Masks as the hollow talisman of a new fundamentalism

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Wonderful new article in The Critic: Faith Mask, that questions whether medical masks serve more as symbol of a new religion rather than virus-blocking medical device:

“Will we throw off our masks in 2021? Some public health officials, our new priests, want us to keep them, perhaps because they are true believers in the protective power of the mask, or perhaps because masks symbolise our obedience and compliance to the new creed: public health policy. If you don’t wear a mask, or point out the scant evidence in favour, you are labelled a Covid-denier. The implication will be you do not care. There are fines for such heretics. There is also public shaming.

Masks symbolise values that go far beyond science, a new creed we are finding the words for. They emblemise a nascent “religion” in which the moral code is based upon extending life, not securing your place in the afterlife. But in this liminal time, before we have the words and authoritative codification, make no mistake about the symbolism. 

Masks are the vestiture of the faithful, signalling belief and, importantly, obedience. Handwashing and sanitising are daily baptisms, washing away our innate human infectiousness just as the Christian baptism washes away our innate sin. 

Cathedrals play host to mass vaccinations in a powerful intersection of the old and new religions. Spaced congregations of the masked elderly wait, listening to organ music for their modern miracle, the rite of biomedical transubstantiation. As with all religions, your priests demand obedience and piety.”

 

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The loudest voices in favor of endless lockdown-ism were shut-ins to begin with

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The advent of endless streaming content, high-speed internet, and screens everywhere, means that confinement is far less unpleasant than it would otherwise be. This seems dangerous, because it makes people far more complacent about forced isolation, forced separation, and forced quarantine. They’ve got their screens, so the loss of freedom doesn’t sting as much as it could and should. And for the people screaming the loudest for endless lockdowns, they were shut-ins to begin with.

The writers for corporate press, the social media addicts, the people whose existence is spent almost entirely in front of a screen, who make their living do so, are the ones providing support for unending pandemic authoritarianism. It doesn’t cost them anything, they feel the deprivation, and they may even have resented all along the people who have actual lives away from screens, a life lived at least partly outdoors, with friends and family and face-to-face interactions.

And these people with real lives in turn have a far less active online presence, which means that their opinions about the entire charade are not made widely known. They don’t have time to troll social media, enforcing a hollow appearance of virtue with inexhaustible vitriol.

The people providing a faux consent for endless lockdowns are the ones for whom “lockdown” means absolutely nothing.

New COVID stimulus package would jack up minimum wage, while also eliminating the tipped minimum wage

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The restaurant industry has been dealt a series of nigh mortal wounds over the past year, and the new Democrat-promoted economic aid package would drive a final dagger through its heart. Specifically, the new aid package would completely eliminate the “tipped minimum wage” of $2.13 an hour, forcing restaurants to begin forking over $15 per hour, which would only have the effect of eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs, and even restaurants, themselves. We’d be left with a fast food wasteland, and far fewer other options.

The $2 server wage is a stroke of genius, providing a priceless entry-level position for people would otherwise never break into the job market, incentivizing good service in exchange for a good tip, and affording invaluable work experience.

A $15 minimum wage, particularly one imposed on restaurants, would lock millions of young adults out of the job market for years, diminishing their lives and careers dramatically.