“Common sense” is under attack from all sides. Some folks seem to have trouble understanding what “common sense” even means. 

By current usage, “common sense” apparently means “the guess that I pulled out of the ether.”

Note that word “ether.” I could have used a more common — and vulgar — metaphor.

Anyway, last week, Dr. Anthony “Who Is That Unmasked Man?” Fauci was asked about double-masking, and he posited that it was “common sense” to wear two masks. Uh, what? Could it make sense? “It likely does,” he explained, “because, I mean, this is a physical covering to prevent droplets and virus to get in. So, if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.”

A few days later, Fauci “clarified” this odd notion. “There are many people who feel, if you really want to have an extra little bit of protection, ‘maybe I should put two masks on.’ There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference.”

Well, “no data” means there is something wrong with the “that.”

Cue your viewing of the Kant monograph, at bottom of page.

And cue, also, a view of my latest “Terra Incognita” video:

Further, just because we can make a fairly obvious conjecture doesn’t mean that it is sensible. Two poorly fitted masks will hardly work better than one well-fitted one.

And note how he touts the masks, as prevention for the mask-wearer from getting infected, rather than to reduce the chance of infecting others. One half the rationale for the masks being dropped, we should ask why.

While masks do something, the evidence does not show that universal mask mandates have been effective even to slow down the pandemic.

And what of Dr. Fauci misusing the notion of “common sense” to shore up the mask mandates? Well, his recognition that doubling up has no data to back it up begs the more important question: whether the mask mandates have been beneficially effective at all.

“Common folly” has to be the better term than “common sense.”

Of course, the mask mandates have been crucial in implementing lockdowns. Without them, compliance would not have been nearly so complete. Masks are performative, ritual. Wearing them places you in the tribe of wearers, and conditions wearers to their understood function. Without mask mandates, I suspect Americans would have rebelled against the lockdowns long ago. (Think about it: objecting to lockdowns while wearing a mask seems dissonant; you cannot object to an extreme measure to “fight the pandemic” while engaging in an extreme measure to “fight the pandemic.”) And lockdowns were key to getting Trump out of office.

As well as setting the stage for The Great Reset.

So what we are getting from Fauci is not common sense but a psy-op.

twv