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Governor DeSantis held a blockbuster press conference yesterday titled “Mandate Freedom,” in which he coined what may be my favorite new expression. He was talking about the possibility of new federal mask mandates, and said:

“We see all this stuff, and we see they are not following the science. They are trying to follow a narrative. They are trying to follow an agenda. Here in Florida, we did not — and we will not — allow the dystopian visions of paranoid, hypochondriacs control our health policies, let alone our state.”

https://twitter.com/DeSantisWarRoom/status/1699784459103711376

Haha! “Dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs!” That’s money! I can’t wait to use that terrific line someplace.

Optimizing outcomes by thinking the best of people...

The first trap I managed to escape was trying to convince ‘narrativers’ of anything other than the narrative. Stepping away from those pointless ‘arguments’ saved me a lot of heart ache and time. My energies went to analyzing data.

The second trap I managed to escape was falling for the lures of trolls with regard to wasting my time responding to their hit pieces. ...

The third trap I am still learning how to side-step is the one that is really hard to see. I am not even sure how to define it, but I do know how to define the outcome: division. If I do fall into one of these traps, I usually end up with misgivings against someone that perhaps I have never even met. That kind of thing. It reminds me of when I found myself yelling at my screen when I still had facebook back in 2020. I had to stop myself one morning and simply ask the rational question: Why am I wasting all this energy, and ramping up my blood pressure over something I can’t even verify? Is this the purpose of these ‘messages’?

Ultimately with people, my strategy is basically to think the best until I have proof that they are crapola. And by crapola, I mean someone who really is consistently intent on hurting others. I think these people are few and far between, in reality, and that most people want to do good and perhaps even think that they are doing good even if they aren’t. ...

Thinking the best of someone creates and maintains an environment of possibility - a best potential whereby that someone has a chance to live up to this best potential. Thinking badly about someone does the opposite, and creates and maintains an environment of doubt, deprivation and non-productiveness. The former is productive and allows for the possibility of best outcome. The latter is non-productive and encourages worst outcomes and actually, potentially prevents any good from manifesting. ...

Try something new. Optimize our outcome. Even if some people are doing ‘questionable things’ ask yourself: have you walked a mile in their shoes? Will you? Are they really evil, or are they just ego (driven)? To be egotistical is not the same thing as being evil and let’s face it, none of us have any idea what we’re doing so isn’t it best to try to drop ego stuff and help each other along the way. This is hard one for us humans.

Optimizing outcomes by thinking the best of people...

Study: 'Neuroticism predicts national vaccination rates across 56 countries'
Which definitely correlates with real world experience, especially on social media

The more neurotic you are, the more likely you were to get vaccinated. So sayeth SCIENCE itself!! (Until this paper gets retracted at least.) ...

While we are only going to discuss a few highlights from this study, it is actually written in fairly comprehensible English that is accessible to laypeople for those interested in reading it in full. This study also drops some ‘truth bombs’ not often seen in academic literature. ...

Translation: The level of neuroticism for a country’s population had a statistically significant correlation to vaccination rate - the more neurotic the population, the higher the vaccination rate.

And it’s not like neurotic excesses were in short supply over the pandemic:

All the Very Important Science People have been wrong about everything, which means that none of them can pull the plug on this farce. They’ll continue their doubtful performances, selling slightly updated versions of failed pharmaceutical products and making claims well in excess of the evidence to an ever shrinking audience of virus enthusiasts.

This weekend, the Empire State Building bragged about lighting itself up in blue and cyan, in respectful observance of the Branch Covidian holiday season that begins with “New Booster Day.”

The building was mercilessly mocked in the comments, which I will link for your amusement.



https://twitter.com/EmpireStateBldg/status/1703182364497625350

During the lockdowns I was absolutely gobsmacked by how thoroughly so many of my friends fell for the psyop and succumbed to the mass psychosis.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, most of them are quite convinced that carbon dioxide is a pressing threat to the survival of the human species, one which photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries will save us from; that race is a social construct; that the pay gap between men and women is real; and that a woman is whoever uses she/her pronouns.

Still, in this case, it all just seemed too obvious to me that the entire thing was a put-up job, a hysterical collective nervous breakdown cultivated by an unholy alliance of politicians greedy for power and pharmaceutical behemoths greedy for cash. I mean, we had the Diamond Princess results in March of 2020.

These aren’t stupid people, by any means. I’m talking PhD scientists, computer programmers, engineers. In terms of raw cognitive grunt this is a group with serious horsepower. So despite the fact that they’d largely swallowed every other mandatory absurdity in the prevailing culture, I retained a naive expectation that they’d eventually come to their senses and realize that COVID’s dangers were exaggerated.

No such luck. Most of them still haven’t comes to their senses. Even several months ago masks remained a common sight in professional settings, and of course, the majoity dutifully, even enthusiastically, lined up for their untested gene therapy injections. Which, as so many predicted before the rollout, have done absolutely nothing to protect anyone from the Coof of Doom, and have generally proved to be far more trouble than they’re worth what with all the myocarditis. Many of them got sick from the shots. That didn’t stop them from getting more. ...

“Smart people do this thing, so if you want to be smart you should do it too!” is in practice a highly effective argument for manipulating the behaviour of people who identify as smart. ...

The propaganda in favour of vaccination has been absolutely relentless for a couple of decades, now. The party line has been that any skepticism at all towards not just vaccination as a concept, but even the product safety of any specific vaccine, is a marker for anti-science obscurantism. ...

“Vaccine hesistancy” will get you branded a kook, in other words, and laughed at for being stupid. Smart people don’t like getting laughed at for being stupid. It is extremely important to them that they be thought of as smart people by other smart people, because being smart is central to their identities. ...

Notably, it is precisely the opposite ends of those traits which are strongly selected for in our academic institutions, probably more intensely than they select for intellect: low Openness, high Conscientiousness, high Agreeability, and high Neuroticism are all strongly preferred. That combination of traits tends to produce an intellectual community that values conformity far more than it values truth. When the majority of the world’s intelligent people are acculturated into a system that prioritizes obedience over veracity, looking at what the smart fraction do might not be a great guide to actually smart behaviour. In fact, it may be the precise opposite.

Unfazed by data, scientific research, or common sense, the maskaholics are back. In response to an uptick in Covid cases, they’ve begun reinstating mask mandates. So far, it’s just a few places—a college in Atlanta, a Hollywood studio, two hospitals in Syracuse—but the mainstream media and their favorite “experts” are working hard to scare the rest of us into masking up yet again.

Never mind that at least 97 percent of Americans have Covid antibodies in their blood as a result of infection, vaccination, or both. Never mind that actual experts—the ones who studied the scientific literature before 2020 and drew up plans for a pandemic—advised against masking the public. Never mind that their advice has been further bolstered during the pandemic by randomized clinical trials and rigorous observational studies failing to find an effect of masks and mask mandates. Scientific evidence cannot overcome the maskaholics’ faith.

It’s tempting to compare them with the villagers in Cambodia who erected scarecrows in front of their huts to ward off the coronavirus—but that’s not fair to the villagers. Their Ting Mong, as the magic scarecrows are called, at least didn’t hurt any of their neighbors. The mask mandates imposed harms on the public that were well known before Covid, which was why occupational-safety regulations limited workers’ mask usage. Dozens of studies had demonstrated “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome,” whose symptoms include an increase of carbon dioxide in the blood, difficulty breathing, dizziness, drowsiness, headache, and diminished ability to concentrate and think. It was no surprise during the pandemic when adverse effects of masks were reported in a study of health-care workers in New York City. More than 70 percent of the workers said that prolonged mask-wearing gave them headaches, and nearly a quarter blamed it for “impaired cognition.”

97 percent of Americans have Covid antibodies in their blood as a result of infection, vaccination, or both.