Best interaction with an antimasker:
Them: masks don’t work
Me: We’ll I’m going to wear one anyway
Them: Well then you’re just traping the germs against your face
Me: so you’re saying they block germs?
They even stated the correct reason to wear a mask: to trap the germs against my face, so others don’t get infected
It’s like they don’t compute the idea behind it, it stops at me me me
My favorite reply to them is that it’s America and I can do whatever I want, I’ll call them snowflakes too whenever appropriate. They get pissed when you insinuate they’re anti American lul.
Well, it’s only fair, seeing as they ARE anti-American.
i’ve just recently seen the same with pro 2a people. It was on a video about inclusive gun safety training, because the 2a is quite literally, for everyone. SO many people in the comments were saying something along the lines of “well if we trained them, then they might kill us”
Yeah no shit. What do you think they thought of you prior to this moment huh? Just utter fucking ignorance for anything more than a mere shred of intellectual thought being put into whatever they say. Not to mention that this is borderline authoritarian policy by nature but that’s the other funny part.
Didn’t gun control ramp up when the Black Panthers started exercising their rights to bear arms? Funny thing is the Panthers seem much more like a “well-regulated militia” than this Wild West, permitless carry, anything goes BS.
exactly. gun control only started when minorities started exercising their right to bear arms. The right don’t want gun control laws until the groups they are trying to oppress start exercising their second amendment rights.
Someone once told me that the box in which masks came in says “doesn’t protect from viruses”, as if it was hidden-in-plain-sight proof that masks don’t work.
Yeah, they don’t protect the user from viruses, they protect other people. The box is technically correct, Patricia, there is no conspiracy here.
While it is fun to tweak their titties with this, it will make zero difference on their position because their position wasn’t arrived at by rational thought.
Their actual position is that they don’t give a fuck about anyone other than themself. Everything they claim to believe is just a rationalization they think will sound good to someone else. All they care about is what they can convince others.
While there is some nuance between people, you pretty spot on.
Weaponized magical thinking.
So they just deny space exploration. Easy.
I recently had some guy rattle off 10 stupid reasons why we never landed on the moon in a row. I have never heard a more clear example of the fallacy of verbosity. One of them was "We didn’t have automatic windshield wipers for cars in the 60’s so there is no way we had the technology to go to the moon. "
I swear to god his reasons were that stupid and he had a ton of them.
The Saturn V moon rocket first flew in 1967, first carried a crew in 1968 and flew the first moon landing in 1969.
Bernard Sadow patented the first suitcase with wheels in 1972.
That sounds like some pure uncut Dunning-Kruger there!
People act like their mamas never told 'em to cover their damned mouths when they cough or sneeze. It’s the same damned thing, only masks work much better at keeping your filthy germs from infecting other people.
Common sense ain’t common, they say, and this anti-mask nonsense is just proof that it’s true.
But don’t you know? Having symptoms like “drier mouth,” “fogged glasses,” and “smelling your own breath” are much more dangerous than a virus that killed a million Americans at least.
What it really tells me it that the mouth breathers are crazier than we gave them credit for.
People act like their mamas never told 'em to cover their damned mouths when they cough or sneeze
Nor to wash their hands before eating (or even after going to the toilet.)
I tried explaining universal precautions to a pastor of a church I was attending, and pointed out that there is a Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor that overrides one’s personal desires. He could not dispute my points, but he also didn’t do anything to implement safety procedures.
Guess who left the church after the unsurprising COVID outbreak?
I realize a lot of people here aren’t believers, but my point is that even within the context of religion or common wisdom, masks make sense.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how decades of lead in gasoline, pipes, and in other places likely damaged generations of people’s ability to reason. I’m sincerely beginning to think this is a bigger problem than we’ll ever truly know.
You learn that most people are disgusting the first time you use a crowded public bathroom.
Or lick their hands when handling money
Well it doesnt help that studies post covid restrictions found many of said restrictions where ineffective. Masks tho we have good evidance they work at least.
Masks are more effective in protecting others if you are sick, rather than protecting yourself if others are sick. We should have the attitude that protecting others is good.
They still do reduce transmission to yourself but yeah, the big win is in not spreading it yourself.
My favorite metaphor for the subject: If you’re wearing pants, it’s really hard to piss on other people.
Masks are more effective in protecting others if you are sick, rather than protecting yourself if others are sick.
This was 100% not the messaging that was told to the public in the beginning.
I think they dumb down messaging too much. But then again, with what we know now, it’s not like the public is behaving responsibly. But thats not a messaging problem.
We should have the attitude that protecting others is good.
This flies in the face of North American “exceptional/radical individualism”.
Asian societies are largely collective. You do what you can to serve others, putting the needs of the community ahead of your own, and this leads to tighter-knit, stronger, and more resilient communities.
North American society is based on “muh rights” individualism, where the person is most important, and society needs to serve their needs, and not the other way around. This leads to weak, ephemeral, almost non-existent communities that are there only in name, or by a fluke of geography that makes completely random people cluster together without ever making serious or deep social connections.
Of the two, the former might end up being stifling to creatives and neuroatypicals, but the latter cannot survive any significant challenge without a significantly negative impact on the “community”.
The 2 party political system flies in the face of basic individualism.
As always, it’s better to recommend more strict restrictions when you don’t know if they’re effective and there’s an impact on public health. Hindsight is 20/20
If you’re going to lock the country down then you need to support small businesses too. Imagine spending long nights building a business only to see it disappear under COVID restrictions. And then you learn that the restrictions weren’t necessary.
I don’t know about other countries, but the on and off lockdowns in some countries proved to be ineffective. Many experts said it’s better to do lockdown in one go than it being staggered and having different levels of restrictions. But on the one hand, the totalitarian zero-COVID restriction like had happened in China is just as ineffictive.
Yep, the lockdown waves probably weren’t ideal for preventing viral spread, but we now know they were at least better than doing nothing.
Hopefully we learn for next time
Ship no go. Can you make it go?
You’re assuming these people believe we even send things to space. I had a serious ass conversation recently with my father’s roommate. Typical conspiracy theorist ding dong. Full on flat earther and everything. I asked him how he thinks GPS works if the earth was flat. He admitted he didn’t know but then when I started to explain how it works by pinging satellites we put up in space he cut me off and said space isn’t real. Like legitimately thinks space isn’t real. He on a separate occasion also complained that we didn’t need to wear masks during covid because we apparently make our own viruses in our bodies and viruses don’t spread between people.
These people don’t even understand how logic works. Let alone that people could be smarter than they are.
There’s always been crazy and stupid people. And then we gave them the internet to connect and to have a voice. Now they feed of each other’s crazynies and believe they run the world.
Only way to fight this is education. Give people the ability to see through crazy. You’re not born with common sense. It’s taught and learned.
Tbh, it’s really your fault for choosing to interact with this person more than once.
yeah, god forbid you try to break down the echo chamber existing between parties for the benefit of public good.
Fuck you, be a good robot for the party and STICK ONLY WITH THE PEOPLE I DEMAND YOU TO STAY WITH.
Well, if you reject all knowledge you cannot obtain through direct observation, you can kinda start to understand how they ended up where they are.
They’re intimidated by the scientific method.
Many of them are religious and believe plenty of things they didn’t directly observe. It’s more that they have been trained through religious thinking that if someone confidently claims something it must be more true than someone who honestly admits that “it is the best we can know right now and we will update our understanding as we obtain more evidence.” These people need the answer now and that answer can’t change because changing your opinion based on new evidence is seen as weakness and opinions should be handed down from on high and never change.
I just want affordable healthcare
Socializing your health care might destroy you guys, since there’s so many fatties, smokers, guns and people who ignore doctors. Sounds expensive.
Except that it is a proven fact that public health care costs less per capita than private, so actually it sounds less expensive. The people lobbying to keep it private are the only ones who stand to lose and their brainwashed army of sycophants can’t understand anything beyond the points they’ve been trained to parrot.
So I would love public healthcare but what’s the reason that public is cheaper
This came off snarkier than I intended I’m just curious
what’s the reason that public is cheaper
The number of middlemen is removed and their profit motive is removed from the equation.
Huh that makes sense
But surely you must understand how someone, having failed all of their classes and then dropped out of school altogether, understands complex matters better than the people who are brilliant, have international acclaim, and devoted like 5 decades of their lives to study that same thing?
Or you know, at least watched this 11-minute video?
And if you do, can you explain it to me? :-P So far all I have is “Might Makes Right”, but somehow that seems to be lacking something…
The oligarchs have not decided that Mars can be made into a culture war issue… yet.
They are on their way with how Musk and the other Silicon Valley idiots are going
🤓
The reality is that you can easily get infected through a mask, but the viral load is much lower
Also if all the people around you are wearing masks in addition to yourself, then it’s way way lower
as the meme states actually, the point of masks isn’t really to protect yourself, that’s a marginal side benefit, the point is to protect everyone else from your pestilence ridden breath of death.
watching videos that show how particulate from your breath spreads with and without just literally anything in front of your mouth is disgusting, unblocked your breath carries spittle several METERS in front of you, like the world’s most disgusting sprinkler put sideways.
I tried explaining this to a friend who was convinced masks do nothing. He would say stuff like “if it can still get through then what’s the point”. He claimed only people at risk should wear them.
if you can still die while wearing a seatbelt what’s the point
you should make him eat poop
since he consumes a non-zero amount of fecal bacteria just like everyone else
not eating poop does nothing
For some reason anti-maskers think that getting shot once and getting shot 276,000,000 times are equally bad
Aha, but if every bullet is a killer bullet then it is exactly the same.
Checkmate atheists.
I am reasonably sure that a fair many conservatives feel that they are entitled to their biases and fallacies and the world must bend to these biases.
It’s deeper than that, they literally believe they can change objective reality by believing hard enough.
That’s why they excuse all of their bad acts, if they ignore it, it doesn’t exist to them.
Negative object permanence.
Too bad they can’t make tulpas with that power
You can, and they’re useful, and tulpa is a stupid fucking name. There I said it.
The only thing about them is that they are really only useful for organizing parts of yourself that you are not consciously aware of. You can’t manifest a slenderman IRL but you can make a mind palace and vastly improve your memory, or go on spirit journeys and learn how to forgive.
It’s all in your head but that doesn’t make it any less real.
Currency and democracy are ideas made manifest, and all they are is shared ideas in our heads.
What’s the point of using my mind to create something internal? It would be better if I could just twist reality with a thought. Smh.
It’s complicated and if I fully explain it to you, it won’t work as well for you.
Google ‘mind palace’ and start playing with the practice. It’s really just a fun imagination game that can actually improve your memory drastically.
I’ll just look for a chaos magic grimoire at this point
Yeah ok but there’s a difference between being a chunibyo and wanting to organize your thinking.
What is the thesis of this meme, that people are just stupid and there is no underlying problem or system that can be improved?
Science is often communicated to the public via either companies, politics, or the media. Which al have their own interests and issues in representing “scientific facts”. To give some examples of the “science” people have been exposed to: These new pain killers are perfectly save and absolutely not addictive. Making health care accessible is actually bad for the economy and will be more expensive in the end. Or the numerous articles on outlier papers published in the media that conclude that it’s actually healthy to [insert obviously unhealthy habit here (sponsored by some industry group)].
Science has a communication problem, and the communication conduits have a huge credibility problem. The results of which made an already bad pandemic even worse.
Holy shit, a reasonable comment that doesn’t just assume the other half of the country are idiots.
People don’t know what to believe and are skeptical for good reason (some historical, some present). Time and time again we’ve seen our institutions fails us. We see blatant corruption that the elites don’t even bother to hide (e.g. corporate capture). And we see freedoms eroded in times of crisis (e.g. Patriot Act). I’m not saying we should be conspiratorial about doctors or science. But reasonable people on both sides of the aisle see what’s happening to our institutions and this has knock on effects.
Lot of over lap with anti-maskers and young earth flat earthers.
Fauci is to blame. The path of evil is paved in good intention.
The fucker told everyone that they didn’t need masks.
What he was intending to do was make sure doctors and emergency personnel had masks. instead, it became an inflection point of publicly dividing the nation.
Let’s be real, the misinfosphere would’ve have found something else to misguide the morons. He didn’t even say “you don’t need masks”, he said “don’t buy all the masks, stay inside”
It’s such a bad idea to prioritize medical personnel having masks. There’s no way they would become high-risk vectors with the multitude of sick people they handle daily. /s
Yes, but the point is, a government official GASLIT THE PUBLIC, which gave a HUGE validation boost to the conspiracy nuts.
He directly aided morons in spreading their moronery, which is the exact opposite purpose of his entire fucking job. IMO he was criminally neglegent.
Comprehension of the underlying reasons for a particular set of events or advice isn’t really a conspiracy nut’s bread and butter. That’s why they’re idiots and professionals aren’t to blame. Keeping the healer alive is a pretty basic strategy and Fauci was right to do it.
His one job is to not give public health measures a bad image, and he did the exact opposite by gaslighting. It’s amazing how people are defending being gaslighted. Pathetic.
Your understanding of gaslighting isn’t quite right.
He started with gaslighting. Then he EVENTUALLY corrected himself in poorly phrased ways that were far too easy to clipchimp his message ib to oblivion.
I do not care how much anyone respects him or doctors. I don’t care what word you think would apply. His job was a communicator, and he failed miserably.
In a March 8, 2020, interview, Fauci stated that “right now in the United States, people [who are not infected] should not be walking around with masks”, but “if you want to do it, that’s fine”. In the same interview, Fauci said that buying masks “could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need” them: “When you think masks, you should think of healthcare providers needing them”
Yikes. Apparently he did gaslight people in the time between stating his position and then explaining it.
What really happened was bad actors circulated edited clips of this video, out of context, around Facebook and other social media sites. Lots of folks, apparently you included, ate it up and have been happy customers at the propaganda buffet ever since.
Exactly. The surgeon general tweeted out, “STOP WEARING MASKS” and CNN was publishing articles with all the anti-masker claims, including that they don’t work and could increase your risk of getting it instead, and people just pretend like it never happened and the anti-maskers came out of thin air.
It wasn’t just an idiotic ploy to deliberately spread misinfo to trick people into leaving masks for doctors, it was also about the government trying to cover their own ass for having sold off their emergency stockpiles for fast cash.
Step on Mars but not on snek.
Are we really still pretending the mask I got from the front bin of Home Depot actually works?
Can we look at the other claims the government “scientists” claimed to see how they were not real scientists?
Are we really still pretending the mask I got from the front bin of Home Depot actually works?
Are we still pretending <100% effectiveness = worthless? (Just kidding, I know folks are.)
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-mask/art-20485449
The issue here is that people pretended masks were very affective, and I have not seen any actual data that they were very useful. I have seen a lot of memes like the one above that pretend they were essential when the only data I ever recall seeing was they were overall 4% useful, by a pro-mask source. And if you look around there are lots of sources that said they did nothing, I dont know which is true, but lack of solid evidence seems to point to it was pointless.
Do you think masks should have been mandated indoors if they had a 4% impact? How about 0.1%?
Twentyish studies are sourced at the bottom of the article I linked, and it details the effectiveness of each mask type in the body of the article. Why we are discussing mandates now I don’t know, feels like a bit of the ol’ goalposts on wheels to me, it’s not what I replied to.
I think this is the most important part of the article “Yes. When used with measures such as getting vaccinated, hand-washing and physical distancing, wearing a face mask slows how quickly the virus that causes COVID-19 spreads.” It essentially says do all the things and it will be impactful.
At what level of impact do you think masks should have been forced on people?
I’m not going to re-litigate mask mandates with you. I’m sure you’ll find someone happy to have that argument. You can keep moving those goalposts, but I’m not following.
That was really the big question back in the day, and when I see spotty evidence at best for mandating something that really is the key question.
damn i uh. Yup i read that statement.
Ok im going to go jerk off to furry porn or something immensely more productive than what i just spent time doing.
The cheap, dumpy masks are still going to somewhat reduce your intake of particles and significantly reduce your output, which is their main point.
Thats great, but did they actually prevent spread is the question to ask. We can start out with the hypothesis that they do work, then we need to actually confirm if that is true.
here. just the first two research results for a simple google search “did masks work research.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10446908/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8499874/
i mean… you could look into it? know that it’s difficult to set up an ideal study during a pandemic.
edit - also, it’s hard to take you seriously in this debate when you aren’t bothering to ACTUALLY LOOK AT SOME RESEARCH yourself. but i see you making lots of comments making a show of concern.
From all that I have seen and heard its at best split or the impact is so small that it is not noticeable. I think most of the ones that say it worked involved healthcare setting where trained people used good masks, not me at home depot with a mask from a box.
What I can say is that during the “mask years”, I seriously never got a cold, flu, or Covid. I usually get a cold at least once or twice a year. I think it’s still been a while since I’ve had one. My sister actually just got Covid about 2 weeks ago, I wore a mask around her for a few days and never caight it, tho I had a booster 6 months before, and she was about a year out. I took 3 home tests over 5 days and they were all negative.
Cool, I dont really know how this relates to the overall effectiveness of masks. I am going to guess that you were very cautious and took all kinds of precautions.
That people can still type in these word salads in 2024 is beyond me. Real actual scientists all over the world have answered these questions years ago. Stop asking Facebook for answers. Try Google
So you think that google is unbiased?
No. Google helps you search the web. It’s up to you to look for trustworthy sources but that’s not too hard. Just sticking to Wikipedia is fine most of the time.
But that involves reading and this may prove challenging to some.
Facebook is a cesspool.
Is Lemmy and Reddit not cesspools?
Only if the people using it are making it into one. I am looking at no one in particular…
Answering everything with a question isn’t as smart as you think.
What? Yes? Home Depot sells N95 masks. Protection is why they exist.
Are we really pretending this metal saw blade I got from the front bin of Home Depot actually cuts things? I’m skeptical.
Most people didnt use N95 masks, they used random cloth ones and the surgical looking ones. The N95 masks are actually really good for dust, I use them all the time.
they used random cloth ones and the surgical looking ones. The
While not as good as a properly fitted N95, they are still more effective than no mask at reducing the spread of airborne particles from the wearer.
Remember that masks were always mostly about protecting others, not so much about protecting the wearer. And I think that’s where the loudest resistance came from - selfish people who don’t give a fuck about the wellbeing of other people.
Great, can you quantify how effective they were? So the issue is that if almost all infection happened not in public and cloth masks are marginally useful, what the point of wearing them in public if there is no measurable benefit?
Imagine still trying to start mask debates in 2024.
And yet here you are…
If you don’t know the difference between starting a debate and pointing out the ridiculousness of the topic then I guess that explains the obsession.
Just out of curiosity, what is a real scientist?
Someone that takes in data and comes to a data driven conclusion, not an ideological driven solution.
