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 got one of these free energy audit things which included swapping out up to 30 or so bulbs with LEDs. Whatever contractor did it seems to have gotten the cheapest bulbs they could, and the majority of them have failed by 4 or 5 years later. So far so good on the name brand ones I replaced them with.
This is just wrong. Go figure out which vaccines you haven't had, and then figure out why they haven't been prescribed to you. (Hint: It's not because your doctors are anti-vax)
While you are technically correct, my charitable interpretation of GP is "There is no downside (not grossly outweighed by the upside) to taking any vaccine (against an illness you are likely to come in contact with)".
It's hard to exhaustively list all qualifiers to statements in short form communication.
Still false. Maybe if you qualify it further to currently prescribed vaccines (e.g fda certified ones that haven't been taken off the market for whatever reason, or just superceded by newer better vaccines), you'd be closer, but some of those vaccines still wouldn't be recommended to certain people for certain reasons (say after a certain age, or maybe if they're pregnant, or if they have certain conditions, etc, etc, etc)
I don't think it's being particularly pedantic to say "there is no downside to any vaccine" is just wrong, and not really something that should be repeated. It's more of a religious statement than anything else, and it's the exact kind of thinking that comes out of the insane pressure put on people during covid.
Just so I don't misinterpret your meaning, what specific examples of vaccines are you thinking of?
I'll address one as an example, and you tell me if/how I'm wrong: LAVs, like the MMR vaccine, specifically the Rubella portion is contraindicated in pregnancy for the risk of CRS (in the fetus) and recommended instead after pregnancy. But that is because the risk of contracting it is low enough to not warrant immediate protection. But it is recommended both for the adults and children. It's a temporal recommendation, not against.
You are not weighing it against getting Rubella itself, so it falls under the conditional "illness you are likely to come in contact with".
Same difference. "There is no downside to any vaccine" means at any time, if you see a label that says "vaccine", it's never a bad idea for you to take it.
I'm not claiming any expertise here, but some examples:
The jannsen covid shot: you're likely to come in contact with covid, this one is only recommended for folks who can't do mRNA for whatever reason. (The same concept applies to any vaccine that isn't considered the best of its kind)
HPV: not just blanket recommended to everyone, yet you are very likely to come into contact with HPV.
Chatgpt comes up with plenty more examples, but the concept is simple. Just because something is called a vaccine (or medicine in general) does not make it some kinda special power up that everyone should be maximizing their exposure to.
> Same difference. "There is no downside to any vaccine" means at any time, if you see a label that says "vaccine", it's never a bad idea for you to take it.
No it isn't. Getting rubella while pregnant would be much much worse for the fetus, while likely mild for the woman.
> The jannsen covid shot: you're likely to come in contact with covid, this one is only recommended for folks who can't do mRNA for whatever reason. (The same concept applies to any vaccine that isn't considered the best of its kind)
Ergo: The Jannsen vaccine is better than getting covid without it.
> HPV: not just blanket recommended to everyone, yet you are very likely to come into contact with HPV.
It is blanketly recommended before coming in contact with HPV.
> Chatgpt comes up with plenty more examples
Ok, if you're open to explore, keep them coming.
> , but the concept is simple. Just because something is called a vaccine (or medicine in general) does not make it some kinda special power up that everyone should be maximizing their exposure to.
Vaccines are better than the illness they're protecting from. That's the arguement:
> "There is no downside (not grossly outweighed by the upside) to taking any vaccine (against an illness you are likely to come in contact with)".
If you just compare the downsides of a successful vaccine (which is not all vaccines) to the downsides of the disease it targets, it should obviously always come out that the vaccine was a net win. But you can see how that gets pretty far from "there is no downside to any vaccine" right?
Chat gpt mentions oral polio. You're probably better off having had the oral polio vaccine if you are 100% going to be exposed to polio. But you wouldn't be doing a random first world resident a favor advising them to get the oral polio vaccine (which isn't suggested by "there is no downside to any vaccine")
So granted, you have an infinitely better argument than the original. And maybe that's the argument they meant to make.
I think so, because it's generally a frustratingly frequent point having to be made to people still convinced that the covid vaccine(s, of different varieties) was somehow worse than just getting covid, which we were pretty much all guaranteed to get at one point or another.
If that was not what you were positing, I think the original poster thought you did. But we're veering far into speculation at this point. I'm happy to have explored the topic with someone equally curious at least.
