Is disabling signup intended? If no, re-enable it please. Further more, I want anonymous account that can post without login.

He should not be removed from FSF as far as law permits him. I want to see what he will/can do. Complete Hurd works please! :D

Nobody has to check plastics, though. Bisphenol A can still be sold without repercussions. There's also this whole thing about cell phone towers they place on school roofs maybe causing health issues and scientists assuring everyone that 5G is safe. Like they did 100 years ago that tobacco was safe.

It's just so incredibly hard to trust what scientists say.

I don't know every European country good enough, but for Germany: "Nobody plans to erect a wall!" and for Great Britain: September Dossier

No government has the best of their citizens in mind, that's just how it is. European countries have more social features because they are rather homogeneous. Handing out some benefits to people you have a positive attitude for is easier than handing out benefits to your arch nemesis. The major reason the USA isn't like that is because people from the US hate each other. And the reason for that is that the USA is a melting pot of many different people. The more you increase that type of diversity the worse things will get.

It's also why people in the US can feel the need to arm themselves. I was on vacation in Norway once and saw a car in the middle of nowhere. Open door, key in the ignition. It was a non-issue. People were just all nice to each other. Do that in the US and that car will be gone fast. Americans actually have a valid reason to arm themselves for defense. Not necessarily everywhere in the US, but in enough places. People hate each other. There are gangs in the streets fighting to death. That's just the kind of place you get when mixing people together that actually hate each other.

The way I see it Socrates was right. I know that I know nothing.

Oh man, I'm a bit ashamed of myself that throughout our entire discussion I hadn't once thought of the replication crisis in contemporary science. I had a course that covered that last semester quite thoroughly, including p-value-hacking to get statistically significant results. Well, so much for my university education.

Thank you for reminding me of it, you are absolutely correct that many research findings nowadays cannot be replicated when reproduced! If anything, it makes the need for a truly independently funded scientific agency more imperative. The publish-or-perish mentality nowadays is absolutely destructive for scientific integrity and makes researchers susceptible to publishing inherently biased findings.

Anyway, regarding your claim that I make an appeal to authority: although I agree with you in principle that:

Claim B is true, because Authority A says so

is a logical fallacy, some subjects (including medical science and pharmacy) are expert topics that require multiple years of dedicated study to get a good grasp of. It is idiotic to think that any layman can make the same informed judgements that a researcher can. The best we have is peers of said researcher checking the validity of their methods before and after publication. Hence peer-review (but as you pointed out, replication crisis throws that in the dirt)

Plato himself pointed that out when he asked someone if they'd rather vote on how a ship is steered or let the helmsman handle it.

Closely related is the argument from ignorance: because you don't understand how something works, doesn't mean that it is false. Or in this case, because a layman (including myself, I'm in the field of AI and CS, not biology) doesn't completely understand how mRNA vaccines work, doesn't mean that they're therefore dangerous.

I concur that the U.S. government has pulled some shady shit the last century and has a poor track record. So I certainly understand your skepticism regarding your government. I'm from Europe (in the case you hadn't figured that out) and I really feel that the average European citizen has a different relation to the average European government than the average U.S. citizen has to the U.S. government, if that makes sense. Generally speaking, social democracy, liberalism and christian centrism are the prevailing ideologies here and this is reflected in our government policies. Most European countries have a reasonable welfare state and collective labor's rights. To many of us, this government is not a big baddie that must be kept to a minimum, but instead ought to occasionally intervene to protect the weaker in society. European response to the coronacrisis has been largely economically Keynesian. So yeah, different relationship dynamic. Our media landscape is generally diverse and broad with relatively little polarisation. Some media outlets have a slight bias in columnists and opinions but overall I cannot think of a concrete example where two news agencies report stuff in seriously different ways, unlike the CNN/Fox situation. Perhaps that makes us a bit naive and trusting but it does appear to work well for us thus far.

And about Snowden: if I recall correctly his revelations were mostly about the intelligence agencies overstepping their legal authority and getting cooperation from the upper echelons of the tech giants. I don't think that is wholly applicable in this discussion about the reliability of government in general. But I could be wrong here.

Many of the examples that are in that meme stem from a time when regulation was minimal and the scientific community relatively small. To get a new product approved in the EU nowadays, a company has to navigate a labyrinth of red tape before it hits the market.

NO! Why ? Here

I'm suspicious of the vaccines and will probably wait and watch for at least a year and may not get it at all. I explained why in an effort-post on a different thread

Clearnet: https://ramble.pw/f/conspiracy/2792/-/comment/3666
Onion link: http://rambleeeqrhty6s5jgefdfdtc6tfgg4jj6svr4jpgk4wjtg3qshwbaad.onion/f/conspiracy/2792/-/comment/3666

If I had to choose a vaccine, maybe I would choose Sputnik V. It's not mRNA based and it has been out longer than the AstraZeneca vaccines. Sputnik will probably not be available here in the US and maybe for good reason, but if I lived in country that was importing it AND that country was friendly with Russia, I would consider it more trustworthy than the others.

Maybe you should check whether that trust is warranted..

https://ramble.pw/f/funny/2583/i-m-a-scientist-you-can-trust-me

Because an appeal to authority isn't an argument and scientists have a whole replication crisis going on, so they lost lots and lots of credibility over the past decades.

Now, if you trust your government and what the high priests tell you about sacrificing virgins to appease the thunder god, that's fine, but not everyone can be naive and trusting like that.

Especially not with how weird this whole situation has been handled over the past year.

I don't think any trust in the so called democratic government is warranted. A government that poisons it's citizens with LSD and pretends a magic bullet that curved in the air killed Kennedy cannot be trusted. Not even a little bit. And those are just on the top of my head on what everyone can agree is bullshit. Duck and cover, amirite?

Nobody needs to keep their mouth shut. As long as enough people accept bogus primary sources, like the ones retelling them through their own media outlet, it's going to be enough.

With lies it is like with projects. The bigger and grander, the easier it is to get people going along. If you want funds for a nuclear plant, nobody bothers checking everything. Try to build a bike shed and things are different.

Wikipedia has a whole long ass article about things people got wrong just because nobody bothered checking and verifying primary sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

"The government isn't spying on us, they have better things to do" and "over dozens of independent rivaling news organisations somehow collaborate to keep information hidden - all while all people in said organisations keep silent without any dissent whatsoever." Then Snowden came along.

There's precedent for the thing you try to frame as ridiculous happening in the past ten years. And after seeing how Snowden ended up, others will think twice about following his example.

I applaud your skepticism, the internet is frequently full of shit after all. I agree to an extent that most stuff on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt, but some trust in our democratic governments and census bureaus is warranted, I think. Society requires some trust in order to function. The CDC estimates the amount of U.S. deaths at 532,355. I'm sure that there's some degree of error in these statistics, but it should certainly be accurate enough to give an indication to what the order of magnitude of deaths is.

It's the same matter regarding the claims of election fraud in the U.S. The vast majority of people in various branches of the U.S. federal and state governments, legislature and independent observers have come to the same conclusion that there is no evidence of large-scale fraud. The problem with conspiracy theories in most cases is the staggering amount of people who would have to be "in" on the conspiracy. And most importantly: everyone would have to keep their mouth shut. A blanket statement such as "the mainstream media lies and cannot be trusted" implies that over dozens of independent rivaling news organisations somehow collaborate to keep information hidden - all while all people in said organisations keep silent without any dissent whatsoever.

In this specific instance, however, the primary source that the article's author mentions is this 8-hour livestream from the FDA which is summarized in this FDA report. In this document, the various known and potential risks of the Modena vaccine are assessed critically. Paragraph 8.3 and 8.4 describe these in particular.

I'm waiting for a few months before getting it. The vaccines out there right now are day one unpatched versions (think Cyberpunk 2077) there will be some undiscovered bugs.

It's some nobody writing words on the Internet. How would you be able to trust that? Media have been caught lying too often. The only way to trust this would be the ability to verify all the claims. For example by having a list of all the names of the 307.000 Americans that have died supposedly from Covid-19 with time stamps of their deaths, location etc. and then personally investigating every single one of them.

Obviously this is impossible. It's truly unfortunate that we live in a world were nothing can be trusted that isn't personally verifiable.

On what basis can these sources not be trusted?

Unfortunately, these sources cannot be trusted.

I just refuse to take anything from china. But people have good reason to not want to take it, politicians just want to create narratives and now days its hard to know who you can trust.

I completely agree with you that it remains to be seen what, if any, long term effects the vaccines will have. I certainly understand your reservation in this regard. So that's a fair argument.

I trust the judgement of the various medical agencies when they say that the benefits outweigh the risks, I'll send you a message when I grow an additional toe :)

I believe that authorities genuinely have the best interest of the public in mind. I also believe they tend to be incompetent idiots.

I don't buy any of the conspiracy theories floating around either. I do buy that it's physically impossible to foresee any side effects that may appear 5 years after vaccination for a vaccine that has been in development for 9 months or so.

So, everyone, please go ahead and beta-test this thing for me. I'll join you in a couple of years.

Not from the UK so can't comment on that.

Call me naive but where I come from the authorities traditionally have the interest of the public at heart. Sure, I might not like all of their methods: the lockdown sucks, mismanagement happens and wrong decisions are made from time to time. But if you, like me, share the opinion that a vaccine really is the only way out of this mess (because natural herd immunity isn't really taking off), then of course you want to encourage people to get one by using social media and influencers. It's a good strategic move. I absolutely don't think that critical news should be censored, on the contrary that's imperative for a healthy discussion. On the flip side, much of that "critical news" is unscientific populist fearmongering that does not contribute at all to an end to the situation. I certainly understand that it can be frustrating (for politicians and authorities) to see this impair genuine effort to fight the virus.

So just say and leave it like that. Why enlist celebrities, heads of state, who-knows-who-else to promote the vaccine? Why is the Labour party in the UK proposing to pass laws that censor news critical of vaccines? Something smells fishy to me.

"They're selling it too hard, so something must be wrong."

Man, I really wonder what kind of reason they could possibly have for wanting people to get vaccinated. It's not like 2.7 million people have died because of covid-19.

https://coronavirus.medium.com/what-to-know-about-serious-adverse-effects-and-deaths-in-the-moderna-vaccine-data-1031aa7f2582

This information was included in a briefing document published by the FDA ahead of Thursday’s meeting. As in Pfizer’s trial data, which showed that six people had died but that none of those deaths were related to the vaccine, the Moderna data also included some deaths. Thirteen people in Moderna’s 30,000-person trial died as of December 3. Seven of those people were in the placebo group and didn’t receive the vaccine, and six were in the group of people who got the vaccine. None of the deaths were deemed related to the vaccine treatment.

It’s worth noting, for context, that the deaths of over 307,000 Americans have been attributed, definitively, to Covid-19.