On religion and LGBTQ issues: > A strong, free nation can only be made up of religious and virtuous individuals, strong nuclear families with a cisgender father and a cisgender mother, and a lively and effective civil society, all protected under the wise framework of the Constitution as it was intended by our Founding Fathers. > To have a virtuous people, America must return to its religious roots. > Strong, nuclear families consisting of a cisgender father and a cisgender mother are the “fundamental units of society." All governments under the Constitution should protect and encourage them and discourage all other kinds of families made through voluntary actions.
On the right to vote and welfare: > they who have actually paid for the services of government, and thus, should have a say in how it runs. Those who haven’t, and get themselves addicted to welfare, should not, for they do not pay the price of living in society. > In addition, all government welfare is waste.
You can look at the sidebar for more fun tags, to see his opinions about Black Lives Matter (evil), "censorship" (Facebook and Squarespace taking down his favorite conspiracy pages), and many tags about his Mormon faith, which as an atheist, is probably not my place to criticize.
What good is a mask in your pocket?!?
Mask mandates from governors are not, in fact, rules. Executive orders are not laws. See https://gavinhoward.com/2020/10/executive-agencies-cannot-ma... .
If a business decides to enforce their rule, well, then we both know that it would be best that I do as little business with them as possible.
First of all, if you're really arguing that masks affect mental health more than they save lives (https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/in-science-all-factors-matte...), I don't even know what to say. I'd really want to see the science behind this, but I suspect there isn't any real science. Common sense and knowledge of professions where people use a mask for long periods of time should be enough to debunk this.
Also, this is truly abhorrent:
> Of course, 161,392 people have died. (Oh whoops! It turns out that only 6% of those people died from COVID-19 alone, so it’s really 9,700 deaths)
If my car breaks don't work, I ostensibly die because I'll be crushed when my car falls of a cliff, but the real cause of my death is the fact that the car breaks didn't work.
For the other article, gee, I wonder if the folks behind it have an agenda to push: "Townhall: <<Conservative>> News, Cartoons, Top Stories".
Anyway, do realize that this is a global phenomenon, people aren't out to get your "freedoms" and countries which are far freer than the US have realized that Covid is a real pandemic and treat it using real science, not pseudo-sience peddled by crackpots or even worse, people with a hidden agenda (usually one about making $$$).
I know I won't change your mind, but please break out of your bubble. Find international sources, use Google Translate to see what they say, compare, contrast, think critically. Also, read up on your history and check out what they did to fight the 1919 flu, for example. Or SARS. Or what they're doing all over East Asia, mostly successfully.
Oh, by the way, your argument makes you look even worse than you think it does. It's all about ME ME ME! "There's a tiny chance that masks hurt me" and "there's a tiny chance that masks don't help others as much as people say", so basically, "f** everyone else in that case, I don't want to be inconvenienced".
> Who knows? The point is that we don't know all of the ways that masks affect us.
I don't know all the ways that the rice I ate yesterday affects me. I'm not going to stop eating rice because of this.
Your argument is completely null.
When there's no clear proof of something having a strong negative effect, the rational thing is to assume it doesn't have a strong negative effect.
When something clearly has a strong positive effect, the rational thing is to assume it has a strong positive effect.
And when we decide to do something, we balance positives with negatives. There is nothing in this world that only has positive aspects (the opposite is also true, nothing truly has only negative aspects). We never do something because it's "perfect", we do things that are "good" (more positives than negatives). We live because of water and oxygen but water can drown us and oxygen can burn us.
Your logic is: "a lot of very respectable people (as well as common sense) say that this thing has a positive effect, but I don't know if it has any negative effect, so I just won't do it at all".
That's no logic, it sounds more like spite.
I don't say this lightly, even on the internet, but you act like a horrible person. Please reflect on your behavior and for your sake, I hope you change.
Anyway, goodbye!
Oh, and by the way, there's arsenic in rice. https://www.fda.gov/food/cfsan-risk-safety-assessments/arsen...
For masks, see https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/masks-and-carbon-dioxide/ and https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/in-science-all-factors-matte... . In essence, those who claim that masks work might be right, but they also ignore other factors that, if considered, might show that masks are worse for us overall.
The Internet doesn't have a shortage of rants. If you're wrong about other areas then why should I care about your opinions on technology?
That doesn't consider the opportunity cost; time that I spend on this argument can't be spent on another better argument.
There are more arguments then I could read in a lifetime so I focus my attention on people who are otherwise sensible.
Participation in a discussion usually implies an interest and a willingness to spend your time considering various arguments. If you only limit your exposure to arguments made by people who agree with you in other domains then I have to conclude your interest in this space is not very high.
My only posts in this thread have been to explain why I flagged the post and why I feel it's valid to dismiss the author based on his other views.
The author's position on masks is that he's too precious to comply with local laws, that businesses complying with said laws should be boycotted, and that executive orders aren't actually laws so he isn't bound by them. The first two beliefs are merely antisocial; it's the last claim that causes me to place him in the crank category.
> If you only limit your exposure to arguments made by people who agree with you in other domains then I have to assume your interest in this space is not very high.
My political beliefs are sufficiently bizarre that at best few people agree with them; if anything, he and I probably have some beliefs in common.
Also bc might not be quite the yardstick when it comes to software that needs to be secure.