Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing quite a cacophony of issues or maybe perhaps I should say an eclectic choice of issues but, Syphilis Tests, Mask Mandates and Traffic Lights. Hopefully by the end this will not sound as crazy as it does at the beginning. 

I started thinking of syphilis tests after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: More Incentives for Foreign Film Shoots and just a quick excerpt. "A major obstacle is some regulations are outdated such as a requirement that actors take a blood test for syphilis he said," and they are talking about this in the context of Work Permits. For anybody who has ever had a Work Permit in Thailand or maintains one to this day, you are probably well aware that every year you have got to go in and deal with a medical exam and part of that medical exam pertains to Syphilis. Well why is that? Well it is just kind of a throwback. It became a requirement probably at a time when Syphilis was a much bigger issue than it is today. I am not certain this was a requirement back before antibiotics were readily available but it might have been a requirement when yes antibiotics existed but it might have been more difficult to get certain things in to Thailand so they were actively trying from a public health standpoint to forestall outbreaks of syphilis in Thailand when it was a major issue. Those days have kind of come and gone. We know that antibiotics have pretty much kicked syphilis off the list of things that we were overly worried about from a public health standpoint. What does this have to do with mask mandates and traffic lights? 

Well I was thinking the other day also about traffic lights. I was going through a traffic light at an intersection and somebody just came first and through, basically late. They had run the red light essentially; the yellow had gone to red and it turned green on our part of the intersection but they just went buzzing through. People see this all the time in Thailand. I totally understand this isn't the biggest deal in the world but the reason I thought of it as I was sitting there and I remembered my grandfather of all people talking about traffic lights when I was a kid. In fact I was kind of an early teenager so I was probably a snotty little kid and he came up to an intersection and the light was going yellow. Now he had time within the yellow to go through but he didn't and he basically just stopped at the intersection and I sort of said: "Why did you do that? We could have gone through it, we could have made it. Bla bla bla, and now we are sitting here!” and he turned to me and he brought up a good point. He said, you know the purpose of the traffic light, people become essentially obsessed with the light without thinking through the purpose of the light. The purpose of light is not to get killed essentially by going through an intersection and getting rammed by somebody and killed by another party. The purpose of the light is not to game the light for the light's sake. That yellow light doesn't, and it is kind of strange we kind of gain this sort of emotional attachment to mechanical processes if you will, or inert processes that are just created for a purpose and we forget the purpose sometimes. With the traffic light, it is not a matter of, "oh this is an inconvenience because it is turning yellow and I am going to just slow down and stop", and some people say "I am going to buzz through it!" Well and everybody is entitled to their own opinion but you are taking a risk there and you are failing, with respect to the obsession over the light itself, failing to look at the underlying reason for the light which is to protect you from getting killed. It is like my grandfather said: "I don't really care about the light, I care about not dying." I remember him saying that specifically which brings us to mask mandates and this sort of operates inversely. 

My concern with mask mandates is the same reason one of my concerns is that it becomes like Syphilis, like Syphilis tests. We end up doing this in perpetuity and it is really no longer necessary and quite frankly I think a world where we are doing that is a terrifying one I mean just on many different levels. I think psychologically people walking around without masks on has a terrible detrimental impact to the collective consciousness of the state, the society you are dealing with. I mean you are walking around; you are not seeing people's faces; you are not seeing them smile, I mean that alone concerns me on many different levels. I am not a psychologist or anything but lay people are allowed to have their opinions too and walking around watching everybody masked up like covert commander, it becomes sort of concerning as time goes on. Meanwhile, more to the point, I don't think a lot of people are really thinking about the underlying reason for these things. Especially when I see people walking around alone outside or they are in a car by themselves and they are wearing these things. To each their own. If you want to do whatever you want to do I am never going to condemn somebody for what they wear by their choice but we have already done videos on this many times and WHO said outdoors this isn't something that is overly necessary. 

The reason for the video is I just hope we continue to critically think as time moves forward about the reasons why we are doing these things and we continue to reevaluate whether or not it might be time to discontinue certain practices that quite frankly are no longer necessary, if they ever were.