“Look, I just fix stuff, okay? This whole empathy thing it’s, uh, not exactly my strong point, all right?” – Andromeda
The Mrs. says I have no empathy. I have no idea why she would feel that way.
I was in a pretty deep sleep, having another stupid dream. My definition of a stupid dream is something like, “being at work, and writing an email”. If I’m going to dream, I don’t want to waste it on work, I want to be out conquering the green-skinned warrior women from Alpha Centauri, not dreaming about doing my taxes.
Occasionally, though, I have a fully formed thought so perfect that it jars me out of a deep sleep, and I have to write it down, like that time I invented the goldfish treadmill, or the silent alarm clock that slapped The Mrs. in the face with a comically large clown glove so her alarm wouldn’t wake me up.
The Mrs. did not appreciate the prototype of that alarm clock. The Mrs. then said, “The time is not right for that invention.”
Regardless, the subject of my slumber’s epiphany was . . . empathy. It started with a dream of me going to work. I was late (which never happens) so I was going 105 miles per hour (Trudeaus per fortnight) in a 25 miles per hour zone. Someone in the dream said (I didn’t see them) that, “You leave John Wilder alone. He was only speeding because he was late.” I started laughing. Here, someone was making excuses for me because of misplaced empathy.
I laughed, and woke up laughing. I also knew I was changing what I was going to write about today.
In my defense, the sign said, “Speed limit 35 ahead” and there were three people in the car, so three times five is 105, right?
Empathy sounds good. It is good, because empathy is really what enables conscience, remorse, and the power to change behavior that hurts others. There’s even a term for people who don’t have empathy: sociopath. Oddly, that’s what my ex-wife called me during our marriage, but I thought my car just had a great suspension.
Regardless, when I ran over that pedestrian, I didn’t feel a thing.
So, yeah, empathy is important. It’s important enough that psychologist Jonathan Haidt had it listed as number one on his list of the foundations of morality, though he used the word “care”. I’ll skip the others for now for a later post, probably on Friday, so we can focus on just one: care/harm, which I’ll call “empathy”.
That is the single foundation of morality that Leftists score higher on than folks on the Right. And, in my boredom at work (in my dream) I figured it out – the reason why the Right can’t talk to the Left is that the Left is so full of empathy that they can’t stop crying enough to have a decent conversation.
The Mrs. screamed, “You never listen to a single word I say!” What a funny way to start a conversation, right?
Before we get to the punchline, it’s very important to consider this question: Who do normal people primarily feel empathy for?
- Those who are weaker than us. A good example to illustrate this is Bill Gates. When Bill Gates lost $30 billion, who cried? Not Bill. I don’t think Bill cries at all unless he has solid gold tissue paper infused with Moon rocks and sasquatch hair to better absorb his tears.
- People who are experiencing similar problems to the ones they’ve had, and that are similar to them. I can’t really understand how a Kalahari Bushman feels after not getting an antelope, but I can understand how I feel when the Pizza Hut™ is 20 minutes late with the pizza.
- Connectedness to the object of empathy. Typically, I feel a lot more empathy for The Mrs. when she’s feeling blue than I do for Kim Jong Il when he runs out of vodka during his endless game of SimKorea®. I feel more about people in my town than in the next town over, and by the time that it’s a bus full of 275 nuns and 1,043 orphans falling off a cliff in India, my empathy has drained down to, “Huh, maybe they should put up guardrails” and “Who knew that they had mountains in India? Or nuns?”
It’s not horrible to feel this way, it’s natural. I should care more about my parents (in general) than an Iraqi cabdriver in Paris. And I can only imagine so much of the pain someone is suffering if I have no basis to relate to it. And no one has felt sympathy for Bill Gates since 1982.
Leftists, though, score really high on empathy, much higher than people on the Right. My theory is that most of them live in big cities, and live a much more anonymous and disconnected life than we do here in Modern Mayberry, where I can’t go into the liquor store without the clerk saying, “Oh, Wilder, you again. Do you even have a home?” The social fabric, ability to contribute, and sense of belongingness in smaller communities is often richer.
I would look exactly like that, if I had hair, and if it was brown, and if I hadn’t discovered carbohydrates.
I think this begins to rot their brains. They have natural feelings of empathy, but no natural way to use them, so this normally virtuous process becomes subverted. Ever see someone on the Right screaming because someone couldn’t kill babies in a state they don’t live in? No.
But their empathy isn’t what people on the Right experience Leftists score higher in empathy tests (which shows how they feel), but those same Leftists contribute less to charities than people on the Right. Why? Because they think that everyone should feel the same compassion Leftists feel and everyone should share in and help out, so the Leftists raise taxes and take money by force to feed their need to be empathetic.
The result: Leftist empathy is paid for using everyone’s money. Sort of like my relationship with my kids, but if my kids had guns.
But it doesn’t stop there. The particular thought that woke me up was the idea that a Leftist would explain away any crime if the person committing it met their empathy filter, because they care about empathy more than every other foundation of virtue.
This is devastating at the level of a civilization. It means that, no matter what, feelings are now the highest form of virtue. Let’s take some examples of this type of thinking in real life:
- “That man shouldn’t get a ticket for going 105 in a 25, he was late to work!”
- “Timmy didn’t mean to break your window, he was just playing, and he’s only four.”
- “How can they give him a DUI? His parents were alcoholics.”
- “No mother should have to fear her son will be shot while he’s out robbing convenience stores.”
- “It’s not fair that the homeowner had a weapon of war, an AK-15, when he shot that boy who only had a revolver.”
- “No human is illegal – besides, they do the work that we won’t.”
- “Those are mostly peaceful riots – only a few billion dollars’ worth of property damage was done. That’s why the store owners have insurance.”
- “Why not give them reparations? America owes it to them.”
- “How can Americans be bothered to have to have state-issued identification to vote? It’s unfair.”
- “Those Christians are awful! Why else would a trans person feel like she had to kill them?”
- “Muslim shooter kills 30. Muslims will be the most impacted by the backlash.”
Remember Bill Gates? No one feels bad for him. But Leftists feel empathy especially for those they look down on, that they feel better than. The Left feels that the people the Left gives their empathy to are somehow lesser than they are. They have no empathy for productive taxpayers, but empathy for murderers and looters.
Why do the Leftists throttle news about blacks killing blacks? Because they treat them with the same empathy they treat toddlers. Black people can’t be expected to know better, after all. Why do they elevate news of an 85-year-old white man shooting a 16-year-old black kid while burying the story of a black man shooting up an entire white family? Because Leftists view the white guy as more capable of self-control than the black guy, who shouldn’t be judged by this one event because there were thousands of people that he didn’t shoot, after all.
I wonder why one of these got national news attention?
In my humble opinion, the law should be entirely color blind. And ideology blind. That’s the reason we have the law. The January 6 “rioters” should be punished in exactly the same fashion as the George Floyd “protestors” if they committed crimes. Walking through the Capitol? Yeah, not an issue. Sitting at Pelosi’s desk and stealing her laptop? That’s a crime, and the guy should be punished in a fair and proportionate way. Period.
Many of the George Floyd rioters did far worse, yet few have paid for crimes up to and including murder and the $2 billion dollars in damages done. The law has simply ceased to be ideology and color blind and is now converged to punish only people on the Right. The idea that hate crimes have been enshrined in law and that “hate speech” is rapidly becoming criminalized despite that pesky First Amendment is telling that the justice system is becoming broken.
The last (nearly 60!) years since Johnson’s Great Society was implemented have shown trillions spent to work on the “root cause” of poverty and racial disparity in this country. There have been trillions spent on this project out of empathy. Result? Roadway design is being called, by Transportation Secretary Zoolander, racist:
And the last three uniparty presidents, looking around, decided we just didn’t have enough foreigners, so they’ll Uber some in:
Unchecked, pathological empathy by the rank and file of the Left is destroying the country – if you pick a big city, it’s nearly certain that some new horror is occurring daily, and that there is no one even pretending to stop it.
Thanks, George Soros!
Pathological empathy is killing us, literally. The destruction of society is ongoing. And we know why. What I do know is if we can see it, if we can ridicule it, and if we can polarize it we can make change happen. The guy who dresses as a girl who got his own Bud Light® can?
He was the polarizing figure that society coalesced around, coming as he did on the shooting by yet another transsexual, brought it home for many. “This has gone too far.”
So, point out the hypocrisy of this misplaced empathy when you can, and don’t dream about writing emails at work.
Minorities don’t set policy — because minorities don’t have the vote counts to force any result. “Minority” means “didn’t do it, because can’t do it”.
Who did do it? Look in the mirror. You majority are obeying the bad laws, you majority are paying the taxes to enforce the bad policies.
People obey and pay taxes because of a hope that the system will work.
I disagree very strongly – minorities do set policy. At very few points in my life has there not been a 70%+ supermajority to keep illegals out.
And just who keeps letting them in?
minorities do set policy
When you are in that voting booth, only one brain controls which lever your finger pulls. Similarly, only one brain controls when your finger presses the trigger of a gun. Humans are not ants and are not controlled centrally by pheromones, that is not the structure of human decisionmaking computation. The Ron Paul presidential candidacies proved most voters had their fingers in their ears, and disproved the claim that the mainstream media has the entire country in a Truman show.
At very few points in my life has there not been a 70%+ supermajority to keep illegals out.
There may have been a 70%+ opinion poll results, but voters didn’t pick candidates to support that outcome.
Then why do those candidates oppose their voters?
Then why do those candidates oppose their voters?
Because those candidates are organized criminals. It is a middle-class blindness to think that all humans who dress and speak well have middle-class values. In order for an organized crime gang to trust someone, they have to have a secret to hold over them, such as evidence of a crime. Thus, the FBI collecting dirt under Hoover, and today’s Epstein island. Epstein’s assistant was convicted for procuring underage prostitutes for nobody. They had a victim in court as a witness, and nobody asked her who her Johns were. Everybody just knew they would be killed if they exposed those facts.
And there you have it. Compromised.
By who?
Like every other animal, humans have brain firmware programming for instincts carried in their DNA. Like every other animal, humans have instincts for social-political organization. The human political organization instincts are for great ape monkey troops of extended families, headed by a charismatic, dominant leader. As a human political system we call that “tribal group communism”.
Humans instinctively do communism because that’s what we’re programmed to do. But if you grow the tribal group headcount from 150 to 300 million, you increase the tax base by a factor of 2 million, and thus also the military power of the head monkey. Then the tuning constants in the instinctual programming game theory get out of tune.
There is no rational case for why some group of people should have political power over another group of innocent people. But if you attempt to implement Liberty and Justice For All(TM), that means the pecking order has zero height, which means everybody is at the bottom of the pecking order; this causes most people’s instinctual programming to freak-out, and do anything to get off the bottom of the pecking order. That’s why rational, peaceful, productive choices like Ron Paul are unattractive to most. Most ordinary humans’ instincts need to hurt innocent people to feel safe.
The lefties who claim humans are an instinctual blank slate, and therefore may be trained to become new soviet man, have failed the most trivial biology class.
Excellent, excellent comment. I’ve had a similar discussion with both of my sons. Small groups are not large groups . . .
Compromised. By who?
One answer is, “I don’t care, I hired Representative Smith to do an honest job and put him into a position of trust, and if he is seduced by criminals then I will prosecute him, no different than if he was a crooked bank teller”.
Another answer is, you notice Hoover didn’t retire independently wealthy, so he wasn’t the godfather. The google term is “power elite analysis”, and the answer in the US is a few thousand movers and shakers who are kingmakers in political parties, and on the boards of major corporations.
Exactly. Who do the politicians fawn over? Those are the ones that rule them.
The USA died in January 1970. What occurred then?
Forced integration of public schools. Downhill ever since, empathy on steroids.
That, and the 19th Amendment.
How many suffraging women will it take before we men do something!!!
This hits me badly – I am a woman, and I’m embarrassed about the poor logical thinking skills shown by those of my sex. I’d hate to lose the right to vote, as I’m the more conservative voter in my marriage.
How about limiting the vote to ONE person in the household? Anyone living on their own – AND self-supported (without government subsidies) – gets to vote. If you’re supported by the government (and not medically disabled or retired after working), you can’t vote.
Under that system, retired waitresses can vote, but women who prosper off the public cannot. College students getting government loans/grants can’t vote, unless they provide sufficient money through their employment to justify it. Your kid, while living on YOUR income, can’t vote. They want a say in government, get a job and live on their own.
The US Constitution falls to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_escalation attack, as do all forms of voting invented so far. Thus there is no going backward to a set of more conservative or better-incentivized voters. Popular beliefs about the Constitution include much magical fantasy, including the “Bill of Rights” idea that privilege escalation is blocked, the idea that office holders are more noble rather than less, and the “magic dirt” theory of why immigrants “will” all assimilate.
The reality is the US Constitution implemented a copy of the British government, with slight alterations such as that the monarch could come from other families. The Founding Lawyers wanted a copy of the British government so they could become an American aristocracy in it. Simple, eh? All that freedom talk was just a smoke screen hiding a conquest by organized criminals.
Eh, do not feel too bad. Our sex was not responsible for the 19th Ammendment passing. That was the pathologically empathetic boy-men re-enacting the sin of Adam.
Our mission is to raise virtuous sons and daughters. No man can stop us: the hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world. Failing that duty is the only one you can justly be faulted for. The rest is on the men.
I’ve always wondered what would have happened (story-wise) if Adam had snatched the apple from Eve’s hand and ground it under his foot.
Ah well.
I’ve always wondered what would have happened (story-wise) if Adam had snatched the apple from Eve’s hand and ground it under his foot.
Eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil was the software update that installed consciences in human beings, who previously had no consciences and thus were animals? Golly, thank you Lucifer for raising me from the animals, you were correct to rebel against that nutcase who made you! Should we rename you Prometheus?
In return, the psychopath control freak creator-daddy made all living things suffer. The Bible makes more sense if the “god” voice is an alcoholic narcissist in a rage and the “satan” voice is good and sensible.
2,000 years ago, the mainstream media who published the Bible said ‘trust the experts to make decisions for you’. 2,000 years later, the mainstream media is still saying that. Providing cover stories for the powers that be is the function of the mainstream media.
That was never something I was exposed to, but several people I know were, and it wasn’t very pleasant.
There is empathy and pseudo-empathy. Our problem has been our empathy..I believe a significant portion of us have run out of empathy. The results will be the tree being fed.
We really are nearing a “Oh, no, dad’s getting up, and he looks pissed,” moment.
One can hope.
John – – While the following is about the Ruskie-Ukie bloodbath war of attrition, I felt it might also support your ideas about empathy (emotional thinking is what I call it):
Well, anybody not swallowing Washy Poo-Post and NY Slimes fodder would have easily seen back then, some ten months ago, that without additional foreign troops, the Ukies would be bled dry and could not win based on the war of attrition that was playing out.
And yeah. I get it: We Americans root for the underdog….
That is an emotional response and clouds judgment. And now the cold water is splashed in the faces of those who wanted to see the underdog win regardless of cost to the underdog.
Time is long past to sit down and call a cease fire to end the senseless bloodshed and stop before Ukraine as a nation is totally consumed in destruction.
They absolutely have been. But Russians suck at war, so the meat grinder continues. And it never should have started.
The response from Ukraine is succinct:
https://i.imgur.com/5MyQH0w.png
Not sure if it’s empathy, or just an obsessive, burning desire to be contrarian, for…reasons. Numerous hyper-liberal family members, all but one of whom are female, scratch and claw each other in the futile effort to out-virtue-signal one another as if engaged in some sort of Thunderdome death match competition (“Two bleeding hearts enter, only one leaves”). Tellingly, none of them are well off, financially. Yet they are each magnanimous in spirit with your tax dollars, all-in on CRT-based trans reparations for undocumented autistic vegan POC abortionists (provided they identify as rabidly non-Christian). And there I am, being all White, male and cis. Sheesh.
If I were in that situation, I’d agree and amplify: “Oh, you want to give $200,000 reparations? Why not $200,000,000 reparations? Climate change? The United States has a huge carbon footprint – every person entering will make the planet warm faster. Don’t you care about the planet?”
They are fighting over status markers. That is downstream of whatever (empathy or other) determines the status.
My ex-boss had a term which I adopted: “I can feel for you, but I just can’t reach you.”
I like it.
Can’t misplace your empathy….if you don’t have any.
Yeah, I rank kinda low on the empathy scale. As people on the Right normally do. I think my empathy rating was “post-apocalyptic warlord”.
High empathy and also high discrimination. Good times working with the public, nu?
The Left demonized judgment. That is the missingvlink.
It is. Judgement is part of . . . society. To live here, norms must be met. But the norms now include the unspeakable.
it’s not empathy, it is a hatred of, ultimately, life and existence itself. it is their ‘rebellion’ against everything, a nonstop temper tantrum where if they can’t control everything (and constantly reaffirm their domination by forever pushing for more) they want to kick the table over and set fire to the place to get back at the meanie.
it’s not empathy.
Nope: too narrow a view. Why does the illiterate kid get promoted to the next grade? Empathy. Why does the idiot teacher not get fired? “She’s doing her BEST!” Why is the thug not in jail forever? “Prison is a bad place!” Why is the mom who drives her many kids into the lake, or murders them in her bed not executed? “The poor woman had post-partum depression.” Why is the border open? “Those poor Central Americans need a safe home with economic opportunity!”
Don’t kid yourself – it’s empathy.
Empathy sans judgment.
Pick any virtue, un-moor it from all the rest and turn it into the Deity.
It is a fun thought experiment.
Oh, that’s there – but it’s more a self-hatred, that makes them want to watch the world burn.
But it’s empathy, too. I’ve got a graph I’ll share in a future post.
as city comes under fire for being soft on crime
Thanks, George Soros!
George Soros cannot vote in Chicago, so he could not have voted for this DA. George Soros does not live in Chicago, so he can not be continuing to obey the police and courts in Chicago who are directed by this DA. Who actually did this? The DA, court employees, police officers, and at least half the voters in Chicago.
No, the people who elected the DA were the ones voting in the primary – no R is going to win there. George pumps in money in the primary? Boom. He owns another DA.
No, the people who elected the DA were the ones voting in the primary – no R is going to win there.
Right, “at least half the voters in Chicago”.
George pumps in money in the primary? Boom. He owns another DA.
Gee, it almost sounds like you believe voting as a mechanism can never work as advertised, because too large a percentage of voters are willing to have their vote choice altered by monetary distractions/incentives.
Interesting points, great discussion. Yes, money does matter. How would I regulate it? I haven’t thought about it in depth, but having 100% less George Soros is a great start.
Or, people cannot be arsed to pay attention to local elections and make excuses after the fact for their skiving off.
Absent the repeal of 19A this won’t change. Western Civ rose for millennia without suffrage. One century of suffrage has nearly destroyed it, and is doing its best to complete the job.
Hard times herd women to the Right. Those are just around the corner.
Which countries have lost reserve currency status, after about 100 years, with social spending overpromising and a naval battle loss?: Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain. Only in Britain could women vote, and only for the last 17 years. It’s not about 19A; women voting changed nothing.
Think of it as a feature?
One hopes. Hard times, from my reading, herd women toward the most promising easy safe refuge.
The reading I’ve done over the 20th century shows that drives them to conservatism. I’ve already seen TikTok vids of women who want to stay at home rather than serve at the front.
Yes toward things that make them safer. And if they catch a good man it will push them farther along.
But if their personal hard times are because of weak men, they’ll raise their kids wrong
I think you just described every major city.
See, it feels good to laugh!
If feels like napalm in the morning, or being crapped out of the steaming lowest common denominator egalitarian cloaca that is contemporary society.
Honk, honk!
Honk! It does smell like victory . . .
We don’t have a national “misplaced empathy” problem.
We have a “Sociopathy calling itself empathy” problem.
When proper grammar is enforced at gunpoint, things achieve crystal clarity in a remarkably short span of time.
And will do.
Yes. We have seen unprecedented things, and will see many, many more. Oddly, I think these creatures have forgotten how to feel like a normal human, but more on that on the next posst.
Speaking of which, Mr. Aesop, I point your attention to Mrs. Hoyt’s essay. RTWT
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2023/04/27/no-forgiveness-without-repentance/
When are you going to make amends for *your* sociopathy? I would have called it misplaced empathy five minutes ago, since you were all in on the face muzzles aka Gilligans killing grandma!
I was willing to believe you were simply mistaken when you dismissed the claims that the muzzles were a test to see who would stand up against egregious tyranny. Bad judgment; over-empathizing of nurse for his patients vs. an abstract principle. Misplaced priorities.
But heyo! It’s evil derangement. You’re a monster!
Or perhaps, the allure of sacrificing judgment to emotion, including kindly emotion, is real. Admit the error, repent, and be forgiven.
The alternative IS evil. Or “sociopathty”
I told you masks work, as designed.
They do.
There’s been, AFAIK, exactly ONE study in the last decade that actually isolated all other variables, and tested exactly the effectiveness of face masks, as designed:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2
TL;DR: Masks compared to no masks: 10,000% improvement.
>mic drop<
QED
[Pro Tip: This is why everyone who says, or points to retarded and half-assed invalid masking "studies", and then pronounces "Masks don't work" is quite literally mentally retarded.]
I also told you, at the exact same time, that masking policies would never work.
Because people are peawits.
So much for your bogus claim that I was “all in” on face diapers.
The original essay is still right where I left it on my blog. You could look it up.
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-masks-and-gloves-will-and-wont-ever.html
Me 2, You 0.
I was all in on people being Gilligans.
Pretty much parked that assessment over the center field bleachers.
24/7/365/forever. On pretty much anything.
You also evidently missed my reply on the host’s forgiveness essay here, where *I* was the contrarian who pointed out that without repentance, there is no forgiveness.
https://wilderwealthywise.com/forgiveness-its-whats-for-supper/#comment-23336
https://wilderwealthywise.com/forgiveness-its-whats-for-supper/#comment-23341
For Common Core grads, those were penned here about three weeks before Sarah’s missive you referenced.
With no errors in sight, there’s no need for me to address repentance nor forgiveness on the above topics.
Strike three, kid. You’re out.
Whatever your day job is, you should probably stick to it, rather than trying to pin things on me that never happened, based on recollections most charitably described as spurious and ill-informed.
Like Reagan said about the Left:
“The problem isn’t what they think they know, it’s the things they think they know that just aren’t so!.”
BS. A N95 only traps 95% of >3µm particulates. Virii are roughly 1.0µm.
They also increase CO2 intake that has been proven to cause male infertility. Not to mention O2 deprivation.
So you couldn’t read? Or couldn’t bother to read? Therefore didn’t read the study extract, nor the results. Well played.
N95s weren’t tested. If you’d looked before your knee-jerk response, you’d have known that without stomping your jangly bits with cleats on. And viruses demonstrably don’t travel dry like cocoa powder, they travel in saliva droplets, which are far larger than the size of a bare virus, and as demonstrated, handily intercepted by simple masks.
1000x better than wearing no mask.
But only if they’re worn correctly and conscientiously.
Which is why the policies were always doomed to failure.
And surgical teams wear surgical masks for hours on end. And have done so for a century-plus. For exactly the same reason. Feel free to show the studies that document their mental decline from oxygen deprivation.
(Oh, wait, that’s never happened. Bummer, huh? Albuquerque. Snorkel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiWAkqvDrcA)
Basic scientific ignorance FTW.
You’re always entitled to your opinion. Choosing to make it a totally uninformed one diametrically contrary to reality is an interesting choice, but with rather predictable consequences.
https://i.imgur.com/mpFib9w.png
google “1981 mask study” returns https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/
Abstract
No masks were worn in one operating theatre for 6 months. There was no increase in the incidence of wound infection.
O Brave Anonymous Commenter:
1) Surgical masks aren’t worn to stop wound infections. Major flaw.
2) Gloves are. Nobody operates without those, ever. Minor flaw.
3) Prophylactic antibiotic therapy for wound infection, both before and after surgery, pretty much eliminates wound infection down to a fractional rate, and has for decades. Second major flaw.
So that “study” just proved that the author(s) beclowned themselves, don’t even understand the fundamental basics of the topic they were attempting to study (like most studies ever published and peer-reviewed), and they shot holes in their own junk for a rent check, while the internet is forever.
So did you really want to talk about the weather, or just make chit-chat?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l38dJiBhO8o
Just like parachutes aren’t worn to prevent plane crashes, and mustard isn’t applied to stop e.coli infections in hamburger beef.
When you cite a jackassical 40-year-old “study” with a childishly stupid and invalid premise, you get a recockulous “answer” that has no bearing on what you’re actually trying to discover.
The trade name for this is “retard science”.
It’s also why no hospital in the U.S. has stopped using masks in the operating rooms.
Actual medical professionals – by which I mean all of them– aren’t nearly as easily bamboozled by a bad survey as folks on the internet trying to find any shred of validation for their confirmation bias.
Covidiocy is real.
This is why 90+% of all studies are crapola, and why any American, on average, talking about anything vaguely scientific, usually sounds like Jethro explaining macroeconomics and calculus to Ellie Mae and Granny. It’s funnier on TV. Or at least, it was – 50 years ago.
When you find a study that actually surveys what it purports to do with regard to mask effectiveness, give a holler. Shooting the hole in that faulty one with a 16″ naval cannon took maybe 0.00002 seconds. (To be fair, you’re only about the 47th person to cite it as if it proved anything valid, without realizing you simply don’t know what you don’t know.)
Thanks for playing, and we have some lovely parting gifts for you.
>HONK!<
Oh the Nature study. In a frictionless universe with a spherical cow, lots less droplets. That’s a “mic drop” ?You’re a nurse Mr. Aesop, you have to remember the difference between in vivo vs. in vitro. And in vivo, the jury is in, the results of all observational studies are in: they’re a bust. And you knew that back when all we had were the unfitted cotton and paper masks. Even masking done near perfectly for short periods of time in controlled settings required the fool things be ventilators, air flow output not in.
Remember our spherical human? You had high school physics. You know that just because air is invisible it still has mass. You know that someone breathing out, or worse sneezing or coughing, the mass follows the path of least resistance.
You knew all this, and you refused to back down when faced with the evil you supported and the people you helped gaslight. You never stood up for the people being pointlessly tortured by these things. For little kids being forced to wear these literally filthy muzzles all day. You never spoke out against them as tool of the medical totalitarian state. Instead you went along, God only knows why.
And you write about scoring points? Here’s the score: Me 0 for being a coward and being fooled by the mask up crew. God help me, I wanted to believe. Maybe me 1 for finally speaking up and standing up for what is right when I did. Here’s another 1 for admitting my errors. Maybe I’ll get to my 20s one day. The board goes to 100 at least. Use a better scorecard, Mr. Aesop.
I didn’t miss Mr. Wilder’s post by the way, or your comments. But sure, it’s only Those Other People who need to repent. Not you. You were technically correct. Possibly. Bah. Maybe someone will write third well-written piece (obviously better than I can) that you finally pay heed to.