[charbonneau]

The majority of people claiming to care about others by following uncertain pandemic mitigations are doing no such thing. Rather they are taking top-down direction from a post-truth political machine that increasingly rejects uncomfortable realities, and replaces them with a reassuring narrative of doing the right thing. You can tell this when talking to them because rather than laying out some chain of reasoning and hoping to find a flaw in it (as curious minds are), they get to the exact same terminal talking points and act like having stated such settles the matter.

[mindslight]

While there are some truths in your mirror of my comment, the symmetry breaks down because we're talking about a single topic.

The blue post-truth political machine is focused on identity politics, which has little bearing on Covid response. Giving a pass to protests for police accountability, or dwelling on how Covid "especially impacts communities of color" are examples of its distortion. But these aren't completely undermining its overall treatment of Covid.

And yes, many people who are taking Covid seriously are also simply following top-down direction. From a libertarian perspective, this is similarly ridiculous - eg the continuing prevalence of ersatz face cloths as opposed to real filtering respirators. But really, this is traditional authority doing its thing - most people don't do the work to truly make their own decisions, and so they defer to some leaders that tell them what to do that are expected to generally make decisions in society's interest.

The real question to be asking is why the red tribe's authorities have misled them on this topic so tragically. The opposing position to "wear a mask to protect others" should have been "wear a mask to protect yourself and your family" (eg valved respirators are fine). But they instead chose to reject the whole topic, with disastrous results.

[charbonneau]

I wasn't trying to make a distinction between blue and red tribes. You can paint a political propaganda machine however you like, its goal is the same: To encircle people by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, true and/or false, by playing on their will or their needs, assailing them in both their private and public lives. It furnishes them with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. Through the myth it creates, the machine imposes a range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence.

> The opposing position to "wear a mask to protect others" should have been "wear a mask to protect yourself and your family"

Should the mask topic also prohibit any divergence? Is the evidence so unambiguous that all raised objections can only be a tragic misleading with disastrous results?

Cochrane review (Nov 2020): "We included nine trials (of which eight were cluster‐RCTs) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness (two trials with healthcare workers and seven in the community). There is low certainty evidence from nine trials (3507 participants) that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI) compared to not wearing a mask (risk ratio (RR) 0.99, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.82 to 1.18)"

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...