Here’s a radical thought: even if masks provide benefits to the wearer and to other people (an unproven assertion) wearing them shouldn’t be mandated! We’ve been breathing viruses and bacteria on each other for millennia, it’s an unavoidable part of life, and we all have a right not to breathe our own respiratory waste if we don’t want to. From Brendan O’Neill at spiked-online.com:
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.
Boris Johnson has announced that it will be mandatory to wear masks in shops in England from 24 July. If you don’t wear one you could be fined £100 by the cops. We should talk about this, right? We should weigh it up. Discuss the efficacy of masks and the desirability of empowering the police to take a hundred quid off someone who dares to show his face in public, like a politer public-health version of the morality guards in Afghanistan who would whip women with a stick if they ever committed the crime of unmasking their face in public. Apparently not. Apparently you would have to be a Covidiot, a mad libertarian, to want to discuss this latest development. The right thing to do is vigorously nod your head in agreement with the Tory government, don your mask, and muzzle your opinions.
