask. Everyone fucking knows this, including the mask maker, the people suggesting people wear masks, and, you know, the folks who designate masks as N-95, where the 95 stands for the 95 fucking percent of shit it will filter out. That means they know 5% gets through.
But like every right-wing argument, that misses the fucking point. The reason you wear masks is not for 100% certainty or protection, but because the virus is transmitted by being aerosolized when individuals speak, breath, yell, cough, sneeze, etc., and is carried through the air in droplets, where it can infect other people who inhale it, or if it gets in through their eyes, or it gets on their skin and they then get it into their eyes, mouth, nose, or it gets on a surface where it can stay for several days for someone to pick up that way. You wearing a mask reduces the chance that if you are carrying it, you are blasting out the plague every time you breathe, cough, talk, yell. It reduces the chance that you inhale it, because the droplets will get caught in the outside of your mask, and also why disposable masks are FUCKING SUPPOSED TO BE… DISPOSED OF.
To ignore the advice of the medical community, you have ignore everything above AND think that doctors for some reason have been running a long con since, well, fucking germ theory, and have been wearing masks forever just to one day get to this point, where, they could claim a false pandemic and force everyone to wear masks to IMPOSE THEIR WILL ON YOUR FREEDOMS.
This fucking pandemic might not kill us all, but right wing stupidity might.
HumboldtBlue
Judge Deals Setback to Trump Family: Ugly Pyramid Scheme Lawsuit Likely to Unfold in Public
hells littlest angel
The right-wing mind has always been like this. The difference is that the internet has given a voice to once-voiceless (well, less voiceful) rank stupidity.
Anonymous At Work
So, the chain link fence would work if you used Jurassic Park mosquitos: encased on large blocks of Amber.
Kay
The mask giving thing is nice. Republicans are missing out. I’ve now gotten two really pretty masks from nice women. Both quilters! Because they have all that printed cotton :)
Betty Cracker
So true, and as Kay recently pointed out, it highlights the absurdity that underlies the entire pro-virus “movement,” which holds that Democratic governors and public health officials WANT to tank the economy, interrupt education, etc., because they get off on the power to stop people from getting haircuts and tattoos. It’s beyond stupid.
Maybe it’s projection and they believe there’s a reverse Cleek’s Law operating among liberals? I’ll admit that if Trump is defeated, I will relish the wingnut tears more than I’ve ever enjoyed a round of schadenfreude in my life. But that’s not the primary motivation. I want the fucker gone because he’s destroying the country I live in.
Kay
The covid thing was pretty bad but they still somehow managed to both make it worse and make it all about them. Remarkable.
Maybe those two things go hand in hand, though. “Worse” and “about them”.
raven
@Kay: My bride is churning them out.
zhena gogolia
@Kay:
I have one of those too from a quilter. It’s quite attractive. The problem is that my hair is very thick, and these masks have elastic that goes over the whole head, so I’m having trouble putting them on over my hair. Hard to explain. I’ve ordered some from Etsy that have ear fasteners, I think that will work well.
Incitatus for Senate
Consider the size of an individual Corona virus, compared to the average size respiratory droplet that contains it. If you scale it up so the virus is mosquito sized, the chain link fence grid is probably small enough to stop it.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I absolutely agree these things are connected. Making it about them focuses the attention away from solutions to the real problem and onto their unrelated BS worries. Of course the absolute worst about this is Trump, who constantly has to make everything about him.
Kay
@raven:
It’s just this nice encounter amid all this misery. I have a floral and a butterfly one. Quilters! Of course.
Salty Sam
If you are having to ‘splain it, you have been “pwned”. Go eat your arugula, Libtard.
Geoboy
“This fucking pandemic might not kill us all, but right wing stupidity might.” I vote for option 3 – the pandemic kills off right wing stupidity.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
This is the part I’ve never really gotten. The whole “these people want to control your lives!” shit. You hear the same shit about climate scientists and others who say we should be weaning ourselves off oil. What makes right wingers think that so many people are driven by a need to control everybody? Is it that they themselves long to lord it over other people and control them, so they just cannot fathom that other people don’t feel that urge? What?
And really. Wearing masks is the big goal of these people? They go to all these lengths to control society, and the big fucking payoff is–people have to wear masks? That’s it?
I mean, shit. Can you imagine the next Bond movie, and it turns out that the whole point of Blofeld’s scheming and plotting is to get everybody to wear masks? What a lame payoff. Would James Bond even bother to try to stop him?
In my admittedly limited experience, few people feel a need to dominate and control others. Am I missing something here? Or maybe I just don’t know the right people.
Frankensteinbeck
@hells littlest angel:
The difference is that we are now getting to hear some of the hateful, idiot, jackass shit that they have always been telling each other mouth to mouth. They have always clumped in groups, and controlled entire small towns with their conformist cruelty. Light is now shining into those cracks and they don’t like it. Actually, one of the things that has them so enraged and demented now is that increasingly over the last generation, their victims have seen over the internet that conservatives are not the definition of normal, and hope and others like the victim do exist.
Salty Sam
Exactly. Pure projection.
meander
Next time I get surgery, I’m going to show this to my surgeon, nurses, and other OR crew. Then I will demand that because of this amazing work of science(!), I don’t want anyone in the OR wearing masks because any viruses or bacteria in their exhalations are probably too small to be captured by the mask.
Science!
jonas
And yet these same people all love to point and do the Nelson “Haw-haw!” when someone talks about gun control or firearms and shows a “bullet” with the case still attached or something. Apparently there can only be expertise when it comes to firearms. Everything else you can just make up as you go along to suit your own prejudices and ignorance.
rikyrah
One of the DOCTORS that MSNBC has had on commenting since the beginning of COVID-19…
Caught The Rona.
He believes that he caught it ON AN AIRPLANE -Phucking Flying Petri Dish???
The sight of this probably mid-40’s, in shape, White Man, in Nicole Wallace’s show -with the oxygen under his nose???
He didn’t have any of the usual symptoms…..he was ‘fine’ until HE COULDN’T BREATH.
Get that finger oxygen monitor, folks.????
First,the 33 year old skinny health nut Black woman at the NYT and now this guy.
This shyt is for real, and folks out here being phucking crazy???
old
I am terrified ??
https://twitter.com/ShantiAkers/status/1262229406774431745
WereBear
The doubling down function of the wingnut mind is not equipped with sensors. They have no idea when they are crossing the Ridiculous Horizon.
gratuitous
And, if I had an iota of faith that I could get a reasoned response (which I don’t), what is the end game? Doctors and medical professionals are all going to have a good guffaw seeing you wear a mask? The countermeasures aren’t 100% effective, but they are relatively cheap and easy. It’s not like everyone has to buy some thousand dollar air purifier with $50 filters that have to be replaced every other day. It’s a cloth mask! Toughen up, buttercups!
MisterForkbeard
My own right-wing idiot friend is now saying that “now that we know this isn’t a REAL pandemic we’re going to see a lot of lawsuits about civil liberties and very few about noncompliance”.
Sigh. Giving a lot of thought to just cutting this guy off. He says like this stuff a lot, and it’s honestly just exhausting to even think about.
WereBear
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Yes.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: The problem is that COVID is pretty bad, but it’s not ‘society-ending bad’ where 20% of the people who get it will die…. and you can protect against it significantly by staying home and wearing a mask. Therefore it’s not serious and Democrats were just simultaneously scaredy-wimmin-cats and also conniving unstoppable tyrants.
It makes me want to beat my head against the wall.
WereBear
@jonas: One of the ways to detect the mental illness known as Wingnut Mind is that they always try to have it both ways.
MattF
RW wackos got a lot of early practice from crackpot economics. I recall back in the days of the 2008 financial crisis, a guy in the office next-door was predicting that the US currency would soon collapse and there would be hyperinflation starting any day now. And he went on and on about gold and fiat currency, and so forth. I never tried to make sense of it. At one point I muttered ‘No one knows what’s going to happen‘ and my (very conservative) officemate brightened up and chimed in ‘Yes, exactly’. So, the mind-set of knowing more than all the experts isn’t new, and being wrong, repeatedly doesn’t stop them. And being loud and shouty doesn’t make you right, even to your ideological buddies.
Frankensteinbeck
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
If you think in zero sum terms like a bully or a domestic abuser, then you are either the one hurting others by giving orders, or the one being hurt by taking orders. If you are a racist, America is a dystopia where a black man became president and the n-lovers must be fought tooth and nail, giving not an inch anywhere. If you are selfish and don’t care about the public good, this whole thing is a big hassle and there is obviously no good reason, so it must be an attempt to persecute you. If you are even mildly bigoted, you are seething with resentment and feel oppressed because society no longer considers you the definition of ‘normal’ with everyone else a second class citizen. If you’re a mean asshole, any compassion or attempt at public good pisses you off just to witness. Almost every Republican belongs in one or more, usually all of these groups. For all of them, the thinking ends up pretty close to “This is a conspiracy to oppress me.”
Baud
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
I would like to control them. But I would like to do it for public policy purposes, not for my own social status.
M31
well if the mosquitoes only got into your yard by hitching a ride on a tennis ball, then the chain link fence would be a good idea, wouldn’t it?
but asking the right wing ‘mind’ to extrapolate from data is too much to ask
patrick II
For a long while, I have categorized ignorance into two types. Regular ignorance and aggressive ignorance. Regular ignorance just means someone, like everyone, doesn’t know something, but they are willing to listen. Aggressive ignorance means they don’t know something and fuck you for trying to inform them.
There are many reasons for the second: insecurity, lack of imagination, but lately it seems mostly bound up in macho tribalism, or white tribalism, or conservative tribalism which seems to combine the others.
Anyhow, that’s my take.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Here’s a look at the next Bond movie:
Blofeld: Ah, Mr. Bond, now that I have you at my mercy, it’s time to let you in on all the details of my nefarious plot! I’m going to fake a worldwide pandemic, so that everybody in the world will have to wear [cackles maniacally] masks!
Bond: And then?
Blofeld: And then? And then what?
Bond: And. Then. As in, what happens after they all wear masks? Will the masks be impregnated with nerve agents, and it’ll wipe out humanity?
Blofeld: What? That’s insane! Why would I want to do that?
Bond: O.K., then, you’ve bought up stock in all the mask-making companies, and you’re going to corner the market and become the richest and most powerful megalomaniacal billionaire in the world?
Blofeld: Ooh… Controlling the world face mask market… Shit. That might have worked… Too bad I never thought of that. Oh, well, there’s always next time.
Bond: So, then what? What’s the point of all this?
Blofeld: The point? My dear Mr. Bond, the point is that everybody in the world will have to [cackles maniacally again] wear masks! What more needs to be done? That is the point! It’s the whole point! This is the epitome of evil! It’s the scheme my whole life has been building toward! I will have the whole world [cackles again] wearing masks!
Bond: Shit. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I signed up for this movie. This is the dumbest script yet. And to think I thought Moonraker was bad… Oh, the hell with this. I’m off. [unties self and walks off stage]
Fin
rikyrah
????
Kay
@MisterForkbeard:
The “open it up” nutters I have met here- the people who believe the Governor of Michigan deliberately tanked her own state so she could boss them around- are fanatic Trumpsters who are just mad because they thought he was a glide to re-elect and then this thing happened and they can’t control it.
Which I sort of get, but I think it’s bullshit to jam it into this “we are being SILENCED” whining. You’re mad because Trump got hurt. Just admit it.
I think it’s perfect that the intellectual leader is a former NY Times reporter. He’s one of those awful Righties who call everyone else sheep. They sure can pick ’em over there!
MattF
@rikyrah: And I expect ‘Guard Your Potatoes’ will be trending, very soon.
azlib
Believe it or not, I got a mask from a neighbor who is a Trump supporter. Turns out she and her husband own a MA factory which was converted to produce cloth masks. She passed them out to our entire neighborhood.
joel hanes
Just as the cruelty is the entire point of many preferred Republican policies, defiance is the entire point of many preferred wingnut narratives.
They have not matured beyond “You’re not the boss of me!”.
NotMax
“We didn’t have any of this crap back when we had real lightbulbs and real toilets.”
//
Kay
@MisterForkbeard:
Leaving aside the whole rest of the world, who ALSO put these controls in, I simply do not believe that all these governors destroyed their own economies and made their jobs much, much harder because they 1. sought to harm Donald Trump or 2. had a maniacal urge to exert authoritarian control.
I don’t think that makes any sense. I don’t think that’s how that works.
Gravenstone
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
It’s projection. The assholes whining about others wanting to impose control on them are actually the ones who want to be in control. And when they feel like they are in danger of losing whatever control they do have in their lives, they lash out.
JPL
@rikyrah: Who knew that you needed assault rifles to protect potatoes?
HumboldtBlue
@rikyrah:
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
“‘Spud Squad’, this fall, on Fox!”
patrick II
@MattF:
Yeah, I think the way we are taught economics has much to do with aggressive selfishness we see around us. We are taught that each of us makes the correct choice for ourselves and the invisible hand will handle the common good. People who take that to heart feel no responsibility for the common good, since if people just acted selfishly (or greed is good) things will turn out for the best. The poor people made poor choices and deserve what they get. Libertarianism is the extreme example, but that radical free-market thinking thoroughly infests our culture. They call themselves free individuals but live in a culture that can trust less and less to those around them, and eventually will do badly, because when tested by disease and they refuse to wear masks or stay six feet away, or see hurricanes increase each season, they refuse to act as a part of a community to save the environment, the culture will fail. I am free to do what I want, the rest of you should be too, the invisible hand will raise individual actions to infallibility.
rikyrah
WaterGirl
@MattF: Good luck with your asparagus.
n
@MattF
“Liberate the latkes! Make America Grate Again!!”
//
jonas
And, moreover, the majority of people in places like NY, Michigan, and CA who have died from it were POC and the elderly in nursing homes. In other words, parts of society largely invisible to many of the proud, white non-mask-wearing yokels out there. If no-one *I* know personally has died, this must all be a big hoax, etc., etc.
JCJ
@MattF:
If you come near my potatoes I will cut you…
HumboldtBlue
@rikyrah: New poll shows Sen. Martha McSally losing ground to Mark Kelly and that’s not even the bad news
Amir Khalid
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
I could easily imagine Daniel Craig’s Bond doing that. Pierce Brosnan’s Bond? Maybe not.
Baud
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
The one where Blofeld tried to get everyone to use low energy lightbulbs was actually pretty good. More so than the one involving low flow toilets.
catclub
Unfortunately, this is what they believed in 2016. Possibly different truth values, though.
Shalimar
@gratuitous: The thing is, doctors have been wearing masks for more than a century. If this is an elaborate gag to make us look silly, it has the longest set-up in history. They need to get to the punchline.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
@Baud:
Yeah. You Only Flush Twice was easily the worst installment. Even Sean Connery couldn’t save it.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: No kidding. It never made any sense, at all.
These guys are just high on their own supply. They want to be the victims of other people’s decisions… while also making all the decisions.
Citizen Alan
@MisterForkbeard: Do it! Life is too short to tolerate unnecessary interactions with Garbage humans!
Raoul Paste
I greatly enjoyed the Blofeld / Bond dialogue
Ten Bears
I kinda’ wish someone would give me shit for bandanaing-up. I’m tired of playing nice with the repubescents. A minority, albeit highly vocal well connected minority, imposing a tyranny, in this case DEATH, upon the majority, upon the rest of us. We really should do something about that. There’s an Amendment for that, as I recall, a minority imposing a tyranny upon the majority.
One of the Originals.
rikyrah
Not mad at them.
At?All?
hitchhiker
Just in the last 20 minutes I’ve seen two separate references to an interview Fauci gave on 60 Minutes on March 8th, where he says there’s no reason for everybody to be walking around with masks on.
Both times, the person quoting it said it happened in “late March,”‘ and neither time does the person mention that he was talking about surgical masks during a period when most of the country was still free of the virus, and there were less than 5000 known cases, all of them in either WA or NYC.
This is now “evidence” that Fauci doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and covering your nose and mouth is just a stupid trick Democrats are playing to make you feel scared. I wear a cloth covering whenever I get into the elevator in our building, where we know that at least one tenant has covid-19. The other night I took the dog up to the roof for a few laps, and when the doors slid open, there stood 4 beefy young guys with beers in their hands.
They looked at me and snickered, and it was all I could do not to punch them in the nuts.
MisterForkbeard
@patrick II: “A Beautiful Mind” had that one scene where the main character figures this out, and I’ve always loved it.
If everyone makes the best choice purely for themselves, everyone else suffers. If you make the best choice for yourself AND weight society/community in, then everyone does much better. And they explain this by having a bunch of horny college bros all focusing on one woman on the bar, or not being creeps and hitting on a bunch of different women instead.
If you ever wanted to explain community good or real economic theory to bros, that’s the scene to use.
Frankensteinbeck
@catclub:
It absolutely is. It really helps understand why Republicans act the way they do to keep in mind that they look at Obama and feel the same way we do about Trump. Hell, they read Obama’s traits the way we do Trump’s. Quiet and dignified? No, that’s unmanly. A good negotiator? No, that’s weakness the world won’t respect. Follows the advice of experts? Obviously a moron who doesn’t understand the Truth they know instinctively. Spreads equality? That means he’s oppressing white people. And so on. And so on.
NotMax
OT.
Okay, who’s the wiseacre who ordered the economy pack of leg cramps? Ouch.
/OT.
zhena gogolia
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
lolololol
patrick II
@patrick II:
The United States, the land of extreme and thoughtless individual freedom, has over 90,000 deaths and over 1.5 million coronavirus cases. Here are just a few examples where community action: a period of isolation, wearing masks, testing, social tracking, have shown what a culture and government who cares about someone other than themselves can do.
Vietnam: 0 coronavirus deaths. And they have a long border with China.
Hong Kong: 5 coronavirus deaths. A city of 7.5 million people crowded next to China. I thought they would be in terrible shape.
Greece: 163 deaths, 2834 cases. A European country that got it mostly right.
Part of our power came from the attraction of a competent democracy. Our failures are not only failures for ourselves, but on the limits of American democracy, less a shining city on a hill that others see as an example, but a burning rubble to take as a warning.
Roger Moore
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Got it in one. If you ever ask why right wingers are accusing people of something, your go-to explanation should be projection.
West of the Rockies
This may be nothing ground breaking, but here goes… Growing up (I’m 58), I think we’re all indoctrinated, sometimes without malice (Washington and the cherry tree), other times with pointed manipulation (the myth of happy slaves).
We know that there were some alright Republicans: Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower.
When that changed with Nixon and then really changed with Reagan, it was the slow boiling of the frogs in the pot: not everyone was aware of the fundamental greed and malice of Saint Ronnie and how conservatism was really just greed and bigotry.
But now, with Limbaugh (the father of argutainment) and Fox and Trump, McConnell, Barr, etc., 40% of Americans are so invested in the cult that they can’t admit they are wrong, that Trump is a pig, that taking hydroxychloriquine is bad, that climate change is real, and so forth.
It’s all, of course, super disheartening, but so it goes. We need to GOTV and figure out how to indie 50 years of Republican ratfarking.
zhena gogolia
@patrick II:
How is your son?
Kay
@MisterForkbeard:
We had a brief period where they weren’t the center of attention and that cannot stand.
Someone here commented to John re: one of his rants “thank you for keeping that to yourself” and that’s where I am with these people. They talk too much. Far from being “silenced” they never fucking shut up.
You know what would be nice and decent? If we could spare a second to think about all the people who have died. I read that one out of every 300-some people died in one NYC neighborhood. Maybe we could ask Elon Musk to STFU for 5 minutes while we mourn our people. It’s obscene.
hitchhiker
@jonas:
This reddit thread from yesterday ought to be required reading.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gln8tu/people_who_had_covid19_or_know_someone_who_did/
zhena gogolia
@patrick II
Sorry, the commenting is screwed up.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@MattF:
Those would be the people who yammer on about the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 being the death knell for the stability of the almighty USD, and how everything has been precarious since.
Nothing like the passage of over a century without the predicted disaster occurring to prove you wrong.
MisterForkbeard
@Citizen Alan: I might. Dude’s quiet most of the time, other than being a ridiculous gun-humper. But he’s a clever guy, and has a lot of joint friends. He also reaches out to me sometimes to get the liberal/scientific opinion on things, which is nice.
But he’s gone full whackjob in the past few years. When Scalia died, he thought Hillary had done it somehow, since he knew she had literally hundreds of people killed. He never met a Trump policy he didn’t like. And now he thinks the entire pandemic is made up, or at best “just cowardly fear-based decision making”.
Approvingly cites Bill Maher when Bill says this is just like the flu, etc. I think I’m just going to give up.
Just Chuck
Their attention span is too short for proper argument. The proper response:
“So you know more than every single doctor and hundreds of years of medical research, huh? Wow.”
And walk away. You can’t argue with malicious stupidity, there’s no longer a functioning brain there that can apprehend logic or reason. The best you can do is ridicule them for the peanut gallery.
Maybe if you do want to insert facts into your snark, try something like:
“It’s not to stop the virus itself, it’s to stop it from being carried on the spittle you no doubt spray over everything when you rant and rave like a lunatic.”
Overall point, these people cannot digest an argument over 240 characters long.
Meyerman
@Incitatus for Senate: I know that science is hard for conservatives, but a paper just came out in PNAS. Droplet size from speech started out at 12-21 microns. As water evaporated from the droplet, the droplet shrank to 4 microns. SARS-CoV-2 is approximately 0.12 microns. Like you said, it’s the droplet that matters. The droplets (at their smallest) are 33 times the size of the virus. If we apply this scaling to mosquitoes, an average size mosquito with a wingspan of 5 mm would be carried along by a droplet 16.5 cm in diameter. Chain link fences openings are 2″ (5 cm). 16.5 > 5. And now I am going outside because it is a beautiful day
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
I’m sorry, but your plot is still better than Moonraker.
Betty Cracker
@HumboldtBlue: This quote from the article you linked:
Good question. Republican pols like Rick Scott and Marco Rubio (whom I closely observe because I’m unfortunately represented by them) are almost comical in how obvious they are about straddling the line on Trump. They handle the association with tongs in some settings and hitch their wagons to Trump in others. That, I can understand even while holding the hypocrites in contempt. McSally’s actions I do not understand.
Roger Moore
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Where would you like your internets delivered?
Another Scott
Relatedly, …
We’re living in a satirical movie…
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
chopper
@MattF:
i need to guard my potatoes from 30-some odd feral hogs, obvs.
Kelly
Social Security has been on the verge of collapse for 84 years.
MattF
A side note: apparently, according to Rick Wilson, the Lincoln Project’s latest video is now on the front page of Drudge news. I should add that no, I won’t give a link, and no, I haven’t actually checked this out personally.
I’d bet that Drudge wouldn’t put a video from us libtards on his front page– but the never-Trumpers ring a bell for him.
Kay
People complain about Dave Weigel but he’s the only “big” political reporter who actually makes an effort to understand Democrats. The rest of them treat us as “not Republicans”, the outlier to the norm, which is Republican. They don’t really believe Democrats exist, as a base, except in a stereotypical sense – ‘political correctness!’ – like that. They think there is the GOP base, and then a bunch of center Right swing voters and that second group encompasses all Democrats.
chopper
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
“hyperstagindeflation! it’s comin’ this time, i swear”
Bex
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): All these people need to be controlled but can’t admit it to themselves.
NotMax
@chopper
Automation will come to the rescue.
Tater Bots™.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay:
Yes, but that’s only a .3% death rate! That’s the flu! How dare you strip me of my constitutional rights, try and make we wear a piece of cloth on my face and… okay, I can’t keep this up. I feel dirty.
trollhattan
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
“Moonraker” had a plot?
Just Chuck
As my high school shop teacher put it: “Ignorance is when you don’t know something. Stupidity is when you choose to not know.”
opiejeanne
@Kay: I’m so excited! I just got some really fun fabric I ordered nearly two months ago for masks. This company prints on demand and they’ve been swamped with orders to the point that they’ve hired more people and bought more printing machines, and they sent letters of apology for not being able to ship sooner.
The designs include, among others, neon jellyfish, a Pacman game, Art Deco cranes on a teal background, black hedgehogs on white, white hearts on red background, and RBG wearing her fancy collar on a black background.
Betty Cracker
@MisterForkbeard: As some wag on Twitter pointed out, Anthony Weiner’s continued existence is all the proof anyone needs that the Clintons don’t have people whacked…
trollhattan
@chopper:
You’ve just landed that coveted WSJ op-ed jerb!
–“Successfully predicting seventeen of the last zero bouts of hyperstagflation.”
trollhattan
@Just Chuck:
True. One of those two states can be corrected.
NotMax
@Just Chuck
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
– Søren Kierkegaard
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: Agreed. There was a note in a recent thread about how the median democratic voter in South Carolina was a 50-year old black woman.
And yet, the only people that got attention, media scrutiny and interviews were the Very Online Left (disappointed in Democrats) and Republicans (Democrats are the anti-christ). So Biden doing well there was a complete surprise because they hadn’t bothered to actually try to understand the electorate. The media has the same problem nationally.
Kay
Obama woulda had a proper ceremony for “those we have lost” and it would have been respectful and kind and uplifting.
Trump and the low quality hires instead chose to pretend they never existed. Just appalling personal behavior, every single day and all of them. “Poorly raised” my mother would say.
piratedan
@Frankensteinbeck: appreciated the classification process you outlined regarding the types of folks that inhabit the GOP. I also think that there’s an additional one, family legacy, we’re Republicans because we’ve always been Republicans, we’re not even sure what it actually means anymore, it’s just part of the tradition in and of itself.
MisterForkbeard
@Betty Cracker: Yearp. Or Mitch McConnell. Or maybe Bernie Sanders. :)
But seriously, I don’t even get the conspiracy theory at all. If the Clintons did this to even 3-4 people, the Republicans, the (Republican) FBI, local sheriffs, etc would be all over it and have produced massive amounts of evidence. The only reason they wouldn’t have done this is if… the Clintons ALSO controlled all those groups.
They’re still trying to find a way to create a unified theory of Clintonmurder. They just have to square the circle of being simultaneously all powerful, yet failing to actually murder any real nemesis or having any evidence… and also losing the election.
This is the entire reason for QAnon. So these folks don’t have to face the fact that their fantasies are fantasies.
Amir Khalid
Some ‘Rona related sportsball news: The BBC is reporting that six players and club staff at three English Premier League clubs have tested coronavirus positive. PM Boris Johnson’s Conservative government wants to restart the football season to “lift the nation’s spirits”, and clubs duly began pre-restart training today. Matches resume sometime in June; if there are more positive tests after that — there is no real reason for optimism that there won’t be — this will force delays on a match schedule that already cannot take any more delays.
MattF
@piratedan: Also, if everyone in your circle is a Republican, it’s likely that you’re also a Republican. I recall, back in the Stone Age, my dad was amazed that Eisenhower won the presidential election– everyone he knew had voted for Stevenson.
patrick II
@zhena gogolia:
Thank you for asking. I have reserved talking about it until all the tests are back (they gave him 11). He seems free of the virus, but still with at least one dangerous clot in the lung. Rest and blood thinners until the clot is gone.
He had no symptoms except extreme exhaustion, and finally, chest pain which caused him to go to the emergency room, they did a CT and found blood clots. The blood clots are what are killing people who get surprised at the quickness of mortality by heart attack. They have probably been sicker than they knew for a while. I will only feel relieved when I know his lungs are clear.
Meanwhile my 97 year-old mother is in a assisted living home where there had been zero deaths, then 1 death two weeks ago, and now 14 this week. It moves fast. My brother and sister are taking her home as soon as they can.
My sister is 71 and brother 69, and my brother is going to be sitting in a car with someone coming from a coronavirus infestation for four hours to get mom to my sisters house. I am as worried about them. God bless their brave souls.
Many phone conversations the last few days, but I try not to think about it too much when not directly dealing with it (or go crazy) by writing dumb posts and reading a dumb scifi book with a space witch, a talking dog, a kidnapped girl on a planet populated by a race evolved from turtles.
Anyhow, so it goes.
Raoul Paste
BOND; “Do you expect me to talk?”
GOLDFINGER: “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to wear a mask”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay:
The flags on the Public Safety Building across the street are at half mast and have been for weeks. Is that true nationally? You would think they could at least do that until the day no one died of COVID.
HumboldtBlue
@Betty Cracker:
That’s because you’re an intelligent, rational and observant person who isn’t a fucking dingbat.
Whatever the hell she is doing may she long continue doing it. They are trying their damnedest to smear Kelly with deep ties to China and other bullshit that they very craftily manufacture.
Robby-D
I used to think that being Conservative meant you didn’t understand nuance; I now think that not understanding nuance attracts one to being Conservative.
piratedan
@Betty Cracker: she’s even doubling down by stating that the virus is a communist plot in her most recent ads.
Hoping that the trend continues that she crashes and burns and leaves a minuscule amount of ash at the impact site.
HumboldtBlue
@patrick II:
Sheesh, all the best, I can’t imagine the emotional and mental toll this is taking on millions of families like yours.
Have some love from the Lost Coast.
And 2020 can fuck right back off from whence it came.
NotMax
@Dorothy A. Winsor
Tsk tsk.
/pedant
Kay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I just think there should be some recognition that all these people died of this virus. I don’t think these “shortcuts” the US does all the time really work, in some essential sense. “Get on with the business of business!” it’s a kind of denial. It all just gets heaped up into this toxic sludge of unresolved anger and grief but it doesn’t go away and then it bursts forth in some insane spurt of irrational anger. We’re a sick country. This isn’t healthy behavior.
jimmiraybob
This is he unbreakable Trump-cult bond. He fulfills them. They vote for him.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@NotMax:
Hm. Half staff?
Betty Cracker
@patrick II: Good lord, how frightening all around. Wishing peace and strength to your family.
NotMax
@Dorothy A. Winsor
Aye aye, Captain.
opiejeanne
@WaterGirl: Haha!
We came out one morning to find every seed potato we had planted that week lying on top of the ground. Someone with little hands had dug them up and decided they were inedible. We suspect raccoons but maybe it was the Trumper neighbors. //
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Weigel is among the best of the major daily political reporters, IMO. I don’t always agree with his take, but he seems genuinely curious about the people and the processes and less interested in performative cynicism. He isn’t wholly focused on building and monetizing a personal brand like so many of them are. I appreciate those qualities.
Kelly
‘Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.’ John Stuart Mill.
JustRuss
Of course not. Masks are just the first step down the slippery slope. Next is mandatory Birkenstocks, then tie-dye for everyone. The librul tyrrany is just getting started!
HumboldtBlue
@Betty Cracker:
And it seems like we’ve been reading him forever, but he really only came to light after Obama election, right?
Taken4Granite
Last I checked (and it’s been a while), the citywide rate was about one dead for every 400 people. And we all know that the effect has been uneven. I would not be surprised if there were neighborhoods in NYC where one out of 100 people died.
Betty Cracker
@HumboldtBlue: Good question; I’m not sure. I thought I first became aware of him during the 2008 campaign, but I could be wrong about that.
raven
Ugh, they just lifted the vacation rental ban at the Florida beaches and our friend’s place is open. I keep thinking it’s now or never until after the summer if they open everything down there.
The Moar You Know
@MattF: I did and it is.
Boy, someone got to Drudge. That guy is definitely on the Never Trump team.
Immanentize
@NotMax: I take it you’re a “half staff” man, yourself?
Oops, asked and answered I see.
Are your Charlie Horses distracting you from knee pain? If so, win!
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
Destroying the country.
He certainly is trying, but he didn’t get here without help from decades of the republican party’s help. And I believe that they have thought for decades that the only way they could succeed was to dumb down the masses They haven’t totally succeeded, but they have made progress.
HalfAssedHomesteader
The ignorance I can kind of cope with — just do the best we can to keep to keep the reigns of power from their mitts. But it just seems like from here on every problem that requires a united front to grapple with is going to be politicized and thus leave us vulnerable to more and more problems that grow in size and severity. That’s what I find truly depressing.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
I would say they think there is a third group, ‘progressives’, who are a fringe of naive eighteen year old ‘Millenial’ hippies. Damn near everything is framed as a conflict between the ‘progressive wing’ and the ‘moderate wing’ of the Democratic Party, even by people who should know better.
zhena gogolia
@patrick II:
Oh, I’ll be thinking of you all. What a trial.
zhena gogolia
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
They have been here in CT, but the governor just ordered them raised again.
HumboldtBlue
@Betty Cracker:
What ever happened to Kevin and Ms. Molly?
donnah
People want to see respect for grieving families and recognition for the huge losses we’ve suffered. I want that, too. But I don’t want Trump or any of his party to do it. The names of those who have died don’t belong in their mouths. They are to blame in the sense that they knew and did not act, they acted only when they feared being exposed, and they stopped those who would help. They simply don’t care about the dead.
I hope that someone like Barack Obama or Michele or a compassionate actor, anyone but a lying Republican, would put together a special tribute that would air nationally. We need some sense of honor for those who have died, and something for their families.
billcinsd
@Meyerman:
Also, those size droplets are not aerosols but suspensions
Roger Moore
@Kay:
The population of New York City is about 8.2 million, and there have been over 20,000 deaths. That’s right about at 1 death per 400 people for the entire city. In the entirety of the Bronx, it’s about 1 per 330 people. I have no trouble believing the worst individual neighborhoods are far worse than that.
trollhattan
No way, no how Trump wears a mask to this.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Birmingham – 115 new cases and 5 deaths over the weekend. Mask usage required, and is being done by my limited observations.
Also, a way has been found to make a trip to the DMV worse. Going on three hours and I haven’t even entered the building yet. Ughhh
Brachiator
@Kelly:
Great Quote. Of course, Mill was referring to the UK Conservative Party, but it works as a general principle as well.
@Ruckus:
The masses in America and other countries have never needed anyone’s help in being stupid. They have always managed very nicely on their own.
We have always had a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in this country. We are suspicious of smart people, deride them as “eggheads” (originally used against Adlai Stevenson), or weakling nerds and geeks.
The Republicans are just taking advantage of suckers. But as that wise philosopher once said, “Never give a sucker an even break.”
lgerard
Wasn’t if JFK who said
Mask not what you can do for your country
Of course he was a loser who got shot
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Cook County (Chicago et al) seems to be leading the country in total cases (64k) at 1,200/100k. Queens is #2 @ 59k and 2,600/100k. Just checked my county, we have 1,200 total cases and 81/100k. Lockdowns work.
OGLiberal
The problem with these idiots is not just that they want to open up everything, right away, but they want to do it and not wear masks, not social distance, not refrain for large group gatherings, etc. Can’t they even just try to say, “If you open stuff up, I promise to wear a mask, stay 6 feet away from others as much as possible and not have a 120 person graduation party for my daughter.” But I guess making that compromise would mean that they’re pussies and Trump actually did fuck shit up – and that’s a bridge to far for these dumb asses.
EthylEster
@Kay: “Poorly raised” my mother would say.
“Not raised, jerked up”, as mine would say.
AnnMcC
John Cole tweet: “I put a cow bell on thurston and he is driving me insane”
Me: As well he should if you actually put a cowbell on him!!
Betty Cracker
@HumboldtBlue: I think they decided to be Very Offline. Can’t say I blame them!
Jeffro
@WereBear:They have no idea when they are crossing the Ridiculous Horizon.
That’s because they do it at Ludicrous Speed! ;)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MattF: I never bothered to check it out because drudge and trump, but I do remember seeing flurry of “if he’s lost drudge…” tweets a few weeks ago
I’d kind of forgotten drudge existed
Jeffro
@rikyrah: He would really, really like to get the Very Fine People out there marching again, this time with automatic weapons and trumpov flags.
Citizen Alan
@trollhattan:
Of course, Moonraker had a plot. Of course, it was the *same* plat as The Spy Who Loved Me except it was in space instead of underwater, but it had a plot.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t know what happened to him because he used to be super cynical and Rand Paul loving. He did the best job on the D primary by far- so much better it wasn’t even close. Actual coverage of the people and events without all that bullshit they do “oh, look, here’s the interest groups we caricature” where they treat us like there are like 11 of us.
I held a grudge against him for a while because he uses the term “ballot security” which is a ‘tell’ in voting rights circles- it’s wingnut lawyer language. I know that is a very specific and petty grudge but that’s what happened :)
HumboldtBlue
@Betty Cracker:
You ever hear anything about Strange?
Brachiator
@Jeffro:
Somehow, I skipped “Space Balls.” Gotta go back and watch it.
germy
It’s almost like she’s trying to give republicans advice on how to attack Biden:
James E Powell
@Betty Cracker:
There are quite a few Republicans who are all in on the Trump team. Their plan is to fire up the base and smear the opposition. I don’t think they have a Plan B.
Bill Arnold
@Betty Cracker:
More like, 2 fucking months of precious time frittered away treating COVID-19 as a PR problem, so that the only remaining tool in the public health toolkit was an economic shutdown. Which we did, and continue to do, very ineptly at a national level relative to a lot of other countries. It’s a huge fail for the US, and the world is watching.
Major Major Major Major
Obviously mask-wearing is good and everybody should do it, but it’s worth pointing out that our country’s public health leadership spent months lying about this and perhaps that undermines their credibility.
Jeffro
@germy: “…must…help Republicans…keep it…close…”
Betty Cracker
@HumboldtBlue: Nope, not in several years. Last I heard, he was doing okay. I hope he still is. I think of him often.
Jeffro
@Brachiator: It’s a blast. My kids nearly died laughing every time Dark Helmet was on screen. =)
HumboldtBlue
@Betty Cracker:
I think of him a lot as well.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more clever and funny commenter, anywhere.
Is Citizen Alan from here Alan from RR?
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Citizen Alan: I watch “The Saint” on AmazonPrime and Roger Moore is so good. But as campy Bond he was terrible (save “Live and Let Die”)
Major Major Major Major
@Kay: Weigel is definitely individually biased but it rarely comes across in his (usually excellent) reporting on partisan bases. He’s also a lot less idiotically libertarian than he used to be.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:,
I go along with that–although he was passable in For Your Eyes Only. It was Julian Glover and Michael Gothard who made that movie work, though.
catclub
@NotMax:
wouldn’t it be half staff for land and half mast for ships?
aspiring pedant.
West of the Rockies
@patrick II:
Wait… Space turtles?!? Do tell!
Brachiator
@OGLiberal:
This is just politicized adolescent denial. These dopes are screaming “You’re not the boss of me!!” at governmental authority.
This is not even “I got mine, fuck you.”
It’s “I got mine, fuck myself.”
Kay
@donnah:
Good point, donnah. They’ll do a crap job so they can’t do it.
I saw this and liked it. It’s not a memorial but it’s a short film of people in Venice. They just talk about what happened to them in this very honest way- they’re bewildered, because you are, but there’s no posturing about it. They are UNCERTAIN and they somehow manage to deal with that.
HumboldtBlue
@Citizen Alan:
Guess I can personally.
kindness
With modern Republicans/conservatives, it’s almost like they never grew up. Here they are in adulthood and yet they are proudly using the
‘I’m rubber you are glue’
as a valid argument. I get that keeping people stupid was part of the 1%s plan to keep themselves in the 1% and us out of it. But do they really think this level of stupidity is a good thing? No, that’s crazy talk.
West of the Rockies
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Half-mask: you’ve got your mask on, but your nose is poking out at the top.
Betty Cracker
@HumboldtBlue: I don’t know. Maybe he’ll tell us! :)
Dorothy A. Winsor
@West of the Rockies:
LOL. I’m getting used to a mask and finding it easier to breathe in than at first. The hygienist who cleaned my teeth yesterday had two masks on–a disposable one over the top of an N95 one. I asked if that made it hard to breathe and she said that after a while she became accustomed.
Miss Bianca
@MisterForkbeard: I’d do it. And tell him why, if you think he’d give a damn.
Frankensteinbeck
@Brachiator:
Since Obama was elected, the Republican message has no longer been “I Got Mine, Fuck You” and has just been “Fuck You.”
Brachiator
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Didn’t realize that “The Saint” was available on Amazon. I’ve watched a couple of full episodes on YouTube. And last year, one of the broadcast digital stations ran an entire season of the series.
It was fun to see Honor Blackman and Shirley Eaton, both from “Goldfinger,” in a couple of episodes.
Moore’s Saint had a bit of an edge. Adapting a theme from the novels, he often took down the “ungodly,” people who weren’t just crooks, but who deliberately preyed upon and exploited people.
West of the Rockies
@JustRuss:
You forgot underwear. Free-ballin’ it is a Constitutional right!
HumboldtBlue
@Frankensteinbeck:
You ain’t never lied.
artem1s
Not sure why this is always the case with these people. The disconnect between short term actions and long term consequences has always been a challenge for a lot of people. They have been with us always. Problem is there is a subset who now can weaponize their stupidity. If all these yahoos wanted to indulge themselves in some quackery and Ponzi scheme grift no one was really hurt. But now that we have 2nd amendment and COVID terrorists throwing their weight around, it’s a little harder to ignore them and wait for them to Darwin themselves. This nonsense typically only surfaced as a public health problem if it rose to the level of hurting those who had power and turned them into the powerless.
Something like taking lead out of gasoline or regulating second hand smoke for the good of the public health should have been a no-brainer and easy to implement but took decades because those that were losing something (even if it was only a little profit) had more power than those who would be helped. That’s why we typically need a symbol to rally around (dying celebrities, beaten and bloody penguins, Native American with a tear in his eye) before public consensus turns to favor the powerless over the powerful. But now that the Heritage Foundation and the NRA has figured out a way to use astroturfing and the main stream media to gain public sympathy for (or fear of) the yahoos to get their way, we are becoming more aware of this weaponization of pig ignorance. Now that we can limit the consequences of nicotine usage or anti-vaxxers to the death of a few powerless no nothings, we say ‘vape away assholes’ or ‘go ahead and have your chicken pox party assholes”! But as soon as their choices start to put others (the majority) at risk again, that’s when the conflict resurfaces. And we have some pretty powerful people who have chosen to let the stupid weaponize their rage because it serves their interests and profit margins.
this pandemic is really very similar to the climate change crisis. It’s not affecting the powerful quickly enough to get their full attention. And by the time they realize/admit they are at risk too, it may be too late for all of us.
germy
jeffreyw
@West of the Rockies:
It’s turtles all the way down. This is known.
Brachiator
This just in …
A lot of dopes will applaud this as putting America first, and returning manufacturing to the US, but economic and national security concerns are overblown.
And the fun thing is that there are currently no effective drugs that this company might be making. They got a big fat government contract, and could push out nothing but sugar pills for years.
But Trump will toot his own horn for doing … something. And the suckers will end up paying big bucks for a lot of nothing.
artem1s
@Major Major Major Major:
I am not inclined to blame public health officials who were trying to keep the public (and Jared) from hording and profiting off the resale of medical supplies. Toadies who were embedded in Trumps ass, yes, blame them all you want.
HumboldtBlue
@germy:
I bet they all got a sharp rap across the knuckles from
SisterSgt. Mary Frances O’Donnell as well.Religion poisons everything,
patrick II
@West of the Rockies:
Mercy for Hire Mission Pack 1: Missions 1-4 (Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire Mission Pack) Kindle Edition 0.99 cents.
The sentient turtles are a little slow.
Nicely written light space western. Especially considering the price.
Bill K
@jonas: When I hear someone bragging about their gun expertise I remind them that guns are designed to be used by weaklings and morons. A 1-year-old child killed his mother once with a handgun.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I can honestly say I haven’t given Matt Drudge or his Report the slightest thought in many years. At least a decade, and probably longer than that. In the late 90s I used to check his site several times a day — not for the screaming red-siren headlines, but simply because he was the only news aggregator out there at the time, and a good chunk of my job was media monitoring. He had links on his front page to every newspaper, magazine, and broadcast outlet (US and foreign, which was useful), and I found it convenient to have them all in one place.
But things changed and I forgot all about him. Haven’t missed him, either.
Bill Arnold
@Ten Bears:
Are you in a stand-your-ground state?
Major Major Major Major
@artem1s: I’m certainly in favor of criticizing public health officials for taking the official strategy of “straight-up lying to you is okay and good”, and I certainly have seen people say the CDC’s flip-flop on masks is because The Deep State Got To Them.
And, personally, I’m much less inclined to trust the public health officials who decided to lie to me instead of trusting me to make the right choice with real facts.
Trump’s politicization of the virus more generally is the bigger problem, of course.
Major Major Major Major
@germy: I read about that! And then got linked to an article that went under my radar last week: “Smoking Gun” Emails Show De Blasio Was Directly Involved In Delaying Yeshivas Investigation
Perhaps he’s just trying to make himself look Tough On Yeshivas.
Betty Cracker
@SiubhanDuinne: I used to check it daily for the news aggregation function too, back in the day. Last time I looked at it, within the last couple of years, I think, it still had that mid-90s aesthetic.
Kent
For 3 years GOP politicians have lived in mortal fear of being primary-ed by Trump and the MAGA fanatics. That is basically why. I think the sands are shifting but some of them like McSally are still living in that world.
trollhattan
@West of the Rockies:
Yes, Gamera. He is the children’s friend.
Accept no substitutes.
Miss Bianca
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The flags outside our school also. Part of that may be the sudden death of a school board member last month, but I am thinking it’s also for the COVID-19 deaths in CO as well.
Gov. Polis held a memorial service last Friday evening for them. Over 1,000 so far in Colorado.
Kay
They’re just swimming in wingnut cash on that side of the aisle.
It’s bad that she did it but I think you can understand. They shower them with attention and also cold hard cash.
I feel like I could do it- would be good at it :)
JPL
@patrick II: I was thinking about you earlier. Hopefully your son keeps healing, but I’m hearing that it takes weeks for one to feel completely normal.
jonas
@hitchhiker: Damn. That’s a pretty intense historical document right there.
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: My friend who died of COVID-19 lived in Queens. : (
Bill Arnold
germy
I visited my local supermarket early this morning. Sign on the door says Masks Required. Went inside and saw a maskless customer – old white guy pushing his cart down the aisle. Of course, I encountered two shoppers ignoring the “one way” signs in the aisles, coming towards me as I obeyed the rules. Saw one grocery stocker maskless. And at checkout, one of the cashiers had his mask down over his mouth with his nose uncovered.
I wanted to use self checkout, but it wasn’t open yet. So I picked a cashier with a mask, and at the end of the transaction he said “Stay safe!”
“Thank you, you too!” I replied.
Part of me wanted to complain about what I saw, but I didn’t want to hassle this employee who was following the rules, and there were no managers visible.
I’m at a point now where I’ve given up speaking up for myself. I’m just tired of the bullshit.
I mean, I almost forgot my mask this morning. And if I’d driven all the way to the store and then realized I’d left it home, I would have turned around and driven back home to get it. The people who ignore rules, I just find them enervating.
trollhattan
@Miss Bianca:
So very sorry. Admit I’d be petrified if I lived where the toll has been so great.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
Health officials did not lie. A lot of people demanded a simple answer to a complex question.
And many people cannot be trusted to make the right choice. Most people do not get the key point that masks are meant to help prevent people from spreading the virus, not to protect the wearer from getting sick.
And the larger issue is that fools are discarding all health recommendations. There was never any dispute about the value of social distancing. Never. And yet dopes are refusing to comply with this.
They probably stopped washing their hands as well.
trollhattan
She really, really has his number. This is his snappy retort?
jl
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Except with a corrupt and bad faith national leadership, we may be doomed to repeat it indefinitely.
Federal and state police power to control dangerous infectious diseases are as old as this country, going back to John Adams signing the first federal legislation, the negotiations between federal and state power in public health, particularly law enforcement power in quarantine, go back to the beginning of this country. Contact tracking and quarantine as standard public health practice for a dozen dangerous infectious diseases go back 80 to 100 years, depending on how you want to define it. State regulation of public space, and public behavior to protect public health in the US go back 150 years. In fact, the US used to be a world leader. Back in the day, the oligarchs of the day in the UK thought US advances in public sanitation was dangerous nonsense, that would upset the social order and corrupt morals.
Everything old is new again. There is obviously some new stuff with covid-19, but a lot old and familiar too. Need to drop some history on the ignorant and foolish in this country, as well as science. Enough of them might decide to stop being dupes of ignorant and self-destructive manipulators in high places to make a big difference going forward.
germy
Annie Glenn, wife of late astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn, dies of coronavirus
trollhattan
@germy:
Safety kabuki does not get the job done. Either have and enforce protocols or stay closed.
germy
germy
@trollhattan:
Safety kabuki. Reminds me of all the TSA restrictions. Removing shoes and dumping water bottles.
Oklahomo
@chopper: It’s like Rapture prediction.
germy
@trollhattan:
“You’re my favorite waste of time.”
( Marshall Crenshaw )
Major Major Major Major
They most certainly did. For example, contrary to the surgeon general’s all caps tweet, masks work! Even easy-to-wear surgical masks help protect the wearer—and more recent studies suggest the same is true for literally any reasonable barrier. Should we discourage people from hoarding medical supplies? Yes. Is lying in all caps an effective way to do this? Ethics aside, it obviously was not.
Feel free to substitute “numerous instances of the CDC saying basically the same thing, but with more words and correct capitalization” if you’d prefer.
This didn’t happen in every country. Our public health leaders fucked up on this front, and the only way we’ll stop it from happening again is by acknowledging it.
rikyrah
@Kay:
the Black version of that is
” No home training. ”
it’s one of the cruelest and most dismissing of Black insults.
Gin & Tonic
@germy: Ukraine is still requiring masks pretty much everywhere. So an MP from the majority party who’s on what we’d call here the RWNJ spectrum showed up at the Parliament building today with a crocheted mask. I suspect she thought she was being clever.
Brachiator
@germy:
This is really sad. It’s funny, even though I idolized the original Mercury 7 astronauts, I never knew much about their wives and families. But I think I read more about Annie Glenn after seeing the movie “The Right Stuff.”
She was quite an individual.
May she rest in peace.
Bill Arnold
If anyone wants to mainline the mask guy, he’s a QAnon guy (I think same guy). Here’s a few links:
https://picbabun.com/jaysather
https://www.jordansather.com/about
Really stupid stuff. He is shitty at conspiracy theories[2], appears to be profoundly ignorant about scientific matters[1], and a threat to the country due to his anti-public-safety propaganda efforts.
[1] @Meyerman: elegantly destroyed the chain link fence stupid-meme. In words and numbers, sadly, which the consumers of such garbage are allergic to.
[2] Q people really should be wondering more seriously about the origins of Q. Just saying. (It’s an op!)
jl
@Major Major Major Major: I think there was honest disagreement about what the role of masks should be for covid-19 control. Some of that was driven in the US by a bizarrely pedantic and unrealistic approach to the role of scientific evidence in public health. Some experts seemed to want a double blinded placebo controlled trial with an official p-value < the Holy 0.05 before we did anything. But that kind of evidence is never going to happen for public use of masks to control disease with respiratory spread.
Others, usually the ones with practical experience, said, look they seem to work in places with successful policies, it’s damn cheap compared to letting an outbreak turn into a disaster, so let’s do it.
I think the public health people with practical experience were correct from the beginning.
Edit: part of it was cynicism and pessimism in the US about the ability of US public to do anything competently and responsibly. But, look at quality of public information campaigns in US, which IMHO ranges from stinks to non-existent. Other countries have done much better than we do.
Will enrage some people in this country, but many countries ranging from Africa, to South Asia, to East Asia (you know, ‘those’ people) know how to handle unexpected and emerging disease threats far better than we do in the US. I wonder how much racism is involved in Trump’s tantrums over the pandemic.
rikyrah
@Kay:
When this is done, I want a Vietnam Memorial for the victims of COVID-19. I want their names in one place. I want it on the phucking National Mall??
rikyrah
@patrick II:
???????
HumboldtBlue
@Kay:
I was waiting for a fresh thread before I posted a link to that story.
germy
@Gin & Tonic:
That’s quite the knee slapper. Almost as funny as the gas mask on Matt Gaetz.
Betty Cracker
@Kent: Rubio and Scott both stood for office as candidates in the Trump-captured Republican Party in a swing state, so it seems like that should apply to them too. They addressed the danger by being two-faced on the Trump question.
Maybe McSally is just a crappy strategist. I mean, she tested the theory that embracing Trump is a winning strategy in her state, LOST, got appointed to a vacant seat, and is now testing that theory again and not doing so well? Seems dumb to me!
Ksmiami
@hells littlest angel: it’s an infantile irresponsible view of freedom. These people need to be exiled from society
Renie
It’s the old GOP mindset, if it doesn’t affect them personally they don’t care. Once someone they know gets the virus and gets sick and dies, then they will care about it.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
Health officials did not lie.
But go ahead. Oversimplify.
And of course, this really has nothing to do with the current idiotic defiance of people who reject all health recommendations., which is where anger is more properly focused.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: From what I’ve seen, the WHO has been very guilty of the p-value stuff, using terms like “no evidence” to mean “inadequate double-blind clinical evidence to move to phase nine million human trials”.
The CDC, based on post-mortems I’ve read (Vox maybe? the big Politico one?), decided to play armchair psychologist and decided that telling the truth about masks would be worse than little white lies. They didn’t trust us with the knowledge that masks can be effective, especially if everybody wears them and we’re careful about how we do it. Instead they thought people would use them wrong, and engage in riskier behavior, and hoard medical supplies–so they lied.
Do wish I remembered the link.
danielx
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I have sinus issues that do make wearing a mask more restrictive, respiration-wise. I do it anyway.
People in my area are starting to back off wearing masks, which pisses me off something serious. It’s like they’re proudly proclaiming “I don’t give a good goddamn about you, or your family, or mine either”.
jl
@Brachiator: I think US was slow to respond to experience in other countries, slow in responding to emerging evidence, and bizarrely incompetent in understanding how to implement public health policy that required mass public education. So, self-evaluation of mess ups is warranted.
But I agree with you, I don’t see any evidence of bad faith in the CDC and public health service, at least among the career people and experts.
With certain political leadership, that is another issue.
LongHairedWeirdo
I doubt 200 comments in, this is news, but I’ll mention it.
Masks don’t just stop *your* droplets – they also stop *other people’s* droplets, so long as the mask isn’t wet through.
If someone sneezes near you, and there’s a bit of a spit droplet in the air, *that* will get stopped by a cloth mask as well. I saw a news article saying that wearing a mask (alone) is almost as good as constant hand washing (alone) to stop an infection.
This is complicated, because early on, “they” reported that a mask wouldn’t help, so don’t hoard them, save them for health care and other front-line workers. “They” were wrong – masks do help protect from droplet transmission, which seems to be the primary form of transmission.
It is known that the Covid-19 virus can exist in aerosol form, but it doesn’t seem to be transmitted that way – if it were, it would be far more infectious (like the mumps, with an R of 18 – 6 times higher than the highest reported for Covid-19). That said, when intubating a person (for example), there’s a lot of aerosolized virus, and there, everyone agrees, a cloth mask just ain’t good enough.
In short, that meme requires a type of ignorance being set up on a par with someone else’s informed knowledge – in other words, it’s like most Republican orthodoxy.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: The US has forgotten how to do certain things. Maybe because no real mass disease threat affected a large proportion of population for decades (edit, there have been epidemics over last 50 years in the US that killed large numbers of people, but only ‘others’ only the poor, only the disenfranchised). Maybe because of attacks and resulting decay of tangible and intangible public infrastructure.
The US has to realize that, apart of bad faith political leadership, we stink at certain important public functions now and need to reform ourselves.
japa21
@trollhattan: He is just a plagiarist. Last week she said people should stop paying attention to anything he says, so his comeback is to say basically the same thing. And besides, she didn’t say he was morbidly obese.
germy
@japa21:
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator: Sad to hear of her passing. “The Right Stuff” was a fantastic book and one of my favorite movies, and the portrayal of Annie Glenn gave me a lot of sympathy for her. Loved the scene where she refused to give LBJ a photo-op.
jl
@LongHairedWeirdo: Thanks for reminder: this country is too incompetent in certain vital public functions to produce masks and face shields, and gloves needed to keep people from getting killed.
Even yesterday, I heard a clinician in an interview saying that getting primary care going again for procedures and exams that need to be in person, hard to get off the ground because it is hard for offices to get medical quality masks and face shields. So that is the hold up for safe visit to doc, dentist, physical therapist… really??
Saying needed to ration was OK in first stages of crisis, but I don’s see any excuse for it now.
Chief Oshkosh
@West of the Rockies:
????
Even TR wasn’t really a Republican. He was arguably a version of Progressive. Regardless, he was a bloodthirsty, twisted fuck of a human being…
…who started the National Parks and other great things.
Gin & Tonic
Trump is scheduled to tour a Ford plant in Ypsilanti on Thursday. Ford says it has informed the White House it will be requiring a mask.
Let’s see how that plays out.
jl
@Chief Oshkosh: Used to a lot of Republican progressives. Earl Warren, for one. He came to very bad end from perspective of a rapidly changing GOP.
Major Major Major Major
@Major Major Major Major: @jl: Can’t easily find my source(s) on a workday afternoon, but it was probably either via Zeynep Tufekci (e.g. this op-ed, which isn’t quite what I was looking for) or my friends in public health, who are pretty upset that leadership + comms teams decided to take the wrong approach.
japa21
@germy: Notice the last two words. “They say”. She was just talking about what other people say. She didn’t say it was her opinion. IOW, she was using a favorite Trump tactic.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: I think we do need to look into how corrupt political leadership may have corrupted civil service in federal public health agencies.
That is a legit question, and needs a thorough investigation. No more of this ‘look forward, not back’ stuff. GOP corruption has gotten to the point that it can, and has, gotten a lot of us dead and disabled.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
The rocking limo in which LBJ was pitching a fit was a brilliant little detail.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
Narrator: “There is no chance he masks up.”
And I hope Ford throws his ass out.
germy
@japa21: It was the funniest part of her quote. “They say.”
Subtle and brilliant shade.
Josie
@EthylEster:
Mine would say, “He wasn’t raised, he just grow’d.”
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: Ha! Pro virus movement. That’s hysterical but so true. Does this mean NYT will scour heartland diners for Trump supporting Covid microbes who stare wistfully at customers not wearing masks?
jl
@trollhattan: could have some workers in full bore hazmat suits wheel some splatter shields around him as waddles around the place. I’d like to see a video of that.
germy
He wears orange makeup. No way he’s going to wear a mask. It’ll smear.
Geoduck
@Another Scott: Except in Idiocracy they proactively brought in the smart guy, asked him what was wrong, and finally did what he suggested.
piratedan
@trollhattan: I have to admit, those were some of the BEST MST3K’s EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
John Revolta
@Gin & Tonic: I can’t wait to see assholes setting fire to their F-150s. I gar-own-tee there will be a few.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: For sure–one of Trump’s obvious goals is replacing the career civil service with a patronage system (turning it into some sort of “deep state” if you will), and we need to root that out wherever it is.
For the record, I’m not saying the people making these decisions were malicious, just wrong. There have been some suspicious decisions of course (e.g. the WHO delaying human-human transmission reports by a precious week), and obvious political hackery in our own agencies. But I’m trying to focus on the masks.
Citizen Alan
@HumboldtBlue: no, I’ve always been Citizen Alan here
LongHairedWeirdo
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
“They want to control your lives” is, essentially “sure, we say nasty things about liberals, some of which might not be 100% accurate, but come on, look at the horrible things they’d do to you, like how
one of them wantedthey all want to keep you from buying a 44oz fountain drink!”Remember, the GOP’s official strategy, since at least 1994, has been to proclaim “only Republicans can be good, decent people; liberals are all terrible, horrible, people.” So liberals have to be wrong, in harmful ways, all the time.
So, if liberals think torture is wrong, they’ll celebrate it when W engages in it. Or, if liberals think masks are a good idea, they must not be.
And this is one of those few self-affecting situations where the constant barrage of lies might have an effect. The GOP didn’t need to worry about lying their collective asses off about the Schiavo situation, because that only harmed an innocent husband and a helpless woman; sure, they led their followers to believe the courts were utterly worthless and corrupt in their failures to “protect” Ms. Schiavo, and sure, many of those people still, even today, see this as an act of purest evil, but that doesn’t cause harm to the politicians or pundits who swore Democrats wanted “poor Terri Schiavo to die!” No politician was punished, no pundit lost their job.
Heck, Scarborough gets to act like a good guy, because Schiavo was just fine for him to join in the hatefest, but Trump is just a tiny bit too far. I’m sorry – the Schiavo situation is what helped lay the ground for Trump, so you don’t get to act like an angel today, if you didn’t, back then, say “maybe it’s not right to tell people their family, friends, and neighbors are scheming to murder a helpless woman”.
trollhattan
@piratedan:
Right? Speaking of, IFC is running two MST3K episodes/week, so an opportunity to catch up. I even caught an honest-to-gawd Ed Wood flick, featuring a rich girl armed robbery ring from the ’50s. Gold, Jerry, gold!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Major Major Major Major:
You’re assuming that the situation is static. In the case of masks, supply was constrained in January, February and early March so much that surgical teams were having to re-use masks. So public health officials gave the prudent advice for the general public to not use masks so that health care professionals were have sufficient supply. Once the supply situation changed, their advice changed.
jl
@John Revolta: Does Ford still sell more vehicles outside of the US than inside? If so, then obvious they are part of the international Deep State conspiracy to coup plot against Trump.
If they don’t anymore, will be remembered that they used to, and a bill of attainder and declaration of corruption of blood will be drawn up.
StringOnAStick
@Major Major Major Major: When this started, I immediately started sewing masks for family and friends, and then the official recommendation came out that “cloth masks are useless, don’t bother”. I kept making them and sending them out anyway because as someone who wore a mask in a dental setting for 11years, I knew that was a BS take that would end up being revised. Funny how that goes.
my final model is the typical pleated mask but with an opening to slide in a piece of bendable metal for the bridge of the nose. Those metal strips on higher end coffee bags are perfect; I wish I could find another source other than stealing empty bags from the U Grind It station. This life of crime doesn’t suit me and I feel guilty.
Ruckus
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
Last I checked, the CA DMV offices are all closed TFN. My license expires soonish and as I’m over 70, I have to take a driving test. I have no idea what would happen if I were stopped.
Gin & Tonic
@StringOnAStick: I found (and ordered) a bag of 100 of those strips on Amazon. Looks like they’re still in stock.
LongHairedWeirdo
@MisterForkbeard: I gave up on a friend for nothing more than his constant lies about how liberals don’t care about the Constitution. If a person lies about that, they’ll lie about worse.
Major Major Major Major
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I think it’s great that the advice changed when the situation did. I would’ve told people not to wear medical masks too. But what officials actually said was that masks don’t work to protect the wearer. That’s not advice, it’s a (mis-)statement of fact.
Ruckus
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
You are trying to make sense of it. Don’t bother, it will just make you insane. There is no logic, no thought, only obedience. And it’s not obedience for self or country betterment. It is obedience for the betterment of the people screwing them, the rich.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
DMV offered renewal extensions in April. More details here. IDK how this will morph as more time passes.
catclub
One of the Unix Fortunes is a long quote about getting a ‘half-done’dill pickle in a particular NY deli
Ruckus
@MattF:
Being wrong is always explained by “Someone is lying.”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Major Major Major Major: Again, you’re assuming information is also static, there is a great deal that we know now that we didn’t know 3 months ago. There is, in fact, a great deal we still don’t know. People, including professionals, will make comments based upon the knowledge they have at the time.
BruceFromOhio
Not just a choice, an entire existence, one that the ignorant will fight to the death, burning down to ashes all the exists, to defend. Once upon time, the ignorant were simply that: plain old dumb fucks that really couldn’t do much more than trip over their own Gaia-damned bootlaces. Somewhere along the way, this got commoditized to be profitable, and now weaponized to take down a country.
I feel a poli-sci doctoral thesis just got its wings.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Moonraker had a *plot*? Next you’ll insist there was a *script*!
(Okay, the latter I stole from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. An actor in the “Bluntman and Chronic” movie is accused of not even having read the script, and he asks, in confused horror, “there’s a *script*?” I don’t know why that line tickled me so much.)
J R in WV
@Frankensteinbeck:
I know thinking isn’t the right word here, they don’t do that. How about “Reflex Response” or “Kneejerk Reaction” instead? Or something like that. But not thinking… they can’t do that usually.
Otherwise, a great comment. I do know a couple of neighbors who are conservative church-goers who don’t appear to fit into most of those categories, but you never know, do you?
J R in WV
@patrick II:
You think these dolts were “taught economics”? Really? I came this close to a minor in Econ, because the one prof was interesting and liked contentious questioning in class. I thought lots of econ fundamental foundational stuff was absurd, like assuming continuous growth in an economy.
But then he was no longer scheduled to teach another class, being chairman. So I concentrated on my major, computer science, and let it go.
But my point here is that virtually none of these bullies ever took the first econ class, ever. They are greedy assholes by nature, can’t be fixed. Some things you can’t fix, being a greedy RWNJ is one of those things.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Last I heard, the DMV had opened some offices. Also, renewals have been extended. You may be able to go online and verify and get further information.
ETA: Also, I think the dumb Real ID deadline has been extended to October 2021.
I didn’t have to do a driving test, and got a letter with details for doing online renewal. Crazily enough, the DMV site was having problems with too many people trying to access it, and it took me a couple of days to get in. But I recall that it was fairly easy to get information updates about services and extended deadlines.
Bill Arnold
@artem1s:
It differentially targets effects affects the age cohorts which contain most of the power and wealth in this world. If they are not paying attention, they are beyond hope. I think they are paying attention; that’s why there has been any pushback at all against the “let it burn through the population ’cause our wealth is more important than human life” psychopath collection. They realize the escaping thing long enough for there to be a vaccine is dicey if it is allowed to burn through the population.
They really haven’t thought through the potentials for social unrest.
Just One More Canuck
@rikyrah: We’re going to build a wall and make Trump pay for it
J R in WV
@Betty Cracker:
I suspect that this means that McSally actually believes Trump’s Bullshit line is the gospel truth. Without Trump, McSally just might have parroted that line without Trump leading her by the nose. That’s my take.
I own a house in AZ… I wonder how long you have to have been resident in that house to register to vote in AZ? Could I stand spending the summer in AZ?
Nope, never mind.
Even at 5500 feet it gets REALLY hot out there. Dry heat? So is a blast furnace!
StringOnAStick
@Gin & Tonic: Thank you for that link!
Bill Arnold
@jl:
Worse than that. There is no scientific evidence for some of the other measures being taken, particularly with respect to COVID-19. There are people actively worrying about toilet plumes and infection through the eyes. Maybe it’s reasonable, but there is no direct scientific evidence. Hand washing and surface cleaning are likewise emphasized, without direct evidence. Probably they help (and they certainly help with e.g. rotaviruses) , but the solid evidence so far is entirely that is spread through droplets (sometimes in suspension and not settling for a while). Mix that in with deliberate anti-masker disinformation, like that Dr. Russell Blaylock guy who has been arguing that masks increase the risk for users because the prevent virus particles from escaping and make some of them recirculate, and it gets messy.
Looks like sciencetimes.com changed the headline for that piece, from “New Evidence Shows Wearing Face Mask Can Help Coronavirus Enter the Brain and Pose More Health Risk, Warn Expert” to “Are Face Masks Effective Against COVID-19? The Pros and the Cons”. (Yeah, I complained.) It’s still an awful piece, that still says “Dr. Blaylock says that exhaled viruses would not be given a chance to escape if wearing a mask. ” And they didn’t change the url.
J R in WV
@NotMax:
Good call ~!!~ Half Mast is only onboard a ship!
I used to raise the flag on my ship, and sometimes we raised it, and then lowered it to half mast. Not as easy as it sounds either!
[ I will confess, don’t recall for whom we lowered it to half-mast, was nearly 50 years ago now! ]
Bill Arnold
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
That was not the advice. The advice was that the general public should not wear masks. (Maybe there was an exception for people that knew they were infected; I don’t recall.) That meant that nobody, outside the emerging fuck-the-anti-masker-CDC- guidelines were into making and distributing cloth masks, and there was less urgency to ramp up other production of e.g. surgical masks. The CDC killed 10s of thousands of people with this (counting the future). They were wrong, and it was major wrongness, that cost a lot of lives. IMO.
At least the CDC shifted when some in-their-faces-showy-evidence was generated by some frustrated people emerged; the WHO is still against use of masks by the public.
J R in WV
@germy:
Which is why I have no respect for the corrupt heifer.
Her parents did PR for Trump, which paid for Maggie’s expensive private schooling from preschool to whatever exclusive college she attended.
No ethics in the whole family~!!~
Gretchen
@?BillinGlendaleCA: mask supply is constrained right now, this very minute. My MD and respiratory therapist relatives are re-using masks, unsafe,y, for multiple days NOW because sufficient supply isn’t available. The situation would be way worse if private citizens were encouraged to buy them. One thing nobody predicted was how many masks home sewers would make.
Gretchen
@Bill Arnold: droplets settle on surfaces so surface cleaning is obviously helpful. Infective coronavirus has been isolated from stool so yes, it makes sense to close toilets before flushing. Many viruses can enter through eyes which is why lab workers are required to wear eye protection. Do you need firm proof that coronavirus behaves like other viruses before taking steps that are effective against other viruses?
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: The WHO guidance on masks is much, much more nuanced than that (IMO).
https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1274280/retrieve (as of April 6, 2020, 5 page .PDF).
(Emphasis in original.)
My take is that if the US had a competent national government that could explain this type of nuance coherently, then we’d all be better off. It’s obvious that masks (of any sort) can help when coupled with other sensible policies, but (and I think this is the WHO’s bias) by themselves can actually make things worse.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Am I the only person who sees a serious contradiction in this simple sentence?
If masks don’t help, why would we need to save them for health care and other front-line workers>??? This is so stupid I don’t see why anyone would believe it for a split second!!!
If it will help front-line workers, it will for sure by god help me keep from infecting my frail wife!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So obvious a set of nested lies~!!~
Ruckus
@patrick II:
Yes.
Freedom and responsibilities are two different things. This concept may be too difficult for republicans to understand.
Just One More Canuck
@AnnMcC: Hoocoodanode
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Did you steal/find my box of leg cramps? You can keep them BTW, I hope I’m done with them.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
You can put both elastics under your hair. Just hook the top one over your ears. This is what I do with my masks with ties.
Just Chuck
@Chief Oshkosh:
He coined the word “Progressive” in its political context.
prostratedragon
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Wonderful!
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Brachiator: It’s also on Tubi which you can get on most smart tee vees and devices (such as Roku)
Barb 2
Hong Kong – the whole population – started wearing face masks as soon as covid 19 news broke. Less than 10 people have died. From a large group photo of looks like all are wearing various blue masks.
Earlier research lead me to the information that an insert of paper towel brings a cotton mask up to 93 N. (Search string – face mask paper towel insert.) The blue shop paper towel has the highest filtration of the tiny droplets .
why these masks? Because the N95 masks are still critically short, and needed by medical personnel.
Do not judge that a cloth mash is a toy mask. Here is one link of many on the subject.
https://www.businessinsider.com/homemade-mask-using-hydro-knit-shop-towel-filters-better-2020-4
NotMax
@David The Establishment Koch
AFAIK the indie movie White on Rice is still on Tubi as well. Just a fun romp and impressively skillfully made tight and quirky little flick. You’ll come away from it with a feel good glow.
LongHairedWeirdo
@J R in WV: What, that a mask, alone, won’t protect you, but a mask, with face shield, or goggles, etc., might?
That’s not a contradiction – that’s insufficient information, a constant trouble with all journalism. You can’t write a 50,000 word story on everything that could use it; sometimes you have to squeeze it in to 500 words.
Similarly, they say that you can catch Covid-19 from a surface, but not from food. *That* doesn’t get explained, and an ignorant person might insist that it, also, is a contradiction, but again, it’s just insufficient information. They may not know, for sure, if you can get it from surface contamination (because it’s hard to prove someone got something from a surface, if they were also in an area where an infected person was); but they do know that no traced infection came where the only possible source was a food worker. The CDC has eagle eyes on new cases, making sure they don’t miss a case of infection via food; but right now, food seems as safe as houses, but surfaces are still considered a possible vector.
Anyway: key is, sometimes, one needs to assume good faith on the part of journalists – it’s not easy, because we have so many examples of bad faith, but good faith, fact based arguments are out there, and just because you can’t trust a Republican as far as you can throw a fit (or even a (Honda)Fit ) doesn’t mean you can’t trust *anyone*.
Later, they found cloth masks seem to help (and here’s a new article to that effect); at that point, saving N95s for health care workers, and recommending cloth masks, was the right call.
Matt McIrvin
@MisterForkbeard:
On a forum about theme parks, people were talking about Walt Disney World opening part of their Disney Springs shopping area (NOT the theme parks) with social-distancing and mask restrictions.
Someone was speculating that they’d get sued for requiring masks and that would be the end of it. I was wondering why they didn’t think Disney would get sued over somebody getting sick. If the notion is going around the rightosphere that the mask rules are going to be stopped by litigation because the pandemic is fake, I guess that would explain it.
Gretchen
@J R in WV: do you have a link to someone saying a mask won’t help, aside from Trumps tame surgeon general? Fauci said in early March that he didn’t think the average person needed to wear a mask when there weren’t many positives, but that’s not the same as saying they don’t work.
SWMBO
@StringOnAStick: Way to late to a dead thread but look for floral wire.