WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 19632105

(no title)

anon1385 | 6 years ago

You're getting downvoted because you're dangerously wrong. Yes some anti-vaxers send threats, but the idea that they have managed to silence the mainstream scientific opinion on vaccines is ludicrous. That information is widely available to everybody. I bet you can't find a single anti-vaxer who isn't aware of what the mainstream position on vaccine safety is. Being opposed to the orthodox position is a big part of the appeal!

Also anti-vax isn't something new. It dates back to at least the mid 90s and the original Wakefield paper. There were no cult like organisations pushing it at that time. What did exist was a mainstream media willing to push the story for many years, even long after they knew the original paper was faulty. The problem wasn't born out of fervent zealots, it was created by con artists and co-conspirators in the media who exploited liberal ideas of "free speech" and "media balance" to knowingly spread a conspiracy for their own financial gain. There was no "subculture" at the time. I'm not sure you can even really say there is one now, given that anti-vax is one of the conspiracy theories that has wide appeal across different groups (i.e. it exists across the left/liberal/conservative/right political spectrum).

You are trying to push your own ideological position (more "free speech" is good and will solve the problem) onto an issue, and it doesn't fit what actually happened at all, or what we know about how conspiracy theories spread (it's not a lack of counter-information, because conspiracy theories by definition include the fact that they are being suppressed by central authority).

discuss

order

AnthonyMouse|6 years ago

The way free speech works isn't that nobody is ever wrong, it's that the debate ultimately leads to the truth.

People who don't understand science don't trust random scientists, and there is a reason for that -- anyone can put on a lab coat and say whatever they want. You have to consider the source and actually read the research and determine if it's credible. Most people don't have the training for that, and many of the others don't have the time, but that's not a problem as long as you trust someone who does. Your brother in law is a chemist and you trust his opinion; he trusts the CDC's. When your trusted chemist and your trusted nurse disagree, they get together and hash it out and if they're both being reasonable then one ultimately convinces the other.

The problem comes when you introduce a culture of attacking rather than debating people. Because you're not going to silence the CDC, but you may very well silence the brother in law, and then you create a group of people who don't trust anyone providing the true facts because everyone within their in-group is being silenced.

Which is why, despite a century of various fringe anti-vax misinformation, it's only now, in the climate of filter bubbles and deplatforming, that enough people believe it to compromise herd immunity and allow diseases like measles to stage a comeback.

stcredzero|6 years ago

Yes some anti-vaxers send threats, but the idea that they have managed to silence the mainstream scientific opinion on vaccines is ludicrous.

I don't read what he said that way at all. When one uses force instead of trying to convince, one has admitted to losing the argument.

You are trying to push your own ideological position (more "free speech" is good and will solve the problem) onto an issue, and it doesn't fit what actually happened at all

You're strawmanning here. Free speech is good and did win the argument. Your conceit is that "solving the problem" being the same as "winning the argument" is a false equivalence. Solving the problem is something else entirely.

No one in 2019 publicly defends drunk driving. It still happens. There are southern California communities of explicit white supremacists, but mainstream society shuns them. Those are examples of groups who have thoroughly lost the argument. However, "solving the problem" doesn't mean that the state and industrial complex gets to enforce their will over the populace to the point of creating "thoughtcrime."

I don't want to live in that kind of society. (Tired of having to argue? Looking for a solution which is final?)

I do think that exposing others to pathogens and damaging herd immunity is quantifiable, and we can pass laws around that. It's much preferable to legislate the tangible and physically measurable, instead of creating "thoughtcrime."