They’re stuffy and claustrophobic
Another fresh exciting novel idea from Brendan O’Neill – masks! Masks are authoritarian! Fight the power!
Here come the sneerers. Their target this time? Anyone who expresses even a tiny amount of scepticism about mandatory mask-wearing in shops. Within hours, mask sceptics have become the new climate-change deniers. They’re granny-killers. They’re sociopaths. They’re the kind of people who care more for their right to breath all over the fruit and veg at Lidl than they do for the continued existence of people over the age of 75. The speed with which mask scepticism has been turned into a foul blasphemy that only thick people who probably voted for Brexit would ever engage in rather confirms that this latest manifestation of the culture wars has very little to do with masks. It’s all about people. Those people. It always is.
He says, having started his piece with “Here come the sneerers.”
It is remarkable that it is always the people who spent the past year or so telling us that Boris and his crew are fascists who have unquestioningly embraced every Covid-related diktat issued by Boris’s government.
What? On the one hand it’s not about the masks it’s about the people, on the other hand it’s always the people who hate Boris who do what Boris says? That doesn’t add up. That contradicts itself not once but twice. Tell us exactly where we hurt you, Brendan; you’re all over the place.
The snobs even have a study now to confirm their prejudices against mask sceptics. The Daily Mail reports that researchers in the US have found that ‘people who refuse to wear a mask or comply with social distancing have lower cognitive ability’. ‘Real covidiots!’, as the Mail sums them up. We’re squarely back in Brexit / blue passport territory, with the chattering classes once against looking down their long noses at what they presume to be the mentally deficient, ‘low-information’ little people.
So it’s about snobbery? Or is it about chattering? Wait is it long noses? No it’s blue passports? I can’t keep up. He has such a rich vocabulary of inverse snobbery I can’t parse it all.
We have to talk about this. We cannot let mask-wearing become the ‘new normal’. Masks are horrible. They’re stuffy and claustrophobic. They make it hard to read people’s faces. They alienate us from each other even more, hiding smiles and discouraging chit-chat.
He should try being on a ventilator. That really hides smiles and discourages chit-chat…and then you die.
I would offer to cough on him to show him what stuffy and claustrophobic really feels like, but I’m no longer contagious.
Sure, it’s nothing at all about the asymmetry between cost and consequence, everything to do with… all those…contradictory… things…
Peter Hitchens is being predictably idiotic about face coverings, too, calling them “muzzles” and saying that we somehow owe it to future generations to not wear masks in public for a tiny fraction of our lives. He’s all in favour of blasphemy laws and against the bodily autonomy of women, but wearing a little paper mask for a bit is the greatest destroyer of liberty the world has ever seen.
He proposes (apparently seriously) that people be allowed to sign some sort of register declaring they are “relaxed”, meaning that they promise not to sue anyone if they get covid-19. There will be relaxed buses, bars and planes. He “guesses” that the relaxed people will be healthier in the long run. He doesn’t have a great history of guessing correctly.
Hitchens doesn’t mention little problems of spreading covid to the non-relaxed or taking up NHS resources if they catch it themselves due to their idiocy. I don’t think even Hitchens is quite stupid enough to believe any of this. He’s playing to a crowd. Which makes me despise him even more.
I saw that yesterday. He’s going on and ON about it. He’s somewhere on the list of things to grumble about today.
Yeah, it’s a hot summer, and I put a hot mask on my face. Why? Cost-benefit analysis. All these free-market conservatives should understand that, and I suspect they do, but they underestimate the cost of COVID.
Masks are a pain for those of us who wear glasses because of the steaming-up, but it takes only a tiny bit of imagination and 30 seconds with a pipe cleaner or double-sided sticky tape to more or less solve that problem on the cheap.
I’ve bought the kind of mask motorcyclists wear, which fits the face a lot better than the surgical types and has a raised filter. It seems to do the job a lot better.
It’s easy for me to say because I can manage without my glasses for distance-seeing and it isn’t too disorienting. Others have a tougher time, I’m sure.
That’s been one of my worst problems, too, latsot. I don’t go without my glasses except when I have decided it’s time to trip over things and break my bones. My vision is quite poor without them. But my ophthalmologist showed me a couple of tricks that help. And steamed glasses are less of a problem than not breathing.
I hadn’t considered that angle, but now that he mentions it… I would bet the overlap between mask refusal and Brexit voter is far higher than that between mask refuser and Remain voter. In USA, the mask refuser group is near one to one with Trump voting, so it seems reasonable to me that mask refusing also be associated with Britain’s ‘stupid/conservative’ demographic, by which I mean Brexit voters.
This link is all the more reasonable for the fact that refusing to reduce community spread is pretty stupid.
iknklast,
I had to have an eye test with a mask on. The eye testing machine steams up too, of course.
Read the first line of letters… wait for steam to clear… read second line…
Holms,
Yeah, I think we’ll see a lot of unmasked gammon in the weeks to come.
As I understand it, the reason we wear masks is not really to protect ourselves; it’s to protect other people from the droplets which come out of our mouths, in case we have Covid without being aware of it. Everyone who gets coronavirus went through a period where they didn’t know they had it, but we’re still highly contagious.
They’re treating masks like motorcycle helmets, or seat belts — “my risk.” Yes, if they get sick they can later spread it to others, but the real issue is not whether they might get it, but whether they have it now — while they’re not wearing a mask.
Sastra,
Yeah, a better analogy is to condoms, which don’t protect the wearer so much as the partner.
Of course, I’m willing to bet that there’s a pretty large overlap between non-mask wearers and non-condom users, at least among men.
Brenden is right. Masks are stuffy and can be claustrophobic. I know from experience. I put up with them for about 30 years as a surgeon. I wore then for up to 12 hrs at a time depending on the procedure. Oddly, I was able to communicate, cognate, and breath with one despite my asthma, and the tasks I completed in one might be considered fairly involved by most people. Occasionally, it was for my protection – most of the time it was for the patient’s benefit. Admittedly, I bought into the germ theory early in my education so the idea that I could exhale something detrimental to those around me doesn’t seem strange to me.
Pliny, I manage to wear one with asthma, too, and do manage to communicate. The whole thing is just…bogus. If the dumpster fire had chosen to do one sane thing in his entire term, and modelled the wearing of masks, people would be wearing them. But he set the tone, and they picked up the hue and cry.
One of the high schools in our town is trying to decide on their requirements for reopening. A mob of angry parents showed up to yell. You can probably guess what they were yelling about. And some of the teachers joined them, claiming the students would be less likely to be involved in discussions if they were wearing masks. Yeah? I imagine ventilators and coffins would also put a bit of a damper on discussions, too.
One of the high schools is reopening with mask mandate; the other likely will bow to these angry parents. As my husband says, their superintendent is a tower of jello. And the teachers who are required to show up every day are right on the front lines (to borrow Trump’s war analogy).
Wearing the mask has reminded me of how superfluous all the tech-driven connectivity is, and how it is seen as such a necessity now. I reach for my phone to look at something while grocery shopping (avec le masque), so it fogs up my reading glasses which I need to see the tiny screen, then the face ID doesn’t recognize me so I need to type in my PIN, and when I put it back in my pocket I feel how heavy the damn thing is and start wishing I had left it at home. My stupid smartphone is more of an inconvenience and a hassle than wearing a mask. Masks are hands-free, don’t require your attention, don’t need to have their hungry batteries charged, can stay in the car because they are not need at home (for most of us), and don’t cost a lot to buy or maintain. Being old enough to remember being unreachable doesn’t help the situation, and I would argue that it undermines people’s being able to trust each other to negotiate the world autonomously. I find the things nannyesque (but that could just be my contact list, lol)… I wonder how many mask rejectors would consider not having their Borg-like auxiliary brain not attached to them for even a few minutes.
A good thread on the dangers of mask wearing:
https://twitter.com/CharlTaylorPage/status/1283043553531371521?s=09
latsot, here was another good one on that thread: