Mask-Burning: The Ethics of Freedom

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding↱ suggests, "Mask burning is our new book burning", and while I am not necessarily in the mood to parse the differences, we might take the moment to appreciate the fact that we should even consider such notions.

The accompanying video, from an Idaho protest, is somewhat grim. "Parents teaching their kids to burn masks" might well be "peak 2021", but it seems more useful to consider the symbolic, even emblematic, value of this American exercise in demonstration and free speech.

American society often attends the notion that dangerously infamous causes should be allowed to march down Main Street if they so insist, and usually we use the KKK as an example. But where pretending low danger of ideas translating into action easily favors such banality, we also see what blithe generalization about free speech has allowed, and even cultivated, of American infamy.

To the other, coronavirus, in the pandemic variants our society presently faces, are an actual definable disease, not some metaphorical indictment of antisociality or our American sentimentality thereunto.

Colloquial dispute might suggest these Idaho parents are wilfully endangering their children, but even before anyone can choose to take it so far, the underlying disapprobation presumes impropriety.

Thus, a basic question of ethics:

• Hostility toward prophylaxis during time of pandemic, increasing Covid danger in their community, and, as the example has it, exposing and conditioning children to danger.

• Free speech.​

The point is not to refuse the latter, but, rather, to ask a straightforward question: Is there any ethical obligation, question, or issue—i.e., complaint—to be considered, here?

Some might hesitate to address questions of parenthood; after all, teaching kids to be stupid and dangerous to themselves and others is a long and prideful American tradition. Between our freedoms of speech and religion, this isn't the sort of thing that will have authorities seizing children from homes unless we track a body count. Even still, if the question wonders more generally what the hell is wrong with people in Idaho°, or maybe we just shake our heads in quiet disdain, the common link is one of judgment and disapprobation. And it is, indeed, easy enough to construct any number of ethical arguments describing a wrongness including culpability.

But is there really any ethical question, or is an actual mask-burning protest in the time of covid simply a question of free speech?
____________________

Notes:

° It's complicated; the Idahoan political relationship with self-defeat, or what jurisprudence describes as a suicide pact, shot through as it is with superstition, supremacism, and crackpottery, is about as messy as it can get without being Kansas or Texas.​

@DrEricDing. "Mask burning is our new book burning. Parents teaching their kids to burn masks in Idaho is peak 2021 right now... SMH #COVID19 #MaskUp". Twitter. 6 March 2021. Twitter.com. 6 March 2021. https://bit.ly/3qu4MWY

 

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moral validation culture dogma = ?
Free Speech is the act of setting fire to things(directly applying violence to define free speech to enshrine violence as the means & the ends which is virtue signaled by the language of "free speech")

same/same (?)

so to them free speech has nothing to do with speaking, debating or communication
it is the singular act of violent domination of others as a moral right

irony of the alt-right attacking the free speech rights of BLM protestors to attack them with violence to prevent their non violent free speech
to enshrine the alt definition of absolute terms by forcing all free speech to be only legitimized by right wing violence as a moral right

gender indoctrination of concepts
gender discrimination by overt control of all aspects of life terminology
by rendering aspects of gender to forms of social compliance

medical = female ... there for medical = sex

very sinister but very normal for church groups

the then compulsory compliant behavior is indoctrinated as compulsory culture dogma
and little boys are taught to sneer at medical technology as a right to equal rights for women as a process of gender valuation
by proxy dogma(free speech)

very sinister indeed
and all very open and in plane sight
they could equally be holding a nambla march
it would contain just the same level of moral depravity

burning medical waste in public places without a permit or regulated incineration device during a pandemic.

surely a heavy(period) fine would be in order

or any women can just walk outside & start burning their used sanitary pads in protest against predatory pricing of women's hygiene products access rights
to free speech

so many layers of complicity & discrimination

Govt ordinance[thoughts]
critical resources during a global pandemic
face masks
pollution Air pollution public hazard bio-waste disposal
burning medical waste items
burning medical waste items in public without license or compliant regulatory incineration devices
public nuisance

ignoring above ethics & looking at it from a Freedom of religion & constitutional rights agenda conceptualization

indoctrination of children to become the predator towards concepts of & the directed acted out process to de-ligitamise medical science via gender associations to form a collective stance against aspects of normal societys equal rights premise

i would(seriously) expect to read this in mien kumpf hitler youth training manuals

yes
very concerning on a psychological social engineering child abusing level


tampon torch march for (reproductive rights)free speech(good global headline grabber)

 

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Truth of the matter is that while I hear what you're saying, American authorities rarely disrupt protests for violating local burn rules.

The album cover for Kilroy Was Here↱, by Styx, inculdes a civic bonfire, a burning of music and musical instruments styled after infamous Nazi book burnings. And while it is easy enough to remember local book burnings and record burnings—small affairs like we see with masks in Idaho—there used to be a televangelist named Dave Roever, a wounded combat veteran who would preach in fatigues and beret, and his ministry ran a summer camp for children. The advert segments running during his show on the Christian network when I was young actually included footage of kids throwing books and records into a large bonfire, as if this was one of the selling points of the camp.

Americans have not only tolerated this, our culture also seems to promote or at least condone this sort of behavior. Maybe if it was a bunch of feminists burning bras, there was a time authorities might have cited for indecency, but I don't recall the Eighties having a big "cancel" dispute because pro-censorship rallies were quashed or fined for lack of a fire permit.

Also, let's face it, if they're burning some masks in Idaho, at least they aren't out hunting nonwhites and infidels, and for the moment, that might be the best assessment we can offer.

Nor can we utterly ignore the point that our American, traditionalist chauvinism, rife with superstition and conspiracist crackpottery, prone to holier-than-thou pogroms against their human neighbors, and comfortable with literally dehumanizing and demonizing language, has brought us this iteration, in which people really are a disease.

And, Nijisan, you might well be familiar with that vague notion of an historical collective and, not so much its tendency to fulfill its own doomsaying, but, rather, when it turns out all those panicked descriptions of what is wrong with everyone else was just them describing themselves the whole time.

The tricky part in that might be trying to consider your assessment and its relationship to the extraordinary contexts of the American discourse about indoctrination, and then observe that it's not some psychosocial dysfunction about teaching kids to burn books their parents don't know how to read, but, rather, an actual contagion with a body count that is terrifying even as it is understated, and also preventable.

American society is one in which it is presently acceptable to groom one's children toward a reduced quality of life in order to fulfill one's own aesthetics. Comparatively, the mask-burning is just that much more direct than teaching our children the customs of domestic and sexual abuse, and even, comparably, a valence more direct than a lot of the usual antivax idiocy that on its best days does nobody any good.

 

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Stupidity . Freedom being stupid , In this case . Uninformed .

They simply haven't experienced a close one's death because of the virus .

 

Flags, Bibles, Korans, Science Books, Creative Literature, Political opinions,

what next... vaccine burning ?

how many of them have experienced a "close one" death of someone by bad diet & lack of exercise resulting in obesity related diseases & heart attack ?
most of them
what is THAT cool-aid ? private health care national system where profit must come before human services
no big profit in it for corporations = no public service
then the ideologies to suit that (cool-aid chorus songs)

however your logic process does not effect the result you might think from a logical persons perspective.
they do not have the logical thought process that you may consider innate intellectual ability skill sets.

typing this reminds how very lucky i was to go to high school in a unique style school with some of the citys most brightest students as my friends.
they, far smarter than i.
but my parents, (& what some call god-parents[who were mostly engineers English majors & Doctors etc]) instilled me with a core value of learning from wisdom in what ever form it took & respecting that.
Learning & seeking to be smarter was a core aspect of collective social goal as well as individual personal value which equally intertwined to compliment both the individual & the community.
power was a REAL democracy[unlike many peoples twisted concept of what those political terms mean].

which is quite contrary to a lot of common ideology.

(speaking to Tiassa here because i think this goes over most peoples heads)
but that whole naval gazing idolization of the past instead of pursuing the better future is a toxic mind trap
they sell that as another form of cool-aid with heirs to superiority as a form of abandonment of personal self accountability & ambition.

Lament and all its glorious personal fulfillment is like heroin(opium) it has its uses, some critically formative
however its not a good thing to have for breakfast lunch or dinner

what i would pay to watch(in a non universal health care society) unfold would be teen age boys having tampon burning ceremony's
just to observe the social reaction by media churches & various other groups
watching conservative & extremist gender conformists twist & buckle at the spectacle would of conflicting moral absolutes of gender conformity & legal bias as an ideological power metaphor be pure delight.
possibly wearing T shirts saying "Childrens crucifix volunteer fire brigade" just to anti-up

picture the 1940's american comic strip of the boy scouts sitting around a camp fire roasting tampons on sticks.
did you bring your packed lunch of moral outrage ? is it gleefully wrapped in toxic masculinity for flavour & social conformity for hope ?
my gender reveal gun is bigger than yours

my question for the psychologists
what psycho-sexual connections does the burning of the face masks have for teen/child sexual development ?
e.g/i.e (per-say) would it be equally framed in the same action of inflated condoms being used as balloons at a teenagers birthday party ?

 

[burning the trust in the system]
ALT-right anti-vaxxer asymmetrical warfare tactic ?
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-56138699

 

Glad they were caught . No matter who they are .

 

the implications of them not getting caught and being allowed to bring down the entire vaccine system would be considerable
if that was their intention
it would cost many lives
like an act of war

maybe they are just miscreant right wingers wanting free vaccine & to be able to claim they tricked the administration & become popular in their social group.
such a practice may become more common.
the fraud they commit of pretending to be a different person would carry significant penalty's for the police to punish them with if they need to, they could also use that crime to validate the IRS to investigate them if they needed.

social order saves lives in some things. pandemic vaccination & preventing damage to the systems public reputation to drive public interaction/service acquisition is one of them.

anti vaccine media & opinions is a big issue for the usa

"trust in the system" is the primary issue for Americans in a society that is divided between left, right & government.

 

To your last statement , it is everywhere .

 

because media has played to the "is it real is it fake" agenda to service the public's desire to align to opposing camps for social collectivism

anti-vaxxing has become the new personal liberal self esteem concept to many Americans & American wanna-be foreign right wingers

media play to divided concepts to seek likes or hates
both sides draw comment to provide debate or argument
most modern media is not concerned with debate
only active public engagement via any means because their money comes in from advertisers who buy space(based on traffic, not engagement, just like super bowl & sports broadcasting & advertising etc[the sell lottery tickets to possible gate numbers who might spend some money{its complex gambling}])
so its click income not content income.
irony in the age after the communication age but that's the odd human animal.

fake personal power by claiming to have ownership & control over deciding if vaccines are real or not
in reality they don't self educate about science
so its all a big ego lie & game.
but that's the sadder side of the human collective animal in its greedy self interested ego social model.

idol worship
ego leaders
borderline narcissism social models
toxic masculinity
fascists
dictators
serial killers/psychopaths etc etc etc

 

Agreed

The evolution philosophy of the strongest survive forgets that it also takes the intellect to survive as well .

 

very complicated in depth concept

"modern human society" is probably the better expression

without intellectual advancement & support modern society collapses
humans are like all other organic biological animals intrinsically entropic(my personal subjective opinion on a theory).

so to maintain human society & its intellectual ability which is defined by a level of freedom & ability
work must be done
work is effort
when the work stops the conveyor belt of human needs & real world effects moves society backwards.

possibly 1 reason why my intellect is so terribly offended by book burning and attacks on learning & such like artistic concepts of social design & intellect.

as society becomes more and more effected by climate change, society will need more and more people helping to pedal the bicycle(row the boat/ship)

if only American liberal conservatism was honest & would not seek to bring down the rest of society with it, it would have its 50% self declaration of moral standard of "liberal".

but the tribal, maligned socialist engineering of the right wing has generated a false base for their religious socialism & labelled it miscreant greed & selfishness to service a corrupt single leader moral compass of social value.
... and in so doing have undermined religion in their own society, but thats a far more complex debate.
institutionalized religion for all its woes n throws does not book burn
some self entitled evengalicals who probably by virtue & practice more closely align to satanists do though.

 

Highlighted

Not collapse , but pauses .

Second highlight

The new generation is ordered .

 

im giving PR & marketing companys ZERO for free
even then with the impending climate change disaster wiping out modern civilization, i am at odds to give any real depth of opinion.

PR & Marketing company's are all mostly greed alt-right orientated

giving them insight into the"new generation" would be like a death curse to the future of human modern civilized society

 

You know, ignoring the same censoriousness, in sellers refusing to sell a book by a sitting congressman or Dr. Seuss books no longer being published, that has motivated actual book burning.

No different from bra burning, as a symbolic gesture of resistance to oppression.

American society, at least use to, hold that the best defense against bad ideas is airing them in the light of day, to be refuted and ridiculed. This is precisely why such as the KKK are laughably and impotently small in numbers. The freedom of speech led to the low danger, not vice versa. Similarly, we've seen a drop in support for the likes of antifa and BLM after people have seen the results. That destruction and violence was largely cultivated by Democrat politicians not only refusing to enforce the law but also refusing to prosecute those arrested.

Children are the very least at risk for Covid.

Studies have shown that mask mandates have had a statistically insignificant impact. So there's nothing of value on the other side of that scale to weigh against a loss of freedom, and plenty of unintended consequences that place the ethical choice squarely on the side of freedom.

The only ethical consideration is how authoritarian are you going to let your fears make you? No only to the extent of taking what precautions you deem necessary, but also demanding that your own fears and assessments being complied with by others, through the threat of government force. That makes questioning if freedom of speech is worthwhile a far more dubious ethical position.

 

Highlighted

Agree

They are already there . The new generation is being controlled . There is a commerical on TV about a video game in which you can be lost . Its concerning .

 

It sounds more like fear and desperation in Florida. Per NPR↱:

"We haven't had any lack of willing arms to get vaccinated," Pino said. "We also have people faking to be old to be vaccinated" ....

.... When asked whether there have been other cases of people misrepresenting themselves to try to get vaccinated, Pino said there had been a few, including one man who shared the same name as his elderly father.

"As we are engaged in this process of trying to move people quickly, some people could squeeze in, so it's probably higher than we suspect," he said of the exact number.

And, noting that vaccines are "the hottest commodity," he said officials have increased security around the site to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.​

The article also notes a recent episode out of Indiana, in which a single county reported "as many as 30 people had lied about their vaccine eligibility in just one weekend".

It seems a strange situation in these conservative states, with perceptions of wealth asserted to influence uneven distribution in Florida and Texas. Meanwhile, in a more liberal state like my own, people generally seem to be remaining calm, or perhaps this is a bluish contiguity around Puget Sound and next to Canada. But colloquial circumstances all around me tell a weirdly different story. My stepmother received her vaccination out of order, simply as a result of bringing my father in for his. When she pointed out she wasn't in the qualifying pool, the nurse just looked around the facility, shrugged, and administered the shot. Compared to the number of people left to vaccinate that day, and the amount dispensed for delivery, they were putting shots in unvaccinated arms so that the allotment got used. New freezer protocols for one of the vaccines might change that, but the significance is long-term, and not just Covid. Current protocols saw an occasion in Seattle when circumstance had health workers asking people on the street if they wanted to come in for a vaccine right that minute. There are, of course, still problems reaching substantial numbers of particular at-risk individuals, and why we didn't simply start by going door to door is its own question, but around here our system is showing different kinds of strain. In my area, the pretense of lying about age would be unnecessarily complicated.

And with the strangeness in some conservative-run states, it's not just the fulfillment of their own government-dysfunction doomsaying, or having been describing themselves the whole time: Burning public trust in the system is part of the conservative raison d'être, a fundamentally ingrained suicide-pact modus operandi very possibly sublimated within the egocentric demand of paradigmatic need.° Part of the reason the states, generally, are in the circumstances they are is that conservatives in the federal government tanked our societal response to the pandemic. Much of the reason particular states endure such circumstances as they do is that their conservative state governance has similarly failed.

It is almost a trivial sort of game to wonder how Covid would have gone under a president other than Trump, but in the most obvious case, we might wonder how conservative states would have reacted to a female president making the case for enforced prophylaxis, and whether a Republican House would have impeached at ten thousand dead, or a hundred thousand. Or, more directly, populist asymmetry was institutionalized, this time, and the death toll reads like a war because that is what conservatives intended: There are almost no better opportunities than an epidemic to prove a pet thesis that government just doesn't work.
____________________

Notes:

° In notes for old, unfinished posts on another subject, while discussing particular anti-religious crackpottery I happen to observe that in considering history according to the behavioral economics of religous belief and practice, I never really expected so obvious and blatant a case study as what history actually brought; and I also suggest an analysis of our American present will eventually countenance a narrative telling how fundamental building blocks of what make religion—i.e., code, creed, and cult—will better describe the behavioral economics of totemistic rightism than conventional political wisdom and expectation. I should probably finish those. Or at least extract that part. Never mind.​

Treisman, Rachel. "Florida Women Pose As 'Grannies' In Foiled Plot To Get 2nd COVID-19 Vaccine Doses". National Public Radio. 19 February 2021. NPR.org. 11 March 2021. http://n.pr/2OK1cuj

 

Perceived Safety of Childhood Vaccines
% of U.S. adults saying childhood vaccines such as MMR are generally safe/not safe for healthy children

_________________________Safe _____Not safe ______Don’t know
Party affiliation
Republican/lean Rep. __________88_________6____________6
Democrat/lean Dem. ___________87________10____________2

Political ideology
Conservative ________________84_________10____________6
Moderate___________________91_________7_____________2
Liberal ____________________ 83_________12____________5

https://www.pewresearch.org/interne...7/2015-07-01_science-and-politics_FINAL-1.pdf​

According to Pew, there's more anti-vaxxers on the left.

 

That's a six year old poll.

Nowadays 92% of democrats thinks it is important to vaccinate their kids; 79% of republicans do. 7% of democrats think that vaccines are worse than the disease itself; 13% of republicans do. 10% of republicans think vaccines cause autism; 5% of democrats do.

Overall, twice as many republicans have a negative opinion of vaccines than democrats.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-important.aspx

 

Since Gallup has different results for 2015, the methodology of one or the other has to be flawed.
Since Pew used a representative sample of 2,002 and the only methodology Gallup gives is 1,025 for 2019, I'd tend to think it's Gallup that is lacking.

But your own bias may tell you otherwise.