> Pathological and perverse, perhaps. But also totally cool and in agreement with the experts.
Um... "perverse"?
I have a lot less patience for these takes than I used to because at least early on in the pandemic people could convincingly claim that wearing a mask was "cool". There was at least truth to the idea that you would be shamed for not wearing a mask. But that's not the situation anymore -- GP wrote a comment about how they're getting a lot of weird looks in public for wearing a mask to help with pollution. If the response to that is, "what's up with this mask fad?", then I'm not sure you understand how fads or popularity work.
Anecdotally, even in a majority Democrat area the majority of people I see in just about every single social situation are not wearing masks, even in enclosed environments and at offices. The majority of retail workers I see don't wear masks. There are maybe 3-6 people total that I've seen in my entire church that wear a mask. And it's not exclusive to Republicans, most Democrats I know are not wearing masks -- to the point where people are far more likely to give funny looks or scowl at others for having one on.
As far as I can tell people wearing masks in public are pretty squarely the minority at this point, but the rhetoric against masking never really got updated since the early pandemic so people are still pretending like if they go to an average grocery store without a mask everyone there will judge them over it.
GP wears a mask to help with allergies and reduce road pollution -- this is pretty reasonable and would have been reasonable pre-pandemic. I don't understand why anyone would care about someone else making that decision in the first place, let alone why they would care so much that they'd call GP a pervert over it. :)