To be upfront, I’m not OP of the Lemmygrad thread. Masking obviously is important and a good thing to do for your community. Personally, however, living in a place like Texas where almost nobody still masks though, 54 months (4.5 years) after the initial declaration, and everybody says COVID is relatively a non-issue like the flu, I understand why the OP would be demoralized.
クロスポスト: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5723508
Basically, wanted to know where people are at with mask wearing (as it relates to containing covid and all), I know it’s been a while since it started. And I’ve seen people who say covid can still be threatening, like through long covid and such, even if the initial impact doesn’t tend to be as bad. Being in the US, it’s especially hard to tell what makes sense because the gov sorta gave up on containment a while back and only ever half-assed pushing mask wearing. And wearing a mask alone was a controversial thing in some places, even in the very beginning. Then there’s vaccines, which of course help, but seems to be a thing like the flu where you have to get boosters to be fully covered for variant strains.
So in general, I’m wondering stuff like:
Do you still wear a mask or not and why? And do you have distinctions like large crowds or anything like that?
How does mask wearing compare by country, from what you know? For example, I’m sure China has a more pro-mask-wearing culture and policy overall, but I’m not clear on where they’re at this late into it.
Partly asking cause I want to re-assess my own position on it, see if it makes sense to change it at all by now. I’ve still been doing it, in part out of inertia, but the US management of it is such a mess, in gov and culture, it’s hard to tell when it makes sense to stop vs. just caving to peer pressure of people who were never acting responsibly to begin with.
I will try hard to make time to report some comments and explain why those comments should be reported. As you can imagine, it will take time to do that. Please understand that I will find that a personally frustrating process, but I’ll try.
This thread offers a lot of insight you might find informative.
In general we are not angry at individuals for not wearing masks. What’s discouraging is the comments that attempt to justify not masking because it’s supposedly fruitless or ineffective. That sentiment is in that thread, a lot. Practically nobody in this comm is going to claim that your individual efforts in COVID mitigation are more important than widespread public health measures. But until public health is prioritized by governments we have an obligation to do what we can to keep each other safe. Does that make sense?
I don’t see any comments that disagree with this, so I’m not following what this is all about.
EDIT: I went through and found a few more and removed them, but strangely they weren’t the comments being responded to, and no one reported them.
I did report a couple comments that were more blatant misinformation, but i was a little wordy in my reports so maybe they didn’t go through? Regardless I appreciate you taking a look. The general attitude in many of the comments of “No one masks so why bother” and the one or two people calling it “virtue signaling” were particularly annoying. Should I not confront racism or misogyny in my workplace just because everyone around me is racist/misogynistic? Should I not reject the attitude of lesser-evilism just because everyone around me are chauvinistic liberals? Of course not. I don’t understand why so many cannot make that same connection with masking. Yes, our governments, especially the US government, have severely dropped the ball with Covid. But masking is only one step towards a community response to protect the vulnerable, and the most basic one at that. If we can’t clear that bar, how can we expect to accomplish anything?
I don’t want to come at you too hard because I understand moderation is a thankless job, and that you are bound to piss off someone regardless of what you do. But like I said in my other comment in this thread, it was really disappointing to see chauvinistic and ableist attitudes about health left untouched, but those who (very understandably, imo) lost their temper on those with those attitude removed. Again, I’m sorry for the long disorganized rant, but I hope you can understand where I and many of the users here are coming from.
I do see two reports from you, and the one towards a lemmygrad user was removed (the other is towards a hexbear user).
Could you link those comments so I can remove them, because I don’t see any: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5723508
This is the most egregious one to me. The entire thread. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5723508/5136253
This one: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5723508/5133914
Basically I think anyone that makes light of wearing a mask/ever having worn one is extremely, extremely suspicious to me no matter the reasoning. This is life or death for me, so asking me to respect their opinions as equal to mine (or somehow more civil) in discourse is absurd. Wear a mask or people die. I die. It is that simple. Any rhetoric minimizing this has no place in a dialectical materialist outlook. Never.
The top one is a hexbear user, not a lemmygrad user. Both were unreported. I’ve removed them both now tho, thx.
ah yeah one of my reports was a hexbear user. i’m at work now so i won’t have a chance to go through the thread again but when i’m off i can go through whatever’s still up and report anything that remains. again appreciate you taking the effort to fix things, this is far from the first time i’ve seen you doing good work on lemmygrad so just want to say thanks and that i’m sorry if i was too harsh in my comments on this topic, it’s just unfortunately i have (usually unproductive at best) conversations about covid and masking just about every day, so i have very little patience around the topic any more, especially when it’s with fellow communists.
No probs! Totally understandable, I’m one of the only people who masks around me too, and its equally frustrating after having some family members who almost died from it.