"Yes, the continued prevalence of COVID mask-wearing at any left-wing function, and therefore any pro-Palestine function, does suggest an outsized prevalence of mental illness."
I had wondered whether anyone else had noticed this.
I would term it more a subculture whose members bond on their perceived commitment to public health and hygiene. Mask-wearing by left in public spaces may encourage hypochondria but that doesn’t mean the mask wearers at, say, the Petro’s talk were all mentally ill.
Having the need to bring up mask wearing is another cheap shot by a weak mind. While it's mindbendingly ridiculous to engage on the matter - who cares?
Relating mental illness to any Pro-Palestinian cause is a clear demonstration of why this author is another vile, immoral Zionist with no knowledge, or at least acceptance of the facts about Palestine. The history is clear. 80 years of Zionist propaganda, lies, revisionist history, obfuscation and genocide is there for those who wish to see it.
Why do you spend your time reading and commenting on any author who you think possesses a "weak mind;" is a "vile, immoral Zionist with no knowledge;" and does not accept facts? Do you cut your wrists and drink shots of poison at the same time, too?
In the words of Schopenhauer: "One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited."
It's called open minded thinking. I couple it with critical thinking. I use it to have an idea of how the world works and how others think. Perhaps your confirmation bias reading suggestion works for you... not for me. Additionally, how is one to know what is bad without reading it? As for commenting, I can only hope that it stirs critical thought in others.
"It was an intriguing question though: what the nation of Colombia, represented by its boisterous left-wing president, can realistically do about “genocide” in Gaza — and why this should be a top priority for ordinary Colombians" ordinary Colombians, certainly those who would have voted for him or other left candidates, have long supported Third World struggles for self-determination, going back a century. Most people of the Third World have, including Palestine, which is why it has been the Wretched of the Earth who have come to the Palestinians defence at the International Stage (think Yemen, South Africa, Brazil, Columbia, etc) while other states have been far more complicit. For most people in the US, and many in the UK and Europe, Palestine is an afterthought. This is not the case in much of the Third World (see: “Palestinians and Latin America’s Indigenous Peoples” (2015) https://www.merip.org/2015/04/palestinians-and-latin-americas-indigenous-peoples/ and “We Do Not Support Genocides”: Gustavo Petro, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, and Political Backlash in Colombia https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1657060). Don't forget that Latin America was settled very much as Palestine was, suffering ethnic cleansing and genocide. There is an explicit race and class divide there which strongly correlates with Left and Right. Those descendent from Europeans tend to be much better off, Whiter and much more to the Right if not outright neo-fascist, with the converse true for those descendent from Slaves and Indigenous peoples. There are explicit links between the reactionaries in Latin America and Israel, going back to the Cold War. Colombia has often been referred to as the Israel of Latin America, by other Latin Americans I have spoken to (“The Colombia–Israel Nexus: Toward Historical and Analytic Contexts” — Leon W. Field (Latin American Research Review, 2017, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/latin-american-research-review/article/colombiaisrael-nexus-toward-historical-and-analytic-contexts/09B58D46CBCD3DFFD963C7435D5094E5)). On his connecting Climate Change and the genocide of Palestinians, in December 2023, (see: Petro Compares the Palestinian “Genocide” With the Climate Exodus https://colombiaone.com/2023/12/02/petro-compares-palestinian-genocide-climate-exodus-colombia/)
Petro definitely sounds a bit unhinged. What kind of doofus visits a foreign country to make a speech bashing its leader? Surely he wasn't all that surprised at the Trump Admin's retaliation? We all know how petty Trump can be.
Also, what kind of leader makes an implicit declaration of war at a university speaking event in the tartget country 😂
He reminds me of the right wing podcasters talking about how there's no free speech in America on their well funded, American podcast on an American website
Michael, thanks for this coverage of Petro. I couldn't figure out what he was thinking coming to the US to go to protests here. Now I know: he thinks differently.
The mask wearing at left-wing events might also have to do with making it a little harder for ICE, FBI and other police agencies, as well as Zionist vigilantes and doxers, to identify participants.
Not even a little; facial recognition has no problem with mask wearing at all, lest anyone be lured into a false sense of security. You would have to cover your face completely, but even if you're wearing a balaclava, you could be easily identified by other means (phone and location history, gait, build, etc; US is the most surveilled country in the world).
To defeat all the surveillance tech at this point, you'd probably need everyone to have left their phones and cars at home to jump out their windows into a dark alley without any cameras while already done up in fatsuits and wearing heeled shoes and helmets that, ideally, make them sound like Darth Vader or something; all complete with some kind of obstructive patterning like fake license plates all over it. Imagine a group of such people.
Thanks for this useful, if somewhat exaggerated information, but it doesn't mean that more than a few who participate in public left-wing events, especially anti-genocide protests, are wearing masks primarily an effort to evade identification in the possibly mistaken belief or hope that this might be effective. (Perhaps mask-wearing is ineffective if you are a known activist on an official watch list, but many at most such events don't fit that category. Don't promote paranoia. That's like promoting paranoia about Covid. Not helpful.)
Software engineer here. Face recognition with public cameras do have lots of issues with facial masks.
IPhone's Face ID face can work reasonably well with a facial mask, because you are holding the phone right at your face, and because they user other sensors for depth besides the image itself. And even then you have to enable Face ID to work with face masks because to maintain recall it expenses selectivity.
Yes, if you are following a specific Person of Interest, you can, given a initial known location, keep track of her, or build a forensic track ex-post factum. But you already have a "fingerprint" so to say, to look for that person in some finite number of known locations.
But identifying random masked faces in bad illumination out of a giant database of a country-wide biometric database, with notoriously bad CCTV camera and lenses, is not that easy.
Your nuts! Do you realize that? What are you talking about? Are you another crazy liberal that hates their country? Do you know how many Americans are killed by drugs? Do you know what this does to your brain? Drugs take away everything you are. The cartels are evil people. They are bad. There is no rehabilitating these people. You’re an ignoramus for defending the worst people of society.
Wow! Another American with no understanding of morality, humanity or responsibility. And a perfect example of why the USA is in such rapid decline towards ultimate failure. Is this where you start calling me more names? Such an intellect you are.
"kill them"... then the rest of the world has the right to kill any American, simply based on the colonial imperialistic American war machine that has destroyed countless countries/societies around the world. Open season on any American, military personnel, or agent anywhere? You're another entitled hypocrite.
WHAT!!!! YOU ARE DEFINITELY A DAM COMMUNIST! Y’all are ruining the country! ALL DAM ILLEGALS GET THE HELL OUT! Sick of the free loaders, then y’all ungrateful can’t say thanks. The world sucks with you heathens.
“Yes, the continued prevalence of COVID mask-wearing at any left-wing function, and therefore any pro-Palestine function, does suggest an outsized prevalence of mental illness.”
as someone in my fifth year of having Long Covid it makes perfect sense why some people still want to mask, some people are far more vulnerable to serious damage from Covid from others, but who cares when you can be glib and dismissive and feel superior to others?
Keep in mind the things you find strange are not universally shared by others
1. Petro did not call for an alliance to destroy America or Israel as is claimed in this piece which you base, it seems, on emotional impressions of a google-translate. Petro's intervention is a call to form a coalition--including states which the US would never attack, such as Spain, Ireland and France--forcing the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and about re-entering an era of multipolarity and multilateralism in which the US no longer can effectively bark orders at every other state on earth. In your rambling screed, you even admit to how wrong this situation is to begin with, only to then collapse into a hitpiece on Petro which seems to be more about frustrations with the US left, and totally absent is any research or context about the party or the left in Colombia...Petro tried to end Colombian shipments of coal to Israel and wants a sanctions campaign to be enforced by other countries.
2. '“The Assault Against Reason,” according to the English translator. Presumably, Petro had meant “The Destruction of Reason” by György Lukács (1954)." In all likelihood, Petro was referring to the Spanish translation of the Hungarian." How do you know that The Destrucion of Reason is a literal translation from Hungarian to English? "Atentado contra la Razón" is probably the title on Spanish editions, mistranslated by your device as "assault on reason" Why do you list this as an error or proof that the guy is a lunatic? If he talked ''down to earth" like Biden, Buttigieg, or other cretins would that make him sound more sober? Would the world be a better place if all politicians in all countries and cultures won points with the public by advertising themselves as passionately anti-intellectual like they do in the US?
3. Talking about the history of Al-Andalus is the opposite of "blood and soil". The very idea of "blood and soil nationalism", according to many historians on both the far left and the far right (including none less than the historian Ben Zion Netanyahu, late father of the current you-know -who) have suggested that the very notion of an ethnically "pure" nation-state may trace its origins back to Spain's expulsions of Arabs and of Jews, just before Spain's invasion of the Americas. These histories are interlinked. When Simón Bolivar wrote in his "Letter from Jamaica'' during a military campaign that he and other creoles have African blood coursing through their veins, this was a rare visionary statement denouncing racism and colonialism.
4. Trump and Rubio are threatening both Colombia and Venezuela with violent regime-change (not only sanctions) while you present Petro as having blabbered violent threats towards Trump only to be surprised by economic sanctions.
This is perhaps the most disappointing post of yours thus far, and a vain effort to lump together the Colombian left which has its actual political traditions, parties, and institutions, with an amorphous American or Brooklynite "woke" left, ignoring enormous differences between the two.
5. Invoking "Colombians in concentration camps" might very well be histrionic, but there are mass deportations, also of Colombians, from the US passing through El Salvador. And perhaps the American hand in the Gaza massacres (if you don't want to call it a genocide) does send a message to the world that any other country which stands up to US allies might follow suit and be similarly crushed. Remember the poem by Martin Niemoller, "When they came for the communists, I said nothing because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I wasn't a Jew...finally they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak out on my behalf''
You leave the impression that Assata Shamir was just a cop killer and unworthy of homage. Please provide context next time to avoid such unbalanced biases.
Trump calls them drug dealers and acts like he has permission for his actions - as sung in the old Steppenwolf song "The Pusher" lyric - "If I were the president of this land, I would declare total war on the pusher man. I'd cut him if he stands, and shoot him if he runs, I kill him with my bible ..." An ominous prediction playing out. He forgets the other Steppenwolf song "The Monster" - telling us "there is a monster on the loose" in America. That could understandably unhinged a lot of people and get them babbling a bit.
Ah, yes, another cudgel in the US's quiver of persuasive measures... The world will be relieved of that thuggery - he said naively - once, ultimately, soon, the US becomes a failed state, on track to become just that with an obscene, unsustainable $1+ trillion per year "defense" budget.
“Nobody knows quite what for” re the shutdown is patently false. Everyone knows what it’s for : to prevent the Massie-Khanna Epstein Files bill from proceeding through to a vote. Which means that the Trump Administration are attempting to prevent something they don’t want people to see from becoming publicly available. It is not a secret that they have been furiously ‘arm-twisting’ and threatening Lawmakers in their efforts to suppress Epstein information. But i suppose that doesn’t fit your weird agenda of “There are no victims - Epstein wasnt trafficking victims - nothing to see here”, so you’ll go with “nobody knows” why there’s a prolonged shutdown.
"Yes, the continued prevalence of COVID mask-wearing at any left-wing function, and therefore any pro-Palestine function, does suggest an outsized prevalence of mental illness."
I had wondered whether anyone else had noticed this.
I think the mask wearing is also to avoid facial recognition software. I remember that being issue at the early Columbia protests.
I would term it more a subculture whose members bond on their perceived commitment to public health and hygiene. Mask-wearing by left in public spaces may encourage hypochondria but that doesn’t mean the mask wearers at, say, the Petro’s talk were all mentally ill.
Having the need to bring up mask wearing is another cheap shot by a weak mind. While it's mindbendingly ridiculous to engage on the matter - who cares?
Relating mental illness to any Pro-Palestinian cause is a clear demonstration of why this author is another vile, immoral Zionist with no knowledge, or at least acceptance of the facts about Palestine. The history is clear. 80 years of Zionist propaganda, lies, revisionist history, obfuscation and genocide is there for those who wish to see it.
Why do you spend your time reading and commenting on any author who you think possesses a "weak mind;" is a "vile, immoral Zionist with no knowledge;" and does not accept facts? Do you cut your wrists and drink shots of poison at the same time, too?
In the words of Schopenhauer: "One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited."
It's called open minded thinking. I couple it with critical thinking. I use it to have an idea of how the world works and how others think. Perhaps your confirmation bias reading suggestion works for you... not for me. Additionally, how is one to know what is bad without reading it? As for commenting, I can only hope that it stirs critical thought in others.
Hilarious. I call it @pete king being ignorant and too pretentious to know it.
So, what's your point? Is it that you can't wrap your head around the concept and have to belittle? Racing to the bottom eh?
Maybe I'm obtuse to the wording (it's possible), but I didn't read it that way.
Refusing to wear a mask in public is tantamount to a genocide of our immunocompromised community members
Oh please.
Michael Tracey is NOT a Zionist.
He looks nice in a suit I think
"It was an intriguing question though: what the nation of Colombia, represented by its boisterous left-wing president, can realistically do about “genocide” in Gaza — and why this should be a top priority for ordinary Colombians" ordinary Colombians, certainly those who would have voted for him or other left candidates, have long supported Third World struggles for self-determination, going back a century. Most people of the Third World have, including Palestine, which is why it has been the Wretched of the Earth who have come to the Palestinians defence at the International Stage (think Yemen, South Africa, Brazil, Columbia, etc) while other states have been far more complicit. For most people in the US, and many in the UK and Europe, Palestine is an afterthought. This is not the case in much of the Third World (see: “Palestinians and Latin America’s Indigenous Peoples” (2015) https://www.merip.org/2015/04/palestinians-and-latin-americas-indigenous-peoples/ and “We Do Not Support Genocides”: Gustavo Petro, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, and Political Backlash in Colombia https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1657060). Don't forget that Latin America was settled very much as Palestine was, suffering ethnic cleansing and genocide. There is an explicit race and class divide there which strongly correlates with Left and Right. Those descendent from Europeans tend to be much better off, Whiter and much more to the Right if not outright neo-fascist, with the converse true for those descendent from Slaves and Indigenous peoples. There are explicit links between the reactionaries in Latin America and Israel, going back to the Cold War. Colombia has often been referred to as the Israel of Latin America, by other Latin Americans I have spoken to (“The Colombia–Israel Nexus: Toward Historical and Analytic Contexts” — Leon W. Field (Latin American Research Review, 2017, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/latin-american-research-review/article/colombiaisrael-nexus-toward-historical-and-analytic-contexts/09B58D46CBCD3DFFD963C7435D5094E5)). On his connecting Climate Change and the genocide of Palestinians, in December 2023, (see: Petro Compares the Palestinian “Genocide” With the Climate Exodus https://colombiaone.com/2023/12/02/petro-compares-palestinian-genocide-climate-exodus-colombia/)
I couldn't figure out how to edit my post to correct spelling and grammar typos, please forgive and move on.
Petro definitely sounds a bit unhinged. What kind of doofus visits a foreign country to make a speech bashing its leader? Surely he wasn't all that surprised at the Trump Admin's retaliation? We all know how petty Trump can be.
Also, what kind of leader makes an implicit declaration of war at a university speaking event in the tartget country 😂
He reminds me of the right wing podcasters talking about how there's no free speech in America on their well funded, American podcast on an American website
". . . Hegelian dialectics (which I’d guess most people in the room would’ve pretended to be extremely well-versed in). . . "
Bwahahahahahahaha!
Michael, thanks for this coverage of Petro. I couldn't figure out what he was thinking coming to the US to go to protests here. Now I know: he thinks differently.
Enjoyable read, comparable to a breakfast of empty calories.
The mask wearing at left-wing events might also have to do with making it a little harder for ICE, FBI and other police agencies, as well as Zionist vigilantes and doxers, to identify participants.
Not even a little; facial recognition has no problem with mask wearing at all, lest anyone be lured into a false sense of security. You would have to cover your face completely, but even if you're wearing a balaclava, you could be easily identified by other means (phone and location history, gait, build, etc; US is the most surveilled country in the world).
To defeat all the surveillance tech at this point, you'd probably need everyone to have left their phones and cars at home to jump out their windows into a dark alley without any cameras while already done up in fatsuits and wearing heeled shoes and helmets that, ideally, make them sound like Darth Vader or something; all complete with some kind of obstructive patterning like fake license plates all over it. Imagine a group of such people.
Thanks for this useful, if somewhat exaggerated information, but it doesn't mean that more than a few who participate in public left-wing events, especially anti-genocide protests, are wearing masks primarily an effort to evade identification in the possibly mistaken belief or hope that this might be effective. (Perhaps mask-wearing is ineffective if you are a known activist on an official watch list, but many at most such events don't fit that category. Don't promote paranoia. That's like promoting paranoia about Covid. Not helpful.)
Software engineer here. Face recognition with public cameras do have lots of issues with facial masks.
IPhone's Face ID face can work reasonably well with a facial mask, because you are holding the phone right at your face, and because they user other sensors for depth besides the image itself. And even then you have to enable Face ID to work with face masks because to maintain recall it expenses selectivity.
Yes, if you are following a specific Person of Interest, you can, given a initial known location, keep track of her, or build a forensic track ex-post factum. But you already have a "fingerprint" so to say, to look for that person in some finite number of known locations.
But identifying random masked faces in bad illumination out of a giant database of a country-wide biometric database, with notoriously bad CCTV camera and lenses, is not that easy.
Hilarious. You ignorant pro-Islamist anti-Palestinian Western poseur morons all think you are Spartacus or Batman. It's hilarious.
"Some might have wondered if this plan was slightly impractical." Ha!
I admit to not reading the entirety, just what should USA do about these dam drugs… yes, kill them.
Your nuts! Do you realize that? What are you talking about? Are you another crazy liberal that hates their country? Do you know how many Americans are killed by drugs? Do you know what this does to your brain? Drugs take away everything you are. The cartels are evil people. They are bad. There is no rehabilitating these people. You’re an ignoramus for defending the worst people of society.
Wow! Another American with no understanding of morality, humanity or responsibility. And a perfect example of why the USA is in such rapid decline towards ultimate failure. Is this where you start calling me more names? Such an intellect you are.
"kill them"... then the rest of the world has the right to kill any American, simply based on the colonial imperialistic American war machine that has destroyed countless countries/societies around the world. Open season on any American, military personnel, or agent anywhere? You're another entitled hypocrite.
Telling me about a war machine? You sound like a college dropout. What is wrong with you? We have a great president protecting us!
What is your freakin problem? What normal person defends drug cartels? I know… drug dealers.
I am no intellect. I went to public school democrats ruined since 1979
WHAT!!!! YOU ARE DEFINITELY A DAM COMMUNIST! Y’all are ruining the country! ALL DAM ILLEGALS GET THE HELL OUT! Sick of the free loaders, then y’all ungrateful can’t say thanks. The world sucks with you heathens.
Thanks!
“Yes, the continued prevalence of COVID mask-wearing at any left-wing function, and therefore any pro-Palestine function, does suggest an outsized prevalence of mental illness.”
as someone in my fifth year of having Long Covid it makes perfect sense why some people still want to mask, some people are far more vulnerable to serious damage from Covid from others, but who cares when you can be glib and dismissive and feel superior to others?
Keep in mind the things you find strange are not universally shared by others
Did you get long COVID before or after you were wearing a mask?
Did long COVID happen for you before or after you got the shots?
Before
1. Petro did not call for an alliance to destroy America or Israel as is claimed in this piece which you base, it seems, on emotional impressions of a google-translate. Petro's intervention is a call to form a coalition--including states which the US would never attack, such as Spain, Ireland and France--forcing the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and about re-entering an era of multipolarity and multilateralism in which the US no longer can effectively bark orders at every other state on earth. In your rambling screed, you even admit to how wrong this situation is to begin with, only to then collapse into a hitpiece on Petro which seems to be more about frustrations with the US left, and totally absent is any research or context about the party or the left in Colombia...Petro tried to end Colombian shipments of coal to Israel and wants a sanctions campaign to be enforced by other countries.
2. '“The Assault Against Reason,” according to the English translator. Presumably, Petro had meant “The Destruction of Reason” by György Lukács (1954)." In all likelihood, Petro was referring to the Spanish translation of the Hungarian." How do you know that The Destrucion of Reason is a literal translation from Hungarian to English? "Atentado contra la Razón" is probably the title on Spanish editions, mistranslated by your device as "assault on reason" Why do you list this as an error or proof that the guy is a lunatic? If he talked ''down to earth" like Biden, Buttigieg, or other cretins would that make him sound more sober? Would the world be a better place if all politicians in all countries and cultures won points with the public by advertising themselves as passionately anti-intellectual like they do in the US?
3. Talking about the history of Al-Andalus is the opposite of "blood and soil". The very idea of "blood and soil nationalism", according to many historians on both the far left and the far right (including none less than the historian Ben Zion Netanyahu, late father of the current you-know -who) have suggested that the very notion of an ethnically "pure" nation-state may trace its origins back to Spain's expulsions of Arabs and of Jews, just before Spain's invasion of the Americas. These histories are interlinked. When Simón Bolivar wrote in his "Letter from Jamaica'' during a military campaign that he and other creoles have African blood coursing through their veins, this was a rare visionary statement denouncing racism and colonialism.
4. Trump and Rubio are threatening both Colombia and Venezuela with violent regime-change (not only sanctions) while you present Petro as having blabbered violent threats towards Trump only to be surprised by economic sanctions.
This is perhaps the most disappointing post of yours thus far, and a vain effort to lump together the Colombian left which has its actual political traditions, parties, and institutions, with an amorphous American or Brooklynite "woke" left, ignoring enormous differences between the two.
5. Invoking "Colombians in concentration camps" might very well be histrionic, but there are mass deportations, also of Colombians, from the US passing through El Salvador. And perhaps the American hand in the Gaza massacres (if you don't want to call it a genocide) does send a message to the world that any other country which stands up to US allies might follow suit and be similarly crushed. Remember the poem by Martin Niemoller, "When they came for the communists, I said nothing because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I wasn't a Jew...finally they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak out on my behalf''
You leave the impression that Assata Shamir was just a cop killer and unworthy of homage. Please provide context next time to avoid such unbalanced biases.
Hilarious. Is "just a cop killer" like "just a rapist"?
Trump calls them drug dealers and acts like he has permission for his actions - as sung in the old Steppenwolf song "The Pusher" lyric - "If I were the president of this land, I would declare total war on the pusher man. I'd cut him if he stands, and shoot him if he runs, I kill him with my bible ..." An ominous prediction playing out. He forgets the other Steppenwolf song "The Monster" - telling us "there is a monster on the loose" in America. That could understandably unhinged a lot of people and get them babbling a bit.
Ah, yes, another cudgel in the US's quiver of persuasive measures... The world will be relieved of that thuggery - he said naively - once, ultimately, soon, the US becomes a failed state, on track to become just that with an obscene, unsustainable $1+ trillion per year "defense" budget.
“Nobody knows quite what for” re the shutdown is patently false. Everyone knows what it’s for : to prevent the Massie-Khanna Epstein Files bill from proceeding through to a vote. Which means that the Trump Administration are attempting to prevent something they don’t want people to see from becoming publicly available. It is not a secret that they have been furiously ‘arm-twisting’ and threatening Lawmakers in their efforts to suppress Epstein information. But i suppose that doesn’t fit your weird agenda of “There are no victims - Epstein wasnt trafficking victims - nothing to see here”, so you’ll go with “nobody knows” why there’s a prolonged shutdown.
They don't call it Petro Dollers for nothing!