Writes Glenn Reynolds in "Mask bullies don’t want to persuade you — but to humiliate and rule you" (NY Post).
I should note that Glenn begins his column by quoting me quoting 2 anti-mask memes. Here's my post from a few days ago: "What do my Facebook friends think they are doing expressing this kind of hostility?"
Glenn also says: "[T]his sort of thing isn’t aimed at convincing those who disagree, but rather at garnering high-fives from people who agree...." Some may say that to use the word "garnering" is to call out to me.
Speaking of words, do people know the word "oik"? I had to look it up. The OED calls it "colloquial (originally School slang)." It means "An uncouth, loutish, uneducated, or obnoxious person; a yob (esp. with connotations of lower-class origin)." The OED quotes, among other things, M. Marples, "Public School Slang" (1940): "Oik, hoik: very widely used and of some age; at Cheltenham (1897) it meant simply a working man, but at Christ's Hospital (1885) it implied someone who spoke Cockney, and at Bootham (1925) someone who spoke with a Yorkshire accent."
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Definitely using 'garner' was a wink and a nod to Althouse (beside the attribution he also used earlier in the column).
"Maybe the mask fanatics are just poor persuaders. But it seems just as likely that they are engaging in poor persuasion because they aren’t trying to persuade.
As with so much that goes on in today’s society, and especially on social media, this sort of thing isn’t aimed at convincing those who disagree, but rather at garnering high-fives from people who agree and, ultimately, creating an ideological veneer for unquestioned elite rule."
Shorter version: virtue signaling. That begs the question: for whose benefit? My guess: the sender's.
It's interesting, though, that most of the memes on social media are not created by the senders but by the meme factories. They are usually slick, professionally produced, occasionally clever but always pointed. It makes me wonder where the resources come from to produce them.
I learned what oik was because of the Great James Taranto who used the term oikophobia frequently on The Best of the Web in the WSJ.
I think Taranto is how I found Althouse too.
I have noticed a lot more anger in the air than even ten years ago. It’s as if each half of the country is perpetually enraged at the other half. I wonder who is profiting off all the rage. There is less and less space for reasonable middle ground any longer.
"Mask bullies don’t want to persuade you — but to humiliate and rule you."
The urge to rule is ancient. Only the methods have changed. Now we have "science," "experts," "public health."
But Glenn forgets that many people like to be humiliated.
In a way, the old notion of rights told rulers that they could not humiliate the populace. But when rights are things the rulers give you, then you are asking for humiliation.
Professor Reynolds observes that there are some terrible vaccination rates among minorities. That's true.
He also fails to acknowledge or explain the terrible vaccination rates among some whites who self-identify as Trump supporters or who live in areas of large Trump majorities.
Now, as for leadership and persuasion... We have 100% of Congressional Democrats vaccinated. And some very unclear percentage of Republicans. Many of who refuse to even say whether or not they have been vaccinated. We have Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson spouting misinformation and essentially encouraging persons who have been exposed to COVID, to not be vaccinated. We had the Fox News Channel raising doubts about the vaccine through a bunch of crazed unqualified "experts."
We knew that black populations had a sad history of distrust of, and dislocation from, our institutions of health care. They are worth persuading. They need persuading. Their leaders, inside and outside of government, are trying to persuade them.* The persuasion seems to be working. "Between March 1 and August 2, the share of vaccinations going to Hispanic people increased in all states reporting data for both periods and increased for Black people in most reporting states."
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/
Ron Johnson and Rand Paul aren't helping. They aren't persuading anybody. And it certainly isn't worth trying to persuade Ron Johnson and Rand Paul. They need a fight, not persuasion.
*Nota bene: I am not having any arguments about Biden/Harris having criticized vaccines. That old right-wing myth doesn't hold up. There is video of both of them. Neither one criticized the COVID vaccines. Harris said that she would not take a vaccine on the word of Donald Trump, at a point in the campaign when Trump was talking about cutting regulatory corners to get a vaccine out sooner. She said she would be first in line to take a vaccine that had the backing of the medical establishment.
I had thought oik (Greek oikos is house) was a reference to oikophobia, a fear held by the ruling class who prefer their elite peers in other countries to their countrymen. I suspect you gave found the real meaning, though.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oikophobia
... to use the word "garnering" is to call out to me.
My first thought while reading the above phrase is that the bold expression should be hyphenated -- call-out. I think of the expression as a synonym for challenge. So, Glenn Reynolds used the word "garnering" in order to challenge or tease you.
On second thought, however, the unhyphenated expression can also mean call outwards. So, Glenn Reynolds was communicating from inside his own blog outwards to your blog, communicating a desire for your personal attention to this particular blog article of his.
-----
A discussion of alternate spellings: call-out vs callout
I prefer call-out.
Though oikophobia is a term Prof. Reynolds has tried to popularize in the past, so maybe I shouldn’t doubt my interpretation too quickly. I think I learned the term from instapundit.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/13/donald-trump-class-rural-white-democrats-glenn-reynolds-column/96413412/
The British slang I don't know could fill several phone books, although I am very good at guessing when I hear a word in context...even the Cockney rhyming slang is fun to try to decipher...
I do think some of the loud and obnoxious mask memers aren't looking for power-- they're anxious about the existence of disease and screaming at people to soothe their own tortured souls. Like melting-down 14 year olds, they shriek because throwing the stress outward makes them feel better.
They can't come to grips with the fact that the only way out of this pandemic is that most people immune, either by vaccination or COVID. The masks and distancing were to buy time to get a good vaccine! Guess what-- we have good vaccines now, and the people who don't want serious COVID can easily get a shot.
But not everyone has gotten a shot, and that makes them anxious, so they scream.
What I find most offensive is the assumption that because I hate masks and shutdowns, I also hate shots. I got vaccinated so I could STOP with the masking and shutdowns. And yet they are still screaming at me, because I am not worried enough and not worshipping their Disease-God.
In recent usage, the term "oikophobia" appears to have been popularized first by Roger Scruton and then by James Taranto.
I read "Oik" as in "oikophobia," the fear or hatred of one's own home, country, or people.
That is a recurring Instapundit theme. Maybe the posh Public School nobs from the OED used the Greek root "oik", meaning "home," in the way US college kids dismiss locals as "Townies."
I agree that many who post pro-mask memes on FB are only doing so to pat themselves on the back. I just put Lesley Gore on in my mind when I see it: ..don't tell me what to do, and don't tell me what to say...
I have to disagree with Mr Reynolds. This is an attempt to persuade by getting the mob to gang up on you. It’s pretty effective as well as the Marxist BLM can attest.
“ I had thought oik (Greek oikos is house) was a reference to oikophobia…”
OED says the etymology of “oik” is unknown. Might relate to the Yorkshire accent.
Politicizing COVID, and making vaccination or mask-wearing political issues themselves, is as stupid a partisan approach to public health as can be imagined. I notice only one commenter here is still trying to "screw that chicken" as they say by insisting that people are making vaccine choices based on political affiliation. I didn't make my choice based on party registration. I have not met one person pro- or anti-vax who has indicated they made their choice based on party affiliation. I know flaming liberals who don't want it and those that do. I know hard-core libertarian types. Same thing: they decided based on their specific medical condition and the available information. So I continue to detest all attempts to frame this issue through politics. Health care choices are inherently personal and private, and we used to agree on that in principle.
Using the vaccine as a political cudgel is dumb, and it reinforces Reynolds argument that bullying people is the point, not compliance. There is no persuasion in the comments I've read that use political affiliation as their premise. You can scroll up and feel the bullying yourself. WTF is that? It's nothing to do with public health: that I know.
Anecdotal Data: Mom yelled at me more than once, because we don't see eye-to-eye on COVID. She gets all her news from CNN, MSNBC, and Good Morning America ... so naturally she gets completely caught up in the Panic Porn Du Jour.
But after she got vaccinated, she has settled down a lot. She's still in a lather about Delta, but she's no longer yelling.
If I really want to get her amped up again, I just need to refer to it as "Trump's Vaccine".
I see we have gotten the conservative case for allowing leftist mobs to humiliate ones self. Chuck makes a very fine example of a castrated conservative.
"Raised doubts"? OMG the horror! In my mind, if you don't have some doubt about using a modified RNA gene as therapy against a novel virus and calling it a "vaccine" when it is unlike any other vaccine approved by the FDA previously, especially in light of the fact there were no long-term trials, then maybe you trust "the government" or "the experts" too much. Most people in the USA overcame that doubt because their personal calculation was the danger from COVID was greater than the anger of adverse reactions. With more than half of America vaccinated and another few million with natural or acquired immunity, we are well on our way to herd immunity.
Those that have immunity are safe. Very few breakthrough cases result in serious illness or death. So why the super-hard sell to get the remainder jabbed? Why do the immune worry so much about something that does not threaten them? Why is the "new goal" 100% vaccinated?
Those last three questions cannot be answered logically. So I am left to wonder what the real purpose for this super-hard sell job on vaccination is. Nothing in our history supports this change in public health tactics, not lockdowns, not masking with useless masks, and certainly not 100% vax rates. When "leaders" set an unattainable goal, and that is exactly what this is, one must wonder what the purpose is because reaching an unobtainable goal can not be the purpose.
And God forbid a news channel would actually raise and explore these questions. No they should all parrot what the State says, just like Facebook does, right? Because the "experts" have been 100% right all along, right? Right?
"Professor Reynolds observes that there are some terrible vaccination rates among minorities. That's true. He also fails to acknowledge or explain the terrible vaccination rates among some whites who self-identify as Trump supporters or who live in areas of large Trump majorities." Sorry, but that's just propaganda from the media.
An inconvenient fact: I live in The Villages, FL for part of the year. The Villages is a retirement community of 138,000 of whom an estimated 80% voted for Trump. The minimum age is 55 and the average age is 70. It also has the highest vaccination rate in the state. I personally know of only four residents who have not been vaccinated for Covid, one is an African American whose doctor recommended he not take the vaccine because of medical issues, one is Biden voter that lives across the street, and two are Covid recovered and are waiting for the required 90 day period to elapse before getting the shot. In fact, the hottest ticket back in February when I got vaccinated was an appointment at one of the vaccination sites set up by the state or counties or by Walgreens or Publix. Demand was so great that appointment websites were full for the week within the first couple of hours and lines of cars at drive up vaccination sites stretched a hour. By the first of March the local county and the state vaccination centers were processing thousands of 65 and above a week and by the end of April Florida had enough vaccine so that anyone who wanted a shot could get one without waiting.
Whatever TV you watch, it doesn't include many Brit police procedurals.
Social media is weaponizing our society. This virus hysteria needs to stop. Anyone who wants to get vaccinated either has done so or will soon be vaccinated. Those who don't, that's their right. We are driving ourselves to a frenzy for a virus that kills one out of two hundred people and those are largely elderly with comorbidities. If we are going to worry about a virus,Marburg with a lethality rate of 80+ plus percent and is highly infectious is the one to obsess about.
Mask bullies?
Shock video from the parking lot aftermath of a school board meeting where medical experts were inviting to speak in favor of a mask mandate in schools. Anti-maskers threatening the experts as they left:
https://mobile.twitter.com/natalie_allison/status/1425449438202548224
-----Guess what-- we have good vaccines now, and the people who don't want serious COVID can easily get a shot. --Deirdre Mundy
I hope that turns out to be a true statement, Deirdre, but the evidence is running the opposite direction. How do you explain delta breaking right through the vaccinated? Check Alex Berenson's "unreported truths" substack site for his discussions of this. Very limited testing of that vaccine, to say the least. We have no idea what its longer-term effects may be.
The worst case is provided by Geert vanden Bossche, who used to be the main vaccine man for Bill & M Gates Foundation, I believe. Has a great virology resume and says these mRNA vaccines are actually competing with our natural immunities, and not for the better. Large-scale vaccination to produce the covid-19 specific antibodies will push the CCP virus into more dangerous mutations quickly, he believes. He is doing his best to make the world listen, but few have. We can only hope he is wrong.
Oh please. Wearing a mask is trivial and the big macho roid gobblers are crying about being picked on by soy boys. No wonder so many people get shadenboners when unvaccinated Trumpers get put on ventilators.
Medical experts are all over the place on a lot of issues. Some they got wrong. See Thalidomide.
When I was in high school, we played around with mercury in the lab. Fun stuff with its reverse meniscus and what not. Later it became like radioactive leprosy germs from which we must all flee, screaming.
Years ago, a Detroit high school bought new shoes for every kid who'd walked through the science wing where somebody had spilled mercury.
Now we find that the mercury in MMR is at a dose level low enough not to be lethal If it were higher, it would be toxic. But the experts--see Wakefield--differ. So we're supposed to stick it in our kids...?
Or have they found another preservative?
Occasionally, grant-garnering hysterias collide and what's an honest citizen to do?
When I see the word “garner” (always see, never hear), I immediately think of the Althouse blog and wonder if the person writing it is a reader of the blog. It seems much more popular than it used to be, though I may just be noticing it more.
When I hear the word “oik,” I think oikophobia, probably because the person quoted here also likes that longer word.
Richard Aubrey;
Mercury is found in tiny quantities in Thimerosol, which is utilized in some vaccines. You mentioned the MMR vaccine, which has been in use for decades and which has saved millions of lives. Thimerosol is one of the most-studied vaccine agents in all of human history, and no credible study has found it harmful.
The mRNA vaccines for COVID do not use Thimerosol, or any other form of mercury.
"Wakefield," I presume is Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the comprehensively-discredited fraudster who stirred up the vaccines-cause-autism hysteria. He's not an "expert."
I simply cannot get over, how far and wide the anti-vaxxers are willing to look, to find any shred of medical info that would support the prejudgment that they all seem to want to make, which is that COVID vaccines are bad. I really would have thought that Trump's involvement in their development would have been enough to get most of his cultists over any dispute. I guess not. There are a large handful of people, like Dr. Joseph Mercola (profiled by the NYT in the link below) who actually profit off the irrational fears of people like you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/technology/joseph-mercola-coronavirus-misinformation-online.html
Will you wear your mask forever, Howard, if that is what the authorities tell you to do? Where will you draw the line?
Chuck. Missed the point. Lancet thought Wakefield was the real deal. Until somebody--pre Sokal Squared--convinced them they'd been had. If Lancet isn't a medical expert, I don't know who is.
Seems they withdrew a piece discrediting HCQ. Wasn't up to their standards. But, to be on the safe side, it was after the election.
Anotehr point is.. mercury fine. Mercury terrible. A little won't hurt.
So maybe we should quit reading Lancet and other replication-crisis media?
I got fully vaccinated back in February Yancy so I don't need to wear a mask most the time. However when I was vacationing in the jungle of the Yucatan peninsula last week where they require you to wear masks indoors and outdoors I did my duty without complaining.
Richard Aubrey; respectfully, thanks for clarifying.
The Lancet was indeed “had,” by Wakefield, for a short period of time. The Lancet eventually corrected the record in the most scathing way any medical journal ever has. And the number of such scandals attaching to The Lancet in a generation can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Right?
And HCQ remains on the fringes as a treatment that no major medical center anywhere in the world relies on. Right?
Howard. I have certain obligations where everybody must be masked. So I do. But I avoid as far as possible options where masking is required. Part of it is a matter of simply not wanting to do it and part of it is a kind of boycott.
You use the term "duty", with which I quibble. "duty" means doing something likely worthwhile as an obligation. One has a duty to help the elderly, for example, in crossing the street. One does not have a "duty" to obey certain rules which make no sense, such as masking in the jungle. It may be required, and not doing it may result in consequences. But it is not a duty.
You didn't answer the question, Howard, unsurprisingly.
He's only halfway there.
It's not about the bullies' emotional needs. (Or, to put it another way, the emotional need--or, rather, the emotional demand--at play here is their desire to control other people.)
George Orwell, Vaclav Havel, and Theodore Dalrymple have explained the whole thing.
Totalitarians (in this case, aspiring totalitarians) want not to convince but to control. They achieve control by shaming other people, and also by bullying them into acquiescing to obvious lies and other wickedness, in order to co-opt them, so that they have no moral authority to challenge the totalitarian system. As when, in Orwell's 1984, Goldstein gets Winston to say that he would throw acid in children's faces to fight the system.
Vaclav Havel set out an example of how it worked in communist Europe:
"The central figure of [Havel's] famous dissident essay, The Power of the Powerless, was a greengrocer with a placard in his window saying: 'Workers of the World Unite!' Havel asked an apparently simple question: what is the purpose of this display?
"The shopkeeper is not motivated by an intention to communicate his enthusiasm for unity of the workers of the world. . . .
The greengrocer’s intention is to signal conformity and avoid trouble. Havel translates the slogan as: 'I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.'"
https://www.johnkay.com/2011/12/21/spontaneity-or-slogans-the-lessons-of-vaclav-havels-greengrocer/
As Theodore Dalrymple explained,
"The purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
Also, put yourself in the shoes of the Great Unwashed.
You watch a couple of hours of network television. You will see at least six high-end commercials for prescription drugs. Each has, at the end, an artificially compressed list of various things which could go wrong. Side effects of increasing severity, including death "may" occur. God help us some "have been reported".
but the "hurried", "urgent", "emergency" vaxxing with abbreviated testing....nuh uh. Nothing like that here. Nope. Don't worry about it. Can't happen.
If my beautiful fourteen year old granddaughter takes a shot and is paralyzed for life, who to I sue for her upkeep and treatment? Wait. What? Never mind.
And these are promoted by a cohort of people who can't keep their stories straight from one week to the next.
I'd give the hesitant a good bit of slack. But that's just me.
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