Agreed. My chief argument with the mask narrative has always been, if they are effective, why hasn't there been official guidelines about what makes them effective? What materials? What construction? How do I know an ineffective mask from an effective one?

To the best of my knowledge, no such guidance has been published in a year of battling COVID. Why?

I want to expand a bit.

The hysteria over wearing masks is a distraction. I get that masks are a symbol of the disregard for the constitution. That they represent the slide towards a totalitarian socialist one party state. That problem can easily be overcome by wearing ones that have a counter message of your choice on them. The problem is that objecting to mandatory mask wearing feeds on the minds of a certain segment of the population who are not typically concerned with issues such as constitutional rights.

I'm not talking about the left who doesn't believe the constitution is legitimate anyway. They will simply use the objection to masks the way they use gun violence to create uncertainty in the minds of the demographic I'm talking about, soccer moms. The people that go around saying Trump is not a nice man. It's issues, and the way they are handled, like mask wearing that prevented Trump from winning.

To over come the fraud in the past election Trump needed a fairly overwhelming majority. I don't mean voter fraud but the kind of fraud that soccer moms hear from their liberal friends, womens magazines, the fake media in general, academia, and other "authoritative voices". I'm not saying there was no voter fraud, if you know your history you know Democratic voter fraud is a feature of every election going back to the early 1800s. If that kind of voter fraud could be stopped the Republicans would have done so a long time ago. I brought this up in another thread in a slightly different context but it needs repeating. What do women want more than any other thing as a general rule? Someone to make them feel safe so they can go about nesting. When they have children the need to feel safe is even more intense. It's designed into them and why they suffer more from neuroticism than males. Neuroticism is nothing more than overwhelming negative emotions brought on by some sort of insecurity, it keeps babies safe.

Selling Trump or conservatism is going to be a hard sell to women under the best of circumstances. I'm not talking about the kind of conservatism as it is general pictured. I'm talking about the America first kind. More importantly about putting abstract ideas before security. Ideas like the second amendment which represents the best articulation of government legitimacy a nation has ever come up with. Women will vote for war of course if they think their security is at risk but are unlikely to vote against an establishment that makes them feel safe. A government that is willing to take away guns because who needs guns anyway. The same mental process applies to masks. It doesn't matter if they are effective all that matters is how they make people feel.

Trump lost the election because of Covid. He did well with the working class and better than expected with minorities but mostly male minorities. When it came to women he did not make them feel safe. It doesn't matter if his economic a;nd foreign policies actually made them safer it's how they felt. You can't argue with instincts. You can't reason with them. They have to be immutable or they lose their fitness.

The whole MAGA movement made people feel unsafe. The reaction to Covid by MAGA supporters just amplified that feeling. Like it or not it was a very masculine movement. You could argue that Trump had a lot of women supporters and that is true. He could have had more. All it would have taken was for him to wear a mask and ask his followers to do likewise.

@Beachslim

It is a bit complicated because there are a lot of things you have to do to keep the Reproduction Rate below 1.

@Beachslim

I get it, he was Bill Clinton without the Slick Willy persona. It is a measure of how left the country has drifted over the last few decades.

I don't mind the drift to the left nearly as much as I mind the incompetence associated with it. Trump at least was willing to take a look at how badly many left leaning policies have failed over the last two decades. It was a start and there was nothing better in the offering.

@wolfhnd "What we are interested in is short term use in combination with social distancing." So, by "short term" do you mean 1 year? 2 year? 4 years?... 256 years? In geological terms 256 years is but a blink of an eye.

@wolfhnd "Trump lost the election because of Covid." I think the cpp virus was a key factor. I also think, however, that the correlation coefficient between actual votes and election outcome is somewhere in the numerical vicinity of Planck's constant.

@cepstralspike

Sure.

I think it depends on who you come into contact with on a regular basis as to how close you think the election was. Most of the people I had contact with voted for Biden. I live in an urban center where people are either middle class professionals, wealthy or poor minorities with an unusual number of Gays.

@wolfhnd I'm kinda like this guy's take. It is a longish article with what I see as very reasonable assessment of how we ended up with Max Headroom @ 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Why Do the Election’s Defenders Require My Agreement? 

The purpose of voting today is to give a democratic veneer to an undemocratic regime—not to give the people a say in the direction of their government. 

By Michael Anton February 23, 2021

[amgreatness.com]

@cepstralspike

I have been talking a lot about freewill later. It comes down to how propaganda removes agency. Worse because we live in a deterministic intellectual environment it's easy for people to slide into indifference about propaganda. Most will never consider it's effect on society as a cooperative organism. Why worry about how you are being manipulated if you could not have done otherwise. It's a convenient excuse for ignorance.

Even in places like the Soviet Union in the end propaganda becomes useless because physical reality has a way of exposing lies. You can see that in feminist propaganda when women wish they have had a husband and children in their 40s. When people in the Soviet Union had to stand for hours in line to get food.

There is good and bad propaganda. It all starts with a grain of "truth" but some propaganda enhances the kind of agency a society needs to be healthy and some diminishes it. In the end cooperation has to be voluntary and only capitalism can approach that as a non coercive form of enforcement. If you go around telling people they don't have freewill they will be unable to make the kinds of decision necessary for functioning in a non coercive society.

@cepstralspike

I read the article and it is consistent with the arguments made by most of the people on the losing side that have a brain.

My one objection is as follows. With such narrow margins of victory no party will ever again have a mandate to govern in a way that would make democracy functional. Not that democracy itself is anything other than mob rule. If you have Republican in front of your name I would hope that you don't believe in democracy. Of course any candidate that made a reasoned argument against Democracy would never be elected again. What that means in practical terms is that anyone that believes in the constitution could never be elected. It puts the Republicans in a very difficult position. They can either be hypocrites or than can concede to a one party country. Because they are so hung up on principals that is exactly what they have done.

That brings us to the central issue which is what principles should the Republicans hold. All values create conflicts. The Any Rand principle seems completely unworkable. You can't have a right that infringes on anyone else's rights is sophistry. A society is like an organism in a wider ecosystem. Every action by any part impacts the entire ecosystem. You can't remove negative impacts with clever sounding philosophy. The Democrats have got that part right so they just ignore negative impacts and assume Democracy is just a nice idea and work on concentrating power. A one party system certainly remove the problem of conflicting values and stalemate. That points to what the fundamental principle of the Republican party should be. The maximum practical distribution of power. It's exactly what Trump was unwittingly doing. He was ironically using the power of the presidency to redistribute power to those left behind and the States. Restoring the constitutional checks and balances as long as that didn't impact his power.

No one in congress wants their power diminished, it's their motivation, whether for good or bad is highly subjective. It's the subjective part that makes me dislike politics in general. Ask me about almost any policy and I will honestly tell you I don't know.

In college my English professor sent me to a psychologist to get help. I apparently was unable to have an opinion on anything. The psychologist didn't help. He pointed out that most people wouldn't understand what I was talking about. He even agreed with me by pointing out how people never see the real car accident as all the witnesses will have a different account. I don't have that problem I would just say I don't know what happened. Give me some time to study the physical evidence and I will offer you a guess. All of life is a guess. You just have to have faith enough in movement to not become inert. Politics should be like that. The people we elect should offer their best guess and the ones that are certain we should avoid. Unfortunately everyone tends to think they see the real accidents.