
It illegal to both wear and not wear a face mask in New York - abhi3
https://twitter.com/srfeld/status/1251228271645208577
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SilasX
Yes, ad hoc/DIY masks feel intuitively wrong because normally it's illegal,
and looks very threatening, to cover so much of your face like that.

And minorities often feel it harder:

[https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/us/face-masks-ethnicity-
coron...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/us/face-masks-ethnicity-coronavirus-
cdc-trnd/index.html)

As for NYC, I _assume_ even without explicit overriding, police are under
orders not to enforce the "no masks" part.

Even beyond the legal bit, I assume there's a real security risk too, since
_actual_ robbers have cover for wearing a mask and people won't raise their
guard or (of course) call the police about it.

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ncmncm
Probably the title means "It is illegal both to wear and not to wear a face
mask in New York". What it says is of course impossible.

~~~
sudoaza
I think it's quite possible, many places have laws against covering one's face
(during a protest or otherwise) and if they made it illegal to go out without
face mask protection during the covid crisis you could find yourself in this
situation.

~~~
tinus_hn
The sentence in the title as it is implies it is illegal for a person to be
both wearing and not wearing a mask at the same time. It’s a grammatical
error.

~~~
waltpad
slight nitpick

It is not a grammatical error: such an error would mean that the sentence is
not constructed according to the grammatical rules (of English), when clearly
it is. What you probably meant is that it's a semantic error: the writer used
a construction which doesn't not convey the intended meaning.

As an example, substitute the impossible fact of both wearing a mask and not
wearing a mask by "both walking and not looking frontward" and you would
obtain a sentence following the same construction, yet doesn't seem to carry
an incorrect meaning.

~~~
ncmncm
waltpad identifies the essence of the matter.

The effect of such a combination of laws would be to make it unlawful to go
outside. The effect of a law as stated in the tweet would be to make
enforcement impossible, as nobody would be both wearing and not wearing a
mask: each perp would be doing one or the other.

~~~
waltpad
I totally agree; there's a world of difference between laws impossible to
enforce and laws impossible to break.

