They are high school students.
2 Likes
I know when you’re a little kid everyone looks old, but those are high schoolers. 
2 Likes
The interpretation of these events depends a lot on what was the reasonable understanding of mask efficacy.
This means this post is really just another argument that masking doesn’t work.
1 Like
My mistake - he was at USF. I thought I had seen something about them being high schoolers a few days ago but the article I found earlier today just said a “group of students at USF.”
But excellent actuarying by picking the one nit & missing the point. 
2 Likes
Yeah, to me the topic doesn’t much matter. He put those kids in an awkward situation up in front of a crowd to make himself look cool politically. It’s a jerk move.
2 Likes
I’m glad you’re coming around, Mr. Gorilla.
It’s not about masking for me, so I picked on the point that matters to me.
1 Like
I agree the desantis thing is jerky.
I was talking about all the other examples she gave.
Yes, I was agreeing with you. It’s about the masking for Marcie and DeSantis’s treatment of the kids for me.
I don’t understand your comment here.
So was it high schoolers at USF? Or college students ?
Apparently it was a group of high schoolers from Hillsborough County at USF, as greenman pointed out above.
And to be clear, even if it was full grown adults, it would still be a jerk move. But the younger the people involved are, the worse it is. Why do we now think this kind of stuff is OK?
3 Likes
It’s not all about masking for me, though I think forced masking is emblematic of a lot of the other issues. It’s about treatment of others - it was brought up (not by me) in the context of how people treat others on the subject of their choice to mask or not. Forced masking and the bullying around that is largely about personal autonomy and power differentials.
That’s one of the reasons the DeSantis incident is ugly: he is an authority figure, and his strong request in a stern tone comes across as an order to the kids, so despite his actual words about them having the choice to wear the mask or not, they may have felt like he was ordering them to take their masks off & that they had to obey. His words & tone abused that power differential.
My point is that many of the people who are now asking for compassion & patience for them to become comfortable with removing masks & returning back toward normalcy are the same ones who were much much uglier over the past 2 years toward people who saw the cost/benefit of masks & mask mandates differently or who needed more time to become comfortable with the risk/reward of an experimental injection.
Also, this DeSantis incident (and that weird TX restaurant) aside, I don’t think there are many people out there who want to force people not to mask. Most of us simply want the choice and are happy to accept the choices of others might be different. That’s the whole point of choice.
2 Likes
A key part of this is that it doesn’t hurt anyone else for some of the kids to wear masks.
There means there is apparently no good reason for desantis to ask them to take off their masks. It isn’t his business whether they wear masks because it isn’t hurting anybody else. The power imbalance makes it worse.
Telling somebody to wear a mask is potentially different. The claim is that masks keep the wearer from infecting other people. This makes it other peoples’ business if a person is wearing a mask.
I know you do not believe this claim. So my guess is that this difference does not exist for you. This is why i said your post is really an argument that masking does not work.
2 Likes
We aren’t asking for compassion or patience. Mostly because we know we don’t owe anything to anyone who might feel compassion or patience is theirs to grant.
This was one of the posts early in this discussion:
Maybe we have a slightly different interpretation of “shouldn’t be any stigma.” It seems like your objection to my interpretation is largely a mere semantic one.
We agree on this. You don’t need to defend DeSantis as a counterpoint to the bad actors that are pro-mask. They can all be shitty at the same time.
Something of a tangent, but my kids’ school district is dropping mask mandates on the 8th (My employer dropped them on the 1st, for both vaccinated and unvaccinated).
My kids both still want to wear them at school, which is nice, and I have a feeling about 50%-75% of the kids at their school will be dropped off wearing them. Not sure how many will keep them on during the day, because kids.
1 Like
I don’t know what your intent is, other than to appear a fool, but using tweets from 2020 as evidence of what proper behavior is in 2022 is just completely absurd.
3 Likes