Posted on 02/20/2022 6:32:41 PM PST by lightman
A piece from Rachel Gutman on Sunday morning published in The Atlantic caused quite a bit of a stir, as she pointed out that "Mask Mandates Don't Need to Make Sense." Such was the original title, before it was quietly changed to read that "Mask Mandates Are Illogical. So What?" The subheadline offers "They only need to align with communities' goals," a point emphasized throughout the piece which illustrates how masks and mask mandates can be about control, whether such a point intended or not by Gutman.
The new title does not appear to have helped the though, as there's still outrage via Twitter replies and screenshot receipts of the original title, as Lindsey Kornick highlighted for Fox News.
Regardless of the title, Gutman still goes about offering a bizarre sense of honesty, but without offering much solution.
Further, the point about mask mandates not needing to make sense still remains. That language is used almost verbatim in Gutman's closing.
She quotes Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in her closing paragraph, as well as throughout the piece. Kirk Sell offers that "I think that people have this expectation that everything has to be perfect, as far as how the logic works together."
"But no mandate is ever going to be perfectly consistent, and that’s okay. Mask policies can still make sense, so long as they serve a community’s shared goals," Gutman goes on to claim in her closing sentence.
Other experts in the piece at least more so acknowledge people being fed up with mask mandates:
It all feels rather performative and silly. Why have a mandate if it can be so easily ignored? “The public sees right through that, and I think that’s led to a lot of the backlash,” Joseph Allen, the director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, told me. To Allen, mask mandates’ contradictions and compliance failures are signs that the U.S. should stop trying so hard to influence human behavior, and start focusing on improving ventilation and filtration in buildings. Masking, because it’s obviously visible and has become unavoidably politicized, is the pandemic-mitigation strategy that’s easiest for most people to notice—which might explain why it’s received so much attention from the public and the media. But structural improvements can operate in the background, protecting people without making them feel inconvenienced.
One common (though not definitively proven) argument against mask mandates is that they don’t actually change people’s behavior: People who would’ve masked anyway cover up, and people who don’t want to mask wear theirs badly or ignore the rules. “Anyone who has been in any sort of public location at any time during the pandemic recognizes that mask mandates are not followed consistently,” says David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. But even disregarded mandates could affect people in other, helpful ways. “From my perspective, the main benefit is not so much the masking itself, but the message to society that this wave is not yet over,” Dowdy told me. A mask mandate may not magically swaddle the faces of everyone in its jurisdiction, but it could remind already enthusiastic maskers to avoid large gatherings, or lead non-maskers to give the people around them a little more space.
For all Gutman writes about mask mandates in her piece, the point seems to have confused many, and driven others to double down on their resistance to mask mandates.
Matt Rinaldi
@MattRinaldiTX
The most honest article on masking you will read from @TheAtlantic. I’ll save you the read. The “communities’ goals” served by mandated masking is to indicate to people when to be afraid.
The article admits that masks are pure political theatre and says that is a good thing?
Wait. Did we drop claiming to be following science? I can’t keep up.
The ruling Party ran on fear.
It’s all they have.
Runaway inflation, empty store shelves, threat of a new Crimean War...but if they can keep ginning up the fear...
“Mask policies can still make sense, so long as they serve a community’s shared goals...
It seems the goal here in Santa Clara County, CA is to keep the populace in a constant state of fear. But it also seems that the locals here are very happy to don the diapers and commit themselves wholeheartedly to that fear. It is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Masked people on the sidewalk still jump out into the street close to traffic to avoid passing too close to the unmasked me.
I applaud your efforts to clean up the gene pool!
Masking was always about fear, subjugation, submission to authority and, ultimately, de-humanization.
Science is, apparently, not about anything making sense. It’s all about manipulating the public. COVID-1984 has taught us much.
It has ALWAYS been about teaching COMPLIANCE….
...not “following the 'science'”:
Masks are:
1) a sign of submission, subversion and subjugation
2) mandated in order to dehumanize
3) virtue signaling devices
4) meant to provide constant reinforcement of fear
5) used to destroy community, friends and family normal communication
6) implemented to create isolation, confusion, anxiety, destroy human connectivity, trust and interactions
7) mandated to exacerbate illness
8) intended to aid in the abandonment of the belief and reliance on our immune systems
9) intended to refute integrous science
10) signal to positions of power that you are willing to give up all of your rights and freedoms based on anything they say, even if it is a BIG FAT LIE!
-PJ
Thank you for honesty, Ms. Gutman. Now could you and the rest of The Left please go straight to Hell?
Maska were nothing more than an easy visual “compliance check” to determine what percentage of the population would go along with the “vaccine” and associated mandates and “passports”.
LOL...unfortunately, I haven’t heard a single “SPLAT” yet.
That’s a great poster!
D@mn.
And to think that these maskerbators breed....and VOTE!
The whole masking premise never made sense and was anti-science.
The only mask that could truly offer protection is a N95 medical mask... All the other mask are complete nonsense and never did work. They gave people a false sense of safety... Because for those who died... The only safety would’ve been wearing an N95 mask. Spend enough time with a Covid infected person wearing a simple mask, and you wearing your simple mask and you will get Covid.
If you’re relatively healthy you will survive... If you are immunocompromised, sick, old or just unhealthy... You may die... Then again... You also have a good chance of surviving because 99.07% of people worldwide haven’t died from Covid over the past 2 years.
The Atlantic was the one running Jennifer Griffin’s fake story about Trump in the rain, at a Cemetery, with his Momma in Prison, okay, I got carried away.
They wrote fake unsourced stories right before the Election and the Fox Never Trumpers tried to sell them with more lies.
Jennifer Griffin is a POS. Now, her and her hubby are trying to get US War dollars moving, after their Russian Hoax didn’t turn out.
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