Iron Sharpens Iron; Nothing Sharpens Mud

I don't have to troll around looking for arguments. Just spouting common sense and reality means they find me regardless.

Case in point:

B, over at Middle Of The Right, put up a post. (And I still read people who I disagree with, or who have disagreed with me, because there's always a chance they'll come around, or I will learn something I didn't know, and they absolutely have a perspective that's outside my cranium, which is kind of the point of the internet.)

A thought:

 So Menards (and Home Depot) both were early adopters of the "Mask Mandate"...here where I live in Indiana, months before the state-wide requirements for masks came into effect,,..

But they don't disinfect ANYTHING.

Not carts, not credit card machines, nothing.

The Virus is transmitted via touch and via airborne at a similar rate...

Yet again, we have the requirement for masks, but nothing else. Much like in a restaurant, or a bar, where one is dangerous when walking to and from the table (or the bathroom) but not when eating or drinking.....

The local grocery stores, all of them, including Wal-Mart, DO at least make the attempt to sanitize the carts and other common touch surfaces. 

Much like the TSA, it is all Theater. 

He's gotten touchy before, but against hope, I responded:

Checking temperatures is theater. Absolutely.

Masking works. (I'm open to counter-argument: just provide the names of the first world hospitals that don't require masks in general surgery, and in fact actually prohibit them, and you win.)

Failure to disinfect: that's just stupid laziness.
Gilligan FTW, Example #3042.

But unfortunately, it's the idea of not being able to cough and sneeze his germs all over random strangers that's apparently the point at issue for him, so full of the bile that led to the last go-around, here's his snappy comeback.

Aesop: Show me evidence that they work, and I'll believe you. If they were effective, we should have stopped this disease already as most mask mandates have been in effect for about 10 cycles of infection....there should be little or no cases if masking the population was an effective deterrent to the spread.

So go ahead, prove it. Or shut up.

Your history shows you are big on talk, but not much else. 

Look, Stud, put your dick away. It's just not that big. And certainly nothing to wave about.

(We'll ignore the 47 Straw Man Fallacies you set up there, ignoring things like spread among relatives, where no masking occurs, as though you'd never heard of it. Taking you to task for errors that obvious is just kicking retarded kids, which is why I didn't get personal in my original reply. But you wanted to dance, so I'll call the tune this time.) 

In fact, I agreed with a lot of what you wrote. You got some things right. Huzzah!

But when you throw out little tard-bombs like that last line, you're pogo-sticking in a minefield of explosive poo bombs, and asking not to get any on you.

It's not all theater.

 

"Always avoid 'always'. Never say 'never'." - Rhetoric 101 

But with reality vs. theater, evidently you can't tell the one from the other.

Sorry to have to be the one who pointed it out, but there it is.

And where I disagreed with you, I didn't come after you and insult you, and instead gave you a pathway to demonstrate your superior grasp of this. You elected to fling diaper spackle instead. Color me shocked.

Instead of acknowledging the proof you demanded, which was already pointed out in my response, and then declining to name any hospital that bans masks in surgery "because they don't work", as requested, you skipped to the Triple Dog Dare. Why would anyone offer you more proof when you can't grasp the obvious, that's been around as common knowledge since your grandfather wasn't even a gleam in your great-grandfather's eye?

You decided to get all butthurt, as seems to be your bent, because you didn't get 100%.

My only response to that is the same one I got in school:

"You want 100% scores? Study harder."

This ain't rocket surgery, but you have to make an effort.

But for B's edification, here's the response to him that I won't bother to post on his blog, because it'll never see daylight:

You win. Pasteur was wrong. So was Lister. Semmelweis too.  

Wait, no they weren't.

Here's the critical flaw in your reasoning, from just that reply:

"If they [masks] were effective, we should have stopped this disease already as most mask mandates have been in effect for about 10 cycles of infection." 

Let's change a few small words and phrases, and see if it gets clear for you:

"If [gun laws] were effective, we should have stopped this [gun crime] already as most [gun control] mandates have been in effect for about 10 [years]." 

You're arguing like the guy who thinks passing a law = 100% compliance, because everybody obeys the law, always, at all times and places. Like they don't ever. 

People run red lights 100 times a day. Should we get rid of stoplights, because they don't work, and they're inconvenient? Laws against murder have been in effect since Hammurabi, and yet people still murder each other. Using your "logic" shouldn't we get rid of murder laws too?? Because they obviously don't work! 

And then, knowing people don't obey laws, and having undone your own underlying rationale for why mask mandates should have worked, you argue against yourself, to throw out all mask laws, because people are people. 

All I'm suggesting is that you take a breath, and pick one side or the other. 

Do masks work? 150 years of medical history says yes.
I haven't been everywhere, and I've only worked in 30-40 or so of the 6000 hospitals in this country, for most of three decades, and not in such a cosmopolitan venue as Indiana. So something world-class may have gotten by me that you alone have figured out, unlike hospitals in Rome, Paris, London, NYFC, Tokyo, or anyplace else, going back to when Victoria was a young Queen of England. So I can believe your skepticism and scientific acumen, or my lying eyes. 

You're not going to win on that point, ever, because it's counter-factual.  

Does the lack of perfect 100% compliance mean that the law (or any law) is of no value? That idea is pure hogwash. Perfection is not the standard, and never was. 

People are Gilligans. Not every single one of them, but it only takes one Gilligan to keep the castaways stranded for the entire run of the show. 

Funny on a '60s sitcom; in real life, amidst a pandemic, not so much. 

The Gilligans have been driving this pandemic since Day One. 

You probably get the concept that "We have to win every day; the terrorists only have to get lucky once." 

That's how virus propagation works too.

So, given that 50% or so of those with this infection are asymptomatic, and can never be detected as infectious (except by testing, daily, 330M people in this country, which we haven't come close to accomplishing even given 10 months), do you figure the better way is to pretend this infection doesn't exist, and throw out all restrictions? Or is it to ask you to make the superhuman sacrifice of wearing a mask in public among people, and keep the flying germs from your coughs and sneezes to yourself amidst everyone else, instead of flinging them outwards 10-30 feet at 100-300MPH? 

We only do two things in the hospital, 95% of the time: wear a mask, and wash our hands. And lo and behold, doctors and nurses aren't dropping like flies from Kung Flu, anywhere, despite working literally inches from people with full-blown COVID for 12-hour shifts, for the last 10 months. 

That's your proof. 

Is there hokum and security theater going on?
Hell YES, by the metric fuckton!
Are some evil nitwits arrogating totally unconstitutional authority and powers they don't have to themselves?
Hell YES!!  

Does it piss me off too?  

HELL YES!!!

Go after that pointless nonsense, and I'll march in your parade and subscribe to your newsletter.

Just please stop throwing out the baby with the bathwater simply because it's a minor inconvenience to put a mask on in public places, amidst other people. 

Somebody telling you that you need to wear a mask all by yourself, 20 miles out of town, alone, is a farking moron.
Somebody telling me they don't want to wear one at the supermarket at noon on Saturday "because masks don't work" is an even bigger one. 

Both statements are absolutely true.

And that, B., is the difference between simple pugnacious gainsaying, and making the point.

But your response serves me right for thinking you were ready to change your spots, and be reasonable and rational. Sorry to have troubled your single thought. No, really. But might I suggest that next time, you try two or three thoughts, all at once. The exercise with the increased weight will do your mind well. Not to mention, your blog.

But lest you feel cheated, I made something for you in shop class.