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I Wear a Mask
Obviously not while inside by myself, but I wear a mask whenever I expect to walk by people or I am getting a delivery. It’s partly because it is required by our crazy governor (statewide lockdowns are stupid), and partly because I want to protect other people. There’s also the fact that we will enforce masking at work, and I’ll be damned if I enforce a rule I won’t practice myself. (I became a stringent recycler in my private life when I was asked to implement a recycling program at my last job) It also is not really harming me, and I try to wear only quality American-made masks and bandanas.
I even stopped a pair of police officers and asked if the CPD didn’t give them masks. I said I’d give them bandanas suitable for masks if the department had left them out. Turns out they had just taken them off to talk outside their car. We chatted a bit before I finished heading home with dinner. It’s not like you could actually social distance from your partner in a squad car…
I practice social distancing, but the two-meter rule was not based on hard science, so I treat it as the rough guideline it is.
So when you see a guy with a mask on, he’s not necessarily a disciple of Darth Gretchen ready to destroy the American way of life or a shrinking violet who lives in terror. Masking is some kind of virtue signaling totem for the left, I don’t want the reverse to be true on the right.
Published in Culture
If you ever had an ambition to be a masked bandit or bankrobber, this is your chance!
I wear a mask when going indoors b/c any step towards reducing the spread is a step towards defeating the virus. Outdoors, I don’t but would if it were a crowded venue (a heavily attended open air soccer game in Milan is thought to have helped spread it). But I will admit that wearing the mask for ~15 minutes in Kroger bothers me more than wearing one for ~60hrs last week at work (except when I am also wearing an N95 or P100 mask as well).
With the attitude I see in most cops in recent years, I would never attempt that.
I wear a mask in stores.
Outdoors, I am happy to stay 6 feet from others, but I refuse to wear a mask.
The crooks in at least Santa Ana, California are already on it.
Santa Ana PD: Robberies Increase by 50%, Suspects Using Face Covering Orders To Their Advantage.
I resist wearing a mask, and so far have avoided any place in which one might be mandatory. I resist contributing to widespread mask-wearing because the widespread wearing of masks alters social interaction in a fundamental way that I think is more destructive to social cohesion than the benefit that may accrue from reassurance that mask wearing provides about safety.
Mrs. Tabby is currently at a meeting concerning when our church might resume in-person worship. There is a significant divide between people who will not come to church unless everyone is wearing a mask, and people (like Mrs. Tabby and me) who consider universal mask-wearing antithetical to the open worship and fellowship that is supposed to happen at a church.
In our geographic area, mask wearing in general is not widespread, and those who do wear masks are notably less friendly and less cheerful than those who do not.
In the early days of smoking bans, ca. 1985, I recall auditoriums split into smoking and non-smoking sections.
Churches could follow the same practice for masks.
Me too. All the time. I also wave so enthusiastically that the cops who know me will imitate it back.
It was your phrasing—you didn’t “stop” them, you engaged them as a fellow human being.
Since I, like Henry, am also agnostic about masks, I try also to be as (implicitly) understanding of other people wearing/not-wearing them as I can be. The people most at risk from my germs (Wuhan or otherwise) are also the ones who might experience negative and potentially serious health effects from wearing a mask—e.g. people who suffer from asthma or have other breathing difficulties.
Those of us who’ve now tried out the mask-wearing will know why that might be. I’m willing to wear a mask for them, and willing also to assume that anyone not wearing a mask in a mask-ish environment…can ‘t. And yes, also willing to accommodate those whose agnosticism leads them to believe that the whole thing is stupid, and does more harm than good. They might be right.
My elderly, mortally-ill sainted mother (as Gary would say) wears a mask even though her maximum “out in public” moment is sitting in the car at the grocery store while her helper goes inside. She’s wearing a mask in the car, behind the closed window, at least six feet and a closed window away from any possible passer-by.
Well, she watches CNN, and has always had an apocalyptic streak in her, so if it makes her feel like she’s helping to forestall the End of Days, maybe the psychological effect is more important? To her? (I made the mask for her, so there’s that, too.)
We’ve had a few warm days here, which made the mask even more uncomfortable; I wonder whether enthusiasm for wearing a double layer of tightly-woven cotton over one’s face will wane as temps along the Acela Corridor rise?
Yeah, I think I was trying to write “stopped by”. Not fixable now – if I edit the post, it will drop off the main feed.
There’s actually a bit of deeper motive to greeting police. I think a lot of the problems we see arising from law enforcement (as opposed to the problems imposed on law enforcement by society and politicians) are due to a sense of detachment and hostility, like a soldier going outside the wire. It’s a way to remind the officer that some people see him as a person, not just a uniform.
I knew what you meant. And I appreciate it.
I think you are correct about this sense of detachment and hostility. But that, I think, is a pretty normal feeling for any monopoly, especially one of which you are forced to be a “customer.”
Now, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand: I think police services are essential (at least for dense urban areas), and that is why the government should not be the sole provider. Socialism fails at providing quality security services for many of the same reasons it fails at providing food, education, and healthcare.
Imagine if neighborhoods could choose which police force patrols them.
Instead of rioting over racial discrimination, they could simply switch to a competitor.
Same with businesses like Target. Imagine if they weren’t forced to rely on the same police force that just killed a man, and has effectively suspended certain enforcement activities.
How exactly would private police work? Since they are private, would they have to respect your legal rights? Could someone hire police that would enforce standards that have no basis in law – for example, prohibit libertarian speech – on someone else?
How exactly would you handle such small jurisdictions?
Talking with you is like talking to a space alien.
That’s an interesting comment. Of course, we aren’t talking about “socialism,” but rather about a public service provided by our tax-funded federal, state, and local governments. That service — policing — is a part of our social infrastructure, valuable even if it doesn’t show a profit.
Policing is distinct from every other service in that it authorizes individuals to use deadly force in a non-defensive way. While the individuals using that force could receive their paychecks and uniforms from a private company and technically be employed by a private company, they should operate, I think, entirely under governmental control. Given that, the effective difference between a public and a private police force is unclear to me.
Why, imagine we had private doctors — they would be performing horrific medical experiments on us!
Or private supermarkets — they would be poisoning us every day!
Moral: You don’t have to be a government employee to obey the law; rather the opposite.
Note that @cjherod wrote, “the government should not be the sole provider” of police services.
One very good reason is that having the police police the police is asking for trouble. In this current case, I gather that the accused killer had a dozen complaints against him, but was never disciplined.
What is being proposed here is that we get the benefits of “the market” by privatizing the police. One potential problem with that is that “the police” are not like a doctor or a supermarket, in that I have the option of walking away from either of those. In the market, walking away is the consumer’s power, the thing that makes the market work at all and that forces participants in the market to compete for, rather than simply demand, the customer’s business.
You can’t walk away from the police. The consumer doesn’t have that option. That seems a pretty important distinction between, say, a supermarket or podiatrist, on the one hand, and the guys about to kick in your door, on the other.
Okay, perhaps that’s a bad example. It may in some cases not be possible to just “walk away” from your podiatrist.
One more comment on this privatized police force idea, because I’m interested to explore the reasons why I reflexively dislike it.
The wonderful feature of the market is that it communicates needs and wants, and rewards those who meet those needs and wants in a reasonably efficient way. That is why markets work and centrally planned systems don’t: markets honestly communicate information in a way that producers can ignore only at their peril.
Now consider who is the “consumer” in the case of a private police force. It isn’t the citizen. It’s the government agency that pays the private police force. The market forces will be those between the government and the private police; it’s the government that the police must keep happy, not the man in the street.
So does having a private police force empower the citizen? I think it does the opposite. With a public police force, the citizen can protest to the government, knowing that, since policing is entirely the responsibility of the government, it follows that failures of policing are also the government’s responsibility. The government’s incentive is to remain in power — to get re-elected — and so it has a pretty clear incentive to manage the police so as not to antagonize the citizens.
Add a private police force and what you do is remove that responsibility one step from the government. The government now has someone to point to when policing fails, a scapegoat that can be invoked when necessary to shift blame from elected officials to private-sector villains. The citizen’s recourse remains entirely the same: petition the government to fix a broken system, threatening to elect a different government if that fails. But now accountability is diluted, blame can be directed elsewhere in a show of official public outrage.
I suppose it would be different if citizens could take private police forces to court and sue for damages. I don’t know how many private companies would accept that liability without some guarantee of redemption from the government. And I’m not sure we want to make routine policing subject to tort action, and put that much additional control into the hands of trial lawyers. I’m pretty sure we don’t.
@henryracette — Remember, there are hundreds of thousands of armed private police already in the U.S., possibly more than there are armed government police. If you think they shouldn’t exist, well, that train has left the station.
“In the market, walking away is the consumer’s power, the thing that makes the market work at all and that forces participants in the market to compete for, rather than simply demand, the customer’s business.”
A very peculiar point to make in an argument for monopoly and against competition!
We are watching the process work itself out in Minneapolis right now.
They can’t fire the police force. They have fired the officers actually involved in the incident — but these are unionized government employees, so we’ll see what the union, the civil service regulations, and the courts have to say about that.
Based on similar incidents, we can expect all that will happen is some rejuggling of the brass, and the resentful rank-and-file will be sent to some futile “implicit bias” classes.
Instead, imagine that this is a private contractor who can be fired by the city, with the loss of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Pretty good motive to make sure such incidents never happen.
Where do those people work? Can they pull me over, stop me on the street, or kick in my door? In other words, can I choose not to encounter them if I wish, just as I can choose not to enter a mall if I wish? (I’m asking seriously; I really don’t know where these people work and what they do.)
I don’t understand your comment. It is precisely the ability of the customer not to buy — to walk away — that makes the market work. And it is precisely my inability to walk away from the police that makes them unsuitable for privatization.
I agree with you that public-sector unions are a problem. I’d get rid of them if I had my druthers. However, I don’t expect anyone who contracts with the federal government to be immune to union pressure; the bureaucracy is notoriously pro-union. I would assume that would be true of privatized police forces as well.
I think it would probably be easier to improve the current system than to throw it out. Let’s push for an end to public-sector unions. De-unionizing some bits of the public sector should be easier than entirely eliminating those bits, politically speaking.
That last is a good point, but something similar could be obtained by making examples of officers who step out of bounds. And that can be done without the negatives that I mentioned elsewhere. There is nothing inherent to public-sector policing that can’t be fixed more easily than public-sector policing could be eliminated.
This isn’t the concept of private police that I have. If the government is still paying for it with compulsory taxation, that isn’t a free market. You have simply gone from social (government owns means of production of socialism) to crony capitalism (government contracts out to favored industries).
So I think you are right about crony capitalist police have those problems. But current socialist system also has many of those same problems.
@henryracette — A few comments on #52.
I think you make the mistake of imagining the consumer or customer as an individual, which is often the case but need not be. For example, corporations are customers as well. They buy all kinds of goods and contract for services in the marketplace.
Cities are customers, consumers in the marketplace, too. A government monopoly police force is, in essence, a contractor with a perpetual contract which cannot be broken for cause, or because a competitor could do a better job for less money.
Also, try to avoid the logical fallacy known as the “excluded middle”, or “false dichotomy”. It’s not a choice between all government and no government. Some areas could be served by government police, others by private security firms, in the same city, much as you have multiple government police forces in places like Los Angeles.
The typical pattern in nearly the entire world is private industry, government regulator. This is how medical care is handled in most cities: some hospitals are governmental but most are not. I think policing might be handled in a similar way, with the government riding herd over private contractors. Then you wouldn’t have the government regulating itself, which is asking for trouble.
P.S.: If you want to see private police in action today, go to a corporate building and try jumping the turnstile. Or, once department stores reopen, try walking out the door with something without paying for it. You will suddenly discover that private police can detain you, even handcuff you.
@taras, I’ve asked you a couple of times, and perhaps I’ve missed your answer, but I’ll ask again.
Police are unique in that they provide a service I am not at liberty to decline. They can pull me over, stop me on the street, and break into my home. As far as I know, no private-sector service, including private-sector police services, has this quality.
When you talk of a private-sector police force replacing government police forces, would you envision that police force having the same authority to impose its services upon me against my will?
Again, I’ll quibble with “socialist” in this context, since we’re talking about “tax funded,” and socialist isn’t synonymous with tax funded.
But I’m interested in how you envision a private, not-government-funded police force would be funded and held accountable. Can you expand on that?
No, they would not have that same authority. No-knock 4am SWAT raids are what government police currently do. Do you like that they do this? You and I probably won’t ever experience this because we are unlikely to run afoul of the Drug War or the Deep State, but this actually happens now to real people.
If you had competing security service providers in a free market, of course you would be at liberty to decline their services. But more likely you’ll buy a policy that is appropriate for your circumstances. Not sure why a private security company would act like the government monopoly police and break down your door. They would approach you or your preferred security company like civilized people.
So are you saying that private police would not be allowed to enter my home by force? Would they be allowed to do so if they had a warrant? Would they be allowed to do so if they had probable cause that a violent crime was being committed in my home?
I’m not trying to be tendentious. I’m just trying to understand how what seem to me to be necessary aspects of policing, the ability to detain people, invade their personal space, and restrain them against their will, would be implemented — if at all — by private-sector police forces.
I can agree that socialism isn’t synonymous with “tax-funded.” I suppose socialism can be self-financing (though obviously not efficient). That’s why I would define socialism as controlling the means of production. In this case it’s security services instead of widgets.