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Why are global warming skeptics asking questions about Covid-19 in the G.W. section?
One of our resident trolls recently pointed out that 35% of excess deaths were atrributed to something other than Covid-19. He clearly believed this meant the number of deaths attributed to Covid-19 has been exaggerated. What it *actually* means is that the excess death figure is higher than the Covid-19 death figure, and so it is likely Covid-19 deaths have been underestimated!
What is the link between climate change and Covid-19?
Is this not just evidence that whatever the mainstream scuentific view, the troll skeptics are just contrarians who will default to the opposite view as a matter of course?
Davie ... nice idea except they block anyone with a different opinion ...
To Anna ... lmfao ... I'm actually quite flattered that this mythos has developed around me. Ohh ... Evil Liz ... an ecofascist paid by a nefarious environmental group to influence opinion on Y/A of all places. As I've said before I'm a clinical nurse specialist paid by the public of Ireland through the Health Service Executive on agreed univerisal public servant payscales. The only other souce of income I had (stopped due to Covid) teaching taekwondo part time.
Thanks all for answering ... it was fun. Let's do it again sometime soon. Take care everyone, and stay safe.
5 Answers
- Anonymous6 months agoFavorite Answer
There are various reasons why some regulars take the contrarian stance.
Sagebrush and a few others here are young earth creationists, they try to discredit the scientific method because it proves their religious believes are wrong. The man is certainly not a Christian and in my opinion, pure evil.
JimZ's motivation is partisan politics, he loves nature photography and as such more likely to be a conservationist, like most hunters and fishermen are. He earns his money cleaning up chemical spills and he moved to a democrat run state because he can earn a lot more, even though he insists democrats are bad for the economy. The man needs help.
The resident troll gets his jollies by trying to upset people, more like a childish bully who is desperately trying to get the approval of members of the extreme right. He is largely ignored on their forums, so he comes to YA where the traffic is so small even 50 sock accounts makes a huge difference.
He and I had a little war going on where I would move his "questions" to different sections of YA and move the genuine questions, he moved out back in to global warming, Judging by his wining, I suggest I won that "war". Making 100 sock accounts is trivial and so is making a program to thumb answers up/down, but what would that prove? When an answer here gets 10 thumbs up or down every one knows it is some one using sock accounts, let alone if we see 100+.
EDIT:
The troll is now saying that Diraq was the one who claimed to have written the bot but that he bought it from some one else. Diraq didn't, I did and I wrote my own version, it is not hard, it was only about 20 lines of code. The troll is a what we in the IT world called a script kiddie, incapable of producing anything of value while pretending they are the bees knees. I have fired a few of them, dishonest, incapable and quite tiring.
I went from manual labor into IT because in those days all that one needed was to show an interest in the field. English is not my native language and I used YA to improve my English. The idea that my English is as proficient as Diraq's is hilarious, I know it isn't, but I do thank him for the compliment, I guess it is good enough to fool some people. I am fascinated with people who believe in conspiracy theories and for some reason, many of them congregate in this section of YA. I used to spend some time in religion and spirituality, but I got tired of the anti theist and pretend Christians posting there.
In construction we had ways of dealing with people like the resident troll more effectively, in IT we had to contend with human resources, but eventually they were let go, sadly on YA, there is almost no effort whatsoever to deal with trolls.
- Anonymous6 months ago
They want to show that they reject science of all kinds, not just global warming. I did think it was amusing the troll chose that particular paper, since as you point out it was arguing exactly the OPPOSITE of what the troll thought it did. I guess he knew that none of his comrades cared enough about science to actually look at the paper and what it said.
It's true I used to have an account "pegminer", which I closed years ago. I never had an account "Peg Miner". As one of the anonymous answers point out, I had nothing to do with creating a bot to move questions--I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do that. I do a little programming, but I am pretty bad at it. These days the only languages I program in are NCAR NCL, Matlab, R and hopefully Python pretty soon. I also do a little command line scripting in Bash and tcsh. All stuff for doing data analysis. What language would a bot even be written in, Java, HTML?
EDIT: The troll, answering as "Anna" says:
Dirac once made this statement about the bot: "Automating the moving of questions was fun, I had not programed in years and it took me about an hour to get it [bot] working."'
Of course I, Dirac, never made that statement at all. If I did, then the troll would be able to give a link to where I said that, since I neither block nor hide my Q&A nor answer anonymously.
- Anonymous6 months ago
@Anna. Dirac's Level 7 is Peg Miner. He always claimed he closed that account, but he never did.
- Anonymous6 months ago
Bad Yahoo algorithms. They put questions in wrong categories all the time.
I'm level 7, but never moved a question. I figure the person knows where he wants it (or will eventually learn about algorithms). Trolls are here to stay. Skip over those. Why sweat it? Just answer serious questions.
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- Davie BwoiLv 66 months ago
Because if they’re regulars in this section they want to see what the fruit cakes here think