erectlocution
Anyways
There's a video I've watched a few times. I'll post it below, but I want to give some preface.
People are stupid.
As evidence, I'd like first to call out one participant in this no-mask rally from September of 2020 in St. George, Utah. Here is a transcript of what she said in the clip (starting at about 51 seconds in):
When George Floyd was saying, "I can't breathe," and then he died, and now we're wearing a mask and we say, "I can't breathe," but we're being forced to wear it anyways.
I will charitably assume that she said more than that and it was edited, and maybe go so far as to say it was edited poorly, but I will not go so far as to assume the intent of the statement was manufactured by the news crew. And I must say, if you believe that being asked, or told, to wear a mask is comparable to having a police officer close your windpipe with his knee for 569 seconds and then dying, you have been failed. Your society has failed to imbue you with the capacity to make rational assessments of phenomena.
There is more in this video to call out, principally Ms. Betty Jake's contribution (at about the 1:08 mark). Somehow she has evidence sufficient to conclude, regarding face masks, that "[M]ost child molesters love 'em." This is the kind of statement that motivates so many questions, like, how does Ms. Jake know anything about what child molesters like let alone love? Why would specifically child molesters love them? Is it because they foil human face recognition some, and if so, why don't--for instance--muggers, or bank thieves, or other criminals love them, too? Does Ms. Jake know that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, of child molestation is perpetrated by people who know the child, like family and friends of family?
Of course it's a waste of our time to really grapple with this statement with any seriousness because it was offered not as a claim from evidence but as a rhetorically tactical statement. She's trying to impugn the use of masks by associating them with predators, to avoid reckoning with the actual, verified safety provided by wearing masks.
It's easy to take shots at these people but I have to remember they're people. This grounds the absurdity and delivers utter horror. It creeps me out to think that people I'd otherwise assume are decent (for some value of "decent"--you understand) and who seem pleasant enough, carry with them foul eldritch animosity, steeped as they are in caustic ignorance.
Here you go if you're a masochist like me. Ed. note: Removed the video because it's been removed from YouTube for violating their terms. I assume that means there wasn't enough white-supremacist signage.
