I'm not at all clear what you are saying. — unenlightened
I am saying that we are inescapably social and interdependent - we have to trust or die alone. Therefore we have to have a moral commitment to the truth, or die alone. I am saying that if we continue to valorise "rational self-interest" we will all die alone. — unenlightened
we have to have a moral commitment to the truth, — unenlightened
We’ve been down this road before. Whenever faced with some mandate imposed in the interest of the common good, some of us act like they just woke up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. “There’s no freedom no more,” whined one man in video that recently aired on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah.” The clip was from the 1980s, and the guy had just gotten a ticket for not wearing his seat belt.
It’s an unfortunately common refrain. Can’t smoke in a movie theater? Can’t crank your music to headache decibels at two in the morning? Can’t post the Ten Commandments in a courtroom? “There’s no freedom no more.” Some of you seem to think freedom means no one can be compelled to do, or refrain from doing, anything. But that’s not freedom, it’s anarchy.
Usually, the rest of us don’t agonize over your intransigence. Often it has no direct impact on us. The guy in “The Daily Show” clip was only demanding the right to skid across a highway on his face, after all. But now you claim the right to risk the health care system and our personal lives.
So if you’re angry, guess what? You’re not the only ones.
The difference is, your anger is dumb, and ours is not. Yours is about being coerced to do something you don’t want to do. Like that’s new. Like you’re not already required to get vaccinated to start school or travel to other countries. For that matter, you’re also required to mow your lawn, cover your hindparts and, yes, wear a seat belt. So you’re mad at government and your job for doing what they’ve always done.
But the rest of us, we’re mad at you. Because this thing could have been over by now, and you’re the reason it isn’t.
But the covid vaccines are not actually being made mandatory, in the actual legal sense of the word.In that respect I consider mandatory vaccinations for specific services/industries a curious hill to want to die on. — Benkei
We’ve been down this road before. Whenever faced with some mandate imposed in the interest of the common good, some of us act like they just woke up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. “
/.../
The difference is, your anger is dumb, and ours is not. Yours is about being coerced to do something you don’t want to do.
Life is what you make of it, so make it a good one.
— paraphrasing the good Doc Emmett Brown
If anything in particular, the "purpose of life" is living (it). Enjoy. :up:
"Back to the regularly scheduled program." ? — jorndoe
While discussing SARS-CoV-2/pandemic, ...
people first need to be in the clear about "the big existential issues" and have a definitive answer to the meaning of life question.
— baker
... kind of reminded me of ...
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
— Sagan — jorndoe
There is a striking similarity between zealous religious preachers and the vocal pro-vaccers. — baker
Yes, it's driven by the polemicism of social media I think. — Isaac
we have to have a moral commitment to the truth,
— unenlightened
...just becomes nothing more than a stick to beat one's enemies with - "see, it's they who are not committed to the truth, not like us, who care for nothing more..." — Isaac
One case presented out of 5 billion doses is a freak case, yes. 5,000 cases would be freak cases, in that sense. — Xtrix
we have to have a moral commitment to the truth,
— unenlightened
...just becomes nothing more than a stick to beat one's enemies with - "see, it's they who are not committed to the truth, — Isaac
But the covid vaccines are not actually being made mandatory, in the actual legal sense of the word.
On principle, a medication that legally has the status of merely an experimental medication cannot be made mandatory. A medication has to pass a long vetting process before it can move up from being merely an experimental medication, and again there is a vetting process before it can be made mandatory by law. — baker
Or is it the case that in those countries, covid vaccinations are demanded by government decree (which is less than a law), or they found a roundabout way to enforce covid vaccinations? — baker
You can distrust your negotiation partner because you have a trusted social world. Start with global social distrust and you will see that you are deprived of language entirely. This too is a lie, or might (as) well be. — unenlightened
mRNA vaccines are, as I understood from an explanation from doctors in the Netherlands, inherently safer than previous vaccines because the injected substance quickly decomposes in the body. — Benkei
So if you want to convince the other party, you need to understand their heuristic. If that's "I don't trust the government and big pharma" you'll have to figure out why. And when you have the why, you can perhaps explore whether that distrust is appropriate in this particular case, and if so whether that distrust, which avoids a certain risk, outweighs the risk of following up on that distrust. At the very least we'll have a conversation instead of how we're talking at cross purposes now. — Benkei
If that's "I don't trust the government and big pharma" you'll have to figure out why. — Benkei
One case presented out of 5 billion doses is a freak case, yes. 5,000 cases would be freak cases, in that sense.
— Xtrix
They are not simply rare freak cases. There are many more of them. — baker
What makes it worse is that most of the interaction takes place in a text medium, black on white, so there is no danger of mishearing or misremembering something.
The text is there for one to carefully read it and reference it. — baker
I suspect that this statement is just the superficial rationalization of something deeper and darker: a fundamentally individualistic view point, in which the individual and his choices are mythologized and glorified, while anything collective (e.g. a nation, a policy or a private firm) is vilified or mistrusted, as standing in the way of personal realization... Atlas Shrugged and all that neoliberal BS. — Olivier5
That's not true, (he says getting out his big stick and beating Issac mercilessly.) Rather, I have no stick, and the truth is not a sword either. — unenlightened
Someone who does not have that commitment becomes part of the uncommunicative world, not an enemy - like a lion, maybe, or a virus or an advert. — unenlightened
People are getting strokes from the covid vaccines, they are dying from the covid vaccines. — baker
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