> Every single plutocrat that pulls the levers that get you riled on your march to becoming Soylent Green got the vaccines. Every single power broker got the vaccines
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am curious how you came to know this so confidently.
While it's clearly rhetorical bombast and zero readers would assume I've actually polled every person in such a position, anti-vax nonsense is a thing primarily among America's bugeoning and incredibly loud idiocracy.
So basically you have a gut feeling that you feel very passionately, but that we have no way of evaluating.
It might be just as likely that zero of the people in such a position took the vaccines for all we know. How is this somehow more enlightened than the idiocracy that you are decrying?
Ignoring that most, like Trump, just outright admitted it, simple logic dictates that reality.
When something has overwhelming scientific and medical evidence in its favour, and the alternative are a bunch of high school dropout conspiracy nuts cheered on by simpletons like Joe Rogan, odds overwhelmingly lean towards the connected and rich going in one direction. Like, this is so blatantly obvious that I find your scepticism laughable.
Checkmate? Are you purposefully trying to fit the cliche?
Just to be clear, you are citing a worthless online Facebook poll. The sort where people like you check "PhD" (the -h is lowercase, bro) because you think it makes your rhetoric more authoritative.
There are countless other studies -- ones that aren't a dogshit, worthless online Facebook poll -- that show an extremely strong correlation between anti-vax beliefs and having a lower education level, and often being lower intelligence. Overwhelming evidence.
But I suspect that you will just flood the space with bullshit from horseshit venues like "unherd", so I bid you goodbye. You mentioned elsewhere, after the ridiculous anti-vax horseshit you said about Zuck, that you aren't an anti-vaxxer. I guarantee you 100% are.
> Ignoring that most, like Trump, just outright admitted it
So if trump said it, it must be true?
The rest of what you said could be translated to: "I believe it was such a good idea, all the rich and powerful must have done it".
How is this not a gut feeling?
My skepticism is solely for your argument, not that these people did or did not take the vaccine, which is something that I consider basically unknowable without a lot of leaps of faith.
Edit: in fact, here's my equally unprovable assertion: most people got the vaccine because they didn't want to lose their jobs. Rich and powerful people don't have to worry about that. Therefore fewer of them got the vaccines.
The amount of regret that exists doesn't fit either, don't forget Biden's warning that those who don't take it will die, the exact opposite of all the fear mongering happened and it's despicable people keep telling all the same lies.
"Regret"? You mean the grifters conning the waves and waves of incredibly stupid Americans? Do you think the million or so people who died of COVID also might have some regrets?
Biden didn't warn that "those who don't take it will die" -- again, why do you people lie constantly about everything? -- he warned that it would be a winter of severe illness and death, which is absolutely, unequivocally, empirically true! In those early days hospitals were legitimately overcrowded with severe cases. Are we pretending that didn't happen now?
I mean, you guys really are. It's incredible.
I get that America is doing a speed-run to being the dumbest idiocracy on the planet, so you guys have this momentary period where you think you "won". Just be aware that to the entire rest of the planet you are a worldwide farce. A "how not to", and it's incredible how much the super rich conned the masses of the stupid to continually act against their own best interests.
By March 2020, the early John's Hopkins data showed a clear trend of those demographics who were actually vulnerable of serious harm, namely the elderly and those with already compromised immune systems. We knew even back then, that children and healthy adults were NOT at risk from COVID-19, even the early strains which were much more virulent than the later ones. It was censored, over and over, by Twitter, Facebook and even HN.
I've only really heard of cisa in terms of "fighting disinformation", which seemed more than a little dubious. Can someone speak to what their mission is and how effective they've been at it?
Or is this like the DHS where you just get to say that we haven't had any more 9/11s, so clearly the money and complete transformation of how we think about personal liberties was worth it?
Theoretically, it makes sense that we would need something like a cyber defense agency. Realistically, this doesn't seem like something the government (even at the best of times) would be capable of doing effectively.
Before its recent extension into the mis/disinformation (censorship) space, CISA was primarily focused on coordinating public/private response to cyber threats and distributing information about known vulnerabilities. It is the primary US sponsor of the CVE system, for instance. It also provides guidance regarding best practices to industry and government agencies.
By getting CISA involved in speech regulation, former directors made CISA into a political football, risking its core mission. (This actually happened during the first Trump admin, under a Trump appointee, but continued into the Biden administration.) There is no reason that an organization established to tackle cyber threats should be involved with regulating speech via third parties in NGOs and industry. None. Not even if that speech takes place “on the internet.”
Reading is worthless if you don't vet your sources. Encyclopedia Britannica and Uncle Johnny's Chemtrail Digest are not equally valid sources of truth.
And there's the actual hard part: institutional trustworthiness is in the shitter. Everyone will have their sources that they trust, and if were honest, none of us can really vet any of them.
A lot of these disputes can be simplified to "I don't trust your sources".
That's true; but I also think a lot of these disputes originate with "your research invalidates my axiomatic beliefs, so I will find whatever 'evidence' needed to counter them." Especially disputes percolating down from the political strata.
Maybe this is me being a dumb peasant, but I can't imagine where I would get the right to have a say in that.
How is it different from me looking at my neighbor in his bigger house with his nicer car and deciding that those should be mine instead? Or my neighbor with a smaller house wanting my stuff?
If you believe in the equality of man then I think so. These people didn't individually invent and then produce 1000s of years of collective humam technology and culture and society by themselves to justify such extreme inequality.
And even if you thought so you can't be surprised when the have nots band together and attack or topple the rich society even if it obly for a small temporary gain. Desperation is the largest source of crime and political instability throughout history.
Yes, that situation is ridiculous and intervention is necessary. But don't paint it like it's just your feelings. The situation is objectively ridiculous.
What is it then if its not just my feelings? Can you give me some specific principle to go by? When is it OK for me to decide that someone else's possessions should be mine?
If you can justify it from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance while taking the categorical imperative into account, and any other universal moral meta–rules that you may be aware of that I'm not
That's fine, you can leave it to philosophers if you want or you can go and learn it. I only referenced two principles and they both have Wikipedia pages. But don't make no effort to learn how people think about objective morality and then complain nobody knows anything about objective morality.
I'll even link them for you:
The veil of ignorance says you should design morals for a society as if you don't know which position you'll be in in that society. If you want to know if it's moral to feed people to crocodiles, imagine that your mind and soul is placed into a random body in the world where people are fed to crocodiles. You might be feeding someone to a crocodile, you might be fed to a crocodile, and in some versions you might be the crocodile. If you had the choice to live in that world but you don't know which one you'll be, would you take it? If you wouldn't because the chance feels bad to you, that's a sign it's objectively immoral.
Categorical imperative: follow rules that you'd be okay with everyone following all the time. Suppose you're very hungry and you see a supermarket and you steal a loaf of bread. Is this moral? "Everyone should steal food" quickly breaks down commerce and isn't good. "Very hungry people with no money should steal bread" works well enough because most people aren't very hungry with no money. We can say it's moral for very hungry people with no money to steal bread. "Very hungry people with no money should just die" works too, but it fails the other principle: that could be you who dies, and you'd rather be allowed to steal bread to prevent death.
These might be different versions of the same principle but I'm not philosophically savvy enough to know that so I'm stating both.
I don't see how either of those principles suggest I should go steal the steaks, because I could easily end up being the person who is stolen from.
Its not surprising when starving people steal, and you can't really blame them for it. And people shouldn't waste frivolously when there are people in their community that are lacking.
But adding these unwritten caveats to private property rights based on whether someone is satisfied with their lot or not... I can't wrap my head around it.
I didn't take being barely able to afford ramen as someone who is going to starve to death. Their health is probably pretty poor, but I was assuming like in real life there would be other options.
Like I said before, if the alternative is death, then obviously stealing is justified. But if the alternative is the soup kitchen or something, then I can't justify stealing the steak. Otherwise you're on a slippery slope.
Is it only ok for luxury items? What happens when you swap steaks out of that sentence?
You have a hundred (dollars|pens|shoes|boxes of cereal), you probably won't notice if I take one.
I don't feel right taking one if I have other options. Whether or not someone notices doesn't make theft OK, it just means you get away without consequences (depending on your religious beliefs).
Not to mention you probably have to trespass/break and enter to do it.
Here's how it adds up: you are either the elite person who will have a few steaks taken (your life still rocks), or as the poor person, you can at least have enough steak to survive, rather than dying of hunger watching your rich neighbor throw steaks away for no reason.
A: The same is true for people that say that antidepressants are mostly placebo. They are not.
B: When people say that antidepressants saved their life, they aren’t joking or exaggerating in the least.
Are placebos unable to save lives?
Not claiming antidepressants are or are not mostly placebo, and don't mean to minimize the pain of depression in anyway. I just don't think whether or not they saved a person's life is an indication either way. The placebo effect is real, right? As in the subject actually gets better after taking it.
> Keep your pet theories to yourself if you are not a subject matter expert or someone who has experienced it first hand.
This is the internet, friend. I wish you the best, but maybe don't put too much hope into that one. I think you'll have better luck cultivating the ability to be comfortable having your own beliefs while others have different (possibly wrong!) ones.
When you do this, you're just accusing people of having no real evaluative power about their own experience. It's pointless, and it's not really an opinion.
Placebo-controlled RCTs show that some people react well to antidepressants with major variation from person to person.
Maybe I wasn't being clear, since I didn't mean to accuse anyone of anything.
I'm not disputing that someone had the genuine experience of antidepressants saving their life. I'm asking if that precludes antidepressants acting as a placebo.
In other words both things can be true: antidepressants saved someone's life and antidepressants can act as placebo (even in the case where they saved someone's life). And notice I'm saying "can be true". I'm not saying they are true, cause I have no idea.
This is a logic question, not some kind of moral attack.
That's what's directly taken out of your check right? But how much more do you pay after that in other taxes? And if you go even further, how much higher are the prices of everything that you purchase due to the various taxes involved in their production?
You note that a bunch of small business just won't be viable if you up the taxes, but you agree on the need to do it. So do you just keep upping the taxes until nothing is profitable except giant soulless corporations (who will then probably subvert the tax system anyway)?
Profitability doesn't only come from large corporations. And it's likely that many large corporations would shut down businesses too if it impacted them.
The limit is that if no other more profitable business exists, the landlord lowers rent until they get some one. But that's often a multi year discovery process. And it's very likely that person will be some other small business that wouldn't have had a chance if the same spot was occupied.
It's hard to overstate just how much the random subsidy is for Prop 13 taxes; there is literally a 20x difference purely based on when a property was purchased or a building was built. This leads to very poor and inefficient allocation of real estate to businesses.
I can't say I agree that "regular pickups" are very utilitarian, unless you're talking about the base trim work trucks. They seem to me to be incredibly expensive luxury vehicles for the most part.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am curious how you came to know this so confidently.
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