Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Announcing Website 26

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I’m proud to announce the launch of a new major revision to Off on a Tangent, bringing the site to version 26.0. This is the twenty-sixth major update to the website since its launch in 1995.

The outgoing twenty-fifth version was the most long-lived in the site’s history. It went live on July 11, 2016, and had one significant revision on August 26, 2017. Since then it has had only minor updates and bug-fixes. It was a good site, but it was starting to show its age.

This new version has been completely re-worked. It is still based on the open-source WordPress platform, but the Tangent theme has been rebuilt from scratch using the latest version of the Underscores (_s) starter theme and the Tangent plugin has been refactored, improved, and expanded. There are too many updates and improvements to describe in detail, but here are some key points:

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Easter Egg: Website 24-25 (Website 1.0!!!)

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With the launch of Website 26, I have retired the site’s ‘Easter Egg’ that was in-place for Websites 24 and 25. An ‘Easter Egg’ is a joke or hidden message in a piece of software or a web site.

If a users found the egg, the whole site would flip into an overlay theme that made the site look a lot like the original 1995 version of the site, Website 1.0!!!

Click here to see how it looked. Enjoy!

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Growing up, I had cats and dogs. There was Bonnie the cat, Bruno the dog, C.K. the cat, and Spike the dog. Each of them played a part in my life as a child and a teen . . . and then I went off to college. While I was away at college, my parents got Roscoe the dog, and my sister got Zoe the cat. Then I finished college. I embarked upon my adult career. I married Melissa on May 28, 2005. We lived in a low-rent, ground-floor apartment in Fairfax, Virginia, as we started to build our life together.

About a year and a half later, we were still living in that apartment . . . and while I was sitting in my office, probably writing some nonsense for this website, I heard a noise out back. As I wrote about a month later, “I glanced through the blinds of my office window to see if anything was going on out back, and saw nothing.” When I heard another noise ten or fifteen minutes later, I looked out the window again and saw nothing. Then I went to our sliding-glass door, opened the blinds, and saw a little orange kitten looking at me with the same kind of surprise with which I was looking at her.

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Gerd Altmann, Pixabay
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On March 12, 2020, Governor Ralph Northam (D) declared a state of emergency in the Commonwealth of Virginia because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused it.

On March 23, 2020, Northam imposed the first public health restrictions: Restaurants and gyms were closed and social distancing requirements were put in place. I complied. It was the right thing to do. We had to do what we could to slow the spread and prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed.

On March 30, 2020, Northam imposed a broad stay-at-home order and a prohibition on most public gatherings. I complied.

On May 29, 2020, Northam imposed an indoor mask mandate. I condemned the mandate as “pseudoscience,” which was perhaps too strong a word. I knew that only medical-grade N95 masks could reliably block out viruses, but I underestimated the effectiveness of simple cloth barriers in blocking respiratory droplets, which are the primary way this virus spreads. Simple cloth masks won’t stop individual, aerosolized virus particles, but they will stop the big globs of spit and snot that carry thousands or millions of them. Even though I thought the requirement was off-base at the time, I complied.

I came to support reasonable masking policies. Cloth masks are useful in limiting the spread of the virus in prolonged close-contact settings. They are unnecessary outdoors, and even indoors when social distancing of more than six feet is possible. But even when the requirements went beyond what was scientifically justifiable, I complied.

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Let’s talk about “cancel culture” and free speech.

A good starting point for this conversation is the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the freedoms of speech and press in the United States. The text has been “incorporated” by the Fourteenth Amendment and now applies equally to federal, state, and local governments (i.e., not just to “Congress”):

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . .

U.S. Constitution, First Amendment (excerpt)

An important point that we need to make right here at the beginning is that the text of the First Amendment does not create a freedom of speech. It doesn’t say that it is establishing or defining some new freedom out of thin air. Read it more carefully. It is saying that Congress cannot abridge the preexisting freedom of speech. It assumes that the freedom is already there. The freedom of speech is a human right that comes not from governments, but, depending on your worldview, from nature, evolution, or God.

So we have to make a distinction between the “freedom of speech” as a general principle or idea, and the “freedom of speech” as a constitutional limitation on government. They are related, but they are different. Both have value. Both deserve to be defended.

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Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.