Prickly City by Scott Stantis for May 27, 2020

At least Carmen got it right.

The reason I wear a mask and isolate myself is to keep from making you, out there, sick.

Once again, Carmen and Winslow reverse roles.

And totally absent in the Bonespurs administration, or followers.

Try explaining that to the cashier at the grocery store.

The cartoon illustrates a point that is beyond the comprehension of Trump Disciples.

Well done, Scott.

During this lockdown our supermarkets (etc) have instituted early morning shopping hours for senior citizens on Tuesday and Thursday.

Might I suggest they also establish certain shopping hours/days for those self-proclaimed ‘Freedom Fighters’ who refuse to wear a mask? And provide a ‘Freedom Fighter-Funded’ hazardous duty pay premium for the employees – AND the cleaners – who work those hours. The stores would add a certain percentage uplift to their bills.

After all, FREEDOM HAS A PRICE . . .

Some clown (on the internet, of course) the other day told me he wouldn’t wear a mask because soldiers died for our freedom.

These people believe that soldiers died so they wouldn’t have to wear medical protection during a pandemic. How messed up do you have to be to believe that?

And claiming the sacrifice of soldiers as justification for refusing to sacrifice anything to help fellow Americans during a national crisis is as topsy-turvy as it gets.

A young man at the Memorial Day weekend pool party when interviewed said if not wearing a mask was good enough for his president, then it was good enough for him.

These highly specific ideas about the ease of vanquishing coronavirus through personal action are showing up, explicitly, at the anti-lockdown protests that have happened, so far, in 22 states and counting.

There, anti-vax and medical freedom campaigners holding signs saying things like “VACCINE MANDATES VIOLATE BODILY AUTONOMY” are being joined by a mixed-nuts assortment of right-wing groups—militias, Proud Boys, Alex Jones and his InfoWars crew, slightly more mainstream pro-gun activists.

All of them share a belief, as Slate’s Tom Scocca recently put it, “that thinking about other people’s needs or interests in any way is tyranny by definition,” and that calls for collective action by entities like the CDC have a sinister ulterior motive.

The nominal point of those protests is calling for the states to allow local businesses to reopen.

But not that far under the surface was a strong dose of disease denialism, and an intensely, literally self-centered worldview.

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Dating back to the 1960s, the right has simply not believed in the value of public or collective action.

More of it, though, is a political sleight of hand, meant to turn the total failure of the Trump administration to meaningfully address a public health emergency killing thousands of people every day into a solvable problem.

The work of manufacturing and distributing masks and tests and setting up a regime of contact tracing is difficult and risks failure.

Denying that doing so is even necessary, and that the crisis can be easily solved by Vitamin C and individual initiative, though, makes government action unnecessary.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/wxevj5/the-coronavirus-truthers-dont-believe-in-public-health

Scrolling through your Twitter feed, it may not be obvious when you come upon a bot account — something that is more likely to occur in the era of COVID-19.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have discovered that much of the discussion around the pandemic and stay-at-home orders is being fueled by misinformation campaigns that use convincing bots.

To analyze bot activity around the pandemic, CMU researchers since January have collected more than 200 million tweets discussing coronavirus or COVID-19.

Of the top 50 influential retweeters, 82% are bots, they found. Of the top 1,000 retweeters, 62% are bots.

“We’re seeing up to two times as much bot activity as we’d predicted based on previous natural disasters, crises and elections,” said Kathleen Carley, a professor in the School of Computer Science’s Institute for Software Research and director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) and Center for Informed Democracy & Social – Cybersecurity (IDeaS.)

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“Tweeting more frequently than is humanly possible or appearing to be in one country and then another a few hours later is indicative of a bot,” Carley said.

More than 100 types of inaccurate COVID-19 stories have been identified, such as those about potential cures.

But bots are also dominating conversations about ending stay-at-home orders and “reopening America.”

Many factors of the online discussions about “reopening America” suggest that bot activity is orchestrated.

One indicator is the large number of bots, many of which are accounts that were recently created.

Accounts that are possibly humans with bot assistants generate 66% of the tweets.

Accounts that are definitely bots generate 34% of the tweets.

https://www.scs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-discussing-%E2%80%98reopening-america%E2%80%99-may-be-bots

Day 34 of the Georgia Economic Recovery.

Strangely, long before the Wuhan Contagion, I learned I have a magic ability to make people sick.

Ceptin’ it’s da right-wing populists, who are not wanting to wear da masks.

Being elderly, having some underlying conditions, places me in the high-risk group. So I mask and glove when I have to leave my house. I have been accosted by unmasked people telling me I’m “a hater,” or “brainwashed,” or “a coward.” But be that as it may, I’ve come up with a new strategy. Every person I see wearing a mask, I say from a safe distance, “Thank you for masking.”

Voltaire!

This comic should be posted in billboard size all over the place! So sensible!