Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

Stay strong, because they are weak.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / No Sooner Than Time Open Thread: Who *Are* Those Masked Men?

No Sooner Than Time Open Thread: Who *Are* Those Masked Men?

by | 107 Comments

This post is in: ,

Suddenly, it’s no longer un-American!

Excellent news, regardless — because As above, so below…

Reader Interactions

107Comments

  1. 1.

    HumboldtBlue

    I think the biggest mistake we made is telling Americans that wearing masks is to protect other people. Know your audience!

    How absurd is our world that straight-up full xenophobia about wearing masks against the foreign flu may have saved lives.

    Selfishness lives here.

    And that Gorka is being quoted anywhere is yet another sign of the impending doom for this planet.

  2. 2.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Went to the store today. At Trader Joe’s there was a man leaning on his Texas license-plated car without a mask, the only one in the area. As I went by, I caught his eye, motioned toward my mask, and said “Mask.” He didn’t put one on, but he kind of slunk to the other side of his car.

    It’s probably no big deal in the outdoors, and he was away from others, but we’ve got an ethos in Santa Fe.

  3. 3.

    khead

    Ventured downashore to Wildwood NJ this past Saturday. The beach experience was just fine. Lots of folks, but everyone was spaced out. The boardwalk? Not so fine…

  4. 4.

    Mathguy

    I like the ring of truth of the phrase “Trump Plague.” Also has multiple meanings: the actual plague, or his spawn, or his hangers-on, or his cultists. Does a lot of work!

  6. 6.

    NotMax

    So it turns out Jacksonville may not have been the wisest choice of venue.

    //

    @Cheryl Rofer

    Possible he’s a smoker (of whatever) and you happened upon him just before or just after?

  8. 8.

    Matt McIrvin

    @HumboldtBlue: Xenophobia is one of the things keeping people from wearing masks, because it’s a practice from East Asia that Westerners have long described as if it’s some sort of quaint superstition or alien politeness ritual rather than an effective public health measure. Anti-Asian racism is a big part of this.

  9. 9.

    Matt McIrvin

    I usually wear a mask my mother (who is a quilt artist, and knows how to make indestructible sewn goods) sent me which is in green mottled fabric, something close to a camo pattern. I didn’t need that level of macho but she may have been hedging her bets.

    Samantha made me one that fit better which is purple with pink polka dots, and I love that thing but I put it in the dryer and one of the straps came loose. I need to repair it.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    I’ve updated my post with this new reporting from James LaPorta.

  11. 11.

    Mary G

    LA County is closing their beaches for the holiday weekend, but the OC has surrendered to the wingnuts and isn’t, so it’ll be packed here. I have accepted an invitation to go to a dear friend’s house on the 4th, only her son and his wife will be there and I trust them, but it still makes me a bit nervy. I need a bit of in person company that isn’t the housemates.

  12. 12.

    Martin

    Let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve been willing to kill Americans to win elections since our founding.

  14. 14.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Not to get tangled in this web, yes I got ya.

    I’m riffing “if Obama said breathing…”

    And that if they had screamed “use a mask” to the idiots because China it may have helped in a perverse manner.

  16. 16.

    Jeffro

    Jenni Konner’s tweet is so spot-on.

    And Sebastian Gorka can go DIAF…or D-on-a-ventilator, if he likes.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    @Mary G

    Hate to sound like a sodden duvet, but stay home for now.

    It’s not just a matter of trusting them, it’s also implicitly trusting every single person with whom they’ve been in contact.

  18. 18.

    Ken

    @NotMax: So it turns out Jacksonville may not have been the wisest choice of venue.

    I don’t see how there can be a venue for the convention Trump wants. He’d need a city or state with no restrictions on large gatherings, and no COVID problem. Incompatible, like a four-sided triangle.

    Plus at the rate opinions are shifting, there’s a very good chance that by the time of the convention any governor or mayor who allowed such a thing would be dragged from their office by an angry (masked) mob.

  19. 19.

    Kelly

    Shopping run this week included a trip to Lowes and since they didn’t match the decking we’e repairing needed a stop at Home Depot. Pleasantly surprised by 90% masked at each place. Salem is in Marion County one of 7 Oregon counties Guv Brown mandated masks in public building beginning last week. Made a big difference. Masks at stores went from 10%~50% to 90%. The mandate spreads to the rest of the state July 1. The mandate is toothless. I’m surprised people came around. News of the virus spread accelerating must be getting thru.

  20. 20.

    Jeffro

    They can chalk it up to toxic masculinity, they can try to attribute it to Fauci’s early statements, whatever…the reason that half of one of our political parties went nuts about masks is because of trumpov’s stupid “hoax” and “it’ll all be over by summer” comments, and his persistent non-mask-wearing, to include him and his campaign’s making fun of Biden about it.

    Let it be yet another thing that eats at his support – I’m certain that the mask issue and the overall failure to do ANYTHING about Covid-19 is why the Ill Douche is losing seniors at a historic rate.  GOOD.

  25. 25.

    Marcopolo

    @Ken:   Empty cruise ship (though oil tanker would fit better) off the coast?  We could all hope they let some asymptomatic folks onboard by mistake.  Or they could all fly to NZ for a month or so (since they’d need to quarantine for 2 weeks).

    Honestly, in my dystopian novel where the world is succumbing to a global pandemic and NZ is the only place in the world that is safe due to the strong action of their kick ass female PM, NZ would wind up becoming the new global superpower.

  26. 26.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    If your masculinity is so fragile that it can’t survive wearing a mask, then it is already broken.

    More importantly, isn’t “protecting others” one of the manly virtues? “I’m sorry, but you’re no man if you only like the fun parts of protecting others, but wimp out when someone asks you to make a serious sacrifice like (checks notes)… wearing… (checks notes again, just to be sure, asks friend to verify he hasn’t had a stroke, and what was actually written was something difficult, that now just *looks* like “wearing a cloth mask”)

    “Here’s a very masculine mask. Put that over your nose and mouth. (hands maskless dickhead the obvious choice: a jock strap)”

  27. 27.

    Marcopolo

    Btw, I will feel much more assured about the outcome of the Nov election when this starts happening to Trump & Pence:

    An angry crowd greets #Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini during a visit to a town under #coronavirus lockdown in the Naples region, with some heckling and pelting him with eggs and water.#COVID19t.co/B0BEkAzh7h— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) June 30, 2020

  28. 28.

    Kelly

    @Cheryl Rofer: The two guys behind me at check out were some of the 10% unmasked. When the clerk asked if I wanted to apply for a Lowes credit card I turned around and said “No I just want to get away from these guys that are too special to wear masks”. The young robust looking nearest one claimed a medical condition. The one behind started in with “You people spreading fear are the problem”. Followed by claiming his wife, a doctor, said the virus problem was completely overblown. “BULLSHIT” I hollered and fled to my truck. ?

  29. 29.

    Marcopolo

    @Adam L Silverman:   As I asked in the prior thread, with the date that this stuff was first known being pushed back so far, how does that figure in the Taliban being invited/disinvited to Camp David around the anniversary of 9/11 in 2019?

  32. 32.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Marcopolo: It means that if Bolton did indeed brief him on it in spring 2019, then he invited them while knowing what was going on.

  34. 34.

    SectionH

    @Mary G: I hope you have a great time! I get it – no really. Mr S and I have some hermit tendencies but yeah… we went over the the kids’ place for our g’daughter’s 9th birthday, because they have a yard. And it was really pleasant. They’ve totally been WFH, E’s (my g’daughter) school was only just over 2 weeks ago, so they’ve srsly been staying the fuck at home too. They’ve got a tiny bubble that is E’s best friend and her parents. And that’s it. And I’m completely paranoid about doing anything that puts us in danger of infecting them the next time we can get together. It’s not worth it to be stupid.

    But a little bubble of ppl with mutual trust, yeah. That’s the little pressure vent that hopefully could keep a lot of people from breaking down otherwise.

  35. 35.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Wearing simple face coverings is not about protecting ourselves, it is about protecting everyone we encounter.

    I don’t care for this framing. Wearing masks do protect the wearer

  37. 37.

    Redshift

    @Kelly:

    The mandate is toothless. I’m surprised people came around. 

    That’s the thing, though – most government mandates are toothless, but making them mandates that businesses our other groups can point to and say “you have to” instead of “we’re making you” makes a huge difference. Most people who aren’t out to make a scene will just go along.

  38. 38.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    The policy has been to maximize confusion so accountability is lost. Seen that way, there is no shift. Just more of the same: Confusion.

    Honestly? There is no policy. These people are flying by the seats of their pants. They were fine with stubborn ignorance on social distancing/masking when it was only killing people in blue cities in blue states. Now that it might hurt them politically it’s all hair on fire panic mode now

  39. 39.

    Anne Laurie

    @Marcopolo: Honestly, in my dystopian novel where the world is succumbing to a global pandemic and NZ is the only place in the world that is safe due to the strong action of their kick ass female PM, NZ would wind up becoming the new global superpower.

    Tragically, I suspect New Zealand under such circumstances would end up much as in On The Beach.

    On the other hand… did you ever read John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids?

  40. 40.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Redshift:

    Exactly. Most people go along to get along too if it’s the law. Merely recommending masks doesn’t give any sense of urgency

  41. 41.

    Royston Vasey

    @Marcopolo: I like that idea!

    No masks necessary here in NZ (42 days since last community transmission, 34 days since last COVID death)

     

    RV in nZ

  42. 42.

    trollhattan

    Yippie.

    A new strain of flu that has the potential to become a pandemic has been identified in China by scientists.

    It emerged recently and is carried by pigs, but can infect humans, they say. The researchers are concerned that it could mutate further so that it can spread easily from person to person, and trigger a global outbreak.

    While it is not an immediate problem, they say, it has “all the hallmarks” of being highly adapted to infect humans and needs close monitoring. As it’s new, people could have little or no immunity to the virus.

    The scientists write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that measures to control the virus in pigs, and the close monitoring of swine industry workers, should be swiftly implemented.

    I miss bats.

  43. 43.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Seb Gorka needs to be stripped of his citizenship and deported to Hungary.

    (insert efgoldman phrase here)

  44. 44.

    Mike in NC

    Fat Bastard should never wear a mask. A better idea would be a coffee bean sack over his fat ugly head secured in place with a roll of duct tape.

  46. 46.

    Martin

    @Redshift: Precisely. Most institutions need cover, at least now and then. Mandates are that cover. Every business is happy to step back and say ‘I don’t make the rules, take it up with the governor’.

  47. 47.

    SectionH

    @SectionH: And by that I mean a real bubble, I mean, you can get closer that 6 feet, you can pee in each other’s houses, and stuff like that.
    We just brought a present that I’d scrubbed my hands to wrap after fucking sanitizing it, wrapped with paper that was 10+ years old, and I had separate plates and plastic forks and cups and stuff for us, and we sat 6 ft away. E does a self-hug thing looking at you, and you hug the same way back at her. I’m so proud of my kids.

  48. 48.

    Ohio Mom

    It doesn’t look to me as if 80% of adults are wearing masks when I am out and shopping around here. I would guess more like 60-70%.

    I don’t know the name for the feeling I get when I put on my mask, it’s akin to the small buzz I get when I do small favors like holding a door open for someone or letting them first.

    But I also admit that I wear it as a political message. I am proud I am nowhere near a Republican and I want tne world to know it.

  50. 50.

    trollhattan

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    “This fuckin’ guy.”

    I make Adam my proxy WRT specific opinions on Gorka, but will never recover from the BBC WS interview that introduced me to him right after the November 2016 election, during which he declared in his plummy fake Brit accent, “The alpha males are back in charge.”

    Hoo boy.

  53. 53.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Remember how all of these appointees were spoken highly off by members of the Republican establishment and the media? Like Barr? All of them have proven to be pretty much useless.

    I can’t understand why, knowing his history during the GHWB administration, they (as in lawyers in the media and in major institutions) went to bat for him. For Christ’s sake, he instituted a massive phone surveillance program 10 years before 9/11!

  54. 54.

    Anne Laurie

    @trollhattan: Oh, c’mon — just about all pig influenza-type viruses are ‘highly adaptable‘ to humans.

    I saw that article, and my private speculation is that the ‘possibility’ is being bullhorned at this particular moment because African swine flu is currently devasting China’s pork production pool — in America & Africa as well as the mainland itself.  Since pork is every bit as key to the modern Chinese diet as beef is to ours in America, this is leading to a whole cascade of ‘secondary’ problems.  (Did you know Tyson et al have been shipping tons of American pork to China even during the worst plant shutdowns here?  Or that the CCP is moving mid-scale pig factory farms back into major cities, after years of striving to eliminate such potent sources of environmental disasters?… )

  56. 56.

    NotMax

    @Anne Laurie

    Did you know Tyson et al have been shipping tons of American pork to China even during the worst plant shutdowns here?

    Gotta link it.

    “Anyone else want that last ass?”

  57. 57.

    Martin

    More on the tumult  in the game community.

    Long after people who work in the film and television industries started naming and shaming carefully hidden abusers and bigots, those in the video game, tabletop, and comic book industries are opening up about abusers in their fields as well. Over the past several weeks, accusations have been flooding onto social media, inspiring even more individuals to step forward with their own personal accounts. And, like much of 2020 that we’ve experienced so far, it all seems to be happening so fast.

    It’s been something, this year.

  58. 58.

    trollhattan

    @Anne Laurie:

    I’m weary of our one-way virus trade. What happned to our virus industry? My recommendation is shipping a hoard of hantavirus mice to China and see what happens.

  60. 60.

    Anne Laurie

    @Martin: That’s the thing about fragile networks — you remove one card, and the whole structure collapses.  Once ‘everybody does it’ fails as a protective device for sexist / racist actions, the penalties cascade.  Which is, of course, why the sexists / racists are so defensive about any criticism of Their Own!

  61. 61.

    Martin

    @trollhattan: Dude, we’ve been working really hard on the booming measles industry, up 2400% in a decade. Surely the export industry was about to explode on that one.

  62. 62.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Martin:

    It has. It’s incredible how much has been rapidly changing, much for the better. A year ago, if you tried to talk about removing Columbus statues because he was an awful slaver, you’d have been laughed off. Now, not as much

  64. 64.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    Hell, why was Christopher Columbus chosen as the Italian that Italian-Americans choose as their patron saint, so to speak?

    Dude has a lot of baggage. Galileo is a much better role model

  68. 68.

    Yutsano

    Add to the list of things that officially suck:Hong Kong just lost its freedom. If Boris is going to do anything about this now would be the time.

  69. 69.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Matt McIrvin: The irony in all this is the Karen at work who refuses to wear a mask is, naturally an Asian woman. Being a dangerous jerk is hardly a white thing.

  70. 70.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Oh, I’m aware. I think the name should be changed. To what, I don’t know. Will it happen? Don’t know. I guess the city could put it to plebiscite. Have to wonder if the Republican governor and/or leg would try to interfere, given it is the state seat of government

  72. 72.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Mary G: on the 4th, only her son and his wife will be there and I trust them

    What does trust have to do with it? They could be asymptomatic and not realize it, Best thing, keep it outside and keep 6ft.

  73. 73.

    Martin

    @James E Powell: Apparently we have Washington Irving to blame for this one.

    Also that book is to blame for why we think people believed the earth was flat. They didn’t believe that.

    Apparently Italian Americans attached themselves to Columbus because they were being discriminated against at the time that the US decided to celebrate the 400 year anniversary of his voyage, so they grabbed onto a figure that the American public already supported (mainly due to the aforementioned book).

  76. 76.

    mrmoshpotato

    “Is it time to mandate the wearing of masks across the country?”

    Nancy SMASH: George, how many months are we into this?  How many people have died unnecessarily?  Do you always ask stupid questions?

  78. 78.

    mrmoshpotato

    Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “It would help if from time to time the President would wear one to help us get rid of this political debate.”

    LOL It would’ve helped if the rest of you fuckers had voted to remove the Soviet shitpile mobster manbaby.

  79. 79.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Do you think that they were aware of the problematic aspects of his history?  Or did they see him as a heroic figure who took three small ships across the Atlantic and also as an Italian who was seen as heroic to the rest of America already?

    Also, you might want to be careful about applying 20th Century morals and mores to people from an earlier time.  Behavior we may see as monstrous could have been commonplace in a previous era.

  80. 80.

    lgerard

    They could just take a hammer to the Columbus statues, make a few subtle changes, and call them Guglielmo Marconi

  81. 81.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Martin:

    Saw this about Stone Mountain:

    After a number of sculptors turned them down, Augustus Lukeman took up the work in 1925, with a different, smaller design. Fundraising was even more difficult after the public debate and name-calling, and work stopped in 1928. In 1941 segregationist Governor Eugene Talmadge formed the Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA) to continue work on the memorial, but the project was delayed once again by the U.S. entry into World War II (1941–45).

    In response to Brown v. Board of Education of 1954 and the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, in 1958, at the urging of segregationist Governor Marvin Griffin, the Georgia legislature approved a measure to purchase Stone Mountain at a price of $1.125 million. In 1963 Walker Hancock was selected to complete the carving, and work began in 1964. The carving was completed by Roy Faulkner, who in 1985 opened the Stone Mountain Carving Museum (now closed) on nearby Memorial Drive commemorating the carving’s history. The carving was completed on March 3, 1972. An extensive archival collection related to the project is now at Emory University, with the bulk of the materials dating from 1915 to 1930; the finding aid provides a history of the project, and an index of the papers contained in the collection.

    Stone Mountain Park officially opened on April 14, 1965 – 100 years to the day after Lincoln’s assassination. Four flags of the Confederacy are flown. The Stone Mountain Memorial Lawn “contains…thirteen terraces — one for each Confederate state…. Each terrace flies the flag that the state flew as member of the Confederacy.”

    This whole thing is a huge “fuck you” to everybody who thought the Confederacy were a bunch of human rights abusing, traitorous assholes. It should be sandblasted off the side of Stone Mountain.

  82. 82.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Do you think that they were aware of the problematic aspects of his history?  Or did they see him as a heroic figure who took three small ships across the Atlantic and also as an Italian who was seen as heroic to the rest of America already?

    Probably. I was taught that in elementary school in the early 2000s. I used to think that he was only responsible for bringing more people from Europe to the “New” World, not being a slaving POS.

    Also, you might want to be careful about applying 20th Century morals and mores to people from an earlier time.  Behavior we may see as monstrous could have been commonplace in a previous era.

    I have to disagree with this. What Columbus did was always morally wrong, no matter what he or the society he came from believed. A basic, universal morality that transcends time and space exists, and the key to finding it is treating everybody like they’re human beings; the way you’d like to be treated, basically. All Columbus had to do was consider the natives he found as equals and ask himself, “Would I like to be enslaved and mistreated”? He evidently didn’t do that because he didn’t consider the native people he found human.

  83. 83.

    James E Powell

    @Anne Laurie:

    Take but degree away, untune that string,
    And, hark, what discord follows!

    Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida act 1, scene 3

  85. 85.

    Anne Laurie

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Hell, why was Christopher Columbus chosen as the Italian that Italian-Americans choose as their patron saint, so to speak?

    What I was told, back in the 1960s?   American Catholics set up the Knights of Columbus, because the Masons (with all apologies to our own late beloved Alain) did not permit Catholics to join.  The Catholics chose Columbus as a patron because they felt he was a good ‘patriotic American’ choice.

    The Knights were, originally, mostly Irish-American — but as more Italian (& later Polish) Catholic immigrants arrived, they joined the Knights as well.  The Italians, bidding to become ‘ethnically white’ (that’s a whole ‘nother saga) in the 1940s, used the Knights as an excuse to claim Columbus as ‘one of theirs’.

    Once every big American city started having a big official St. Patrick’s Day parade, the various urban Italian-American communities demanded they get a parade, too — more or less at the opposite side of the year, mid-October to the Irish mid-March.

    Basically, the choice of Columbus was secondary to a bunch of existing factors.  But it was never gonna be Gallileo, because when the original Knights were organized, Guiseppe G was under interdiction by the Vatican — the Pope didn’t officially ‘forgive’ Gallileo until maybe 20 years ago!

  86. 86.

    Jinchi

    @Ohio Mom: But I also admit that I wear it as a political message. I am proud I am nowhere near a Republican and I want tne world to know it.

    This is probably a big reason we saw so many people wearing masks during the protests. Especially after watching gun-toting, “Re-Open” militias storming US statehouses, masks became a visible statement of whose side you were on.

  87. 87.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): So should we dynamite off the busts of Jefferson and Washington from Mt. Rushmore?  They owned slaves.

    TR’s policy towards the Philippians was awful, blow him up too?

    Lincoln suspended rights during the Civil War, off with his head too?

    As Omnes said, applying our standards to what was socially acceptable in the past can be a bit of a problem.

  90. 90.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Ken:

    I don’t see how there can be a venue for the convention Trump wants. He’d need a city or state with no restrictions on large gatherings, and no COVID problem.

    Apologies to The Drifters

    (UnderOut on the boardwalk plague ship)

    We’ll be havin’ some fun

    (UnderOut on the boardwalk plague ship)

    People walking dying above

    (UnderOut on the boardwalk plague ship)

    We’ll be fallin’ so ill

    (UnderOut on the boardwalk plague ship)

    Yeah (Plague ship)

  91. 91.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    That’s not what I said. I think that everything that a person did should be taken into account and taught in schools and universities. I think individuals like Thomas Jefferson, T.R., Washington, etc are not in the same league as people such as Columbus, Richard E. Lee, or Jefferson Davis.

    IOW, on balance, they’re deeply flawed people who did some bad shit but also contributed some positive things to history. I’m fine with statues, etc honoring them along with plaques for historical context

  92. 92.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Martin:

    He was a Republican you know. Not many people know that.

    Wowie, really? I didn’t know that. Now I know what all those “Lincoln dinners” are for ; p

  93. 93.

    Martin

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think Columbus was less an icon of Italian Americans, and more a fable designed to reform our colonialist past. There was a lot of romanticism at that time regarding how the arrival of Europeans was the greatest thing ever for the indigenous people who lived here. Columbus was just the opening chapter of that story.

  94. 94.

    Martin

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: There are two qualifiers I would note:

    1. Is the person recognized because of their bad acts, or in spite of them?
    2. Do we today have a reasonably clear understanding of their bad acts, and why they were bad?

    Confederate statues all fall under 1)

    Under 2), Democrats don’t believe that Korematsu was wrongly decided, yet we admire FDR. Yeah, he fucked some stuff up, and we acknowledge that – we don’t hide that part of his history. But that hasn’t happened with Columbus. The statue of TR at the museum of natural history should come down, because the statue is a whitewashing of colonialism. But I think NYers would be fine putting a new TR statue in its place that celebrated the good things he did. Nobody minds the statue of Lenin in Manhattan because nobody is under any misunderstandings of who he was, and nobody is celebrating Lenin through that statue.

  95. 95.

    smike

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: 
    I’d give Lincoln a pass because of the whole war-at-home thing, but for the rest of them – whatever.
    “America! Right or Wrong!” is not a very good slogan.

  96. 96.

    smike

    @smike: Was trying to ETA the previous comment to add that I was not implying that the slogan had anything to do with anything in your comment. So, anyway…

  98. 98.

    James E Powell

    @Martin:

    Me, too. I was wondering if it could be sand blasted back to a more natural look. The memorial park in front of it has to go, as well.

  101. 101.

    Ruckus

    If your masculinity is so fragile that it can’t survive wearing a mask, then it is already broken.

    No kidding.

  103. 103.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Omnes Omnibus: Also, you might want to be careful about applying 20th Century morals and mores to people from an earlier time. Behavior we may see as monstrous could have been commonplace in a previous era.

    Except even Colombus commentaries though what he was doing in the Indies was pretty messed up.

  104. 104.

    J R in WV

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    June 29, 2020 at 11:00 pm

    Went to the store today. At Trader Joe’s there was a man leaning on his Texas license-plated car without a mask, the only one in the area. As I went by, I caught his eye, motioned toward my mask, and said “Mask.” He didn’t put one on, but he kind of slunk to the other side of his car.

    It’s probably no big deal in the outdoors, and he was away from others, but we’ve got an ethos in Santa Fe.

     

     

    @NotMax:

     

    @Cheryl Rofer

    Possible he’s a smoker (of whatever) and you happened upon him just before or just after?

    A couple of weeks ago, as I was wrapping up an expedition to Kroger’s and other shops in town, I noticed a lot of people smoking cigs pretty hard on their way up to entering the No-Smoking store. None of those people had masks to don upon entering!

    I think the self-harm embedded in using tobacco also shows in their total lack of concern about their health so far as Covid-19 as well as their lack of concern about others’ health involving second-hand smoke.

    I remember as a little kid, both parents fired up Pall-Malls in the front seat and my little bro and I were trapped in back in that cloud of poisonous smoke. Dad quit cold-turkey in 1960 and never suffered any health consequences from his youthful smoking, Mom died of COPD caused by Pall-Mall addiction. She got hooked at the University, where free cigs were passed out like candy at the football games.

    And Covid-19 is gonna kill even more people, faster, than tobacco ever could have, helped by people addicted to nicotine, as they no longer give a shit about anyone’s health at all. Unless a universal legal requirement to wear masks ALL THE TIME happens really soon, the population at large is screwed.

  105. 105.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Adam L Silverman: Seborrhea Dorka’s ugly mud-jar** mug will be much easier to contemplate once a competent mortician lays hands on it. Which can’t happen a nanosecond too soon. (Not that he’s anywhere near the top of the list – last I czeched ;^D, his tumbrel number was in the mid-100s.)

    (BTW & just FTR, MAGA is Hungarian for ITSELF.)

    **Phonetic rendering of magyar.

  106. 106.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Simple masks don’t protect the wearer very much, though, and claiming that they do opens one up to simple fact-based attacks.

    As well as responses of the form “you wear yours if you’re so scared, I’m not scared.” If it’s all about me protecting myself, then leaving it up to individual choice and counting on karma makes a certain amount of sense. But it’s not–the benefit of wearing them is collective and therefore relies on there being a high level of compliance.

    I don’t know how to reconcile this with the difficulty of getting Americans to do anything with this kind of motivation, but I don’t want to lie to people either.

Comments are closed.