Because it is. If you know something is controversial and will make a lot of people angry, and you put in your post in a forum not for that type of discussion, it is clear your goal is to try and piss those people off.
You don’t seem to understand how bad anti-maskers are. They have killed hundreds of thousands of people due to their callousness. That’s not “virtue signaling” for me to say that, either. It’s fact.
The fact that many of us have strong emotional reactions to that is not “virtue signaling” either. In fact, it is the use of that term in situations like this that lead me to believe the term was coined by people who lack any strong moral convictions at all, and thus assume everyone must be overdoing it for show.
Merely coping with how many people are so easily tricked or are actively malevolent enough to be anti-mask has been one of the hardest parts of the pandemic for me. And, yes, I do have someone in my family who was affected—my mom was delayed on getting a hospital bed because of COVID-19. But, even before that, it was a moral injury finding out how many people I thought I knew were so awful. It is hard to understate how horrible antimaskers are. I think people just undervalue just how bad it is due to moral fatigue. It really is like knowing your friend would kill you to not have to wear a mask.
It takes a profoundly callous person to make comments about masks only being for show. It’s not an okay thing to say, let alone believe. The main reason I wasn’t sure that UV deserved a suspension was that it’s such an awful thing to say that I want to believe he slipped up somehow.
But I do worry that reversing the suspension sends a bad message. It’s one thing not to give it at all, but another to reverse it. The messaging behind the two are not the same.