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Hello darlin’, which parallel universe you from? “Vast majority of adults still wearing face masks in public, ONS data shows”
Last night, I went to a social event of over a hundred people. No masks. I just walked down the street, went to supermarket, saw maybe 1 in 5 wearing a mask, probably less.
Where is this vast majority? Not where I live, that’s for sure.
WTF is going on?
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Last time that I did my big shop at Asda I would guess that it was about half and half, but that was down on the previous week’s visit. No mask wearers at the gym. Out in the street there is the odd person wearing one when they are nowhere near anyone, those people are beyond help.
About 50/50 here. I think masks are like magic talismans. They might as well be wearing garlic to ward off vampires. I think it is a similar mechanism. Ancient people were scared of dangerous forces that they did not understand, and so leaders took advantage of this. Assuaging their fears, giving them something (like a crucifix or a necklace of garlic) that didn’t make any actual difference, but did make them feel better, make them feel like they were doing SOMETHING against something against which they felt powerless.
This seems to me to very much parallel masks: a basically useless thing, with the imprimatur of the “religious” authorities which gives the unthinking masses a sense of control over something that terrifies them. With the exception that masks also allow a Karen affect too. I guess if vampires are coming, and you have your garlic then it is ok if the other guy doesn’t, that way he is going to get him and not you. But this story of Covid, the fear has been whipped up to the point where the vampires are going to get everyone.
I’m seeing a lot less than 50/50 where I go. But, it’s highly dependent on where it is. I see more masks in places which are more “necessary” like the supermarket, but in places that are viewed to be less essential, it appears that the percentage goes down significantly.
80% wearing masks in Twickenham supermarkets.
About 35% wearing masks in supermarket in Hammersmith right now
Over here, the vast majority of people (including yours truly) stopped wearing masks when the mandate was terminated; and masks keep becoming less common. It’s been maybe a week since i last saw one in a supermarket. I tried not to stare.
It was never much of a burden for most people, because masks were required only indoors, in public spaces.
Well, i guess that it was a burden for people who had to be indoors in public spaces for the entire working day. Especially for people with respiratory problems — who should probably not have been indoors in public spaces anyway.
Few masks in my part of the world these days, and those are generally worn either by the very old, or else exactly the people you’d expect (pink/blue hair, Tuck Frump t-shirt, BLM sticker on the bumper of their car).
The funniest one I saw was a man in his early twenties riding a bicycle down the street. He was gasping through his mask as he rode along, at least 50 feet from anybody. But at least everybody knew how virtuous he was …
Mentally ill people have a lot of fear, a lot of paranoia. Masks are a way to let them feel they have some power over the things they fear. The wearers don’t become enraged by non-wearers because of the virus risk. They become enraged because you’re belittling their paranoia.
Hardly anyone wearing them here anymore.
Outer London. Most people wearing them still unfortunately. >80% I would say. Not in the gym obviously (you’d think).
Bobby B. Good point. Guy at work ‘came out’ with having mental issues, and he is a big proponent of masks.
Anyway..counting down the days until I need to show my vaccpass to get into my very WFH-amble office job. Trying to convince my wife to prepare for being poor for a while…she doesn’t like the idea.
Some people wear the mask in supermarkets – and some people, including myself, do not.
Sussex coast. About half are still masking in the shops but it’s steadily going down.1 in 10 of the young to middle-aged walking along the seafront are still wearing them but the elderly show more common sense. The once ubiquitous light blue disposables have been replaced by brightly coloured and decorated fashion statements or football team colours and logos for the men. The street market does a roaring trade in such items. There are anti lockdown/media/mask stickers everywhere you look.
Mind you we are somewhat old fashioned down here. Armed Forces Day is still a big occasion and Emily Thornberry would not care for the flags.
Reminds me of the polling in the UK that said the Conservatives would lose the 2015 election… and the polling that said Brexit would lose in referendum… and the polling that said Trump would lose 2016 election… and the “COVID deaths” – most of which were anything but…
It’s almost like they manipulate data to push an agenda, but no… couldn’t be…
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Experts-ask-to-see-data-behind-new-policy-16347545.php
Two fun links to show your COVID skepticism-curious friends!!
Just for clarity, let’s check what that original article actually said?
https://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/national/19480167.vast-majority-adults-still-wearing-masks-freedom-day-research-shows/
From which one might reasonably infer that, even if a person only wore it once for five minutes in the whole of that week, they would have been included in that “95%”.
W.r.t. vaccine passports to get to work, well, claim to be a vegan and lawyer up. At the very least, you’ll probably be able to talk yourself into a very generous severence package. And, if they do treat you like that, then you probably want to work elsewhere in any case.
“Some 95% of people in Britain said they wore face coverings when outside their home in the past week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found.”
Maybe they did the poll in London and it included people who wore a mask on public transport as it has been made a condition of carriage. That could very well skew the stats.
Ah, so not exactly a lie then, just deliberately misleading. This week I’ve been to my local surgery to give a blood sample, had to wear a mask, I’m one of the 95% myself.
I have been to both Oxford and Cambridge in the last week, in Cambridge, I would say around 20% of adults going around the streets have been wearing masks (or had them around their chins), whereas in North Oxford (peak pompous remainerdom) it is around 45% wearing masks in the streets.
Elsewhere, in small-town England, it is around 10% wearing masks.
The company I work for (software company) in the south west I am very much the odd one out in there I don’t mask at all anymore. I am the only one.
We were in the pub last night at least so some progress (last few months have seen a fair bit of – want to go out for a curry? No I got to wait the 12 weeks for maximum vaccine efficiency) but they were all masking up en route to the bogs, which seems absolutely. 100% ridiculous to me, like saying a quick Hail Mary for luck.
They were even talking a bit about mask etiquette (I just ignored and got up naskless 😂).
The locals around here though have in the main completely ditched the masks. Just walking around the town centre a mask is a fairly rare sight.
I assume this is some sort of weird class thing now, where middle class corporate drones are taking it all very seriously and the more independent, working class maybe (not really a wealth thing IMO, a brickie makes as much as my colleagues) are not.
So like Brexit I assume the polls are unrepresentative.
In part maybe paranoia, in part just a habit and it takes a few weeks to break a habit.
I’ve never worn a mask and very rarely been challenged. Gone about my normal business the whole time but do try to avoid very crowded spaces but I think that’s partly instinctive as one gets older anyway.
Also Twickenham.
I work in a job where I meet the public all the time.
I’d say about 80% of the people I meet in the course of my work still wear masks, and of the 20% who don’t about half apologise and/or make an attempt to cover their mouth and nose with their clothing.
The majority of people who don’t wear masks are the elderly and young men with a cocky swagger about them, often tattooed as well.
While driving down the M1 yesterday (yes, I know, but it was the only route home), stopped off at a motorway service station, not a million miles from Watford Gap, to use the toilet. Almost everyone inside the building were wearing masks including one man, not old, sat at a table with what looked like a carton of coffee and a scone! He would lift the mask up to take a bite of his scone and then lowered it again while chewing. Same action to take a sip of his drink. No one around him, apart from me, seemed to think that this was weird.
Revision of the situation at the gym. The kiddies’ swim classes are on this morning. Lots of mummies and daddies on the poolside watching, mostly wearing masks. Bizarrely, the kiddies are having to sanitise their hands before being dunked into a tank of chlorinated water.
what Hucker said at 9:10am, about what the 95% might really mean.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And in a Western world where the public’s education in math and civics have been fully gutted over the past 30-40 years, statistics can be used any way that anyone wants. And they are, by Left, Right, Middle.
Used to be that journalists would interpret and explain such things–no need for granny to know the difference between a mean and a median. But journalists are in the same civics and STEM deprived boat as the general population so 95% gets tossed out in a way that means “just about everyone, just about all the time”. Mission accomplished.
97% of scientists agree that man made CO2 is causing climate change.
Yeah, right.
Well Mr Ed – Cambridge clearly beats Oxford (less mad – at least in this respect).
My mother would be pleased – my mother always supported the light blues.
C.S. Lewis was very much an Oxford man (part of that last great interwar flowering of thought in Oxford) – but before his death in 1963 he was predicting that Oxford would be more corrupted than Cambridge. Traditionally Cambridge had been the home of many demented ideas, Plato, Karl Marx, Keynes – but it also traditionally gave students and academics time-to-think.
Oxford was more a “production line” (and he did not mean the car industry) – where people were taught what to think and how to repeat it in examinations, before going on to get “good jobs” in government and so on.
Perhaps this is unfair to Oxford – but it would explain the feel of conformity about Oxford.
I live in Richmond, not a lot of tattoos here 😋 & I’d say maybe 40% wearing masks today. Work in Knightsbridge (not many tattoo there either) & I’d say 30% masked at most (literally no one in my office).
My wife observed three men, running at speed, through the local town centre carrying large plastic bags, closely pursued by a policewoman and two security guards.
The three men were masked, so that was 100 per cent of the survey showing shoplifters are fully masked where we live.
Aberdeen: masks are generally on inside and off outside.
Waterstones bookshop in a big English regional city on Saturday afternoon. The barefaced outnumbered the masked-up. I was pleasantly surprised, pleasure and surprise scarcely being that shop’s stock-in-trade. Admittedly there were more masks out and about in the Philosophy section than in Cosy Crime, but there were a damn site more shoppers in the latter than the former.
Further to Mr Ed’s observations of North Oxford, though, I’ve long suspected the Big Education town-criers of logical brain-farts such as “Smart People Do X, so X is the Smart Thing To Do”. Their error is supposing their superior IQs have immunised them against Basic Human Nature: the desire to fit in, and to do what your neighbours are doing.
So this provincial fag-smoking piece of pond-scum supports Professor Piffle’s freedom to ride up and down Woodstock Road on his Vegan-friendly unicycle, wearing his Fuck-Boris Face Mask, from now till Mabon Day; long may you roll, brother. The reason he wants everyone to be made to mask up with him, though, is – I suspect – less to protect ourselves, others, and the National Health Service GC, than to make him, personally, feel less like a gigantic bell-end.
“97% of scientists agree that man made CO2 is causing climate change.”
67.2percent of statistics are made up.
North Oxford… About as typical as Broadmoor, and considerably less sane (I lived there for a year). The neutron bomb is what it needs/
X Trapnel – in the United States (and increasingly in Britain) the “educated” believe their own existence is evil. Bad for the “environment” (which is why they do not have children), and they believe that their very existence is bad for “disadvantaged and marginalised groups”.
Classical Marxism at least had clear historical and economic doctrines – they were FALSE but they were clear, one could spell them out and then REFUTE them.
The utter mush of Frankfurt School Marxism (“err Marxism does not seem to be working, let us throw in some Freud, and some Keynes, and some anti racism stuff, and some feminism, and some Gay Rights, and some Trans Rights, and let us mix in some Green stuff as well”) is just a mess – and yet the education system teaches people to parrot it, and one can not get a “good job” without it.
As Mark Steyn put it recently..
“China regards mathematics as important, America holds mathematics to be RACIST – so it is no wonder that the United States is now 37th in mathematics among children”.
And if a Western academic is honest (about crime figures, about temperature figures – about just about anything) they will be forced out – tenure or no tenure. There is no defence against the charge of being a “racist” (even if you are a black academic pointing out that the danger to black people is NOT from the police – “you ain’t black” even if you have black skin, according to Joseph Biden), and there is no defence against the charge of being a “denier” – you can have been an environmentalist all your life, but if you point out (for example) that temperature records have been dishonestly changed – then you are a “denier” and you most be destroyed.
All this can only end one way – the West is doomed. If we did not destroy ourselves with the reaction to Covid 19 – we would have destroyed ourselves some other way.
Re the 97% Claim – Here’s the contents of a little file I keep handy:
http://www.thegwpf.com/ian-plimer-97-of-scientists-agree-on-nothing/
Mr Ed and Paul reminded me of a Cambridge fellow that i once saw sporting a T-shirt with the (University of) Oxford coat of arms.
Above the coat of arms: OXFORD
Below the coat of arms:
because not everybody can get into Cambridge.
At the same time, the “educated” are terrified that their own existence might end. I have never seen such risk-averse people as the elite. They will shut down society, impoverish their trashy elements, and starve out third-world people on the slim chance that their lives might be shortened.
My theory: even as an agnostic, I think a much bigger slice of society sees none of the promised afterlife that religious societies have always awaited, and so they will go to inhuman (inhumane?) lengths to stay alive.
WTF is going on?
You are being lied to by unaccountable pollie-muppets, untouchable civil serpents and a vast swathe of “churnalists”, ALL of whom seem to still have JOBS!
That is all.
What could possibly go wrong?
““you ain’t black” even if you have black skin, according to Joseph Biden.”
There was I thinking that saying black is white was just a figure of speech.
My “mask-watch” experience since 19 July in north London:
Pub – no masks including the staff.
Swimming pool – ditto.
M&S first visit – lots of masks, only me and a couple of others not wearing them.
M&S second visit – some masks but far fewer, and over half not wearing them.
Co-op – next to no masks.
Buses – fewer and fewer with each passing day.
Perhaps the survey was conducted in Bradford, or who knows, Rotherham.
We are destroying ourselves?? What part does George Soros play, Paul? He seems to be using his billions to install his pet district attourneys in numerous locations througout the USA, in the secretive UK, imagine what havoc his ‘new society’ termites are causing in the infrastructure.
Then there is the ‘Common Purpose’ operation. What damage are they doing. It seems Tony Blair took the opportunity of his tenure to completely undermine the UK institutions, which admittedly were on the decline prior to that.
We are not destroying ourselves, we have been infiltrated and are being destroyed.
APL – yes Mr Soros is bad man, and yes “Common Purpose” spreads bad ideas. But this is all the tip of the iceberg – the education system is saturated in Collectivist ideas, and so the people it produces (the Corporate Managers and so on) often are as well – a person does not spend the first decades of their lives in education and then return to be a “racist-sexist-homophobic-transphobic-Islamophobic….. (on and on)” normal Western person when they finally leave university, the decades of death-to-the-West indoctrination do have an effect. But then you know all this – our society is being infiltrated and is being destroyed, but the problem is a lot bigger than Mr Soros in America or “Common Purpose” here.
Take the example of the University of Cambridge – which I praised above.
I recently watched an interview of Dr David Starkey (a leading British historian) – because he used the words “bloody blacks” (and he is just as likely to say “bloody whites”, or “bloody cats”, it is just the way he speaks) he was “cancelled”.
50 years of scholarship meant nothing – Cambridge (led by the Vice Chancellor) turned on Dr Starkey, as did his old college, and as did every institution. All for saying “bloody blacks”. We live in a country that still pretends to admire Winston Churchill and others – but if they were still about, they would be sent to prison for the words that come out of their mouth on a daily basis.
Lord Halifax, who was always mealy mouthed, might be tolerated today – the chap who was astonished that the Japanese attacked on a Sunday (that the Japanese were not Christians did not seem to occur to him – nor did it occur to him that Christians have often fought battles on Sundays).
Sadly, it appears that such “guardians of liberty” as Dr Davies of the IEA think the problem (the extermination of liberty) is exaggerated. Liberty is being exterminated – and they either do not see it, or they do not care.
bobby b.
I respectfully disagree. I do not think that the people who imposed the lockdowns and so on did so out of fear for their own health.
Look at their behaviour. As soon as the cameras are off, they take their masks OFF. They also go to all the places that they say are dangerous to go to, and do all the things that they say are dangerous to do.
People like the Governor of Michigan are not sincere – they pushed all this as an excuse for Collectivism, not out of concern over health (their own health – or the health of anyone else).
After all if they really were terrified of the disease they would desperately push Early Treatment.
Instead they have systematically smeared Early Treatment – right from the start. And they still have not changed their position even after 18 months of evidence.
Whatever this is about – it is not about fear of a disease.
So this is another thing that Dr S. Davies is mistaken about.
I suspect that it’s much like the reports of drug use and random fornication in the 60s.
Mostly bullshit.
But, also occurring because some Inbred Elite in the East queried their friends about their children, and – wadaya know? ALL of the little Sons of Twits were using, abusing, and canoodling like crazy!
So, by nuclear-level extrapolation (amazing that a knuckle-draggin’ Midwesterner like me actually knows about that statistical term!), ALL the well-brought up teens also MUST be doing the same.
Despite not having the money, or lack of sense, to do so.