Maggie's Farm

If I were feeling sick, I wouldn't go out. If I felt the urgent need to go out, and I were sick, I would wear a mask our of consideration for others, as well as medicate the coughing (pre-COVID too). I think it's been demonstrated that masks, however imperfect, do inhibit the spread of germ-contaminated spittle and micro-drops when they are expelled by coughing/sneezing/breathing. Everybody wants to argue the beneficial extent for some reason, to fault them for being imperfect, even if it means working harder than just wearing a damned mask when asked, which is infrequent now (here).

If I see someone wearing a mask nowadays, I respect their space; I don't crowd and don't judge. Their health is their business.

Recognizing that masks are imperfect, why do people assume that masks are filthy and contaminated? Is something stopping them from washing their mask, or getting a clean one? Has it been dragged through the streets or something? It's become commonplace now to see hand-sanitizing stations nearly everywhere. I notice they get used casually, fairly frequently by a lot more people than, say, 2 years ago. I notice my own family members using them more frequently for sure. And I notice that I wash my own hands with soap more frequently than I used to, especially as I track the flu and current COVID data. Is this a bad thing or a good one? I remember working in SE Asia where for decades it's been entirely normal for people to mask up during flu seasons, and for air pollution too. Maybe the mask is theater, maybe it helps. I see it as a lasting behavioral change. I can't see how it's stupidity or ignorance though, when all of these things are toward improving the odds.

And yet nothing I said anywhere mentioned the use of force, regulation, or compliance measures. Interesting.

'Karens' of any sex are irrelevant unless you allow them to be otherwise. Social media empowerment is not that hard to overcome.

The pandemic has been a public policy disaster from a number of perspectives, in my opinion. It would be hard to imagine a more effective campaign to methodically demolish trust in public institutions. But this is what Progressive Democrats do. They consistently confuse their emotional righteousness with being right, and proceed to arrogate their authority on bad assumptions, into outcomes worthy of interest to the Babylon Bee.

I think this pandemic highlights the strategic weakness of using behavioral goals to drive policy statements to manage public health, instead of using real education. They want everybody bleating in the same direction. A good percentage of the population see right through it - they suspect they are being manipulated, become watchful, and as soon as they see evidence of it, they become resentful and uncooperative - while some of the remainder bleat.

About 2/3 of the country is overweight, and over 1/3 is clinically obese. And this is one of the most common comorbidities associated with COVID deaths, if not #1. How is it we are not seeing relentless PSA campaigns on managing weight loss and improving nutrition, including ensuring an adequate daily intake of Vitamin C, D, and zinc? These are all accepted ways to diminish risk of dying from COVID.

In the 60's we had a plague of heart disease and high blood pressure. Cardiac arrests, strokes, and various cardio-pulmonary diseases were becoming disturbingly commonplace. Yet public health policy was able to constructively identify smoking as a root cause, get research programs like the Framingham study started, and waged a public education campaign the tackled the problem. How many people do you know that still smoke like chimneys? I haven't seen one in America since the 1980s.

I wonder, what did our Public Health experts learn from that? Looking at the pictures of gala events where 'the help' is masked and the stars go barefaced, it would seem they would rather push than lead. History is full of examples of how that's not going to work.

You would agree that "Karen" is a slang term denoting a stereotypical meme in our modern lingo? Switching the meaning of words is a not-very-constructive tactic that I would normally expect from a Progressive. Normally its use is intended to cloud the issues and distract the discussion.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/karen/

What does Karen mean?

Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.

As featured in memes, Karen is generally stereotyped as having a blonde bob haircut, asking to speak to retail and restaurant managers to voice complaints or make demands, and being an anti-vaxx , Generation X soccer mom.

In 2020, Karen spread as a label used to call out white women who were captured in viral videos engaging in what are widely seen as racist acts.

I've never, ever seen the 'Karen' meme conflated with anti-vaxxing, so this is just more of the progressive hogwash and dishonesty that we've come to expect. But I don't see how you can equate this to government overreach, when so-called 'Karens' are by definition individuals.

Wikipedia even includes the 2020 Central Park birdwatching incident in their definition, where a supposed 'Karen' was walking her dog off the leash and was confronted by an angry black birdwatcher who proceeded to threaten her dog. Bari Weiss has recently debunked the Progressive version of those events by detailing the ugly history of similar behavior from the birdwatcher - but in any case this particular 'Karen' has had to move out of the country as a result of the Progressive mob swarm.

I think mob swarms and government overreach are both extremely ugly things, ugly enough to merit their own definitions and plenty dangerous enough to make sure they are easily and accurately labelled once spotted.