Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Seventy Times Seven, Shame on Me

I agree that social media are an abundant source of misinformation.  Take this meme, shared to Facebook last week by a friend.

I commented that it's odd, because despite relentless propaganda campaign over many decades, most Americans favor all those things by a solid majority. Who exactly has been propagandized? It seems to be whoever made this meme.

Someone replied:  "the ~35% of the population (a majority of whom identify as Republicans and evangelical/Christian) that believe it's all socialism, but are somehow the only portion of the population the GOP caters to?"

I replied: "Like I said, you've been propagandized very effectively. I'm surprised at how many liberals and even leftists have been convinced that 35% of the American population is a majority."

Someone else, presumably a friend of the first responder, wrote: "no one said anything about that being the majority. And he's also not wrong. The right is so lost and confused because they blame the left for everything when we actually fight for most of the things they complain about not having."

It went downhill from there, though I suppose it was my fault for being sarcastic.  I still think it tells a lot about the mindset of many liberal Democrats that they see a 35 percent minority as an insuperable obstacle to instituting polices that most Americans want, or say they do.  At least that person acknowledged that it is a minority, not most Americans, who oppose universal healthcare.

In terms of public support and approval, the struggle for universal healthcare and those other programs and policies has already been won: comfortable bipartisan majorities support them.  It's worthwhile, I guess, to try to persuade right-wing opponents of such programs to support them instead, but I don't think it's where most of our energy should go.  I doubt they could ever be persuaded, though I also believe that once those programs were in place they would use them and support them, as they do with "socialist" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  (Remember the line "Keep your government hands off my Medicare"?)  Republican politicians who voted against Biden's stimulus payments and other big-spending acts are already trying to take credit for them, because they know how popular they are even with Republican voters. 

True, the corporate media would like us to believe that most Americans don't want universal healthcare, and they give very sympathetic coverage to its opponents.  You'll see plenty of warm fuzzy stories interviewing rabid Trump fans at breakfast in small-town diners, or with anti-vaccination fanatics on ventilators in ICUs; you'll see columnists urging pro-vaccination Americans to sympathize with the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers.  I suspect that many people who are derisive of those stories will still post memes aimed at telling their opponents that they've been propagandized, or better, "brainwashed."   

It doesn't help that so many liberals manage to convince themselves that Democratic politicians like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg support universal healthcare, despite those pols' explicit and public repudiation of it.  It isn't only Republicans who've been effectively propagandized, and not only on these issues.

Or consider the failed recall vote in California.  Jacob Bacharach cited a corporate-media commentator who claimed that the recall "highlighted the vulnerabilities of leaders who seemed well positioned before the coronavirus pandemic."  Bacharach pointed out that California's system requires "signatures only equal to 12% of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election" to trigger a recall; I suppose such a small number of partisan malcontents can be called a vulnerability, but the commentator mainly seemed interested in inflating the influence of the Right, even though Governor Newsom trounced his opponent soundly.  This sort of thing has been going on too long for clear-eyed, rational liberals to be fooled by it, but they still keep falling for the propaganda -- while blaming the Right for being brainwashed.

I confess I'm a little uneasy about vaccine mandates, another policy that has bipartisan majority support among the public.  Getting injected with anything against one's will is profoundly invasive, and the fact that a majority of one's fellow citizens support it doesn't make it less so.  But those who support a mandate have presumably already been vaccinated.  We're not forcing something on our neighbors that we wouldn't and haven't accepted ourselves -- or that they haven't already accepted for themselves and their children.  (Someone in a local Facebook group angrily denied that schoolchildren have to be vaccinated against numerous diseases to attend school; I replied with a link to Indiana's state requirements.)  Besides, there seems to be considerable overlap between those who refuse vaccination and those who refuse to wear masks, which aren't invasive.  Yet not only do they refuse to wear masks, they attack (verbally and sometimes physically) people who do wear masks.  Whatever motivates them, it isn't a concern with personal freedom.

My critics under the Facebook meme talk as if they believe that unanimity is needed to institute progressive policies.  Maybe they know better, but a third of voters voted against FDR in 1936, at least partly in opposition to the New Deal.  I doubt that any important program has been enacted without that much opposition.  The one-third proportion seems to be stable over time.  Those who feel impotent in the face of such a minority should remember that most elections in this country are won by a simple 51 percent majority; the Presidency is the main exception, because of the Electoral College, but in general no one except a Republican is going to win sympathy by protesting that he or she got 35 percent of the vote.

As bothersome as that hardcore thirty to thirty-five percent of right-wingers are, they really aren't the reason we can't have nice things, and it's a distraction to blame them first. The real obstacle is a much smaller minority of wealthy right-wingers and their collaborators in the corporate media, who either platform them or promote them as the reasonable center.  If the Trump base weren't useful to those elites, they'd be dismissed as easily as the real majority of Americans are.

Someone else posted a meme depicting a flag with the legend "Get Vaxxed and Shut Up!"  An anti-vaxxer complained that it was authoritarian and oppressive.  I commented that I half-agreed: he doesn't have to shut up, but he does have to get vaccinated.  The reactionary -- and authoritarian -- Right minority has had its way for too long.  I don't necessarily want to say to them, "Who cares what you think?" but as long as they're in the minority they don't get to run things.

The Dishonor System

There was an excellent op-ed in today's newspaper on mask-wearing as the COVID pandemic starts to wind down.  I say it's excellent, of course, because it largely agrees with me, especially this bit:

I am astonished that the CDC and local and state health departments are explicitly depending on the honor system for unvaccinated people to continue mask wearing. When did personal responsibility become an effective public health strategy? Public health officials have never relied on people to act responsibly or prudently. That’s why we have public health regulations.

The people most eager to get rid of masks and to attack vaccination requirements are people without honor: people who produce fake vaccination cards, people who make fake legal arguments about discrimination, people who harass and even assault workers in businesses that require masks, people who tried to force the country to re-open even at the peak of cases last year, people who wanted to force others back to work without safety requirements in jobs that were heavily hit by the pandemic.  In my state, Indiana, they included Republican legislators who tried -- ultimately successfully -- to hobble public health measures, and who now want to cut short extra unemployment benefits in order to force (or so they hope) reluctant workers back to low-paid, unsafe jobs.  And, of course, there's considerable overlap between this stance and the claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

Many people, including me, drew analogies to other public health measures, such as the regulation and inspection of food establishments.  As it happens, a South Bend restaurant was recently closed by the board of health after longstanding multiple violations of the health code, culminating in two cases of food poisoning.  It emerged, however, that over the past couple of years the board of health had cut back on inspections and largely stopped public hearings on businesses with major violations.  The rationale was that they wanted not to subject the offenders to bad publicity that might hurt their business - which is, of course, the whole point of public hearings.  Despite all their fine talk of "choice," this policy had the effect of preventing the public from making informed choices.  It might have been defensible if the board quietly brought the offenders to compliance, but as this case showed, they quietly let the offenders continue to disregard the health of their customers.  It's not certain whether this case, emblazoned on the front page of the paper, will produce a return to transparency.  What is certain is that the push to eliminate public health protections isn't limited to infectious diseases.

As low as my opinion is of such people, I admit that I find their positions baffling.  We know that many of them remained steadfast in their denial of the seriousness of COVID-19 even when they got sick themselves -- even when they died of it, or when people close to them died.  But no matter.  Those who claim that they're entitled to disregard the health of others are wrong, both morally and legally.  They don't have the right to lie about their vaccination status.  They don't have the right to spread infection.

Myself, I still put on a mask when I enter businesses and other enclosed spaces, even though I've been vaccinated.  The more infectious, more virulent Delta variant of COVID-19 has been found in 37 states so far.  If we don't get another big wave of infections, wearing a mask won't hurt me and it won't hurt other people either.  As other people have observed, wearing a mask will probably also protect against the routine illnesses -- colds, flu -- that tend to spread in the fall and winter; it's why many people in East Asia have routinely worn masks for years.  The pandemic isn't over yet, but it's not all we have to worry about: the right-wing attacks on the public health system are partly meant to ensure unpreparedness for the next pandemic, but they aren't just about COVID,

The Terminators

I've always neglected local news, to my eternal shame, but reading the newspaper in my hometown may nudge me onto the right path.  Today it featured an article about a bill that has been introduced into the Indiana state legislature to terminate the year-long COVID-19 public health emergency.  There's been some squabbling over who's in control for most of that period, with legislators claiming they'd been shut out of decision-making and Governor Holcomb claiming they'd shown no interest in doing so.

Today's story reported that the resolution would empower the legislature to "terminate a state of disaster emergency at any time and specifies that, if the legislature terminates a state of emergency under the statute, the governor shall issue and executive order or proclamation ending the state of emergency."  That seems fair enough, and the only odd thing to me is that such measures weren't in place already.  I've heard numerous radio reports in the past year of legislators fussing about Holcomb's supposed overreaching, but I wonder why, if they were so upset, it took them so long to come up with this resolution.

There's more, though: 

The general assembly finds that Hoosiers have been living with the realities of COVID-19 since March 2020 and have access to sufficient information to decide what actions should be taken by themselves and their family members. 

The general assembly recommends that Hoosiers be respectful of others and the different levels of personal comfort that Hoosiers have [and] that Hoosiers continue to use caution in their daily activities.

The general assembly finds that vaccinations are now available for law enforcement officer, and other first responders, health care professionals, and Indiana residents who are at least sixty-five years of age.

The general assembly needs to update their resolution: the vaccine age requirement has been lower than sixty-five for weeks now, and was just lowered to forty.  But to be fair, this is presumably the form that was read and referred on March 1.  Holcomb is quoted in the article declaring that it's too soon to lift the emergency, let alone the mask mandate.  The bill hasn't passed, and I suspect it won't.  It's just some legislators throwing a bone to the more rabid of their constituents.

They do talk pretty though, don't they?  Bear in mind this is the same Indiana General Assembly where, just this February, some white Republican members booed and mocked black members during a debate and in the hallways afterward.  But they maintained decorum, they left their robes and hoods at home.

Hoosiers, like the rest of America, have had "access" to information about COVID-19 for many months now, and though most of the people I see are wearing masks when they should, a significant minority don't give a shit about "the different levels of personal comfort that Hoosiers have" and are already jumping the gun.  One sign is that Marshall County, where I live, had achieved the lowest (blue) level of new cases for a couple of weeks, and then slid back a notch to the yellow level.  With spring coming, people are busting out all over, and I don't blame them -- I find I'm increasingly restless with each mild day.

It's because I'm restless and tired of the pandemic that people who refuse to wear masks make me angry. If my county stays in the yellow zone, if the state has to remain under emergency, it'll be because of them.  They think that the mean old governor won't let them have any fun, but it's the virus -- in their terms, it's their God.  If they got their way and the mask mandate were lifted, who would they blame when illnesses and deaths multiplied?  They'd blame the Chinese, probably. 

Sir, This Is Blogger

A thought: If you really had a medical condition that made it unsafe for you to wear a mask, would you want to fight your way into a store crowded with unmasked people sneezing, coughing, talking, yelling virus-laced droplets into the air? This is why I think most of the people who claim such conditions in order to get out of wearing a mask are lying.  It's also why I am always skeptical when people talk about "common sense," since so many opponents of masks or of any effective measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 invoke it.  But maybe I'm missing something, feel free to fill me in.

Earlier this year I saw a meme to the effect of "If Walmart is safe, why aren't churches considered safe"? WALMART WASN'T SAFE, nor were other stores - they were needed, which is why people were urged to wear masks at the time, to go in and get out as quickly as possible, and not to enter if they were sick. But I realize that just yelling 'WHY CAN'T I DO WHATEVER I WANT" doesn't sound as good.

I can understand that wearing a mask makes some people anxious, fearful of being asphyxiated. It's beyond their control, and I sympathize with them. So do businesses, and the government. That's why curbside pickup and home delivery were ramped up, so you can get your necessities without having to wear a mask. It's also why I believe most people who make the claim are lying.

But, you know, you're entitled to lie: lying is protected speech, believe it or not. Other people, however, are entitled to disagree with you, mock you, and yell at you when you harass store employees who have to make you wear a mask or leave.

Side note to all any edgy, rad people who may read this: notice that it doesn't contain the word "fuck" even once. Now, I love that word, but using it doesn't make an argument any stronger. In fact, it's the edgy, elderly-rockstar equivalent of "wearing a mask violates my freedom!!!"

Thank you for reading my TED talk.

The Cruelty Is the Point: It's Not Just for the MAGA Crowd

Manager told here she had to keep her mask on pic.twitter.com/onlbaFCJ4O

— Omar Guillen (@LucianLegacy) June 27, 2020

Every day there are more reports of people throwing tantrums because they've been asked to wear masks while shopping.  The most recent I've seen is a woman in a Fort Worth Seven-Eleven who spat on the counter to show the cashier who was boss.  That's better than the California woman who coughed in the face of a bartender rather than comply.

Then there's the woman in a Hollywood Trader Joe's who claimed she had a medical condition that precludes wearing a mask, and ran to the media to claim she was scared for her life, which reminds me of a white woman who called the police on a black man who'd asked her to leash her dog in Central Park, claiming he had threatened her life (he hadn't, but she threatened his).  This woman's story is excessively complicated, and I don't believe her.  The store rejects her version too.

The woman in the video I've referenced above is more of the same, but what really got my attention were the comments under the tweet that spread the clip.  The bulk of the comments point out that she committed vandalism and should be charged for the food she damaged, if not prosecuted, with deploring of the anti-mask faction.  That's okay, but it does become repetitive. Such comments were less prevalent when I first noticed the incident, though.

I was struck by remarks like "This is a nationwide phenomena [sic]. We need to start tagging and tracking Karens, study them. Spay & neuter. Science!"  When challenged, this person qualified it somewhat:  "Not if it's the crazy Hitler eugenics. But if it's only people who act like shitheads in public, or that treat employees like this, I'd be kinda ok with it."  Sterilizing people is the "crazy Hitler eugenics," and as with Hitler's victims, there's no reason to believe that this woman's bad behavior is determined by her genes. 

Then there was "No wonder we are the laughing stock of the planet. I hope they got her license plate number and called the police", followed by "If there’s life on other planets we are probably the laughingstock of the galaxy".  Someone has a wildly inflated idea of the significance and interest of events on our little rock.

A related theme: "Does anyone realize we are the only country that acts like this when they are asked to do something? Unbelievable".  No, we aren't the only country seeing behavior like this.  The South Korean churches that spread the virus through church services, Israeli ultraorthodox fanatics, European politicians scolding their citizens for ignoring the danger, and so on; the difference is probably that this person can only read English Twitter, but also that they don't pay attention or forget disconfirming cases. This is just another form of American exceptionalism.

What really got my goat, however, was this theme: "She’s a spoiled brat. Her parents probably never told her ‘no’. This is the result."  Or: "Such bratty, hardly ever been told NO - behavior! Shame".  Or: "She needs an Asian mom's whopping."  Or: "why does no one punch her in the face?"  Or: "How is it that parents in this country have raised such rotten young people?"  Or: "Why is smacking these people illegal ? It might even reset factory settings".  Or: "Her house needs eggs on the outside. Also maybe some Oreos on her car's windows? Hopefully she gets doxed."  Or: "jesus christ her parents never said 'no' to her did they",  And a lot more; I was hoping to find again the people who said this woman hadn't been spanked enough as a child, but no luck yet.

No matter: my point is that I got the feeling some MAGA types had wandered into the wrong thread: the tut-tutting over people's upbringing, the claim that Kids These Days have no respect or self control, they should have been beaten more by their parents and that's where this country went wrong.  The fantasies of violent punishment.  That's MAGA, as I know from the sewers of Facebook; so why are ostensible Trump-hating liberals parroting the same vindictive garbage?  It's nothing new, alas -- I remember the same phenomenon during the Reagan years -- but I think it's getting somewhat worse, and it's dispiriting to see liberals once again imitating the people they claim to despise.