Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.
Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.
Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.
That’s only the beginning of her long, detailed account. It’s a distressing read – but to anyone familiar with survivor testimony from Stalin’s camps, it’s not a surprising read. I noticed just one significant ugly addition to what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did back in the day: “every move is monitored by ceiling cameras”. The Chinese communist guards can’t monitor everything in real-time, any more than the NKVD guards could back then, but they can replay it. No longer do they have to rely on the ubiquitous informers that for a crust of bread would sell their cellmates out in the Gulag. No longer does recognising and avoiding them offer hope of a brief safe conversation.
Now, as then, powerful media political interests would rather the story got ignored – so I encourage people to spread it around. (And h/t instapundit from whom I got the link.)
How long before Blojo demands mask spotting by CCTV Covid stasi.
Is it true, though? I became extremely skeptical of first person accounts after Nayirah al-Sabah’s testimony before the US Congress in 1990 – all lies from whole cloth.
$110 a year to subscribe–you don’t know of a copy of the article free do you please?
Yeah because that’s totally the same 😆
While on the topic of the “ubiquitous informers that for a crust of bread would sell their cellmates out in the Gulag” we might remember this passage:
There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen…
‘Bumstead!’ roared the voice. ‘2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall that piece of bread!’
The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
‘Remain standing where you are,’ said the voice. ‘Face the door. Make no movement.’
…
‘But… but…’ Bumstead protested, ‘This isn’t anything like the ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ we were promised by the anti-capitalist talking heads and media darlings of the 2020s.’
‘Sucker,’ came the voice from the telescreen.
The article was trivial to access when I read it, but I see that has changed. It now says
So readable for a lot less than $110, but it has changed from this morning.
Hannah Arendt gave the best answer to this. Speaking of Kravchenko’s account (which communist parties in the west, with much media help, tried hard to smear by faked libel cases, framing Kravchenko as a defector from the Russian army and etc.), she explained that, while defector information was inevitably difficult to verify, since the totalitarian state works hard to prevent anyone from doing so,
(From ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, Hannah Arendt, quoted from memory.)
If the Chinese Communist Party intentionally attacked the world with the Coronavirus by first letting it grow in Wuhan and then allowing people in Wuhan to travel internationally, but not domestically, THAT is something evil to focus on. And something we can probably get to the bottom of. And if guilty, we can do something about it: sue them (fat chance of winning in a UN court, but put the marker down anyway), embargo them, quarantine them (no entry to the USA), nationalize their assets, zero out the debts we owe them, etc.
And we still have a few thousand nukes if it comes to that. I’m getting to where I think I prefer nuclear war to more of this lockdown anyway. It at least wouldn’t be boring.
OK, I’m kidding about the last bit, but not the first bits.
But relatively quickly exposed.
In general people are unwilling to believe that camps are being set up: Castro, Hitler, Stalin, Milosevich etc were all excused long after word started drifting out. You can put in Abu Graib and Bloemfontein if you don’t just want totalitarian regimes.
The number of cases where evidence started to pile up where there weren’t camps is pretty slim. The truth might be slow to get its boots on, but not that slow.
Eh, Chinese problems. If they really didn’t like it, they could just begin an insurgency. But I suspect most people aren’t all that concerned about the fate of people in prison, just like they aren’t in the west.
Mr Black: “If they really didn’t like it, they could just begin an insurgency. ”
Ok Mr Black, how do you go about that? Just asking for a friend.
Bell Curve–Don’t kid yourself.
Re this latest mask shite from Blojob Johnson.
The game plan is to see how many curs crawl. If enough then masks 24/7 and the only way out to be an armful of Gates gene-rewriting pizz. All “voluntary” of course. You could choose to choke in the mask forever. Then the immunity cert that morphs to digital passport =Bliars ID card but much worse and then social credit a go go.
It wont work because there will be enough like me who will neither wear the mask or take the pizz–but that it is being tried says enough.
It seems to me that the ‘slippery slope’ from frankly polite mask wearing to totalitarian social credit has a couple of logic-shaped mountain ranges to get over.
Jon–Your lack of imagination and general nous regarding the political scum of the Earth is your problem. Quite remarkable in view of the last 4-5 month demo of lies and arrogant evil that has killed some 10s of thousands in the UK alone via the antics of the NHS.
Mr Ecks, you may be being a little hard on Jon. Most people instinctively shy away from contemplating evil on a scale that the self described elite are wont to indulge in.
That’s not because they are dull or lacking in a capacity for rational thought. Rather, I think, it’s because the subconscious mind instinctively knows that some shit, once seen, changes everything.
We each have spent our entire life building a picture of the world. It’s where we live, in truth – the picture, that is, not the world. Very few of us have a place in our picture for malignity of that magnitude.
See it, acknowledge the reality of it and your picture is shattered. And where are you going to live then?
Doing anything mildly inconvenient to yourself to avoid killing many of your fellow citizens is, after all, only the start.
Masks today (to help people get out and about safely and/or with confidence, getting us out of this interminable semi-lockdown), gulags tomorrow. ‘fraid that’s just the facts.
Thanks other Rob for extending some charity but I think my picture is just rosier than Mr Ecks’. Perhaps I’m naive. But, I have a few thoughts on this as someone who sees the utility of lots of libertarian ideas but doesn’t consider myself to have all the badges.
1. The scale of challenge that coronavirus, or for that matter a later pandemic which may be based from a more malignant disease, presents to the organisation of our society is significant. Governments have responded in most places with staggering largesse (of taxpayers’/ newly printed money). It’s difficult for most people to see what the alternative to this is, apart from mass unemployment (which still might happen). All libertarians have in response is personal responsibility and mask wearing is a pretty low cost form of responsibility towards others who may be more vulnerable than us. Shooting that down makes us look callous and slightly weird.
2. Government failure (which has been pretty widespread) ought to be a good libertarian recruiting tool. But as with the critiques of Trump, people can’t be both totally incompetent *and* evil geniuses that need to be taken very seriously. We have to pick a vice to ascribe their failure to. My thought is that incompetence is a far more likely a source of their failure.
3. The organisation of the NHS is clearly suboptimal. But libertarian arguments about healthcare In the UK tend to founder on the need to insulate the poor from unmitigated bad luck. Until we have a better answer, frankly we won’t even get a foot in the door of the debate.
Preach sista!
Jon–frightening the life out of people who should be going to A&E with chest pains and other symptoms so that they don’t go is pretty evil in my book. And telling people receiving cancer treatments to fuck off for the duration likewise. Several 10s of thousands who–as in prev yrs –should have been in A&E etc haven’t come. Hopefully some have made it but some thousands who didn’t make it will be included in the deceitful “65000 CCP virus deaths figs” Along with thousands dead with not from virus and up to 15–20 thou winter flu victims now added to the C19 death list. And of course the “put-em-in-a-home-and-save-the-pension” policy that has accounted for quite a number more deaths.
And to compound the evil deceit we now find that the little list above barely scratches the surface of PHE’s program of lying bullshit.
1- Any multiple tests done with positive results counted as a new case. 3 test on 1 person listed as 3 cases of C19.
2- Any body released from hospital cured who dies in next 3 months from ANY cause listed as virus death. So get run over= C19 death.
3- To an already high false test results positive/negative it seems they knew that having cold/flu in the prev year greatly increased chances of a bogus positive.
4- Also seem that as well as positive results being recorded as positive, numbers of negative test results have been recorded as positive as well–deliberately.
This whole “deadly pandemic” has been an exercise in the ongoing Project Fear. But whereas even remainiac liars don’t believe their own crap about supposed Brexit deaths, the C19 caper has a very substantial UK death rate indeed.
As for compassion:
1- Best mask available to public is NS95. Says on the box that it offers no protection from C19. Holes in mask bigger than the virus. Chain-link fence vs midges. Useless
2-Even if mask worked to stop virus it would have to be sealed to the face. I knew a bloke years ago ex-military trained for germ/chem warfare. Their masks had to be sealed to their faces using Fuller’s Earth. Otherwise mask was not a seal. There is a film on twitter of man taking a big drag on a ciggie, putting on NS95 and breathing out. Cig smoke particles are much bigger than virus and bigger than mask holes so NO cig smoke comes through the mask. But a massive cloud comes out of the top, bottom and sides. Mask no good.
3-Wrapping your underpants around your mug or whatever other soggy homemade face nappy you choose causes heat/moisture build up and will help all manner of microbial nasties get a twinkle in their eye.
4-Like your nose and mouth your eyes are mucus membranes. Gonna wear your govt issue blindfold as well? Tho’ most seem to be already wearing theirs.
In short willingly wearing the stinking mask is vile stupid virtue signalling at its worst. As for giving “vulnerable” souls some false illusion of safety–FUCK ‘EM.
Vulnerable=weak and cowardly +fucking stupid. Two minutes research would end their fears. It is on the back of stupid , cowardly and lazy bastards that most of the mass evil in this world is gotten away with.
Blojo knows all the above–yet here and all around the Earth the scum of the state want masks they know are useless. That alone should induce anyone of brains or spirit to say “Fuck off you scum”.
The Other Rob–You make a good point–but life is what it is and the two-legged shite that infest this planet are what they are. Better to see clear than live in illusions that leave you fit only to be some evil fucker’s lunch.
Mr Ecks, I’m not arguing with most of your logic, I would just suggest that, rather than a grand plan of totalitarian suppression, the apparent incompetence is more likely to result from incompetence.
I agree that we’ve frightened people into staying away from hospitals but since we don’t have fever wards (leftists would say due to austerity- obviously!) our health system is unprepared so what was the alternative? My line of work has me looking at a large (but not quite statistically significant) number of UK causes of death. Almost all the COVID ones had cancer or diabetes too. We knew this- so to some extent they’re caught between a rock and a hard place- given the possibility of asymptomatic transmission (and the possible futility of face coverings as you point out).
Vulnerable = people with underlying conditions such as diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure. Although stupid may correlate in some cases, it’s hardly causal.
It still seems to me that you’ve assembled a list of incompetence-based stupidity and error and concluded that a criminal/ totalitarian mastermind is at work. It just doesn’t seem likely. Our PM doesn’t have the attention to detail to wear a condom. Implementing a social credit scheme is beyond the capability of him, and our arts graduate civil service, however much some subsection of them may be viscerally attracted to the idea.
I see the Daily telegraph now has a piece on the Govt’s own new report saying as many as 200,000 non C19 deaths are the result of the LD.
At a time when I have also seen reports that shorn of the PHE specific lies and the with/from death relabeling that the “Deadly Pandemic” in its own right has killed fewer in UK than the bad flu season of 2008.
NHS has already released figures of C19 ONLY deaths–people who died without any additional conditions.
1318.
We have near ruined ourselves over that.
I’m already hearing “Libertarians? Druggies who refuse masks? Loons.”
The most public of the quasi-libs – American Libertarian Party types – seem to pick the stupidest ground to drag us off to die upon.
Mr Ecks- fine – but there are plenty of people who died of Covid who would have survived with their cancer or diabetes. This doesn’t work well as an argument.
When we look back, I think it’s probable that the view will be either that we should have closed our borders earlier (and repatriated Brits abroad to quarantine, maybe aboard cruise ships) or that lockdown should have focussed upon those most vulnerable to dying.
It is equally likely though, that they will find that C-19 has other health consequences for even those who didn’t get a bad course of it.
We just don’t know. Ascribing sinister plots relies upon the belief that BOTH politicians know more about the virus than they’re letting on (unlikely given that it would require complicity from hundreds of government officials in tens of countries), AND a frankly unrealistic view of their ability to predict the consequences of their actions, when we know from past bitter experience that they are terrible at it.
Sadly, plus ça change….
Thank you Mr Eks.
Yes. Stop confirming my prejudices. Because common sense that tells you that a mask against a virus that has no air tight seal around its edges is simply ineffective for its stated goal.
See, far too much common sense. I’m afraid Samizdata has devolved into Panic central. Honestly, I don’t know if Samizdata has been selected for disinformation by some sort of Marxist collective, or one or other foreign intelligence agency.
This shit didn’t come from Johnson! This has been brewing in the guts of the ‘deep state’ and the tome of regulations were ready to go on the day Parliament instituted the lock-down.
Johnson just didn’t have the backbone or the intelligence to say to his advisers, Woah! That’s some stupid destructive measures you’re suggesting there’.
I also am coming around to the idea that his little spell of fashionable COVID-19 absence, was nothing of the sort. I fancy he had a nervous breakdown.
The Civil contingency act has been on the books for years. The most authoritarian measures ( comparisons with Nazi enabling acts are not misplaced ) yet, those instruments were not sufficient to deal with the COVID-19 scenario. That is frankly, unbelievable.
Wild assertions only undermine arguments (as I recently pointed out elsewhere). At a time when he knew the MSM would (as they soon after did) try very hard to frame Cummings or him for wholly legitimate within-the-rules acts, the idea that Johnson could get away with (would even contemplate trying to get away with) a scam requiring silence from NHS nurses, his security guards and etc. is foolish.
I WROTE THIS POST ABOUT THE CHINESE COMMUNIST GULAG !!!
I fully appreciate that saying “that’s bad” is hardly worth a comment, and people may feel they have nothing else to say. As anyone knows who ever wrote a condolence letter to a friend who had just lost a loved one, when you feel most is not when you feel like saying most.
My own request on this post was to talk, comment, etc., about it elsewhere (when context was appropriate) – to “spread awareness” – so I don’t mind no comments about it here.
But a lot of commenters above seem to found this thread a useful place to bang on about unrelated stuff that concerns them right now – stuff I might sometimes agree with in part – or not – but way off topic.
I invite commenters to imagine adding an on-topic paragraph beginning, “Compared with being in a ChiCom concentration camp …” to their comments and reflect on how they would then read in this thread.
“Yes. Stop confirming my prejudices.”
You’d like us to stop confirming your prejudices? Sure!
Mr Ecks is quite correct about the holes being bigger than the virus, and about leakage around the sides of the mask, but it’s a little more complicated than that.
Coughs, sneezes, talking, heavy breathing, etc. all emit aerosol particles in a range of sizes, from about 0.1-100 microns, around 1,000 to 300,000 particles per cough. These are droplets of mucous and when you are infected they are packed with viruses. The bigger the droplet, the more viruses it contains. A 100 micron droplet has a million times the volume of a 1 micron droplet, and can contain a million times more viruses. But bigger droplets fall to ground faster, and tend not to travel far. The biggest drops fall out of the air within a few metres, medium sized droplets at around 5-10 metres, and the smallest can float in the air virtually indefinitely, travelling kilometres. Droplets also evaporate fast, they have a large surface area to volume ratio, so big droplets evaporate to become small droplets and spread further, but without losing any virus. Also, the further they travel, the more dilute they get, but that depends a lot on wind speed and turbulence, and is complicated to model.
It takes a lot more than a single virus to give you the disease. Most particles are filtered out by the body’s defences around the airways – hairs, sticky mucous, and cillia. Those that reach the cells face more barriers and defences. And if they manage to invade a cell, and penetrate the internal defences too, the immune system kicks in and devises a more specific response. The fewer virus particles there are, the more time it has to do so. So to actually infect somebody, you need hundred of thousands of viruses arriving in a short enough space of time to overwhelm the defences. The dose matters.
So while 1 micron particles do detectably contain viruses, they are thought to be too small a dose to pose much of a risk. The body’s defences mop them up easily. You have to get a few of the bigger particles with thousands to millions of times the dose to overwhelm the immune system.
So the initial understanding was that it was only the biggest particles that mattered, which is why the rule was about stopping within 2 metres for 15 minutes. If you share space with somebody for longer, you obviously get more of a dose, which means smaller particles matter more, which means the separation distance ought to go up. They’ve been starting to worry about the possibility of a build-up of smaller particles over long periods, with people sharing confined spaces indoors more.
The effectiveness you need from masks depends a lot on the size of particle and the dose limit you want to stop. For chemical warfare, with actual gases being a primary concern, you need an actual air-tight seal, hence the measures taken by your military mate. And for long exposures to more deadly pathogens, where you are worried by 1-10 micron aerosol particles, the technical specifications on masks are stringent. Those are the medical masks used by the health service.
For COVID-19, for everyday use, we’re not so bothered. The biggest particles fall out of the air quickly, so keeping your distance is sufficient. The smallest particles are too small a dose. We’re only really interested in the intermediate sizes, around 10-50 microns, that spread further and are still quite big.
Catching them early is more effective because of the evaporation effect. Medium-sized droplets can be stopped by fairly coarse cloth close to the source, but they evaporate and shrink the further from the source they get, so filtering becomes less effective. Coarse cloth also stops a large fraction of the biggest particles, reducing the dose at short range, the biggest concern for transmission. It stops it getting onto surfaces, and being transferred by hand-to-face contact. This, by the way, is the biggest concern for entry via the eyes. You don’t pass large volumes of air over your eyes as you do breathing, so direct airborne infection is unlikely, but hands rubbing the eyes is more common.
On the other hand, wearing a mask makes you more likely to fiddle with it, increasing hand-to-face contact. It may collect a heavy dose in its fabric, which you then touch and spread everywhere. It depends a lot on how people use them, and how they behave.
The biggest problem with ‘non-professional’ masks as Mr Ecks says is leakage around the sides of the mask. Tests show that typical examples only reduce the particle count by about 30%, but if a tight elastic cloth is used to form a better seal to the face around the nose, this goes up to more than 90%. There are things you can do to make ‘non-professional’ masks more effective.
Multiple barriers probably don’t combine linearly – particles small enough to get through one go through the other.
Overall, the science around masks is more complicated than it would at first seem, and there’s a lot we still don’t know. We don’t know what dose is needed to cause infection, or whether a lighter dose gives the immune system time to respond and so results in a milder case, or what the balance is between breathing particles in versus hand-to-face contact, or how much spreading the dose out over time helps. It’s why the scientists were saying up to now that the science on masks isn’t clear, and they’re probably not that effective. It makes sense that they would have some beneficial effect, but it may be that the benefit is trivial, especially if you are careful about keeping your distance and hand-to-face contact, and the costs mean it is just not worth it. Or it may give you the extra 10% leeway in reducing R0 you need to open up 10% more of the economy.
“See, far too much common sense. I’m afraid Samizdata has devolved into Panic central. Honestly, I don’t know if Samizdata has been selected for disinformation by some sort of Marxist collective, or one or other foreign intelligence agency.”
Ah! So we’re all secret agents working for foreign intelligence agencies plotting against you? Oh, yes, that totally sounds like ‘common sense’. Have you also considered alien invaders from outer space, or from a different dimension?
“The Civil contingency act has been on the books for years. The most authoritarian measures ( comparisons with Nazi enabling acts are not misplaced ) yet, those instruments were not sufficient to deal with the COVID-19 scenario. That is frankly, unbelievable.”
So far as I know, they haven’t used the Civil Contingencies act. They used the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. This was described as a consolidation of several earlier laws. The ability to impose quarantine measures to control epidemics dates back to the Sanitary laws of the 1800s and efforts to control recurrent cholera epidemics. Nothing new.
The statutory instrument issued in 2020 under the authority of the 1984 Act was needed to set out the specific details pertinent to this particular disease. You would obviously take different measures under the Act for different diseases.
“I WROTE THIS POST ABOUT THE CHINESE COMMUNIST GULAG !!!”
Yes, and some people *genuinely* seem to think their situation here is comparable. Isn’t that in itself worth commenting on?
Evil circs rarely occur overnight –Chinese Gulags have a cause/effect chain. The time to stop them is before they get started.
As for globo elite–the sheer IQ-stripped numptiness of Blojob’s actions suggest stupidity and fear alone can’t account for events.
If you are trying to reduce chaos etc ( such chaos being conducive to extra economic ruin ) why the fuck give Local Govt trash LD powers? Their ranks –both as employed hacks and Councillor commie-creeps–are already packed with business-harassing scum who will just love the power a supposed Tory PM has given them to lord it locally. A Rush indeed for such types.
Winter 2020: will Blojob use Winter Flu season 2020 to claim a 2nd wave, new LD? On one level he is that stupid. But I think he knows the nation-ending extra economic damage that would cause. An interesting choice–if no 2nd wave bullshit –Bloj is likely just a panicked hysteric. If 2nd Wave & LD is pushed then likely he is globo elites man cos such moves would be pushing us to Agenda 21ype collapse.
Title “Stuff we all already knew” Volume 1.
But it is your considered opinion that a mask that has no air tight seal, and is not rated to extract any
virus from the air stream, is going to stop virus escaping or being inhaled and that despite it being written on the fucking box that the mask isn’t effective against virus infection. In your considered opinion, it is effective against virus infection.
And you wonder why I discount nearly anything you write as worthless?
Not me. I’ve told you straight up, you have destroyed the credibility of anything you say as far as I am concerned.
For all I know, you are a precocious little girl with anxiety issues, needing constant reassurance.
I’ve made my position perfectly clear. Totalitarian regime in a country where the population are culturally inclined to tolerate totalitarian regimes, oppresses its population. Stop press: Dog bites man!
For the best part of a century Tibet has been under the heal of the Chinese. That’s not fashionable any more so the grievance caravan has moved on.
I’m more concerned with the fate of my own country.
“But it is your considered opinion that a mask that has no air tight seal, and is not rated to extract any
virus from the air stream, is going to stop virus escaping or being inhaled and that despite it being written on the fucking box that the mask isn’t effective against virus infection. In your considered opinion, it is effective against virus infection.”
It’s ‘effective’ in the sense that it has an effect. A proportion of the larger aerosol particles are stopped. It’s not ‘effective’ in the sense of reducing the viral dose to zero, or guaranteeing that you can’t get an infection. It just reduces the probability, by some small amount, by reducing the volume of large aerosol particles that get out.
The stuff written on the box is required by lawyers, and doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means.
And I just explained why asking whether it “is going to stop virus escaping or being inhaled” is the wrong question to ask. You’re going to wind up breathing in viruses anyway, they’re in the air. That’s a different question to whether there’s enough to cause an infection.
“And you wonder why I discount nearly anything you write as worthless?”
I already *know* why. You said it yourself: “Yes. Stop confirming my prejudices.” If it confirms your prejudices, you credulously swallow it down without a shred of critical thought. If it contradicts your prejudices, it’s unbelievable nonsense. I already know that no information is ever going to persuade you. And I don’t care. That’s not why I’m talking.
Your predictable response was particularly ironic, in this case, because I was largely agreeing with you and Mr Ecks. You had actually got some bits of the story right! 🙂
That assumes that the airflow goes through the mask. With out a seal, you know that isn’t the case. With a mask, no seal, all you are actually doing is building a reservoir of virons on the inside of the mask in a nice warm environment where they can accumulate and shed on the next exhale.
And it’s my estimation that that ‘small amount’ isn’t worth the damage to our formerly ‘high trust’ society.
“That assumes that the airflow goes through the mask.”
No, it assumes *some* of the airflow goes through the mask, which is obvious since the mask gets damp at the front.
It’s been measured. They have an effect.
“And it’s my estimation that that ‘small amount’ isn’t worth the damage to our formerly ‘high trust’ society.”
Agreed.
APL,
See figure 5 here. The blue and grey bars show the percentage of particles removed, as measured immediately inside and outside the mask.
Also figure 3 here.
NiV – looking at that, am I interpreting it right to understand that wearing a “buff” (neck gaiter, the sort of thing one wears whilst running/cycling) is largely pointless?
I wear a mask on the basis that I might be asymptomatic, and have no interest in, y’know, committing involuntary mass manslaughter, and it’s a minor inconvenience to me for a potentially significant benefit to others.
Whilst the “potentially” bit is still up for debate, I’ll err on the side of taking one for the team…
I already owned a couple of buffs, but upgraded a while ago to “proper” cotton masks (although not to N95)
There seems to be a connection between it and the facemask issue.
When my local supermarket started selling masks, i did not buy them because they were made in China and i did not trust them. Now i am twice as happy that i didn’t.
Niall, I suspect the problem is that, while people can and do pass along such information, there just isn’t that much to say about it beyond “omigawd!” or maybe “nuke the bastards!” It annoys me that, while calling everyone they dislike Hitler, people fail to see the real thing when it appears.
“NiV – looking at that, am I interpreting it right to understand that wearing a “buff” (neck gaiter, the sort of thing one wears whilst running/cycling) is largely pointless?”
That’s how I would interpret it, yes. Although I don’t know how much reliance I would put on specifics – it’s hard to tell if it’s because of the shape, the fit, or the material. It’s also possible that such a mask helps a bit with the largest droplets, but not the smaller droplets these tests were measuring. There are a lot of potential complications.
But the general message I took away from the papers is that you need multiple layers of a tight-weave cloth fitted *tightly* to the contours of the face around the mouth and nose to have any effect. The air has to be forced to pass *through* the cloth. If the weave is tight enough to work as a filter, there is a tendency for the air to just go around it if it has a chance.
They clearly have some effect, but it’s complicated, and hard to be definite about.
“Whilst the “potentially” bit is still up for debate, I’ll err on the side of taking one for the team…”
That’s my impression of the reasoning behind the change. I think if they wanted to do it for public health reasons, they’d be a lot more picky about the type of mask and how it is used. It’s clear that there’s a wide variation, from nearly useless to moderately effective, and things they could easily tell you to do to improve matters, and so far they haven’t. (Although that said, I also think that’s something free enterprise should be doing, we should not be expecting the government to tell us what to do all the time.) I interpret that as indicating a more political motive. It defuses criticism, it’s seen to be “doing something”, and I guess there’s a perception that people are not going back to the shops fast enough because they’re still nervous, possibly more nervous than is justified, and there are hopes this might make people less nervous. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work protectively if people are safe anyway and it gets them back in the shops.
Personally, I’d be more in favour of telling people the detailed scientific truth. If you think it’s safe to go into shops now, say so. Explain how you know, or why you think so. Don’t mislead about it. But they’ve been very worried about people relaxing too much, and abandoning the distancing measures that do work. I don’t know.
“When my local supermarket started selling masks, i did not buy them because they were made in China and i did not trust them. Now i am twice as happy that i didn’t.”
That’s a good point, but I prefer to make a distinction between the ordinary people working in China and the Chinese government. Boycotts, especially silent ones, hurt the former more than they do the latter. Bad publicity and exposure of what they’re up to hurts the latter more than the former. I’m happy to see the media are doing a round of bringing the subject up, grilling the Chinese ambassador, and so on, although vaguely disgusted that it’s taken them this long to do so. I’d like to see a lot more of that. Give the Chinese dissidents a platform, and a megaphone. Give the human rights campaigners a platform. Do some documentaries on the history of the Chinese Communists, the atrocities, the camps. But I’m wary of trying to starve a hostage-taker out, because it’s the hostages and victims who will starve first.
Nullius: you correctly complained some time ago about people’s faulty reading comprehension (wrt predictions about deaths from covid19).
You are now displaying some faulty reading comprehension of your own.
“Nullius: you correctly complained some time ago about people’s faulty reading comprehension (wrt predictions about deaths from covid19). You are now displaying some faulty reading comprehension of your own.”
OK. Explain.
There is nothing to explain, really. As i said, i did not buy the masks because i feared it would be a waste of money; and buying them does no good to the Chinese people if they are made by Uighur slaves.
“As i said, i did not buy the masks because i feared it would be a waste of money; and buying them does no good to the Chinese people if they are made by Uighur slaves.”
Were they made by Uighur slaves?
If you’ve got goods labelled according to the working conditions of the workers, and you choose to buy only the ones with decent conditions, I approve of that. It encourages change. But you’re right – I had missed where you said they were doing that.
If the masks had been made by ordinary paid workers, then the thing that improves their working conditions is to increase demand for their labour. Initially, that means more can get better-paying factory jobs. When everyone has jobs, that means they can demand higher wages and better conditions. Increasing demand is how you make the poor prosperous. I agree that doesn’t work for slave labour, but I wasn’t aware you could tell the difference.
And the fact that they might be made by ordinary workers is reason enough to buy masks??
And what you still don’t get: even if you don’t know that the masks actually work?
“And the fact that they might be made by ordinary workers is reason enough to buy masks??
And what you still don’t get: even if you don’t know that the masks actually work?”
No, and I got that.
I’m in two minds about it, I think one of two things is most likely to be true, specifically with regards to the messaging and timing:
1) The “science” behind mask-wearing has become more accurate as more and more testing has been carried out, and more and more studies and indeed case studies are available; allowing people to compare for instance towns with vs without masking, and countries with vs without, and the consensus has shifted towards “they work”*. So, they government has recommended them, because they believe the consensus, and particularly as we ease out of lockdown, in order to hopefully prevent or mitigate a second spike.
2) The government doesn’t believe “they work” – but they believe that the general public are fearful still, and are looking at the many countries which *do* mandate mask-wearing, and they know that the approval ratings for their handling of the pandemic are pretty shocking, so they’re performing a bit of security theatre to get people out and about and get retail going again. I keep an eye on retail, and the job losses are staggering. So part of me thinks that the government are only doing it in order to stimulate that part of the economy (there’s debates to be had over that – “if so, why not in offices” would be a reasonable counterargument, and I simply don’t know)
*the issue with a simple “they work” is obvious, and you yourself already noted it – to what extent, and how much depends on fit/material, not pulling the bloody thing down to sneeze, and many other factors. As previously noted, I’ve taken this whole thing very seriously indeed, but masks have been a subject on which I was uncertain from the beginning. “Are they helpful or harmful?”
Eventually, I’ve come down on the “helpful, only a little bit for *me*, but much more for *you*” side. On balance, the (real) dangers of people adjusting them, touching their face, not remembering or caring to wash them, etc, are probably more than balanced out by the benefits.
I think “they work” is not a hugely useful statement – I think “they help” is more useful. Even a badly fitted masks, or indeed a buff, can help by (I’m making it up) 15%, say. A good mask – bobby b’s note around N95s has got me thinking – might help by 70% say, in containing transmission in crowds. Think of it like vaccines and herd immunity. If it breaks the chain, then it doesn’t need to be 100%. And it really isn’t a hardship to wear a mask for 30 minutes or so a few times a week.
And importantly – and this is the bit that often gets missed – they could be very helpful when combined with existing measures like the 2m rule (maybe letting us reduce the 2m to 1m safely), handwashing while singing Happy Birthday, and so on. When the whole toolbox is used, they’re just another XX% towards controlling transmission in crowds – but people seem to have got themselves into a very binary situation of making statements like “THEY WORK, DAMMIT!” instead of “they help, and due to maths, if everyone wears one, they will help immensely“; or the equally unhelpful “Well, if they don’t work 100% in protecting me from COVID, then I’m not prepared to wear one, even if they reduce the chances of little old asymptomatic me passing it on to you by 20%.”
3) The whole thing is some kind of deep-state psy-op meant to test our compliance for dehumanising measures, orchestrated by Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Greta Thunberg’s handlers, the ChiComs, Her Lizard Majesty The Queen, Prince Harry and Piers Morgan, for reasons to do with 5G, depopulation, RFID trackers in vaccines, cashless payments and immunity passports.
To say that I find it…unlikely…that “surveillance state” Britain would mandate covering your face as part of an ongoing operation ending in gulags, black helicopters and forced labour camps would be something of an understatement.
Nigel Farage is also not alone now in taking them – and other reporters of ChiCom evils – more seriously.
Niall try explaining this to Marc Cuban or Mr Bloomberg, or any of the “Woke” billionaires.
Or to any of the Big Business Corporations.
They will not say a word against their beloved People’s Republic of China.
Perhaps the West is already dead – it just has not stopped twitching yet.
As for the “Woke” billionaires and the endless Corporate managers who rush to give money to Marxist “Social Responsibility” “Social Justice” causes in the West.
I do not trust my self to write further about them – as my hatred for them is too great.
Battleswarm blog has some more quotes, and links to other reporting.
This report gives some unpleasant details – and compares China’s aborting and prevent Uighur births “to prevent terrorism” to how Egypt’s 13th dynasty aimed to prevent their Jewish slaves from becoming dangerous.
The link I followed to it asked, where is the outrage? I think that the PC, like any who over-act for over-long, have rather lost their capacity for real outrage. It’s not just conscious deceit or unconscious refusal to notice resemblances to things they said they cared about so much as to break many a rule, cheat on many a duty. Inability to feign outrage save for an immediate personal/political goal could be a consequence of a lifetime of that being the way you achieve your goals.
Comparisons to the Nazis, like accusations of racism, are far too cheap in today’s political discourse. This one, however, because it compares with China’s gulag, at least sets a standard. Keeping people in mind of it might assist ensuring that any domestic PC “analogy might strike the uninitiated as coming somewhat from a distance”.
The writer did not notice one similarity.
Orwellian indeed, but also Nazi: on rare occasions in the administrative chaos of the Third Reich, German Jews the SS sent to Poland were returned to camps in Germany; they were recorded as “returned from vocational training”.