[MuchoMaas]

> Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks.

Funny, that's how I would describe the widespread insistence that we can indefinitely conceal half of everyone's faces in public (when the only effective masks are ones which create a large amount of plastics pollution), or assiduously suppress the spread of pathogens, without having some as-yet unknown knock-on effects. It's bizarre that so many treat these things as unalloyed goods with zero downside whatsoever.

[roflc0ptic]

I don't view them as unalloyed goods, for sure - it's just that most of the hostility came pre-anyone having great arguments against them and struck me as fundamentally tribal - went into an ice cream shop with my girlfriend in Ocala, Florida, got glared down as the only people wearing masks. This wasn't well considered social pressure, it was most assuredly "we don't cotton to them types around here."

I do think the arguments against wearing masks when interacting with children/making children mask have been quite strong, post ace-2.