Parker MolloyMay 2021, December 2022
Emma Green must be cursed to keep writing the same exact story where she sneers at people who wear masks
Hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. have died from COVID between the publication of those two pieces, but she seems as unfazed as ever and convinced that people who took COVID seriously were somehow overreacting.
It's just such a frustrating type of journalism, with the writer's pre-formed opinion driving the direction.
And, I think it's worth keeping in mind, that these types of articles (there was another just the other day in NYT about "the last holdouts" i.e. people who still wear masks) are taking issue with people *choosing* to wear masks places. For the most part, mask mandates (which were always pretty limited) just aren't happening anywhere anymore. This is all very "your personal behavior irritates me and I don't like to be reminded that COVID happened."
It's bizarre. It's controlling.
Because while there's definitely a collective argument to be made that other people *should* mask (as their lack of precautions increase everyone's risks), there just isn't an argument to be made for why people *shouldn't* wear masks if they choose to.
So since late 2020-ish, there have been these writers who put out pieces where they try to create an argument against masks.
Those pieces inevitably boil down to a few implicit and explicit points:
Aesthetics:
So much of those pieces come down to "I don't like seeing things that remind me of the pandemic" or something similar. The point of these pieces is to create a social stigma around masks so that people who wear them might feel social pressure to ditch it.
And someone might point to the stigmatization of people who wouldn't wear masks/get vaccinated/adhere to recommendations, etc., as a "gotcha."
And, again, this is all built on the premise that being disallowed from wearing masks and being required to wear masks in a particular venue have similar levels of negative effects on others in that group. And that's just simply not even close to the case.
Once you acknowledge that no, actually, stigmatizing something that can have a negative effect on the health of others around you and stigmatizing something that can *only possibly serve to make it less likely for them to pass on a contagious virus to others* are not at all the same thing, the arguments for these sorts of aesthetic-based "omg why are people still wearing masks?" pieces lose their legitimacy.
And this happens on a number of topics. Anything that's been propped up as being related to a "culture war" or "cultural issue" gets argued in this same exact way in media: largely aesthetically-based, dependent on people ignoring that the negative consequences of Action A are not identical to the negative consequences of Action B.
This is why "contrarianism," while hugely rewarded in the media industry, is usually so damaging when it comes to sharing actual news.
Craig Danz@parkermolloy it is so nice to see you back …micro-blogging (that what we call this?) with ease again. Twitter had become so unbearable and I forgot how great your writing is in this format when you aren’t constantly being harassed.