Schindler v N95 masks
And the replies are taking this completely seriously.
Right, because rules to avoid contagion during a pandemic are exactly the same as Nazi genocide.
Tip Jar
And the replies are taking this completely seriously.
Right, because rules to avoid contagion during a pandemic are exactly the same as Nazi genocide.
Well, they said having to wear a mask was like having to wear a yellow star…or something like that. False equivalency is in full bloom in the modern political, social, and medical world.
He’s right, though. People do tend to overestimate their immunity to creeping authoritarianism and where it leads.
Sounds like someone who saw Schindler’s List, but hasn’t read The Banality of Evil. Maybe he did read it and forgot, who knows.
The rest of it is a ridiculous false analogy by a disgruntled anti-vaxxer. Covid was not a moral issue. Maybe he didn’t have a friend or two who died from it. I did however, and some of us took it very seriously.
I thought Peterson was a pretty smart guy before he became so political and silly. I still agree with him about compelled speech, and some of his more simplistic moral positions, but his musings have become more bizarre over time. I’d like to see him justify his all meat diet from a moral standpoint. Yeah, good luck with that.
If Peterson had wanted to assert the truism that people ‘tend to overestimate their immunity to creeping authoritarianism and where it leads’, he could surely have done so. It is very simple to do so, as you, Nullius, have demonstrated. The point that is being criticised is the comparison between ’Nxzi’ (?) informers and those ‘informers’ who, he is claiming, informed on, say, Boris Johnson’s parties solely because of the ’thrill’ of ‘moral superiority’ that it gave them. The comparison is typical of the disingenuous rubbish that people like Peterson trade in. He should look in the mirror and recognise the sense of moral superiority that so obviously drives him. How the man preens & flatters himself!
The part before the ellipsis is right; the part after it is ridiculous.
I’m assuming that there is a (real or imagined) automatic censor that flags certain words. People misspell those words or use symbols in place of letters to avoid triggering the censor.
Thank you, Sackbut!
I’m wondering whether ‘Nxzy’ has some connexion with the new name of the forum on which Jordan Peterson, or some fan-boy of his, has posted this video of JP depositing yet another fake pearl of wisdom into the trough that is X. No doubt it has been greedily swallowed down by the incels.
I don’t know. Is it ridiculous? That’s going to depend on what you read as the actual claim being made. To me, the post-ellipsis claim doesn’t appear to be that those who informed on others during the pandemic were incorrect in their threat assessment (to borrow ɓoard game terminology), but rather that the actual motivating factor was the same rush that motivates people to be the first to call out those who step out of line. In other words, he’s asserting that people’s behavior supervened not on epedemiological facts but instead upon incentives from the status game, which would entail that:
i. if incentives in the status game were different, people’s behavior would have been different.
ii. if epedemiological facts were different, people’s behavior might not be different.
This seems to me an entirely reasonable account given what we’ve all observed of tribalism and the social value of pronouncing shibboleths
I would suggest that the prime motivator in the case of the Boris Johnson party complaints was the pointing out of his outrageous hypocrisy. While people like us were (sensibly) excluded from the funerals of loved ones (having travelled from another country, no less) he and his cronies were acting as if they were above the rules which they had imposed.
In a lethal pandemic, some people are sticklers for the rules because they are aware of the dire consequences of breaking them. Some because they’re autistic, and breaking rules hurts so much that we cannot stand by and let others break them. And some, yes, inform on others because they get a feeling of civic pride from doing so. But that’s unlikely to be the prime motivator, and he’s an idiot in so many ways that it’s a shame that people listen to him merely because he is sometimes correct, or says something which resonates with their world view.
Thank you, Tigger. I have just listened to Peterson’s complete statement – I had not done so before, since I cannot stand the man’s voice or the man himself. Essentially, he is intimating, in that confident, laying-down-the-law way that appeals to infantile libertarians, that the prescription that people should wear masks in public places in a pandemic was authoritarian over-reach on a par with the authoritarianism of Nazi Germany. I find him despicable.
NiV @8, Peterson’s claim is that 30% of people “informed on” (which is a loaded phrase in itself) those not (for whatever reason) taking, what was widely considered, basic precautions *in order to feel morally superior,* presumably because feeling morally superior, according to him, is bad or wrong in some way. So firstly, how does he know what the motivations of this hypothetical 30% were? Are there no possible alternative explanations? I mean he sounds fairly sure of himself in that clip. Secondly, if he disagrees with this 30% on moral grounds, isn’t he putting forth his own assessment of what he thinks is morally superior? Seems a bit hypocritical if you ask me. He’s a psychologist after all, but apparently he does’t recognize his own projection (in the Freudian sense).
Part fo the problem is that people don’t understand that the utility of masking only comes in when it relates to breathing out. Wearing a maks (except for N95) only protects from %5 of the incoming viruses. The surgical and cloth masks block %70 of the viruses you may or may not have riding on the droplets you breathe out. If people were to all wear masks the combined effect is to block %95 of the coronavirus that was being spread by people who had no idea if they had the virus or not. There were so many people who masked only their mouths, for some stupid reason. Or they would drop the mask when they were talking.
People only needed to stop and think of why operating room personnel wear masks. It’s not to protect the personnel from breathing whatever illness the patient may have, it’s to prevent germs from breathing spreading to a vulnerable patient whose primary immune system (all the apparatus in your nose) first defense mechanisms. When your belly is cut open you don’t want germs to have easy access.
Even some science podcasts didn’t get this basic idea, and I kind of stopped listening to them when they cited studies that showed that masks didn’t block incoming corona viruses. Incidentally, that’s when I realized that the argument tactic of sharing peer-reviewed studies to bolster your claim isn’t really as effective as some people seem to think because lay people don’t have enough training to read beyond the extract to determine whether a study actually says what they claim it says (and often, scientists in the field don’t accept a single study. They need to see a consensus based on multiple studies, and they will also check to see if the study has been replicated. Science can be tedious just from a literature study.)
So, on social media, lacking this basic understanding of why masks were so important, not only were people posting that they wore masks but caught covid-19 anyway and assuming that the masks were therefor a lie; they also started assumng that mask wearing was performative and leading to the conclusion that Jordan makes above, I don’t think that people were educated well enough on how the masks work to fight a pandemic, especially when dealing with the novel version of a virus that can have a 14 day incubation period.
If people would have understood that, they would have worn the masks just as willingly as we take our shoes off when we fly.
In overcrowded Japan, where I live & where most people live cheek by jowl, people wore masks in public spaces, not because they were legally required to do so (the government is legally unable to to issue such mandates) but because they were advised to do so. The number of deaths from COVID, as a percentage of the population, was far, far less than in the USA or the UK.
I suspect that some Japanese people at least were very well aware of how masks help to prevent the spread of COVID. When I was sitting, masked, on a train one morning, the corpulent young man standing in front of me, who obviously disliked gaijin (foreigners), pulled down his mask and proceeded to breathe heavily in my direction, clearly intending to make me feel uncomfortable. I ignored him. Other (bemasked) passengers were, from their expressions, disgusted with this behaviour, though nobody said anything. I didn’t catch COVID as a result.
If you are visiting someone in hospital in Japan even now, visits are restricted to 15 minutes, and you are required by the hospital to wear a mask. (At the height of the pandemic, of course, visits were forbidden altogether.) And the staff in shops wear them still. There are still cases of Covid occurring, here as elsewhere.