love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

— The Golden Sir (@screaminbutcalm) March 12, 2019

are there really grown adults who fear that wearing a mask is an affront to their masculinity or are the media just fucking with me?

Fogs up yer specs.

oh i know that, luckily i'm not short-sighted enough that i can't just leave my glasses off when i'm wearing a mask

i get laziness, i get right wing brain worms, but the macho thing must be made-up for phone-in responses or something

I think the backlash is exclusively from ppl knee deep into the culture war who view masks as part of the idpol 5g Rothschild BLM conspiracy to take away blackface and are distraught at are Boris caving in to that; masculinity is somewhere in the mix there but not a straightforward justification.

This also makes me hope the amount of ppl thinking that is relatively small tho I think plenty of others will go along with it just because of laziness and "hey my mate said".

xposts

There are plenty of people who will just do the opposite of what they're told as a matter of principle. It's not even a macho thing it's more of a master-of-my-own-destiny thing.

I do wonder if bored journos looking to stir up a bit of drama contribute to the dumbassery

No doubt.

It's all bollocks really, the vast majority of people in this country don't want to either catch or spread the rona and just want it over with, they'll wear the masks. They would also, I suspect, quite like to be let into shops in the first place.

I'm sure Toby Young or Brendan O'Neill has done an opinion on it but how many people do these guys represent really?

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-07-15/positive-news-is-coming-on-oxford-covid-19-vaccine-writes-robert-peston

I think Bobby P might be overinflating the balloon a little here but I hope not.

Desmond Swayne is correct, and I won't be spending any money in any shop that has mandatory face masks. If the government think this is going to encourage people to shop they're wrong. It will have the opposite effect. pic.twitter.com/uTUs7IyIxa

— 🇬🇧 Centaur_UK 🇬🇧 (@Centaur_UK) July 14, 2020

Lol, I'm literally waiting for compulsory mask wearing to be in effect before I visit any shop that isn't absolutely necessary. That said I haven't missed any shops or really any aspect of the capitalist dream and maybe I should go live off grid in a yurt in the Andalusian countryside.

Swayne Flu.

https://i.ibb.co/c3FNdVf/Capture3.jpg

christ, is brendan o'neill launching his own range of beanies?

welp!

Apparently washing your glasses in soapy water before putting your mask on stops them fogging up

It's called breath control breath control breath control stylee!

Yeah I mean I haven't been in any kind of shop since the start of April but we have good delivery options here. The few weeks before that the whole process of shopping was physically anxiety inducing and I don't miss it as an experience at all.

The one thing I do miss is the ability or go to someone's house but there's no economic benefit to that so the government is quite happy to let the science to the talking.

There are plenty of people who will just do the opposite of what they're told as a matter of principle. It's not even a macho thing it's more of a master-of-my-own-destiny thing.

Its somewhat in line with seatbelts and motorbike helmets

I'm sure Toby Young or Brendan O'Neill has done an opinion on it but how many people do these guys represent really?

This is really worth remembering, their job isn't to reflect or represent any particular constituency, they are there to provoke reactions (and to disrupt the cozy homogeneity that has crept into the marketplace of ideas and is pushing free thinkers onto the sidelines)

I have been going to nearby shops the whole time (gloves and mask on) and I don’t Deliveroo or order online because I feel like I’d be allowing a certain class of worker to carry risk for me. Since we’ve been allowed to ‘bubble’ I go to one neighbour friend’s house because she also lives alone and that’s fine.

There are plenty of people who will just do the opposite of what they're told as a matter of principle. It's not even a macho thing it's more of a master-of-my-own-destiny thing.

There's hardly any of them too.

The one thing I do miss is the ability or go to someone's house but there's no economic benefit to that so the government is quite happy to let the science to the talking.

TBF going to someone’s house generally involves being indoors with them for several hours, without a mask. Shops might be half an hour tops. There’s a difference there.

I don’t Deliveroo or order online because I feel like I’d be allowing a certain class of worker to carry risk for me

this is tricky cos if everyone piles into the shops then that also carries a risk. and all the background warehousing and distribution stuff is going on whichever path you take. definitely important to think about this stuff though. don't know what the answer is - maybe do as big a load of shopping as possible at any one time and maybe that will cut down the number of potentially hazardous interactions?

Much more into people that want to get back to office discourse. Which is having its own moment (and something we talked to on here yesterday).

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/jul/14/end-of-the-office-the-quiet-grinding-loneliness-of-working-from-home

This report does actually cover quite a few sides of the issue. From the lack of space at many home to perhaps greater invasion of privacy from new apps attached to work computers.

(The people who talk about how much they like the office is a thing, but I assume that's younger people who have just started working...I find that one weird but I'm old)

I was the only person wearing a mask in small local food shop yesterday (the owners were doing it during the first weeks of lockdown only) but tbh have been very slack when it comes to mask-wearing in small places I'm in and out of within a few minutes.

Where I live (WC1) the shops are queue-free for the most part - maybe five people waiting, tops, on a Saturday - so I don’t feel uneasy about popping in for milk and Interesting Reductions a couple of times each week, or buying replacement items from eg. Superdrug in person. I get the bulk of my food from my local veg stand or the farmer’s market and the latter has very short supply chains.

Yeah I think being physically in the shop might be more dangerous for workers, our supermarket delivery drivers have just been leaving things outside the door, knocking and moving to a safe distance before we open. It's not risk free, particularly I suspect at the pick-up points, but it's probably safer than being in a space with hundreds of people going in and out every day. Otherwise we have a butchers and a fishmonger and a bakery nearby who club together and send someone round on a bike with a basket on the front to leave stuff in front of your building, which the most middle class thing I've ever seen but it works pretty well in this scenario.

I wouldn't use Deliveroo or any other rent-a-slave start-up even in a pandemic.

Meals I've ordered from one company that isn't Deliveroo is actually turning up from people with Deliveroo-branded bags as if there has been some sort of loosening up of things and more and more people have signed up with multiple operators, regardless of which one you actually order the food from. Might've been a thing before the pandemic but didn't notice until recently.

I have never used Deliveroo or Uber and obvs won’t be starting now.

'He’s like a political Roy Cropper' – What Conservative MPs make of Keir Starmer’s first 100 days

I've spoken to members of the government and Conservative MPs to get their verdict on the new Labour leader so far:https://t.co/i8CtuksCLR

— Katy Balls (@katyballs) July 14, 2020

Labour source gets in touch to point out that Roy Cropper (played by David Neilson) actually had a winning streak - won best actor at the 2013 soap awards 🥇

— Katy Balls (@katyballs) July 15, 2020

^the kind of rapid-reaction response so sorely missing from the Corbyn years.

I don't think there'll be that many people kicking off about wearing masks as long as they're freely available and inexpensive. The right-wing reaction seems like an attempt to jump on to the coattails of what's happening in the US.

oh that has made my day!

RAPID RESPONSE TEAM! wow team labour should be 20 pts ahead with that kind of setup!

Yeah it's an import from the US. There will probably be the odd video or two of someone getting kicked out of a supermarket for not wearing one but that'll die pretty quickly, I reckon xxp

Roy Cropper famously married to a trans woman, of course.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/matt-hancock-rules-out-mandatory-face-masks-offices-health-secretary-england

Stuff like this is going to be the biggest point of contention - weird discrepancies in the rules.

I think it might still be mandatory to wear masks in offices in Beijing and they don't have any active cases. It's really interesting to see how other countries have approached offices - Beijing and HK iirc have strictly limited them to 50% of capacity, India - which is just as aggressively capitalist and even more right-wing than the UK, has set it at 33%. The UK approach seems to be 'do your best and have some hand sanitiser available if you can'.

It's bullshit because you're stuck in a smaller space for a much longer time at work, school, down the pub etc

Pubs are good for free hand sanitiser tbh, shots of it with pint chasers are the future

I guess you could argue that shops make contact tracing impossible and offices and pubs don't but, again, it's not actually looking to stop anyone from getting it, just making it slightly easier to find them if they do.

tbh if you'd stuck with only bit supermarkets you could probably do a better system of contact tracing via store cards

Big supermarkets, sorry

Also we're assuming this about protecting people rather than persuading reluctant shops to reopen.

It's about persuading reluctant shoppers to get back out spending money

Gotta reluctantly go to Aldi shortly on account of I need to eat

they don't have no cultural problems with face masks in Japan where even if you haven't got one on outside you'll get some stares. They are almost double our population and their urban zones are among the most densely populated in the world, they have half our death toll. The UK government can't highlight successful health policies from other countries in their messaging because it just highlights how shit and useless they have been.

shit, 982 deaths in Japan. Is it really that low or am I misreading data here?

yeas that is the UK c-19 death toll 45.79 times worse than Japan's!

(The people who talk about how much they like the office is a thing, but I assume that's younger people who have just started working...I find that one weird but I'm old)

Well I think with the younger crowd the issue is partly one of the space they can afford, but as you say people like the chat, and the socialising for a drink after work (as told to me once when we talked about it, whereas I was for very much only ever going for a face to face meeting when necessary, and from experience you seldom need it with the video tools we have).

I think you could get rid of the big office but also have a social now and then. Obv I'm happy never setting my foot into an office again but I know people want contact.

as you say people like the chat

Just clock in clock out for me thx