Originally published at: YouTube bans Senator Rand Paul for a week after he posts that cloth masks "don't work" | Boing Boing
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Wow, a whole week. Will anyone even still remember who he is by the time he’s back to Youtubing?
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Even by the terms of their own stunted priorities, the big platforms are being foolish and cowardly. Permabanning Paul and other prominent fascists isn’t going to lose them a significant number of users. The Know-Nothing 27% may be angry if that happens, but ultimately they’re too lazy and attention-starved to find other platforms and too incompetent and stupid to create their own.
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A week is definitely too short for a man who’s among our most rancid pols.
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I always tell them they’re entitled to run a printing press and hand out leaflets. They’re not entitled to Google’s printing press and nobody is obliged to pass out their leaflets.
They usually whine that it would be impossible to do this. Oh really? We’re not allowed to call Trump voters racist or stupid because there’s 70 million of them. With 70 million people you can’t scrounge up the resources prop up a website with a CDN?
I wonder why that is? Well we’re not allowed to call them stupid guys. There’s 70 million of them.
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Often in the same breathe that they decry reality-based anti-trust proposals as “tyranny” and “soshalism”. One of the many reasons I feel comfortable calling them stupid.
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If he really believes that cloth face coverings aren’t doing the job then shouldn’t he be trying to get more N95 masks to the public, thus giving people more protection from spreading the virus instead of less?
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Yes, he has a PHD in asshole.
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Yeah, but he’s my asshole. Figuratively. So I just now tried writing my asshole Senator to tell him, in politer terms, he’s being an embarrassing asshole.
But it’s some stupid form that asks for all your details and limits you to 1200 characters. The final insult is that it insists, regardless of what I put in the fields, that what I wrote " Your submitted request contained a potential security risk." So I can’t even complain to my government representative about his ignorant behavior.
Would anyone happen to know his actual email address?
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As I recall, there was a study a few months back that showed that cloth and paper masks weren’t bad at low concentrations for protecting the wearer, but past a concentration threshold, the effectiveness suddenly dropped as they were overloaded.
It should be somewhere in the main Covid thread, but I’m not going to fish it out.
And then there’s the problem of variants like Delta. Are single Delta droplets more infectious, or do they turn the infected into firehoses?
I’ll stick with my lab-tested KN95s for now.
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Again, it would be one thing if Rand Paul was saying “cloth masks aren’t as effective at N95, so wear those instead if possible.” Instead he’s going the exact opposite direction and telling people they shouldn’t wear any protection at all. He’s actively trying to get more people killed.
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For some reason the “kill grandma” crowd really do want to kill grandma.
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So much this. Cloth masks were a stopgap measure to reduce the overall transmission rate of covid as source control masks. They work enough to do that because the droplets from your mouth and nose are larger when the start out and before they have evaporated and become smaller, or they worked well enough to help a bit to reduce the spread of Classic Covid. But the time for cloth masks has come and gone with respirator grade masks like N95s, KF94s and FFP2s now being widely available (aka filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs).
Anyone criticizing cloth masks for their limited protective ability should be evangelizing effective FFRs or, at the very least, the use of cloth masks as mask fitters over quality surgical masks to get the best of both, the tight fit of the cloth mask and the decent filtration of the surgical mask media. The CDC has illustrated instructions on best practices for double masking.
Rand Paul is an active hazard to public health and should be permabanned from YouTube.
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I have a hard time generally recommending KN95s because they are likely the most counterfeited masks on the planet. If you can find a reliable supply chain to a legitimate brand and they fit you well, then they should be great.
At this point I’d suggest real N95s from 3M. You can buy them at normal prices from Lowes, which should be a reliable supply chain direct from 3M. You might have to tape over the valves, though NIOSH did a study earlier this year and found that valved N95s work better as source control than surgical masks because surgical masks leak so much and the cross sectional area of the valve is actually lower than the leak at the sides of surgical masks, meaning that much of the exhaled air actually goes through the filter media, not the valve.
Arron Collins YouTube channels has particle count testing of various makes and models of KF94s, N95s, FFP2s and KN-95s along with info on the suppliers they came from.
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This is the same asshole who last year was concerned enough to get a test but kept going out in public while he was waiting for the results. The results were positive, of course, so he almost certainly spread COVID around Washington DC.
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On the valved n95 masks this is what I always assumed and some information came out that the valve didn’t filter anything and cloth masks were better. Seemed odd to me since the valve was so small and pointed downward and the cloth masks vent every which way. I started wearing a surgical mask over my valve.
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Our academic work includes an opinion piece available here and a narrative review available here. Our plain language summary of that review is available here, and a longer article here. This website incorporates newer relevant peer-reviewed work as soon as we identify it.
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Paul, who is not mad, tweeted that it was a “badge of honor” to be banned by “leftwing cretins”.
He should ask to be banned for ever, then he’d really be honoured. 
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But but, he’s a dockter!!
/s obvs
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