Dear Sydney: some tips for wearing masks....

* Invest in finding the right mask for your face. Some material may be irritating, some designs may be the wrong shape for your head, some ties may hurt your years. If you’re going to be wearing a mask every day have a think about what works best for you
* Get the seal tight to your face: it shouldn’t be bagging around your chin or cheeks.
* You can stop glasses fogging up by making sure the seal of the mask is close to your skin of your nose or using a little cloth tape to stick it down
* Brush your teeth before leaving the house. Chew gum or suck on a mint. Don’t eat anchovies and onion just before putting a mask on
* Keep a spare mask or two in your bag. Once or twice I forgot my regular mask at home. Another time I came across a teenager who was being refused a bus ride cos they didn’t have a mask: a single-use mask came in handy to give them
* Stick to cloth masks, don’t use masks with exhalation valves - they don’t protect other ppl from you
* If wearing a mask makes you feel faint, focus on your breathing: some ppl get anxious in masks, but you can train yourself to cope better with the experience. I find keeping my line of sight up helps - I get breathless if I look down and breathe shallowly too much
* Wash and rinse your mask regularly or they will be stinky and ick
* Encourage your kids to wear masks - it’s a safe habit and good to learn young
* Send beautiful, colourful masks to friends and family and ppl you love. It’s a sign of a desire to see ppl survive and celebrate better times with them in the future
* Habits are hard to form but you get used to them quickly. Wearing a mask may be hard at first but after a while it becomes routine. Stick with it
* If you smoke cigarettes, you may find mask wearing is gross: you’ll smell it on your mask from your skin and it may be really unpleasant. Also respiratory conditions may make mask wearing more difficult
* A person who doesn’t wear a mask during a mask mandate in a pandemic is a person to keep distance from. It may be they can’t wear a mask for medical reasons, and so all the more reason to be polite and social distance. Don’t be rude to non-mask wearers, just give them space

More from For later read

The common understanding of propaganda is that it is intended to brainwash the masses. Supposedly, people get exposed to the same message repeatedly and over time come to believe in whatever nonsense authoritarians want them to believe /1

And yet authoritarians often broadcast silly, unpersuasive propaganda.

Political scientist Haifeng Huang writes that the purpose of propaganda is not to brainwash people, but to instill fear in them /2


When people are bombarded with propaganda everywhere they look, they are reminded of the strength of the regime.

The vast amount of resources authoritarians spend to display their message in every corner of the public square is a costly demonstration of their power /3

In fact, the overt silliness of authoritarian propaganda is part of the point. Propaganda is designed to be silly so that people can instantly recognize it when they see it


Propaganda is intended to instill fear in people, not brainwash them.

The message is: You might not believe in pro-regime values or attitudes. But we will make sure you are too frightened to do anything about it.
I’ve been frustrated by the tweets I’ve seen of this as a Canadian. Because the facts are being misrepresented.

We’re not under some sort of major persecution. That’s not what this is. A thread. 1/8


This church was fined for breaking health orders in Dec. They continued to break them. So the pastor was arrested and released on conditions of... you guessed it, not breaking health orders. And then they broke the health orders. 2/8

So then he was arrested and told he couldn’t hold church services in person if he was to be released. He refused. He’s still in custody.

Here is my frustration as a Christian in Canada:

1. They were able to gather, with some conditions. They didn’t like those. 3/8

2. He is not actually unable to preach. He is just unable to hold church services because they broke the conditions given by the public health office in Alberta. He says he can’t in good conscience do that, so they are keeping him in jail (because he will break the law). 4/8

3. This is the 1st article of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” 5/8

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