I think the Biden Administration's attitude toward these mandates is "Hold me back!" i.e., like a batter who gets hit by a pitch and doesn't want to charge the mound and fight the pitcher, but knows he's going to look bad if he doesn't. So he stands at the plate and yells until the catcher comes out and grabs him. In this case, the pitcher is those opposing the mandates, and the catcher is the judge. Biden would love to support the mandate, but darn if that Trump-appointed judge isn't standing in her way!
The administration seems to think this is the best of both worlds -- they look like they're standing up for protections and "Science" while the restrictions people hate go away. But I think it will make them look bad on both counts.
--
There was a post from Bob Watcher lamenting people not masking at Safeway because "Shopping
But if someone met their future spouse while shopping at Safeway, maybe it would be. Or even ran into an old friend. A masked activity is an activity where nothing special will happen. Maybe for Dr. Watcher, who's married and lives with his family, that doesn't matter so much. But it might for the rest of us.
If Dr. Watcher wants to wear an N95 everywhere, he can go for it. But the rest of us are entitled to make our own calculations.
I make the same calculation as he does during surges (I'm not worried about the health effects of covid, but it's very inconvenient to get it and have to miss work), but if I had a different life situation where getting it was less annoying, I'd make a different calculation. Or if I lived with an organ transplant patient, I would mask more often. Either way I'm not sure why we can't just make our own decisions, especially given that wearing a KN95 or N95 is pretty effective regardless of what others are doing.
I mean, I got a cold one Friday this winter after my three vaccinations, and I learned only from a sense of civic duty (and a rapid test) that it was the dreaded 'rona. Two years ago, it probably wouldn't have kept me home from work.
Some people can't unbreak their brains from 2020, or at least, they haven't showed it yet.
Have always appreciated your rational takes on COVID, especially allowing reasonable people to make reasonable decisions.
You point it out perfectly that the Biden's admin approach makes no sense. Why not request a stay if this is an emergency? Either this admin loves being unpopular or truly believes it must defer to the CDC.
The maxim that "hard cases make bad law" is not well applied here. There was nothing really hard about the case: the statute clearly authorizes the CDC to make these kinds of regulations; no one is particularly burdened by the regulation; whether it is a good idea to impose this particular regulation at this particular time is not the courts' problem and could reasonably be left to politics. Instead, to resolve this case, the judge held that imposing a masking regulation is literally beyond the CDC's statutory power in any pandemic no matter what the circumstances because it does not count as a "sanitation" measure within the meaning of the statute. Phenomenally stupid and harmful.
Well Barro is saying that it wouldn't be tenable for the judge to make such a ruling if it wasn't such a case. That such a ruling wouldn't have been tolerated in March 2020 instead of two years later, no matter what the statute says.
A crappy judge is more prone to a crappy-quality check on another branch's power... I want the other branches to be smart enough to recognize that reality.
Exactly this. Yes, the Biden admin should not have kept kicking this can down the road. And while we're at it, Congress *also* could have done something useful: we're talking about a statute here.
The solution to a political problem should come from the elected branches of government, not some lousy opinion from a partisan hack in the judiciary. Everything has become stupid.
> whether it is a good idea to impose this particular regulation at this particular time is not the courts' problem and could reasonably be left to politics
We're more than two years into the pandemic, so Congress has clearly had plenty of time to clarify that it means that the CDC has unchecked, time-unlimited power to regulate travelers' behavior.
To put this another way: if there were an Ebola outbreak tomorrow in New York, the CDC couldn't require masking because this Trumper judge decided she was going to twist the statute to say FJB.
From the logical perspective I absolutely hate this and all the newfound covid constitution stuff from the same people whose response to 9/11 was "the constitution is not a suicide pact". But judges are politicians. And as depressing as this is, I think Alito could find a way to blame ebola on someone he already hated and the constitution would once again find a way.
Gorsuch however I think is just a very weird guy with a weird (but principled) view of the law. He might actually prefer an ebolapocalypse to allowing the CDC to do things.
Not to get too controversial but what's your ideal choice of vermouth for a Manhattan? My go to is Carpano Antica though I like to mix it up when at a good bar. Dolin is pretty great for an airport.
One of the worst reasons for forever masking is the "variants" panic. Basically if you believe in the theory of evolution we're going to have variants forever, because viruses evolve. So unless you're a creationist, "let's wait until we aren't facing a scary variant" makes no sense whatsoever as a reason to extend any of these NPIs.
Out of a hundred million Americans who were listening at all, a few thousand particularly bored, particularly aimless middle-class people with no *real* problems (seemingly all of them also on Twitter) found a little bit of direction and purpose in their bitterly banal lives in....
...am I talking about Trumpers on 1/6 or the covid-forevers?
Like seriously, this NYT op-ed from a few weeks ago is basically just restating to NYT readers that the theory of evolution applies to viruses, so we won't magically stop getting new variants. It's not a bad op-ed, but the territory it covers is just so obvious that I'm sort of depressed it even needed to be said.
Of the very #online self-described covid-serious-takers, I would wager one million billion internet dollars that:
If you asked them if climate change (for example) is an *existential* threat, they would enthusiastically nod their heads with nary a second thought.
Anyhoo, I couldn't cosign footnote #2 more enthusiastically. The public health establishment (and, to a lesser extent, this administration) picked this battle. They didn't have to. I hope it was worth it to them; it wasn't worth it to me, and thank God the administration can now just whistle away from this bridge and drop a match. Whether it was worth a 1% or 20% chance in 2024, you can't say it was worth it any longer.
I see Josh commented on the dumb poll showing 56% of people want the mandate to remain. Besides the likelihood that the poll is bad, I guarantee you that those 56% don’t actually ride public transit. Possibly don’t even fly much. A lot of my liberal friends are apoplectic over this decision and almost none of them use transit. But they firmly believe those people who do should be masking up. Grrrr.
In defense of James Fallow asking for the Pilots' manager, the pilot was speaking in a professional capacity, it's appropriate to appeal to his corporate overlords if he's out of line. I think in a context where pilots are distinctly right of center and their customers thanks to educational polarization tend to be left of center, airlines would be smart to find a way to tell their pilots to leave politics at home.
Critically, Alaska pilots are also unionized, high demand employees, so the conversation is actually "hey, don't do that" rather than "we're firing you because that's easy and PR is hard."
I've been flying again since September of last year, and even back then I noticed extremely lax (i.e., no) enforcement of mask rules in airports or on planes. Two months ago I was on a flight where a couple across the aisle from me kept their masks off and talked and laughed obnoxiously the entire flight and no single person said a word to them, not even the attendants. Even within the airport where I live (Kansas City) there were regularly a lot of people walking around without masks at all last fall, or down around their chins, and literally no one was enforcing it, including the security guards these people were walking past.
I feel so ambivalent about all of it. I hate masks, and I am more than happy to discard them. I never wear them anymore unless it is required where I am shopping, or I am asked to, in which case I will willingly but not happily put it on. In local businesses where it is suggested but not required I will generally follow the lead of the employees: If they are wearing them, I will; if they're not, I won't. I get furious in airports at people not wearing them, but that has more to do with my rule-following ethos than anything else. As long as it is required, I feel like everyone should do it, and people that don't are just entitled assholes who clearly think rules don't apply to them. What makes you above the law, huh??
Incidentally, I am a psychologist, and one of my clients works as a gate agent for an airline and has basically told me no part of their job is as stressful as mask enforcement. At one point my client called in sick to work for an entire week because they were so stressed out and sick of dealing with aggressive and boorish behavior around masks. For people like them, I guess I'm glad the mandates are lifted. I feel like a lot of people just trying to do their jobs were put in impossible positions by uncaring corporations and the sociopathic and cruel public. I do worry intensely about the future of this country.
I had a similar attitude, and part of why I followed the mandates is that I didn't want to put these employees in a position where they had to enforce the mandate on me.
I happened to be on a flight yesterday. I saw the decision was handed down, before I got on the flight, but kept the mask on for that reason. I did notice the pre-takeoff spiel did not include any mask-related instructions, nor did the beverage service come with a reminder to mask up between sips.
Then, the announcement came over the intercom that masks were now optional, and all the flight attendants took theirs off, so I did the same.
The fact that flight attendants, who are most impacted by the mandates, and are the most likely to be at risk, were so eager to lose theirs, is proof enough for me (though I'll admit it is aligned with my priors).
Interesting take, thank you. I had been a rule-follower my whole life, true to by rustbelt roots, vestigial lapsed Catholicism, and law degree, but this thing broke me. It started with the post-2001 security theatre (I'm old) and this reductio ad absurdum finished the job. For a long time, I would wear a mask if required but in no other circumstances (I've had the three shots, and don't live/work with vulnerable people). Recently I have had occasion to use the subway more frequently than I usually do, and noticed that there was no enforcement and half the riders were not wearing masks (many more were "wearing" them on chins etc). So I didn't bother.
I was interviewed by a (masked, outdoors) NY1 reporter earlier this week, before the mandate was lifted, as I walked to work. He was basically asking whether I was scared about the uptick in cases in the city and whether the local mandate should be reinstated, it seemed like the goal was to give frightened residents an opportunity to beseech our overlords to Keep Us Safe. Nope! I stated (less elegantly) the view expressed in this post, and apparently they ran it.
I still see many, many people in NYC walking around with masks outdoors, and DC, where I just spent a few days, seems to have an even higher proportion of such people.* I hope that we as a society can move past this thing, but I don't feel terribly optimistic.
*pollen levels in both places are very high right now, so allergy-masking could be a rational move
I mostly agree, and especially with your second paragraph, although I probably mask up more than you do. In part, that's because of three things: my "follow the rules" mentality, a residual "respect covid" mentality that I probably believe in despite knowing better, and the fact that where I live, masking is more part of the culture than it is in other parts of the US.
One of the incidental responsibilities at my job is to enforce mask wearing. It's "incidental" in that if I see someone unmasked, I'm required to politely tell them to put on a mask, but enforcement is by no means my primary job. The prospect of telling someone to mask is indeed daunting. I can certainly imagine why your client feels stressed about it. (I do have a coworker who confessed to me that when they encounter someone at work without a mask, they just pretend not to notice. I'll neither confirm nor deny whether I adopt a similar approach.)
I cautiously welcome the (apparent) lifting of the mask mandates and most of the other restrictions.
I'm "cautious" because my risk profile is very low and I want to at least be mindful that others feel much more vulnerable than I do. That said, I realize the restrictions often (usually?) didn't work, or don't work anymore or aren't necessary any more, given the current situation or what we now know about the virus.
But I know too many people who very sincerely believe they or someone they live with are at risk. They may be mistaken, or in some cases their circumstances may be exceptional, or in other cases they may be doing the quasi moralizing "respect covid" without fully being aware they're doing it. But on balance, I think they're sincere. I don't think we should necessarily build public policy out of that sincere feeling, but I don't want to be glib about their concerns even as I endorse ending (most) restrictions. (To be clear, I'm not accusing Josh or anyone here of being glib. I'm just personally chary of that.)
I will say I'm one of those who loved going back to the office and putting an end to working from home. Of course, that also means I was one of the lucky few people who were able to keep their jobs and work remotely while my workplace shut down. Many, many others didn't have those advantages. But in a way that's hard to explain (especially to people who hate going to the office), it felt liberating to return to the workplace. It's an exaggeration to say I'm misty-eyed thinking about it, but at least in a figurative sense, I am.
I’m writing from a London-to-Paris train. No one in either city wears a mask anywhere inside or out. But on this train armed guards walk the corridor to enforce the mask mandate, which you can skirt by slowly eating grapes or sipping water. Some world man.
"Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday in an interview with Chris Wallace of CNN+ that the appeal was important not only to preserve the mask requirement but also “to ensure the C.D.C.’s authority and ability to put in mandates in the future remains intact.”"
Maybe an article titled "Why does the Biden administration seem dead-set on eroding public trust in its authority and decision-making?"
Seriously though, I legit don't understand their logic here. It's literally the "be as bad at politics as possible" playbook the Democratic party has been reading from for years. Time to maybe throw that out?
I agree with you that every person should be making their own decisions about behavior.
Some of us have our own personal reasons for avoiding crowded indoor places and masking when we can't. That does not mean we are scolds about people who take a different path.
I hope you are aren't scoffing at or scolding those of us who are more cautious than you are. We might be older or immunocompromised or in frequent contact with people we love who are vulnerable.
Yours is the main reason why even though I welcome the removal of restrictions, I want to remember that others feel differently, and often with good reason. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Josh I think you’re mainly right but wrong on Fallows. His point was it’s not the pilots place to make political announcements, they’re just supposed to fly the plane.
I think the Biden Administration's attitude toward these mandates is "Hold me back!" i.e., like a batter who gets hit by a pitch and doesn't want to charge the mound and fight the pitcher, but knows he's going to look bad if he doesn't. So he stands at the plate and yells until the catcher comes out and grabs him. In this case, the pitcher is those opposing the mandates, and the catcher is the judge. Biden would love to support the mandate, but darn if that Trump-appointed judge isn't standing in her way!
The administration seems to think this is the best of both worlds -- they look like they're standing up for protections and "Science" while the restrictions people hate go away. But I think it will make them look bad on both counts.
--
There was a post from Bob Watcher lamenting people not masking at Safeway because "Shopping
@Safeway
is def not in my "If I get Covid from this, it would've been worth the risk" category" https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1515854877733232642?cxt=HHwWhICp5dv-sokqAAAA (I'll ignore the questionable validity of extrapolating the positivity rate among those who got tested to those in Safeway).
But if someone met their future spouse while shopping at Safeway, maybe it would be. Or even ran into an old friend. A masked activity is an activity where nothing special will happen. Maybe for Dr. Watcher, who's married and lives with his family, that doesn't matter so much. But it might for the rest of us.
If Dr. Watcher wants to wear an N95 everywhere, he can go for it. But the rest of us are entitled to make our own calculations.
I make the same calculation as he does during surges (I'm not worried about the health effects of covid, but it's very inconvenient to get it and have to miss work), but if I had a different life situation where getting it was less annoying, I'd make a different calculation. Or if I lived with an organ transplant patient, I would mask more often. Either way I'm not sure why we can't just make our own decisions, especially given that wearing a KN95 or N95 is pretty effective regardless of what others are doing.
I mean, I got a cold one Friday this winter after my three vaccinations, and I learned only from a sense of civic duty (and a rapid test) that it was the dreaded 'rona. Two years ago, it probably wouldn't have kept me home from work.
Some people can't unbreak their brains from 2020, or at least, they haven't showed it yet.
Have always appreciated your rational takes on COVID, especially allowing reasonable people to make reasonable decisions.
You point it out perfectly that the Biden's admin approach makes no sense. Why not request a stay if this is an emergency? Either this admin loves being unpopular or truly believes it must defer to the CDC.
The maxim that "hard cases make bad law" is not well applied here. There was nothing really hard about the case: the statute clearly authorizes the CDC to make these kinds of regulations; no one is particularly burdened by the regulation; whether it is a good idea to impose this particular regulation at this particular time is not the courts' problem and could reasonably be left to politics. Instead, to resolve this case, the judge held that imposing a masking regulation is literally beyond the CDC's statutory power in any pandemic no matter what the circumstances because it does not count as a "sanitation" measure within the meaning of the statute. Phenomenally stupid and harmful.
Well Barro is saying that it wouldn't be tenable for the judge to make such a ruling if it wasn't such a case. That such a ruling wouldn't have been tolerated in March 2020 instead of two years later, no matter what the statute says.
Legal realism, perhaps.
A crappy judge is more prone to a crappy-quality check on another branch's power... I want the other branches to be smart enough to recognize that reality.
Exactly this. Yes, the Biden admin should not have kept kicking this can down the road. And while we're at it, Congress *also* could have done something useful: we're talking about a statute here.
The solution to a political problem should come from the elected branches of government, not some lousy opinion from a partisan hack in the judiciary. Everything has become stupid.
> whether it is a good idea to impose this particular regulation at this particular time is not the courts' problem and could reasonably be left to politics
We're more than two years into the pandemic, so Congress has clearly had plenty of time to clarify that it means that the CDC has unchecked, time-unlimited power to regulate travelers' behavior.
To put this another way: if there were an Ebola outbreak tomorrow in New York, the CDC couldn't require masking because this Trumper judge decided she was going to twist the statute to say FJB.
So if there were an Ebola outbreak tomorrow, restrictions would come from a body that has *not* spent the last two years pissing away its credibility.
I could think of worse things.
From the logical perspective I absolutely hate this and all the newfound covid constitution stuff from the same people whose response to 9/11 was "the constitution is not a suicide pact". But judges are politicians. And as depressing as this is, I think Alito could find a way to blame ebola on someone he already hated and the constitution would once again find a way.
Gorsuch however I think is just a very weird guy with a weird (but principled) view of the law. He might actually prefer an ebolapocalypse to allowing the CDC to do things.
Not to get too controversial but what's your ideal choice of vermouth for a Manhattan? My go to is Carpano Antica though I like to mix it up when at a good bar. Dolin is pretty great for an airport.
One of the worst reasons for forever masking is the "variants" panic. Basically if you believe in the theory of evolution we're going to have variants forever, because viruses evolve. So unless you're a creationist, "let's wait until we aren't facing a scary variant" makes no sense whatsoever as a reason to extend any of these NPIs.
Out of a hundred million Americans who were listening at all, a few thousand particularly bored, particularly aimless middle-class people with no *real* problems (seemingly all of them also on Twitter) found a little bit of direction and purpose in their bitterly banal lives in....
...am I talking about Trumpers on 1/6 or the covid-forevers?
Like seriously, this NYT op-ed from a few weeks ago is basically just restating to NYT readers that the theory of evolution applies to viruses, so we won't magically stop getting new variants. It's not a bad op-ed, but the territory it covers is just so obvious that I'm sort of depressed it even needed to be said.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/28/opinion/coronavirus-mutation-future.html
Of the very #online self-described covid-serious-takers, I would wager one million billion internet dollars that:
If you asked them if climate change (for example) is an *existential* threat, they would enthusiastically nod their heads with nary a second thought.
Anyhoo, I couldn't cosign footnote #2 more enthusiastically. The public health establishment (and, to a lesser extent, this administration) picked this battle. They didn't have to. I hope it was worth it to them; it wasn't worth it to me, and thank God the administration can now just whistle away from this bridge and drop a match. Whether it was worth a 1% or 20% chance in 2024, you can't say it was worth it any longer.
I see Josh commented on the dumb poll showing 56% of people want the mandate to remain. Besides the likelihood that the poll is bad, I guarantee you that those 56% don’t actually ride public transit. Possibly don’t even fly much. A lot of my liberal friends are apoplectic over this decision and almost none of them use transit. But they firmly believe those people who do should be masking up. Grrrr.
In defense of James Fallow asking for the Pilots' manager, the pilot was speaking in a professional capacity, it's appropriate to appeal to his corporate overlords if he's out of line. I think in a context where pilots are distinctly right of center and their customers thanks to educational polarization tend to be left of center, airlines would be smart to find a way to tell their pilots to leave politics at home.
Critically, Alaska pilots are also unionized, high demand employees, so the conversation is actually "hey, don't do that" rather than "we're firing you because that's easy and PR is hard."
I've been flying again since September of last year, and even back then I noticed extremely lax (i.e., no) enforcement of mask rules in airports or on planes. Two months ago I was on a flight where a couple across the aisle from me kept their masks off and talked and laughed obnoxiously the entire flight and no single person said a word to them, not even the attendants. Even within the airport where I live (Kansas City) there were regularly a lot of people walking around without masks at all last fall, or down around their chins, and literally no one was enforcing it, including the security guards these people were walking past.
I feel so ambivalent about all of it. I hate masks, and I am more than happy to discard them. I never wear them anymore unless it is required where I am shopping, or I am asked to, in which case I will willingly but not happily put it on. In local businesses where it is suggested but not required I will generally follow the lead of the employees: If they are wearing them, I will; if they're not, I won't. I get furious in airports at people not wearing them, but that has more to do with my rule-following ethos than anything else. As long as it is required, I feel like everyone should do it, and people that don't are just entitled assholes who clearly think rules don't apply to them. What makes you above the law, huh??
Incidentally, I am a psychologist, and one of my clients works as a gate agent for an airline and has basically told me no part of their job is as stressful as mask enforcement. At one point my client called in sick to work for an entire week because they were so stressed out and sick of dealing with aggressive and boorish behavior around masks. For people like them, I guess I'm glad the mandates are lifted. I feel like a lot of people just trying to do their jobs were put in impossible positions by uncaring corporations and the sociopathic and cruel public. I do worry intensely about the future of this country.
I had a similar attitude, and part of why I followed the mandates is that I didn't want to put these employees in a position where they had to enforce the mandate on me.
I happened to be on a flight yesterday. I saw the decision was handed down, before I got on the flight, but kept the mask on for that reason. I did notice the pre-takeoff spiel did not include any mask-related instructions, nor did the beverage service come with a reminder to mask up between sips.
Then, the announcement came over the intercom that masks were now optional, and all the flight attendants took theirs off, so I did the same.
The fact that flight attendants, who are most impacted by the mandates, and are the most likely to be at risk, were so eager to lose theirs, is proof enough for me (though I'll admit it is aligned with my priors).
Ditto. I, too, don't want to put employees in a position to have to ask me to mask.
Interesting take, thank you. I had been a rule-follower my whole life, true to by rustbelt roots, vestigial lapsed Catholicism, and law degree, but this thing broke me. It started with the post-2001 security theatre (I'm old) and this reductio ad absurdum finished the job. For a long time, I would wear a mask if required but in no other circumstances (I've had the three shots, and don't live/work with vulnerable people). Recently I have had occasion to use the subway more frequently than I usually do, and noticed that there was no enforcement and half the riders were not wearing masks (many more were "wearing" them on chins etc). So I didn't bother.
I was interviewed by a (masked, outdoors) NY1 reporter earlier this week, before the mandate was lifted, as I walked to work. He was basically asking whether I was scared about the uptick in cases in the city and whether the local mandate should be reinstated, it seemed like the goal was to give frightened residents an opportunity to beseech our overlords to Keep Us Safe. Nope! I stated (less elegantly) the view expressed in this post, and apparently they ran it.
I still see many, many people in NYC walking around with masks outdoors, and DC, where I just spent a few days, seems to have an even higher proportion of such people.* I hope that we as a society can move past this thing, but I don't feel terribly optimistic.
*pollen levels in both places are very high right now, so allergy-masking could be a rational move
I mostly agree, and especially with your second paragraph, although I probably mask up more than you do. In part, that's because of three things: my "follow the rules" mentality, a residual "respect covid" mentality that I probably believe in despite knowing better, and the fact that where I live, masking is more part of the culture than it is in other parts of the US.
One of the incidental responsibilities at my job is to enforce mask wearing. It's "incidental" in that if I see someone unmasked, I'm required to politely tell them to put on a mask, but enforcement is by no means my primary job. The prospect of telling someone to mask is indeed daunting. I can certainly imagine why your client feels stressed about it. (I do have a coworker who confessed to me that when they encounter someone at work without a mask, they just pretend not to notice. I'll neither confirm nor deny whether I adopt a similar approach.)
I cautiously welcome the (apparent) lifting of the mask mandates and most of the other restrictions.
I'm "cautious" because my risk profile is very low and I want to at least be mindful that others feel much more vulnerable than I do. That said, I realize the restrictions often (usually?) didn't work, or don't work anymore or aren't necessary any more, given the current situation or what we now know about the virus.
But I know too many people who very sincerely believe they or someone they live with are at risk. They may be mistaken, or in some cases their circumstances may be exceptional, or in other cases they may be doing the quasi moralizing "respect covid" without fully being aware they're doing it. But on balance, I think they're sincere. I don't think we should necessarily build public policy out of that sincere feeling, but I don't want to be glib about their concerns even as I endorse ending (most) restrictions. (To be clear, I'm not accusing Josh or anyone here of being glib. I'm just personally chary of that.)
I will say I'm one of those who loved going back to the office and putting an end to working from home. Of course, that also means I was one of the lucky few people who were able to keep their jobs and work remotely while my workplace shut down. Many, many others didn't have those advantages. But in a way that's hard to explain (especially to people who hate going to the office), it felt liberating to return to the workplace. It's an exaggeration to say I'm misty-eyed thinking about it, but at least in a figurative sense, I am.
I’m writing from a London-to-Paris train. No one in either city wears a mask anywhere inside or out. But on this train armed guards walk the corridor to enforce the mask mandate, which you can skirt by slowly eating grapes or sipping water. Some world man.
I think we need a follow-up, Josh.
"Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday in an interview with Chris Wallace of CNN+ that the appeal was important not only to preserve the mask requirement but also “to ensure the C.D.C.’s authority and ability to put in mandates in the future remains intact.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/us/politics/cdc-transportation-mask-mandate.html
Maybe an article titled "Why does the Biden administration seem dead-set on eroding public trust in its authority and decision-making?"
Seriously though, I legit don't understand their logic here. It's literally the "be as bad at politics as possible" playbook the Democratic party has been reading from for years. Time to maybe throw that out?
It appears to me many of these same points could be made about other topics/issues that ultras on both ends tend to get worked up about.
I agree with you that every person should be making their own decisions about behavior.
Some of us have our own personal reasons for avoiding crowded indoor places and masking when we can't. That does not mean we are scolds about people who take a different path.
I hope you are aren't scoffing at or scolding those of us who are more cautious than you are. We might be older or immunocompromised or in frequent contact with people we love who are vulnerable.
Respect should flow both ways.
I think most people are willing to respect people's choices in determining their own risk profile, though I'm sure there are exceptions.
What I'm less willing to support is when that spills into imposing the most cautious profile on others with things like mandates.
Yours is the main reason why even though I welcome the removal of restrictions, I want to remember that others feel differently, and often with good reason. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Eh sure but Biden's CDC is establishing rules enforceable by law.
Josh I think you’re mainly right but wrong on Fallows. His point was it’s not the pilots place to make political announcements, they’re just supposed to fly the plane.
“ I’ll always remember where I was when the airline mask mandate was lifted”. Is 💯 Josh. ❤️🌴🍸✈️