Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them

This sort of hyper-conformist signaling is rampant across the political spectrum. For example, American right-wing populists who compete for patriotic points with the number of flags they wave, colors they wear, and the number of references to "the American people" and "our great nation" their favorite politicians utter. To them it's a matter of life and death. To me it's embarassing and a distraction.

> Lunches are served on long flights, they take 30 min out of a 9-10h flight...

No, it's not just 30 minutes out of an entire flight. Any cross-country flight provides at least two meals and several snacks and drinks. Longer international flights provide at least three. And you are explicitly allowed to have your mask off any time you are snacking or drinking, which can happen any time during the flight without limits. My wife flew international a few months ago, and there were many people who effectively went maskless for the entire flight, between snacks, drinks, meals, sleeping, or simply sitting unmasked in the dark reading a book. As long as people dutifully mask up when they get up to move about the cabin, complaints are rare.

> there is a risk but it's not as high as not having them.

Citation please. Please show your evidence that the risk of transmission from allowing people on a crowded plane to remove their masks for indefinite periods of time (which is what's happening) is any less than not having them at all. And then explain why it matters when, in actuality, manners and boundaries are the only reason you need to scold someone for not having their nose covered when they're not eating.

Regardless of how little sense these rules make with regard to safety, it seems clear that we're not actually having a conversation about safety here, but rather about personality conflicts. It's clear to me that in some situations you're making rational decisions based on perceived risk, for example, avoiding indoor dining. That makes sense based on what we know about how covid works.

But you're also displaying a rather conformist personality with your admission that rational justifications for rules are less important to you than fulfilling expectations of the group to which you want to belong, to the extent that you're willing to scold people for insignificant infractions of the code. That just makes you a mask-karen, and predictably sets you up for the fights with anti-mask-karens that I so enjoy reading about.

On the other side there are rebellious personalities who become less likely to do something the moment someone tells them they should. Notice that these two personalities often go together. It's no accident that many of the rebellious anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are also hyper-conformist flag-wavers.

People like me are sort of stuck in an awkward tension between these two extremes. My wife and I are triple-vaccinated, my kids are vaccinated, and we observed masking and distancing guidelines when it was important to avoid possibly exposing vulnerable friends and family members before the vaccines were available.

But I also strongly believe that cargo-culting and ritualistic conformity is dangerous to a society. Non-sensical rules and restrictions make us all stupider, and they divert energy from efforts that do actually make a difference, like vaccination. They also deepen political and cultural divides and create conflict unnecessarily, like mask-karens and anti-mask karens arguing over how much of a nose is uncovered when there are other people nearby completely unmasked while they eat their peanuts. That's actual insanity.

You are vaccinated right? Otherwise this whole conversation is just ridiculous.