Post @post@qoto.org

CW Long post. Original content.

How Covid curbs on church-going harmed public health

During the Covid-19 pandemic, people were barred in many countries from attending religious worship for long periods, and nowhere more so than in Ireland. When they were not barred, severe restrictions were put on the numbers who could attend. But strictly from a public health perspective, was it worth it? An important new study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292122001672) suggest it was not, and the restrictions may have done more public health harm than good.

The research, just published in the European Economic Review is based on a nationally representative sample of over 100,000 responses from 52,459 individuals in the United States. It was carried out during the period from March 2020 to May 2021, when most American States limited the number who could attend a house of worship.

A crucial finding of the study is that the severe restrictions on religious worship do not seem to have slowed the spread of the virus.

It says: “there is no statistically or economically significant association between restrictions on houses of worship and either COVID-19 infections or deaths regardless of how restrictions are measured”. (p. 12)

The article concludes that “there is almost no evidence that the restrictions had a positive effect on public health, consistent with a growing body of evidence that has evaluated the launch of State quarantine policies.” (p. 12)

But the restrictions or ban on public worship did harm the mental health of some worshippers.

The author focuses on two variables: current life satisfaction and self-isolation.

The study confirmed that religious people have higher level of current life satisfaction overall, compared to the rest of the population. This is partly achieved by being part of a religious community. Therefore, it is no surprise that is also found a “strong negative association between state restrictions and current life satisfaction, particularly for religious adherents.” (p. 6).

If one of the main sources of their wellbeing was removed, how could it be otherwise?

The author notes that going to a church, or attending any other religious venue, offers people the opportunity to forge relationships and grow stronger in their faith. The survey established that the restrictions had “a disproportionate impact on self-isolation among religious adherents.” (p. 7)

Self-isolation among religious people increased by more than among their non-religious counterparts. This is one of the reasons why their well-being suffered more as a result of the pandemic.

The decline in well-being was stronger in Catholic than in Protestant congregations, and non-existent among Mormons, who are concentrated in Utah where no significant restrictions were put into place.

The main result of the study is that “religious adherents experienced systematically lower levels of well-being and isolation following the adoption of such restrictions.” (p. 11)

The study focuses on the United States only. It would be interesting to see such research extended to other countries, particularly to Ireland that had the longest period of worship restrictions in Europe.

✨ The future is federated

Imagine being able to follow Twitter accounts from your Instagram account

With Mastodon & Pixelfed you can!

▶️ https://pixelfed.org

JOURNALISM 101 RULE: If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true. — Now more than ever.

I'm so proud of this community

Doom scenario: in 10-20 years, the FSF and/or GNU boards are infiltrated by commercial interests and publish GPLv4, which degrades to MIT equivalent and removes copyleft from all projects with a "or later" clause in their GPL license

Big thanks to @captainepoch for all their hard work on Husky over the years 🎉

I maintain a browser extension for saving quoted text or just the page URL in markdown. I made it for my own use of Logseq, but it's useful for anything that uses markdown.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-md/nfjkoojhgklbbnlonpdplbdjkgoemgod

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-md/

#chrome #firefox #logseq #obsidian #markdown #javascript

Hello World! We are now live on Fosstodon

#introduction Hello! I work on free software. Trying out Mastodon again.

Here are some projects I'm working on at the moment:

https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut
https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare
https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/helios

Journals in Logseq can be used to implement the concept of Engineering Daybooks mentioned in the book The Pragmatic Programmer. Or at least that's how I've been using them.

#Logseq #PragmaticProgrammer

Came across https://github.com/Endle/fireSeqSearch today, which indexes your #logseq notes and displays them alongside web search results 👀

idk how useful I'll find it on a daily basis but at least this will get me to look at my old notes more often.

@JoshuaACasey Agreed, especially when the system makes it so easy for individuals to block. You onnly need to block servers not people and you address mostly all bad actors.. so a dozen or two blocks and an individual is good. There is no NEED for a master block list forced upon them because the block lists are so manageable.

Moreover users can just import the blocklist as a CSV, so it literally takes a few seconds.

I mentioned this in a private message to someone recently about why a small handful of servers block qoto. I wanted to reiterate it here for the new comers on QOTO who dont know the history:

So there are some servers out there that demand every server int he network block every instance they do, and if a server doesnt block an instance they block then they block you in rettatliation.

Their reason for this is quite flawed but it goes like this.. If we federate with a bad actor instance and we boost one of their posts then their users will see it and defeat the purpose of the block. The problem is, this isnt how it actually works. If they block a server and we boost it, they wont see the boost, thats how blocks work.

The issue becomes even more complicated when you consider the fact that these servers, by virtue of their policy, have huge block lists where they block tons of major servers. So in order to satisfy them we too would have to block a huge number of servers.

This means you have a choice, you either join a server that isnt blocked, but has a huge block list themselves, or, you join a server that doesnt block and be blocked by a small handful of servers. Obviously that means on QOTO you will have bigger view of the world than you would on any of these others servers. In fact QOTO has onne of the largest federation footprints of any server in the network.

I want to also explain why we choose the decision we did. Years ago when this controversy started and servers across the fediverse started blocking there was a divide of people taking sides. WOTO was one of the few servers that didnt take sides and allowed people read content from any server (but with strict hate speech rules). This caused a huge influx of people,s pecifically from the LGBTQ community, onto our server. It turns out many people relied on us not-blocking for their physical safety. There were big name biggots (like milo yanappolus) who were on the network. They used their accounts here to watch his account for doxing so they could warn themselves and their community and protect themselves accordingly. In fact we added a feature just for them called subscriptions which allowed them to monitor accounts without following them so they could do so anonymously.

In tthe end for the safety of the LGBTQ community here we refused to engage in mass server blocking and instead encouraged our users to block servers on an individual basis and provided access to block lists for them to do so. But some really misguided servers blocked us anyway.

Thankfully the servers blocking us are few and far between and are limited to only the most excessive and aggressive block lists. As I said, QOTO has one of the largest federation footprints on the fediverse,

#mastoadmin

Once you start seeing how much space we sacrifice for #cars, you can't unsee it. They have taken over our cities completely.
And they feel entitled and justified to every single space available. Given a chance, anything becomes a parking spot.
And if you dare speak up about it or oppose it, #motorists respond immediately with aggression, violent threats, racism and sometimes actual violence.
Don't dare advocate for a cycle lane, some space in the footpath for a wheelchair user, or a stroller.

If you have worked with namespaces in #logseq before v0.8.9, you should migrate your existing pages according to the "New file name rules" mentioned almost at the end of release note https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases/tag/0.8.9. Otherwise you might notice some weird behaviour with the pages in a namespace.
@logseq

@pedrosilva @logseq Logseq is so good. I’ve LITERALLY been searching Logseq for years.

Didn't expect to find so much people mentioning @logseq around here.
Looks like #pkm and #logseq are becoming a thing.