For years, I've been doing opinion panels: they're an easy source of Amazon gift cards, and an insight into how the political Left is thinking at any given time, since essentially every survey comes straight from academia, and has the whiff of "let's see how crazy these wacky Conservatives are."

I just got done completing the second in a pair of Corrronnna-related inventories, and-- as a case-in-point to how interesting they can be-- every single question regarding face masks, so-called "social distancing", and a potential future vaccine were centered around Jonathan Haidt's "Care / Harm" moral consideration:

• If you wear a mask, will it make it less likely that grandma suffers a gruesome death?


• If you "social distance", will it keep your "community" safe?


• If you get a vaccine, will it help prevent your children from keeling over in your arms?

A couple of the questions were fishing for why people aren't doing the above, and even those were "Care / Harm" oriented: "Do you think a vaccine will be a financial burden? Do you think a vaccine will have unintended health side effects?"

Anyone who has read Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" can tell you that this survey will totally baffle the researcher who constructed it: "Conservatives acknowledge that wearing a mask might help people not get sick, yet my survey gives me zero clue as to why they aren't doing it." The only rational conclusion they can come to then, is that Conservatives are selfish, heartless, and so forth.

When in reality, where Lefties are single-track "Care / Harm" machines, Conservatives take a very nuanced, wide breadth view of any given situation, carefully weighing all of the factors-- including "Care / Harm", but not limited to it. In this case, and just to list a few non-"Care / Harm" considerations:

• Wearing a mask might make me mildly less likely to get someone sick, but what about the cost and precedent regarding current and future civil liberties?


• What kind of unintended consequences will there be for normalizing mysophobic rituals, en masse, when the actual threat doesn't warrant those kinds of behaviors?


• What kind of signal does this send politicians, where one second they say "crawl" and we crawl, the next they say "dance", and we all dance, right on cue?


• All people are intrinsically self-interested, including Anthony Fauci and the Marxist agitator guy in charge of the "WHO". Their motives warrant healthy suspicion.

The only one of those the survey addressed was the fourth one-- which is also probably the least relevant consideration for the average Conservative, regarding this issue.

Also throw into the mix the fact that Conservatives consistently score higher than Lefties on scientific literacy tests:

"Morbidity rates for this virus for ordinary people are a small fraction of one tenth of one percent; rather than forcing thirty, forty, or fifty million people into unemployment, or to dress like Michael Jackson, or to crush the social lives of nascent emotionally-developing children, why not just have the tiny percentage of vulnerable people, largely in nursing homes, focus on keeping themselves safe?"