[mindslight]

While there are some truths in your mirror of my comment, the symmetry breaks down because we're talking about a single topic.

The blue post-truth political machine is focused on identity politics, which has little bearing on Covid response. Giving a pass to protests for police accountability, or dwelling on how Covid "especially impacts communities of color" are examples of its distortion. But these aren't completely undermining its overall treatment of Covid.

And yes, many people who are taking Covid seriously are also simply following top-down direction. From a libertarian perspective, this is similarly ridiculous - eg the continuing prevalence of ersatz face cloths as opposed to real filtering respirators. But really, this is traditional authority doing its thing - most people don't do the work to truly make their own decisions, and so they defer to some leaders that tell them what to do that are expected to generally make decisions in society's interest.

The real question to be asking is why the red tribe's authorities have misled them on this topic so tragically. The opposing position to "wear a mask to protect others" should have been "wear a mask to protect yourself and your family" (eg valved respirators are fine). But they instead chose to reject the whole topic, with disastrous results.

[charbonneau]

I wasn't trying to make a distinction between blue and red tribes. You can paint a political propaganda machine however you like, its goal is the same: To encircle people by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, true and/or false, by playing on their will or their needs, assailing them in both their private and public lives. It furnishes them with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. Through the myth it creates, the machine imposes a range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence.

> The opposing position to "wear a mask to protect others" should have been "wear a mask to protect yourself and your family"

Should the mask topic also prohibit any divergence? Is the evidence so unambiguous that all raised objections can only be a tragic misleading with disastrous results?

Cochrane review (Nov 2020): "We included nine trials (of which eight were cluster‐RCTs) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness (two trials with healthcare workers and seven in the community). There is low certainty evidence from nine trials (3507 participants) that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI) compared to not wearing a mask (risk ratio (RR) 0.99, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.82 to 1.18)"

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

[mindslight]

I wholeheartedly agree with your first paragraph. However I am drawing distinctions between the results of the two political machines. While their goals are the same, the specific topics they end up rallying around are different. If we were discussing hostile college campuses, then it would make sense to criticize the blue team for its delusions. But rather we're discussing Covid where the red team has driven the mess.

The dynamic isn't that the evidence is unambiguous, but rather that when the evidence is inconclusive falling back to first principles makes sense. Respiratory filtration should help prevent spread of respiratory pathogens, period.

If there are no conclusive results proving that out for ersatz cloth masks, then the scientific approach is to try better protective equipment until it does become effective. Taking a lack of positive results as a reason to eschew protection is anti-scientific nihilism. If a virus is still spreading somehow with a certain type of PPE, then what does it take to stop it? Full face mask? Bunny suit plus PAPR? Once we know that, then we have a good idea of all the mechanisms of spread, and can debate whether specific precautions are worthwhile. Bunny suits might not be, but half face P100 respirators plus face shields at $50 per person might have actually made economic sense based on what Covid has done to the economy.

[charbonneau]

> The dynamic isn't that the evidence is unambiguous, but rather that when the evidence is inconclusive falling back to first principles makes sense. Respiratory filtration should help prevent spread of respiratory pathogens, period.

> If there are no conclusive results proving that out for ersatz cloth masks, then the scientific approach is to try better protective equipment until it does become effective.

I respect your view and completely agree that personal protective equipment should be examined further. The current evidence is definitely sufficient for a strong mask recommendation. I’m only critical of mandates (or bans) in this situation as they push people away from doing their own research and lead to bizarre scenes, as you encountered it with your respirator.

[mindslight]

I'm against mask mandates in principle, but it's hard to ignore that the strength of people listening to malevolent political figures has been much greater than the strength of people doing enlightened research. Maybe I'm just getting older and more conservative, shrug.

The best way of reconciling this seems to have been states issuing directives that didn't actually have the force of law. For example, the only "lockdowns" I know about the US were a few counties in CA. And yet people believed and acted as if there were such orders, even though they were really just strong suggestions to stay home.

FWIW the mask regime I was dealing with was being promulgated by a private company (the hospital), rather than the government. I'll critique any power structure regardless of its charter, but no political framework really has a good idea how to reel that type of thing in. To me the only real way to get past this is for people to become more intelligent so such top-down structure isn't seen as necessary in the first place.