Mask bans are evil and dystopian and I am appalled that they’re even being proposed. Wearing masks to protect your health and the health of others needs to be recognized as a right for all and an absolutely essential protection for those who would otherwise be unable to participate in society
eric adams had definitely been trying to get them going in reaction to the false panic about shoplifting target and other retailers seeded in the media tho
i'm honestly not enough of a normie to know how mainstream that got but there was some testing of defenses and messaging on this
it’s worth noting that california already has a law on the books that makes wearing a mask *while committing a crime* its own criminal offense.
so the demonstration-specific ban really is about further marginalizing disabled people, and suppressing legal forms of protest.
There’s also a very crass, petty, owning-the-libs side to it. “You tried to force us to wear them? Well fuck you! We’ll force you not to! How do YOU like it?”. One can never overstate how much of Republican politics is driven purely by a desire to punish and hurt their perceived enemies.
Don't worry, these expansions of state power will never be deployed by fascist elements against the current liberal structures as they displace them. This only further cements the status quo and could never possibly be utilized to make things worse.
With the rise in people protesting the genocide in Gaza and genocides globally, as well as the protests against all the evil legislation Nazis are doing it is getting harder and harder for police to arrest protesters cause masks. normally police arrest protesters at their homes cause they ID'd them.
I keep using that as pushback when people say it's time to take masks off. "So you want to submit to facial recognition cameras?" And then all the right-wingers say "Sounds like you're a criminal lolol"
I will keep saying it until it becomes a social norm: If we want to live in anything remotely resembling a free society, our top priority is to see that even criminals have rights. Otherwise, all the government needs to strip you of your rights is to find any excuse they can to label you a criminal.
It cracks me up that the Venn diagram of people who support mask bans & people who complain about the 1/6 crowd being arrested due to surveillance is more overlap than not. They have a ready made weapon to use in the next insurrection but just they can't bring themselves to use it because MaSkS bAd.
This is, imo, the funniest part of 1/6. It was the one time they all could’ve worn masks!! And they all got caught bc they refused bc woke or something
A lot of them would have still been identified and caught by the internet though, people were going hard into identifying J6ers who were wearing their silly punisher skull neck gaiters by any details they could come up with from photos and video footage
yes, we should all be reasonable and accept the risk to our health so we can be more easily surveilled. of course the people who want it are like "what do you mean 'we'?"
... I suspect some of it is straight up just resenting that some of us took Covid seriously and disagreed with their worldview, and you could see it on our faces
Left geotagging on, hell. Half of them were livestreaming their criming.
"Mash that Like button and subscribe, and remember me, Honest Dave, when it's time to buy your next used car in Stumpjump, Arkansas! We're goin' in!"
But they are fine ignoring and even enabling some violent protestors - see the off campus attackers of the UCLA protest, and the police doing nothing both during and after.
If I were a brilliant chemist or material scientist, I'd invent magical hypoallergenic makeup, transparent even, that confounds facial recognition, like this ^but undetectable^ en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute...
(Magically, it keeps up with facial recognition technology improvements)
