mask hallucination
mask hallucination
we cannot afford another foray into frightened quackery
why, it's almost as if turning anxiety afflictions into forms of validation and virtue signaling for two years has made the pathologies of many people who were already struggling mentally/emotionally much, much worse.
i mean, who would have seen THAT coming?
even leaving aside the “um, so what meds have we got you on doc?” issues of “is this some sort of psychosis?” and being as charitable as possible in the presumption that “toxic green clouds” was intended as imagery and metaphor, it still raises some truly unsettling questions about mental health (and medical judgement).
why would one chose such an image?
and what does it imply about one’s perception of the world and of patients that heretofore normal human experience undergone by doctors, teachers, bus drivers, parents, friends, and anyone who ever went to a movie (among a cast of billions more) is now deemed too terrifying and dangerous?
and what on earth would lead one to presume that, as a doctor, expressing both this hypochondriac fear and this total lack of grounding in evidence based medicine around non-pharma-interventions (NPI) is somehow a good look in public?
because all i see is this:
at this stage of the game, even a rudimentary familiarity with the data has shown repeatedly that which was already known before covid: masks do not work to stop the spread of respiratory virus. they do not stop contagion, act as source control, or mitigate severity. the harms were well known and significant and the benefits illusory.
it was a talismanic superstition that went into vogue because it looked like “doing something” and while it did zero to stop covid, it did much to amplify a sense of crisis (as seeing masked people everywhere positively screams “not normal!”) and this has both broken the brains of the anxious and engendered a sort of addiction/dependence among them.
masks have become an adult wubbie for social maladroits and agoraphobes: nothing more but also nothing less. it would be unwise to underestimate just how desperately frightened people will cling to “señor blankie.”
no one wanted to hear that the mask karens are back. but they are. and horribly, they seem most highly concentrated in education. they want this back desperately because it allows them to keep engaging in the low status crybully cosplay of anxiety alleviating veil wear without having to be judged for acting like a weirdo or a frail. they are covering their insecurities by taking the liberties of others. and acceding to this is how we all drown.
and make no mistake, karen and the unions that serve her are not going down without a fight.
and the tepid twaddle of teacherdom is clamoring for it. their unions literally filed a complaint with the state over it.
predictably, douglas is a “Psych MA, Public affairs PhD student. Mental health advocate. Drug policy & subjective well-being” with, wait for it, pronouns in bio… this seems to be the typical aliment intersection of the mask impositional society.
and alas, this social contagion is spreading.
what’s really striking to me is how tightly it focuses in bastions of echo chamber privilege like universities. even the much beleaguered children of puerto rico were finally freed a couple weeks ago after 2 years of remorseless distance learning and excessive spacing and face muzzling in schools.
even the CDC has given up on trying to lie their way into claiming masks work.
restaurants, airplanes, theaters, and grocers have regained their senses.
playgrounds and playgroups have returned to normal.
but the top universities boldly solider on in their pseudoscientific panic prophylaxis.
the more i ponder this, the more i suspect that it’s because the professors and unions at such august institutions are among the most arrogant and least realistic people in amercia.
they inhabit positions of exalted status and extreme groupthink so they will accept neither data nor diktat.
they know what’s best and feel entitled to impose it and the density of their mass formation distorts space time.
and they have students (who fought for decades to get here) and administrators (who are tepid weaksauce appeasers of aggrievement) over a barrel.
so if wubbie makes professor feel better, then wubbie it is!
now mask up and pipe down!
it’s really pretty grotesque.
it’s also really pretty telling about just the sort of people we’re leaving our young adults alone with. (and perhaps about the youth as well as i suspect my generation would have torn a school to the ground over this)
these are not the acts of those who prize intellectual (or any) freedom or individual thought or responsibility. these are guilds that prize orthodoxy and obedience and they have been taken over by 12 steppers falling off the mask wagon and back into fear assuaging face tyranny where “your freedom shall end where my anxiety begins” and if that anxiety should extend to imagining green clouds of toxicity emanating from your breathing holes, then the fault is yours and you had better cover them right bloody now, mister.
acceding to such demands is not helping; it’s just kicking a can already dented beyond recognition ever further down the road.
it’s enabling an addict. and they will not get better that way.
if you want to help, it’s time for cold turkey. the world once worked without this and it can again.
you are not being kind by pretending this is OK or playing along.
sometimes, tough love is the only kind.
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