Why The Anti-Mask Brigade Has NO Genuine Concept Of Freedom

The lowdown on why so many medical professionals and advisers have resigned or been driven from office was exposed on the front page of The Denver Post (Aug. 11):

"Vilified, threatened with violence, suffering from burnout, dozens of state and local public health leaders around the U.S. have resigned or been fired amid the coronavirus outbreak."

So, just as we need these epidemiological specialists and public health officials the most, they are being forced out of their positions in droves. Why?  What gives?  Well, we have a significant low I.Q. segment that is not only gullible to propaganda and tripe (like the "plandemic' idiocy of crackpot quack Judy Mikovits),  but also energized to attack public health officials trying to do their job, using their  pseudo "liberty" as an excuse.

Among the deranged examples are the  "Freedom Angels" that stalk and harass health officials online (e.g. on Facebook) as well as other misfits, worms and vermin firmly convinced a real virus (denoted SARS- Cov-2)  is a hoax created by Dems to take down Dotard.  Even 165,000 deaths can't convince these fools it's not a hoax and you even have some of the numbskulls driving to hospitals, looking in reception areas and asking in loud voices: "Where are all the Covid patients?"  As I said, low I.Q.

And what are all these crazies most exercised about? Well, being mandated to wear masks, and practicing social distancing - the only ways to avoid another lockdown, or nationwide quarantine.   The only practical means to avoid hundreds of thousands more infections and hospital ICUs being flooded with desperately ill Covid patients.

It is sad, as one continues to behold the parade of maskless morons fighting with Walmart 'health sentries about having to wear masks and bellowing about their "rights".  Truly they have zero conception of true freedom, and the critical role of responsibility.  What they are operating on instead is a caricature  spawned by Trump and his enabling goons.  

This was brought home to me even more on reading Kwame Appiah's essay ('Rejecting Masks Puts Freedom In Danger') in the WSJ Review (AUg. 8-9, p. C1):

"In the grand American tradition, freedom is about being unfettered, undominated, i.e. 'You're not the boss of me!'  In truth, what political theorist Benjamin Constant called 'the liberty of the moderns' is also a very ancient idea. When people in classical times wrote about freedom they were usually distinguishing the condition from involuntary servitude. .. To be free, as a matter of definition, was not to be enslaved."

But wearing a mask to prevent spread of  a pernicious virus is certainly not being enslaved. No medical specialist or health officer, after all, is chaining anyone up, then forcing them into forced labor.  So how did the original clear definition get mutated into now believing that any mandated regulation, say for seat belts, or not smoking in planes, or wearing masks - is an imposition or limitation on one's freedom?

Technically,  the Bill of Rights in the Constitution first set out rights available to citizens.  What is truly mind boggling in the current climate of invoking rights is that barely 1 in 10  citizens can name even 5 of the rights listed in the Bill of Rights.  Hence, their incessant blabbering about their rights being violated isn't even credible when they can't even name them!  Indeed, many of these nitwits actually believe the states also have rights, which is twaddle as Prof. Gary Wills ('A Necessary Evil: A History Of American Distrust of Government’) has admirably explained, noting only human persons- citizens can possess rights, while states "retain powers and prerogatives."  Hence, "states' rights" is a fiction, an ignorant creation of modern federalists or denizens of the Federalist Society.  As Wills goes on to explain:

“The states have no natural rights. Their powers are artificial, not natural – they are things made by contract.”

But I warrant that not one in a thousand of the maskless twits even knows that.  Then there is the difference between "positive rights" and "negative rights".  Again, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 of the anti-mask brigade know the difference.

The conviction that there are only “negative” rights and there can be no “positive” ones is a long standing trope of the Right.   A negative right implies that there are ‘x’ things the government can’t do to you, e.g.  take away your guns or your property without good legal basis ("eminent domain"). . By contrast, positive rights assert there are actual positive rights to which you are entitled under the Bill of Rights, say health care and privacy. Most of those on the Right, who have only passing acquaintance with the Federalist papers, assert positive rights don’t exist, but they are wrong. They merely show they fail to grasp the concept of an "unenumerated right".

Clearly,  refusing a law or mandate from a state or local government entity to wear a mask (or wear a seatbelt, or wear a helmet on a motor bike) is seen as a negative right.   "YOU of the commonweal have NO right to tell me what to wear! I will wear what I damned well please!"  And yet they happily (ok, maybe not) choke down another negative right they believe they have by not smoking in planes or in medical offices.  So they essentially pick and choose the extent of their exercise of negative rights. 

This is why I suspect in the case of the mask wearing (or refusing it) they are falling into a political trap originally set by - who else ? - Donald Trump.  Who, on numerous occasions, has refused to don a mask himself and sent relentless signals it was "weak" or "unmanly". Well, of course his zombies would follow.  Not only that, but the zombies would start  spreading tropes and trash on their own to justify their reckless behavior, e.g.  one anti-mask nut protester in FLA (WSJ, ibid.):

"Everyone is responsible for their own health care decisions.  We want our choices respected as well.."

Which, of course, is nonsense given  YOUR stupid choice here (not to wear a mask) can affect my health, especially as a septuagenarian. Thus, to go out and about talking loud,  coughing, laughing, spitting or whatever is a sure way to spread the disease and especially to older, vulnerable people. (And don't bloody well tell us to 'Stay inside then!'  given our remaining years have already been severely circumscribed because of the limitations in movement and travel, outings etc. imposed by Covid 19.)  Thus, the "choice" not to wear a mask is tantamount to spreading the disease, and as Appiah admits (ibid.): "Those who recklessly spread disease have long posed a challenge to liberal democracies."   And as he goes on to write: "Pandemics don't just imperil our health they imperil our freedom".  Because if not contained on account of terrible choices, they will force the hands of governments to enforce mass quarantines,  lockdowns.    

In many ways, as Janice has put it, refusing to wear a mask-   especially in closed public spaces -  is like a gas station customer refusing to stop smoking while he fills his gas tank and others are there for service too.  At first I thought that might be too extreme an analogy but on further rumination I believe it fits.  So the Florida mask protester's demand to 'have our choices respected" is really a demand to respect their spreading of death.

Jefferson wrote in his 'Notes on Virginia', that to the extent the people's minds are improved they will hold check on the worst excesses of government.  But the less discussed converse side of that is people's minds need to be improved enough to distinguish between claiming a right without any responsibility, and claiming a right which demands responsibility.   There is no doubt Jefferson would eschew the bogus right not to wear a mask during a pandemic as the former.

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by Robert Becker | August 13, 2020 - 6:45am | permalink

Now For Some Neuro-Babble: "Teens Ignore Covid Restrictions Because Their Brains Are On A Dopamine High"

"Gimme da dopamine so I can ignore da mask orders!"

"I'm pretty much fighting two wars. A war against Covid and a war against stupidity.  The problem is the first one I have some hope about winning. But the second is becoming more difficult to treat.  Why do I say that?  Because people are not listening.   Whether backed up by science or plain common sense, people are not listening - throughout the country. 

I've been in every possible catastrophe you can imagine, from tsunamis to earthquakes and by far this is the worst. This is the worst because it is a continuous catastrophe.  The thing that annoys me the most is we keep on doing our best to save all these people and then you get another batch of people who are doing exactly the opposite of what you're telling them not to do. - Dr. Joseph Varon, Chief Medical Officer, United Memorial Medical Center, Houston, Texas

"There are all these night club scenes like pop ups that people find out about on instagram. And then they go and party. No masks, lots of booze, everybody having lots of fun. We're seeing this thing everywhere across America. And you can't stop a pandemic if you can't stop that kind of activity."  Laurie Garret, on All In, Tuesday night.

The Wednesday headline on page 5A of The Denver Post appeared two days before the new projection of 300,000 dead from the virus by December. Impossible? No!  Too many millions are still not taking the Covid virus restrictions seriously. Even to the point of some of the rebel lunatics making threats on medical experts' lives,  causing nearly 11 to resign already in as many states.  This has elicited an impatience and even outrage at the level of utter selfishness  and colossal stupidity - as reflected in the words of Dr. Joseph Varon.  As well as medical journalist Laurie Garret (appearing on All In Tuesday night)

In the case of the Post article, the refrain of the medical experts watching this national stupidity take hold -  like a mind virus - is that we know damned well what works.  It is social distancing, mask wearing and lockdowns - if need be - especially when there is a surge and there is no vaccine as yet.   This is not rocket science.  Yet, because of the lack of a coordinated national response, where 2 in 5  'Muricans believe the thing is a hoax or "plandemic", we can't get it under control to the point of really opening the economy - or our schools.  In the words of Rachel Maddow Tuesday night:

"This is not rocket science. Without a cure the only interventions we have are these simple, dumb hard things that we fight over.  Masks, and social distance and keeping schools closed and keeping work places closed and having rules about gatherings. That's what we've got.  You do the things that work and when your numbers show the new  things you're trying don't work you stop trying them,"

Then add to that new memetic horse shit finding it's way into print or on the tube.  Balderdash such as spouted in today's WSJ by the clown Bobby Jindal ('The Biden Bait -and-Switch', p. A13), e.g.:

"Mr. Biden, liberal activists and the media are holding the country hostage, threatening voters with exhausting crises, refusing to reopen schools and the economy..."

Let's face it, only a total idiot could write such claptrap.  And just when you thought the excuses for ignoring  Covid-based restrictions couldn't get much more lame, we beheld this WSJ article entitled:  'Why Some Teens Ignore Coronavirus Restrictions' (Aug, 4, p., A9).  The gist of it is that we are wasting time, and doing much harm, by shaming or getting after party - obsessed teens in the Covid era. 'Let them do their own thing!' is the new refrain. Oh, and besides there's the dopamine, which "peaks in adolescents".  Therefore, it "drives them to value immediate gratification over future gains, which can lead to risky decisions."

Hence:  "Motivation is influenced by rewards like novelty, thrills and the presence of peers.  As a result, something that hits multiple buttons can be particularly enticing - such as the opportunity to attend a party that will be viewed on social media."   

Or, launching a Harvard College Class of 2021 Facebook group, i.e. '“Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”   in which some of the most despicable and degenerate dopamine-aroused brain expulsions ever  to see the light of day appeared.  The debased antics were first reported by the Harvard  Crimson  and included:

"students sending each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.”

 "After discovering the existence and contents of the chat, Harvard administrators revoked admissions offers to at least ten participants "

Clearly  the brain -dictated, dopamine choice turned out to be risky indeed.  Yet not all the prospective Harvard students were in thrall to their dopamine cravings-  which one researcher actually compared to  (WSJ, ibid.) "how a starving person craves food."    For example, then incoming freshman Jessica Zhang.  She initially  joined both chats and liked the original group because the shared messages were "mostly lighthearted",  but she bailed from the split off gr0up which wallowed in hate and mockery.  So did  Cassandra Luca,  who joined the first meme group but not the second, after seeing the garbage spewed.   Like Zhang, her offer was not revoked.

What likely set Luca's alarm bells sounding  is when the founders of the “dark” group demanded students post "provocative" (e.g. execrable) memes in the first group before being allowed to join the second.  This was too much for Ms. Luca, to her credit, and perhaps her upbringing which allowed her to transcend her brain's dopamine imperative.

Of course, on the scale of repercussions from bad decisions (due to overload of dopamine in the brain) the loss of a Harvard admission is nothing compared to the loss of a life. Say arising when teens - instead of sharing debased memes -share coronavirus particles instead.  This, whether from being in party crowds without masks, or without social distancing, or worse, kissing up strangers.  That is like playing Covid roulette and while it may seem like sport at the moment, it won't be if you find yourself on a dialysis machine -- because your kidneys failed as the virus attacked them.

When I consulted my psychology postdoc niece Shayl about this dopamine-brain explanation and the related WSJ piece,  she shrugged, and said:

"Well, it's basically what you would call 'codswallop'.  Look at those Harvard teens that didn't go the route of joining the horrible meme group. They clearly exerted control of their dopamine drives and brain "mandates"  and weren't booted from Harvard. If they could do that one could argue any teen could, given the right guidance."

Indeed, and in the same WSJ piece one finds (at the very end) one Ruben Valera, a med student at Tufts University who has not been tempted to break Covid restrictions "because if all the information he reads about Covid 19".    He also believes other young adults would behave more like him "if they had better guidance and information."

Also, to his credit, "while he agrees there is a biological drive toward socialization in people his age, he can't see it as a valid argument."

So the question becomes:  What's left when powerful arguments or pleas (like Dr. Joseph Varon's) no longer work? Well, in that case the evident solution to lower the stupidity levels is to cut power and water to the offending residences where party crowds gather - as LA Mayor Eric Garcetti has vowed to do, e.g.

https://www.businessinsider.com/la-mayor-warns-water-shut-off-houses-hosting-gatherings-parties-2020-8

Something serious, with enforcement potential and sanction, needs to be done to get people's behavior re-oriented to the crisis we're in.  If they won't do it themselves then external means need to be applied.

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The Right's COVID Science Deniers, Hacks, Cranks & Quacks Don't Get To Wrap Themselves In Galileo!

"We're living in a moment when the U.S. is a laughingstock or a subject of pity around the world.  Look at the chart of nations and all who've gotten their cases down, some at or near zero. Then look at the graph going straight up. That is us, our cases are skyrocketing.  We are living in this tragedy, this national humiliation for all to see."  - Chris Hayes, on 'All In', July 2nd

The Right's clowns and cranks as well as quacks, now appear to have gotten inside the head of Ari Schulman, author of an article entitled: 'The Counter Scientific Revolution - Coronavirus And The Galilean Right' (New Republic, July-August, p. 22)   See e.g.

https://newrepublic.com/article/158058/coronavirus-conservative-experts-scientific-counterrevolution

First, there is no "scientific counter revolution" marshaled by the likes of the crackpot Judy Mikovits (featured in the mockumentary 'Plandemic'), or the Stanford "meta research" quack John Ioannidis - who claimed the lockdowns were implemented without adequate evidence  - and who I skewered in a previous post, i.e.

WHO Are These Anti-Lockdown Medical Quacks That Ke...

Wherein I pointed out critics' objections to a paper by Ioannidis, e.g.

"These critics have pointed out - the study was "not random in selection"  and "disproportionately weighted toward white women under 64".  

Adding:

"He leaves out the demographics most susceptible to the virus (African Americans and the elderly) then has the nerve to trot out this B.S.  that the fatality rate is comparable to seasonal flu?   I call quackery! "

Second, Schulman's complaint appears to be mostly with the legit scientific establishment, though he does concede the experts' initial "dilatory announcements" (such as "fudging the question of whether masks were needed") contributed to an opening for Trump to exploit them to his own ends with his anti-mask, anti-science narratives.   As Schulman puts it:

"As President Trump has shown, where trust declines, debunkers abound. Though the dysfunctional politics of expert-administered modern science claims a distinctly left-leaning valence and genealogy, it has lately found the American right to be an obliging host organism. "


 But this exploitation by Trump and the Right's diehard science deniers or skeptic quacks does not endow their position with any genuine "counter science"  based on evidence.  Nor does it confer on them the mantle of Galieo Galilei which they are now attempting to grab. (I.e. to show they are victims of an orthodox establishment like Galileo was of the Inquisition, when he proposed his heliocentric theory to counter the geocentric  - Ptolemaic - one embraced by the Roman Catholic Church)

This is false analogy because Galileo was the ultimate empirical scientist who came to his theory by patient observations, such as studying the motions of the moons of Jupiter, as well as conducting other experiments (e.g. inclined plane) in which he also tested for errors and faulty assumptions. Something the Trumpkins never do.  Nor do they grasp that science is a process of self-correction in the context of successive approximations.  If the Trumpkin "counter revolutionaries",  cranks and quacks grasped that they'd know that initial errors or wrong assumptions (or prescriptions for behavior)  are nothing new as a novel phenomenon is confronted. 

Ok, Schulman does acknowledge this up to a point but then insists his real issue is with the media and other public institutions just imbibing the experts' pronouncements, as if they can't be challenged. As he writes:

"The problem is not merely the experts were wrong - that is to be expected. It is, rather, that our lead institutions and public information outlets continually teated the assurances of experts as neutral interpretations of settled science when they  plainly were not.  And these expert recommendations were translated into the dominant political discourse not mainly as a difficult judgment about to how to act against a novel, poorly understood threat - but as a pretext to police the boundaries of public opinion, to sneer at its dissenters."

But cripes, what would one expect in the middle of a pandemic the likes of which no one has seen before? Do we really want every Tom, Dick and Suzy sounding off and the media judging their opinions with equal weight  to experts?  And look, by mid -April it was pretty damned clear what needed to be done, i.e. masks were needed like in Asian nations, and  extended lockdowns were the primary key to snuffing the virus' spread early on.   This was not rocket science, or as ambiguous an aspect as Schulman makes it out to be.  In particular, flattening the curve was a genuine observable effect of necessary behaviors in those nations that took Covid-19 seriously.   By which I mean had a nationally coordinated response, as opposed to a piecemeal 'do as you please" one like for the U.S.  We also have more than enough evidence from sundry nations'  curves that both masks and lockdowns prevented exponential increases. These exponential increases in case loads now happen to be overwhelming our U.S. hospitals. 

I suspect, because no national mask mandate was ordered,  which yes - needed some serious "sneering at dissenters" like these knuckledragging fools:


But what interested me is the genesis of the Right's connection to Galileo or these crackpots being referred to   (by Schulman) as "the Trumpian, Galilean Right".  Evidently it began with Judy Mikovits whose grievances against her original academic (virology) community led her to deliberately make insipid comparisons with Galileo. As Schulman describes it:

"Mikovits is the most telling of the Covid skeptics. Plandemic depicts her as a persecuted truth-teller daring to speak out against a corrupt scientific orthodoxy. (Anthony Fauci features as a key villain in the film and in Mikovits’s counter-theories about the virus.) Her book Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science, published in April, offers as an epigraph Galileo’s reply, according to lore, to his Vatican inquisitors after being condemned as a heretic—“Eppur si muove” (And yet it moves). In anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s foreword to the book, he expands on the alleged Galileo parallel, and describes Mikovits as a “revolutionary” offering “censored and ‘dangerous’ science,” who suffered a “lynching” at the hands of the establishment. Coronavirus skeptics on the right have eagerly embraced this image of counter-experts as martyrs, heroes standing up to the Inquisition—and the counter-experts themselves have largely embraced the role."

Well, you can't make this crap up, folks. There it is.   But don't be fooled!  Mikovits is no latter day Galileo, far from it.   If any comparison is valid it would be with Immanuel  Velikovsky,  the Russian psychotherapist who scribbled the book, 'Worlds in Collision'.  This farrago of pseudo scientific rubbish argued that  Jupiter belched out a comet with a nucleus the mass of the planet Venus.  It then passed  so close to Earth it caused its rotation to halt (coinciding with Joshua's famous trumpet blast)  - and in addition-  triggered the precipitation of carbohydrates (from hydrocarbons) resulting in the manna falling from the skies to feed the wandering Israelites.  

It took a subsequent essay by the late science writer Isaac Asimov to finally put to rest most of this horse manure after he showed any such halting of Earth's rotation would have converted all its rotational kinetic energy into thermal energy and melted the crust.

So the Right's anti-maskers and anti-lockdown quacks and cranks are not "Galileans"  but latter day Velikovskians.    Nor are they "martyrs"  but rather cynical tools (in the case of the 'professionals') out to use politicization of the virus to help Trump's economic agenda to reopen prematurely.  As if to try to justify his unwillingness to all out pillory them, Schulman writes at one point:

"The product of these dynamics has not been, as we are often told, a Republican rejection of science itself—of its methodologies, its hunger for knowledge of the world, its desire for mastery over nature, its admiration for the excellence on display in rational inquiry. Rather, it has been the adoption of an outsider’s stance to the current scientific establishment—to its particular institutions, and to the pronouncements of its expert class."

"Outsider's stance", bollocks!  All of this followed endless debates  "over embryonic stem cell research, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and cloning—in which liberal partisans claimed the mantle of science for their side."   But truth be told, serious science backed up most of the practical positions, such as for stem cell research and abortion.  (Cloning has since been determined not all it was originally cracked up to be, and again I emphasize the word "originally" before the actual experiments were conducted in detail.)

Then, fortunately,  Schulman -   perhaps realizing he got carried away with what might be construed as too much sympathy for the Trumpie quacks, cranks and zombies -    writes: 

"the Trump era has given all but free rein to the right’s adoption of the Galilean stance. Perhaps this was inevitable: It is the clearest model available in our culture’s scientific mythology, however tenuous a relationship it may bear to history, of a figure dissenting from mainstream scientific views, one who sees himself as persecuted by a corrupt orthodoxy to which he is the rightful heir. The Galileo myth is also continuous with a long history of scientific gadflies who see themselves carrying forward the legacy of the Enlightenment model of skeptical inquiry: the radical individual freed from the oppression of institutions, in something of a funhouse-mirror image of the real work of science. The problem we’re now seeing, however, is that the Galileo model now often eventuates not only in counterinstitutional inquiry, but also in bad science. Though the Galileo posture is a response to a genuine alienation—and some real persecution—it is also an all too convenient pose."

And it’s crucial to recognize how the debunking style of the latter-day Galilean pose departs from the earlier modes of opposition to the scientific establishment. Whereas those were attempts—sometimes robust, sometimes cynical—to establish a set of countervailing scientific institutions, the Galilean mode is a free-floating anti-institutionalism. It is, to cite an old saw, the dilemma of the dog chasing a car: It wouldn’t know what to do if it caught it.

President Trump’s relationship to science during the pandemic offers a sobering instance of just how badly things can go once the dog catches the car. Even now that they hold the reins of power over crucial elements of the scientific establishment, he and his defenders have evinced an inability to understand how to relate to the scientific discourse in anything other than an aggrieved outsider’s role."

Well, at least he comes to that sound judgment near the end.  Better than not at all, so I could at least recognize some content as from The New Republic and not The National Review!

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