TheBanyanTree: Wherein Peter goes shopping (peter macinnis)

[Sally Larwood]

My thoughts exactly. I agree with your every word Tobie. 

Sal
Sent from my mini iPad

> On 9 Aug 2020, at 07:13, trsmith44 trsmith44 <trsmith44 at cox.net> wrote:
> 
> You nailed every aspect of this, Tobie. Trying to reason with morons is
> like giving glasses to the blind.
> 
> 
>> On August 8, 2020 at 4:33 PM tobie at shpilchas.net wrote:
>> 
>>    Interesting about that attitude.  I’m in Berkeley, so what with our hotbed of radicalism here, we’re not hearing a lot of that shit.  My great Aunt graduated from UCBerkeley in 1919 and said that as far back as she could remember Berkeley was always considered to be the place where revolutionaries and social provocateurs congregated to do their roiling.
>> 
>>    What interests me is that the wearing of the mask is more like keeping a victory garden during WWII, or the slogan on the posters, "Loose Lips Sink Ships". (no I wasn’t there. My mother was and she talks).  You didn’t see a lot of people running around swearing to holler state secrets at the top of their lungs from the roof of every building because their freedoms were being curtailed.  Perhaps framing the mask in terms of patriotism would rally the reactionary troops.
>> 
>>    On the other hand, why am I thinking of logic?  What an idjit.  Logic has nothing to do with it. It’s frightening how people can be manipulated, reason twisted, hysteria injected so easily into the citizenry. When truth and lies are confused, jumbled together until it’s an amalgamated bolus of suspended disbelief, people are subject to the most irrational suggestions.  And then there’s the problem with trying to talk sense to nonsense.
>> 
>>    There are anti-vaxers: the folks who refuse to have their children immunized against serious diseases that used to be the major threat to a child's survival. The purported reason (or one of them) was that vaccinations cause autism. Well then….being the mother of twins: one with autism the other not, I’ve got some experience and research to back my scoffing at that nonsense. Dozens, no, far more than dozens, of rigorously controlled experiments have proven that there is absolutely no connection between vaccinations and autism. But here’s the interesting dynamic: If someone is set on the falsehood (or on any bizarre whacked conspiracy theory) the more evidence you present to the contrary, the more entrenched their belief. 
>> 
>>    So what do we do with these, "I refuse to wear a