Is the mask issue contentious?

No, not really. Though there are some fearful sectarian nuts who desperately want it to be.

I believe Japan only did partial lockdown measures, if any, and they've done well because they all wear masks, no problem. That's just what people in Japan, and many other Asian countries, voluntarily do when one may have a cold and one goes out in public. It's to prevent others from getting your cold. So they have no problems doing it when it's a highly contagious and deadly virus.

They don't have selfish speculators who talk about masks from the standpoint of the effectiveness of it preventing you from getting the virus from someone else. They start from the standpoint of wearing a mask as a means of preventing others from getting it from yourself - when you don't know if you have it.

The beauty of it is when everyone is looking out for their neighbours, then everyone is wearing a mask out in public, and transmission of the virus goes way, way down.

A 100,000 times more ideological brainwashing goes into the refusal to wear a mask than into choosing to wear a mask.

COVID science denial, including speculating about the number of deaths from COVID and whether it was COVID that killed them, as well as biased speculation about the effectiveness of wearing masks dressed up as journalism, is all at bottom predatory opportunism, lying in wait, and nourishing itself into something extraordinarily malignant.

It is not seeking truth; it is not concerned with freedom. It is an entrenched, nasty, predatory opportunism; the refusal of the exercise of mercy in a bid for power. They approach a crisis this way: as vultures, like those in a pyramid scheme. The fact that they don't even realize this about themselves because their motives are not nefarious only speaks to how brainwashed they are, and how much they are content to stew in the relativism of ambiguity, the dictatorship of relativism.

They project this despairing power grab from the contented darkness of ambiguity (where any and all conspiracy theories are valid) onto others. Their capitulation to right-wing nuttery and sectarian fantasies - their defeat in surrendering to the politicization of the pandemic for the sake of their own comfort (including the comfortable illusion that they are prophets of the wilderness) - they project onto those complying with safety measures: they lie through their teeth about "defeated and fearful" eyes peering out above their masks.

This image is a total fabrication they weave out of their own desperate, private, wishful thinking.

Wearing a mask in public places, one only encounters this: kind eyes, humour, lots of solid eye contact, and a sense of fraternity. All the bullshit about "fearful and defeated" eyes peering out from above their masks is one of the flat-earthers' little preciouses they will never give up, no matter how much reality says otherwise.

The thought of people simply shouldering a rather mild burden and changing things up to accommodate the lives of others, and not have hospitals overwhelmed, thinking about all the nurses and doctors and hospital staff who would get heavy viral loads if the hospitals are overwhelmed (as clearly happened in Italy among other places) - and that people would do this and simply remain normal - no, this is too much for the sectarian nutbars. We all have to be fearful sheeple staring with round eyes of despair above our strangling masks as we are herded like steer into the vaccination barns.

It's amazing how much they love and cling to this fantasy over and above all observable reality to the contrary.

It's really quite something. But maybe observable reality is just a hologram? It's part of the COVID-21 Hologram? Now that would be something. Holy shit.

"There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

"She [the Church] of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality." --Pope Benedict XVI, in the book-length interview Holy Father We Ask For Clarity