I’m both impressed and dismayed that both of your comments don’t do a single thing to refute mask denialism, specifically whatever his point is on Sweden and Germany.
I don’t even believe his comment, but I’m not going to sneer at it and call it mask denialism to shut it down. I feel better about his comment at least attempting to state an argument and evidence in support of it.
Why not compare Sweden and Norway, in many ways a better comparison in culture, population density and geography than Sweden and Germany? …oh.
See, I didn't specifically went with countering the OP line of argument because refuting BS takes an order of magnitude more effort than slinging it. It's something anyone who did try to reason with generally unreasonable people so abundant lately can attest to. The laminated checklist from March 2020 above just gives that vibe of someone brining up their homework here and all reasoning is going to be futile.
There's a thing called a Gish Gallop (all this is actually rather on topic for discussions of lying) where the counter to someone arguing your points, is to pivot and rapidly throw out more points, pretty much anything you like, too fast to properly refute. It's a rather effective tactic for socially disabling an argumentative opponent: just not for anything truth-related. Might not be truth-related but it's still very real.
All this relates to discussions of lying because the fundamental structure of the gallop, plus numerous other forms of BSing, requires the implication that everybody is in good faith: you're meant to grant that and then examine the arguments and see how they shake out. There's a lot of stuff happening in modern discourse where an anchor point to the argument is, 'since everyone here is in good faith and we just believe different things, let's break down the sides of the arguments'.
But we're not. When you're desperate enough about winning (or not losing important things), good faith is disposable, and then people lie, for advantage, because they badly need advantage and aren't getting it from truth and good faith.
Hence, the OP question of 'How can you tell if someone is lying?'. People will con themselves, but they will also lie on purpose to accomplish a goal.
My thought pattern is deranged, because I compare countries with similar state of health care. One where masks are mandatory and one where it isn't. Well, Sweden also has no lockdown, but it pretty much does not matter since the death count in countries should be way higher if most people do not wear masks even indoor.
While you were smearing me you missed to make an argument.
You apparently think that you can believe in science as some kind of religion, but that is not how any of this works. There is not single science answer for these kind of topics, so you can't avoid arguments. Try refute it! I wanna see it.
I don’t even believe his comment, but I’m not going to sneer at it and call it mask denialism to shut it down. I feel better about his comment at least attempting to state an argument and evidence in support of it.
Anyway, this is a strange tangent for the OP.