Rules are only for the little people.
California Governor Newsom is at it again: breaking rules that he wants to punish us for breaking. And he gets away with it. Sure, he gets a lot of bad publicity, although not enough. But no one has charged him with anything.
What Newsom did was completely reasonable. He went maskless both in posing with Magic Johnson and, at times, while watching a football game. He even gave a good reason: while posing with Magic, he wanted to be “gracious.”
Here’s what he said that was completely unreasonable: he said that that was the only time he went without the mask. It wasn’t. Newsom lied.
Newsom was right to break the absurd mask rule. He’s wrong to let a government official working under him dictate such a rule. What about the rest of us who want to be gracious, the rest of us who want to have human interaction regularly with members of our species?
There’s an old line that you might think fits: “Practice what you preach.”
But it doesn’t fit. Newsom should preach what he practices. He practices disobedience of his rules. He should either preach disobedience for others or get rid of the rules.
READER COMMENTS
Aaron W
Feb 8 2022 at 6:45pm
He is getting rid of the mask rules after this. (Because of this? Maybe? It was set to expire anyway.)
JFA
Feb 8 2022 at 10:12pm
I read that while the statewide mask mandate will expire on Feb 15, those rules don’t apply to schools, and students will have to continue masking. So for the time being, California will allow everyone to go back to normal except the age groups that face the lowest risk from Covid. I have only come to expect such stupidity.
Daniel B
Feb 8 2022 at 11:32pm
I can’t believe that Newsom was economical with the truth like this… I thought the surprises were done after I learned more about LBJ’s corrupt behavior from this interview (I knew some stuff about it but didn’t know just how bad it was, as Robert Caro documented) but I was wrong. Newsom lied, just as many other politicians have done.
This story reminds me of a quote I read a year or two ago. I barely remember the exact lines. It went something like this (the only sentence I’m confident about remembering mostly correctly is the first one): “Politics is like any other profession. It’s the people who are good at it who succeed.”
I don’t think the quote explains its point very well so here’s my explanation of it. There’s a reason why chess masters are very reluctant to sacrifice their queen pieces. It’s because that strategy – be careful about sacrificing queens – is what works, what enables them to succeed. Being more aggressive with queen sacrifices hasn’t lead to as many wins, which is why those who’ve succeeded in the chess profession tend to consider that bad chess strategy – and correspondingly don’t do that.
Maybe the current masters are wrong; they should sacrifice their queens more often because they would win more often. But if that’s the case, why hasn’t anyone gone and done that? Nothing is stopping people from outcompeting those who follow orthodoxies like “try not to lose or sacrifice your queen.” I’m no expert on chess but I’m fairly sure that people (including the good players) have been careful about sacrificing queens for centuries. The fact that the dominant strategy (be careful when sacrificing queens) has not been toppled for so long strongly suggests that expecting good chess players to be aggressive with queen sacrifices is unrealistic.
In short, there’s a reason why chess masters are careful about sacrificing queens: because that is what works, and the alternative strategies don’t cause as many wins. There are similarities in their play styles for a reason: because the people who didn’t follow the underlying, shared principles in those play styles did not become grandmasters. By not following them they doomed themselves from winning enough games to become grandmasters, because those principles/strategies work the best. There’s a reason why chess grandmasters play the game the way they do. And there’s a reason why politicians play the political game the way they do!
A strategy of dishonesty has allowed politicians to get the “wins” they wanted – the things they wanted – more than a strategy of honesty. More honest politicians got “eliminated” from the “tournament” precisely because that strategy doesn’t work as well for them. Something is enabling the dishonest to tend to outcompete the honest. I believe Hayek has the best ideas as to why in his famous chapter Why the Worst Get on Top (since this post is already long enough I’ll just refer to this review of The Road to Serfdom, which has the best summary of the book I’ve ever seen).
Some of you may have said to yourselves “What if we change the rules of chess? Then maybe aggressively sacrificing the queen might work. Analogously, why can’t we change the rules of the political game?” Sadly, the political game is not as easily changed as chess could be. The political game is played for power – and as Hayek argues, the nature of power is very dangerous and is a fundamental reason why the dishonest tend to outcompete the honest.
Why is power exercised “for the good of the whole” inherently dangerous? Because saying “the good of the whole” is the equivalent of saying “the end justifies the means.” Both rules easily excuse any behavior you do, no matter how bad it is. ‘The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule; there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves “the good of the whole,” because the “good of the whole” is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done’ (The Road to Serfdom, 166). ‘There is always in the eyes of the collectivist a greater goal which these acts serve and which to him justifies them because the pursuit of the common end of society can know no limits in any rights or values of any individual’ (The Road to Serfdom, 169).
That is not the only inherent problem with power; for more, see the chapter (especially page 166 and onwards), as well as page 378 of Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell (which channels one of the arguments of the Why the Worst Get on Top chapter on page 158). You can’t change the nature of power like you can change the nature of chess. You can try to mitigate the dangers of political power, but sadly, as long as political power exists the dangers will always be there. I’m not an anarchist but that simply is the nature of the situation.
Matthias
Feb 20 2022 at 6:12am
Your point may be right, but your chess analogy is useless:
We don’t have to speculate about what’s good in chess. We can just ask the computers. There are approximately infinitely better than us mere humans at chess now. So you can have them review your game and tell you exactly where you and your opponent made mistakes.
(There’s some very exciting developments underway in computer chess at the moment. Look up Leela Zero vs Stockfish. But even the dethroned champion of yesteryear was already like a God when compared to a mere mortal of flesh and bones.)
Daniel B
Feb 25 2022 at 12:24am
For some reason I don’t get email notifications of replies to my comments (I have to manually check for replies), so sorry for the late reply.
I don’t think this invalidates my analogy. Chess engines will have common principles and similarities in their playstyles, just as human chess grandmasters have common principles, mentalities, and other similarities in theirs.
The point of my chess analogy is that if you see a bunch of successful people in a given field doing something in a similar way – especially if this similarity has persisted for a long time – then there’s a reason why it exists: because the people who have that similar trait/playstyle/mentality outcompete those who do not have it.
Getting surprised that politicians tend to be dishonest is like getting surprised that doctors tend to know anatomy or that lions tend to kill other animals fairly often. There’s a reason why doctors tend to know anatomy, lions tend to kill other animals, and politicians tend to be dishonest. Without those factors, they would be less successful in their fields and might not even “survive” in those fields in the first place.
I’m not entirely sure why dishonesty is advantageous in politics (I have some ideas) but for now I’ll just say to look up Ignaz Semmelweis and what he said about washing hands, and how the doctors of his day rejected his advice to wash their hands because he couldn’t really explain why hand washing would reduce mortality.
MikeP
Feb 9 2022 at 12:00am
It is good to see California plan to lift at least part of the mask mandates. But while we can all appreciate the return of our freedom not to wear a physically, psychologically, and spiritually oppressive face covering, we need to realize the battle is not over. The powers that be are not ending mask mandates because masks don’t work. They are ending them because The Science says that case rates are trending the right direction.
That is not enough. There can be no quarter for mask mandates. They must end with unconditional surrender. They must never come back.
Masks. Don’t. Work. They didn’t work in March 2020 when the well-known consensus was that masks don’t work, with RCT after RCT demonstrating no effectiveness of masks against transmission of flu or flu-like illness. And they didn’t work in September 2021 when the giant Bangladesh RCT demonstrated that masks don’t work among the working age population — i.e., the population that couldn’t avail themselves of mitigation measures apart from masks.
If anything, COVID and mask mandates have demonstrated even more powerfully that masks don’t work, with that conclusion getting stronger every single day that goes by with public health experts providing no more evidence that they work than ridiculous observational studies that prove beyond any doubt that people who choose to wear masks choose to avoid COVID in other ways too.
Masks are the medical intervention. Masks do cause harm. They must not be mandated again until it is proven with actually scientific studies that they work and that their benefits exceed their costs.
steve
Feb 9 2022 at 9:27am
I have yet to read any evidence that they cause harm, just lots of assumptions. Do you have some? We do have one of our smaller hospitals under police protection because a pt who was asked to wear a mask while int eh hospital refused, threatened people and police had to escort him out. He has continued with threatening phone calls. If that is what you are talking about then yes they cause harm bye making people angry. The evidence that they help has been getting stronger.
Steve
KevinDC
Feb 9 2022 at 9:44am
This article looks at 14 randomized controlled trials on the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of respiratory infections. It includes links to all of the studies in question so you can view them yourself, but this is how it sums up the evidence so far:
JFA
Feb 9 2022 at 10:41am
I’d say the evidence on whether masks “work” is mixed. If they “worked” you’d expect to find clear evidence for it in the environments where they are consistently used: schools. Yet the evidence for supporting masks mandates from this area is not strong. Here are a list of studies showing no measurable benefit for masking:
Age-dependency of the Propagation Rate of Coronavirus Disease 2019 Inside School Bubble Groups in Catalonia, Spain (children just below the age cutoff for masking show no higher rate of cases or secondary attack rates than those just above the cutoff)
Mask Use and Ventilation Improvements to Reduce COVID-19 Incidence in Elementary Schools — Georgia, November 16–December 11, 2020 (no measurable impact on student masking)
Coronavirus (COVID-19) and the use of face coverings in education settings (report from the UK showing statistically non-significant effect of face masks)
Reported COVID-19 Incidence in Wisconsin High School Athletes in Fall 2020 (non-significant finding for face mask wearing)
COVID-19 Mitigation Practices and COVID-19 Rates in Schools: Report on Data from Florida, New York and Massachusetts (non-significant finding for face mask wearing)
If you download the data from CDC, you will find that for the latest wave the rates of pediatric hospitalizations are similar in states that ban mask mandates compared to those that require masks.
I open to the possibility that masks might have a benefit. There are plenty of papers finding reductions just as there are plenty of papers that find no measurable difference. Maybe they decrease cases by 10 to 20%… who knows? But the religious clinging to face mask by many people baffles me. Masks (at least the ones that most people were required to wear for most of the pandemic) certainly don’t reduce cases by 50% (or even 30%). I don’t know of any health intervention that would be required if efficacy were as low as masking.
Additionally, the paper Adverse Effects of Prolonged Mask Use among Healthcare Professionals during COVID-19 finds “prolonged use of N95 and surgical masks by healthcare professionals during COVID-19 has caused adverse effects such as headaches, rash, acne, skin breakdown, and impaired cognition in the majority of those surveyed.”
Also, recall that one of the stated reasons for mandating masks was that mask wearing reminds people that we are in a public health emergency. If that’s the case, then I would imagine that kids in states with mandates have been really stressed the passed 2 years just from seeing everyone in masks. That’s on top of people telling them that they could make their teacher or their friends sick if they don’t wear a mask. Having spent a lot of time recently talking to parents and children about their experience, I would say that constantly reminding kids that they could kill people they come into contact with has caused a large amount of emotional scarring.
I know some parents who haven’t been to another person’s house in 2 years and they are proud that their kids take the pandemic as seriously as they do. I would say that comes dangerously close to child abuse.
Is it masks causing the harm, or the adults around the children who are causing the harm? How much does that distinction matter?
MikeP
Feb 9 2022 at 2:27pm
I have yet to read any evidence that they cause harm, just lots of assumptions. Do you have some?
At least for me, masks cause harm. They are physically and psychologically oppressive. I expect that my pulse and blood pressure are higher when I am wearing one than when I am not.
But, more than that, because I know how useless they are, how unfounded the science supporting them is, and how deranged the mandates are, I find wearing a mask spiritually oppressive. My agency is being taken away. I am made to be a pawn in a horrific game of signaling my obedience to even the most inane and politically based rules.
Let’s say the CDC came out with a recommendation that, to prevent COVID transmission and safeguard the health care system, everyone should wear a hat that says “Protect Yourself From COVID”. Let’s say that this recommendation was encouraged by the president, governors, mayors, and public health officials across the country.
Then the CDC publishes an observational study that finds that, indeed, people who wear PYFC hats and people who are around people who wear PYFC hats have lower COVID case rates, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, whether inside or outside. The CDC puts together ready-made graphics and the media happily publishes and promotes this great new tool to fight the pandemic. After all, the science supports it! Indeed, the effect of PYFC hats is so strong that states and counties turn the recommendation into a mandate.
Question: Do the hats cause harm?
steve
Feb 9 2022 at 9:36pm
Very familiar with the Xiao study. If you read the inidividual studies (did you do that?) you will find that they all have significant flaws, which a number of them note in the body of the paper. Putting together a lot of bad studies does not give you a good one. Link goes to one that is good to start with since it looks at older papers. After that go to the Howard paper (PNAS) which is easy to find. Compliance is always an issue with mask studies so the proper way to do this is evaluate lots of studies not just RCTs, especially those that find novel ways to diminish the effects of compliance.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7253999/
Mike P- If you dont have any evidence just say so. I actually dont think it beyond the pale that we MIGHT eventually quantify some negative effects but to date i have yet to see any.
MikeP
Feb 10 2022 at 11:43am
Sorry, I have not read up on the negative effects of masks. I can only report from my own family — what I state above about me, though it is not clinically diagnosed, plus two of two children who have both been treated by doctors for skin irritation of varying degrees. So that’s 50-75% with negative effects in my household.
I also haven’t read up on the negative effects of ivermectin, but it appears not to have any.
It used to be that medical interventions weren’t based primarily on their not having negative effects, but on their actually having positive ones — usually overwhelmingly positive. It used to be that medical interventions were not mandated unless they were unbelievably positive, such as with sterilizing vaccines.
What has happened to change that apart from media and politics?
Alan Goldhammer
Feb 9 2022 at 10:36am
When properly fitted masks do work and there is ample evidence for this. I suggest you visit Aaron Collins’s YouTube channel. He’s a for real aerosol engineer and has test results on a large number of masks with suggestions on which to purchase and how to insure they fit correctly. Improper use of masks do not work; proper use of masks does.
There are numerous observational studies showing the value of masks during the pandemic.
JFA
Feb 9 2022 at 12:35pm
Alan, you’ve read a lot of masking studies. Instead of saying they “work”, can you quantify how much they work? I’ve seen estimates of relative risk reduction from anywhere between 0% to 60%. I don’t for a second believe the higher numbers, though I’d buy something on the order of a 10% risk reduction. I also haven’t seen much evidence to suggest large absolute risk reductions.
Also, bear in mind that “perfect mask wearing” is not, never was, and never will be in the potential policy space. We can’t take lab studies and extrapolate to the real world. That’s why so many medications end up being less impressive than study results would suggests… scaling is very hard.
So when you say masks work, what do you actually mean? And does that risk reduction reach the level of clinical significance that would suggest we mandate it for everyone?
MikeP
Feb 9 2022 at 12:59pm
Can you refer directly to the videos that cover the behavior of the masks after an hour?
I don’t doubt that droplets are caught by masks or that aerosols are deflected by masks.
What I doubt is that a mask that continues to weigh a tenth of an ounce while worn by a person who exhales half an ounce of water an hour somehow does not catch the water yet catches the viruses. What I doubt is that aerosols have anything close to the momentum required to even reach the mask before being routed by boundary layer effects around the mask. What I doubt is that even an N95 mask will actually make the steady state equilibrium viral output outside the mask different from the steady state viral output inside the mask.
Yesterday a delivery person brought some furniture into our house. I have rarely seen someone wear a KN-95 mask with a fit good enough to actually draw air through it, but he did as evidenced by his significantly labored breathing. I strongly suspect that, if he had COVID, that induced extremely deep breathing brought out more viral load than normal breathing would have and that any effect that the mask might have was overwhelmed by that load and the extra force of his exhalation.
Zero actual RCTs proving mask effectiveness. Masks mandated. It is literally insane.
steve
Feb 9 2022 at 9:48pm
If you are not used to reading medical literature I think you get hung up on RCTs. They are not the only way to look at things and may not even be best. In the ideal you start in the lab to see what happens and then you look at a broad range of studies including observational and ecological studies. Howard did a good job of this.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
Steve
MikeP
Feb 9 2022 at 11:31pm
Ah, Howard. Otherwise known as Tufekci.
Are they going to do another version of this article that includes the CDC’s awesome mask studies on Kansas county mandates, Pima and Maricopa counties’ schools, and the most recent jewel from California where they follow up on positive and negative test cases?
Including these can only improve the article’s conclusions, no?
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Feb 9 2022 at 7:49am
The photo looks like it was outside. Mask rules should not apply to outdoors.
He should preach better. 🙂
MikeP
Feb 9 2022 at 12:36pm
I believe that picture was taken in SoFi stadium, so it has a roof and is therefore indoors in the view of the sociopaths in public health in Los Angeles County. The probability that COVID is transmitted in that venue is near nil.
Meanwhile, in even more sociopathic Santa Clara County, I had to wear a mask Monday while watching a middle school soccer game where all the players wore masks too. To be fair, this was not a county requirement, but a school district requirement. But the probability that COVID is transmitted in that venue is actually nil. Yet the understanding of the applicable science is so poor, and the fear of not doing enough to protect children and others is so high, that what would have be seen as child abuse in 2019 is actively mandated.
<em>Mask rules should not apply to outdoors.</em>
Mask rules should not apply to outdoors or to indoors. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop them from applying.
Ryan M
Feb 9 2022 at 5:08pm
To be honest, I don’t care what Newsom does. He should have the right to do whatever he wants. He should have the right to be a hypocrite and a clown. He should not have the right to mandate others beclown themselves as well.
I would amend your headline to say: “preach what you practice,” but honestly, I don’t think hypocrisy is the problem. The power grabs, the pseudo-science that has been used as an excuse to justify power grabs, the blatant disregard for individual liberty – all of these are far more objectionable than hypocrisy. In other words, even if Newsom and all of these other democrat governors followed their nonsensical tyrannical rules to the letter, that would not justify those rules.
David Henderson
Feb 9 2022 at 6:08pm
That’s why I said “Preach What You Practice.” The power grabs you refer to wouldn’t be there if they followed my dictum.
MikeP
Feb 9 2022 at 6:30pm
Oh, Governor Newsom has an answer for that…
Mark Brophy
Feb 11 2022 at 5:50pm
We should ignore bad laws but hardly anyone does because most people worship the government.
Comments are closed.