Wider context check, his job as a politician is to serve his constituents by leading, even when it may be difficult. Pandering to the lazy and ignorant in a state of perpetual campaigning is an utter dereliction of duty.

Funny how one's enemies are always the lazy ignorant ones.

https://www.prri.org/research/religious-vaccines-covid-vacci...

"Americans of all levels of formal education are similarly more likely to be vaccine acceptant now than they were in March. Americans with high school degrees or less have shifted most (61%, up from 45%), though movement is relatively similar across other groups: Americans with some college experience but no degrees have increased to 70%, from 56% vaccine acceptant in March; Americans with four-year degrees have increased to 80%, from 70% in March; and Americans with postgraduate degrees have increased to 92%, from 79% in March."

(b) that strikes me as a somewhat misleading reading of that data, which shows no _decrease_ of vaccine hesitancy from the previous month in PhDs while hesitancy for other educational buckets declined to some degree.

(c) what makes you think PhDs as a group are less likely to be lazy and ignorant than other groups? Do you have statistics on that?

I'm no fan of the democrats either, and I'd say there is a lot of lazy/ignorant campaigning on their part as well. But on this topic at least the democrats acknowledged the pandemic and aimed for some type of response. There are actually conservative approaches to many of the problems facing our society. But rather than adopting those positions and making public debate be about the merits of conservative/progressive approaches, the republican party has chosen a path of simply denying that the problems exist at all. This cannot stand.

Rand Paul is (1) elected (2) holds a medical license. YouTube is suspending him because (1) he is disagreeing with government policy and (2) they don't like his medical opinion. I think it is fair to say you are defending (1) here?

He is far more qualified to decide what the public discourse is than you, I and YouTube's censorship team.

It's weird that people have decided that privately owned companies should be required to do things they don't want to do, in the name of freedom.

Of course it does, should the government decide it does.

Just like how the Civil Rights acts mandated that certain private businesses have responsibilities to serve certain classes of citizens equally.

Just like the federal housing law requires landlords, corporate or not, to rent out to all people.

The government is allowed to mandate whatever it wants to benefit the public (the source of its power) so long as such a mandate is not prevented by a higher law.

The courts have found that these laws are constitutional:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Atlanta_Motel,_Inc._v...

> countered that the restrictions requiring adequate accommodation for African Americans were unquestionably related to interstate travel and that Congress, under the Constitution's Commerce Clause, certainly had the power to address such a matter in law.

Apparently, all the US government would need to do is argue that YouTube, as a multi-state corporation, is subject to interstate commerce regulations, which is very precedented.

Currently, the government is directly involved in Facebook and Twitter's moderation decisions, by their own admission, and the Supreme Court is doing nothing, so I don't see your hypothetical as being very realistic.

YouTube doesn't have any legal responsibility to the public discourse.

Well, for starters I'd be the first to argue that YouTube shouldn't have any legal responsibility for the public discourse. But the opinion that matters on that topic is YouTube's, and they believe they _do_ have a responsibility for the public discourse. That is why they are engaging in this program of censorship.

What I'm arguing here is that their plan to police misinformation is impossible and, consequently, can't work. And that they are showing an outrageous political bias and anyone with even a slight right-lean of opinion should get out now and find a different platform. Here today we see another example where it isn't working well, as YouTube starts clamping down on what are politically mainstream.

This isn't Alex Jones, this isn't Trump. This is now a doctor offering an opinion on medical practice that isn't his exact speciality. YouTube can't be consistently right on this stuff and they are throwing their weight around politically.

Also, a medical license doesn't qualify a person as an epidemiologist or any other such expert, especially given that his license is in opthalmology.

Let's also not forget that he created a bogus certification board, started by family members, to certify his ability to practice. He's not currently certified to practice medicine by any legitimate medical organization.

Or is it disinformation to say, "the rythmn method is an effective form of birth control"?

https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/unintendedpregnancy/p...

If we had no other method, then it might be reasonable to call it effective, in comparison to doing nothing. Given that better options exist, it is not very reasonable to call it effective without qualification.

If someone chooses to intentionally reduce a conversation to an "effective/ineffective" dichotomy to deliberately mislead or obscure conversations, then it might be disinformation. Disinformation can consist entirely of factual statements.

Actually, a good case for banning ALL discussion of mask effectiveness on Twitter as being disinformation, since the character limit basically forces turning discussion into simplified dichotomy.

How are you supposed to tell which is which without reading minds?

This simply moves the argument from "accurate vs concise" to "concise for good reasons vs concise for bad reasons"

You certainly don’t win senate elections by telling your constituents that they’re wrong. You start with the preconceived views of your constituents and work your way backwards to an argument.

There's the bait and switch.

You see, cloth masks aren't as effective as N95 mask, that doesn't mean they aren't effective. Nor does it mean that the government mandates to wear masks are ineffective.

Frankly, you can look at nearly every other world government that issued similar guidance to the CDC and in all cases those countries did better than the US. Why? Because it wasn't a political issue. The countries that faired the worst all turned COVID into a game of the left vs right.

You can't say masking and social distancing don't work or are ineffective when 40% of the population goes out of it's way to not wear masks, wear them under their nose, and decides to hold big rallies and gathering to celebrate how much they hate wearing masks.

The per capita US death rate is in the middle of the UK, Italy, Spain, and France (which together have about half of Europe’s population). The only country that did substantially better was Germany.

Are you saying masks were politicized in all of those countries besides Germany?

Then maybe you can tell us why blue states NJ, NY, and MA have the highest death rates in the US?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

And, in particular, with infectious disease a few bad apples spoil the bunch.

Can you tell us why the current delta deaths are pretty much entirely the unvaccinated? Care to take a stab at what the #1 predictor of vaccine status is? [1]

Also, maybe a shocker to you, but densely populated states (such as NJ, NY, and MA) tend to do poorly when a communicable disease hits. It spreads fast and the hospitals are overwhelmed.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The vaccines are 95% effective, yet someone who has not yet seen the studies showing their 95% efficacy would be told "The vaccine won't stop you from getting COVID" will understand the statement as meaning that they're worthless.

It is absolutely misinformation, and no playing coy and claiming "But it's only 95%, not 100%, so the statement is still true!" is going to change that. It's nothing more than a technically correct "WELL ACKSHUALLY", except in the case of COVID, it's not just a distraction, but a dangerous statement that is literally costing lives.

> Some people have gotten pregnant while on birth control, therefore birth control "doesn't work". Some people wearing seat belts still die in car crashes, therefore seat belts "don't work". This is a tried and true misinformation tactic.

Now look at this from the other perspective: You have an angry person from the other side of the political spectrum insisting to them that their eyes are lying to them and that their opinions should be censored.

Would this be effective persuasion to you?

That's why I say the answer is to add context. To explain how things work and how we know things. There's a great comment on this very thread about the various mechanisms by which masks capture particles for one example.

Or with vaccines, it's not "works vs. doesn't" but that it works X% of the time in preventing infection, reduces the period for which you're infectious by Y, and decreases the chance of serious infection by Z%. We should be making the case that going from unvaccinated to vaccinated reduces your odds of something bad happening from 2% to 0.0002%.

You will note that this doesn't deny their observations, it explains them and recontextualizes them.

This is also part of how I filter opinions on topics, those who can't explain the hows and the whys do not have any useful information to offer and can be ignored.

Face to Face, and in the past, we were much more civil to one another.

Agreed. "Dog whistle" basically means "I can't find something to attack in what ideological opponent said, so I'm going to pretend that what he said actually means something else, and attack that instead".

There are at least five mechanisms by which a filter can stop particles from getting through. Only one of them depends on the gaps being smaller than the particles.

Briefly,

1. Big particles don't fit between the fibers of the filter. Think fish in a fish net. This is called sieving.

2. Particles too small for sieving but heavier than the surrounding flow don't make the turns as well as the surrounding flow when the flow goes around the fibers. The particles can get embedded in the fibers. This mechanism is called inertial impaction.

3. The smallest might be too small to actually be affected much by the flow of the surrounding fluid through the filter. The move by diffusion, and many will randomly hit the fibers and get stuck.

4. Particles too big for diffusion but too light for inertial impaction still can run into fibers and get stuck. This is called interception.

5. Some filters have an electrostatic charge which can help trap particles.

The effectiveness of sieving, inertial impaction, and interception all follow S shaped curves that start out low for small particles, then at some point start rising, and then level out. The sieving curve's rise is almost vertical. The rise for inertial impaction is steep but not nearly as steep as it is for sieving. The curve for interception's rise is much more relaxed.

The effectiveness for diffusion goes the other way. Much more effective for very small particles, then above some size drops down and is low from then one.

When you put all these together, you get a curve that is effective at the small end, and at some point as size goes up effectiveness drops, reaching a minimum, and then rises again to reach high effectiveness for particles above some certain size.

More detail here [1].

[1] http://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/document...

and got downvoted into oblivion. No meta comment, just the facts on mask ratings.

Says a lot about hn.