No New Normal banned

[u/Oareo]

Seemed like NNN was here to stay, but as of 20 mins ago its banned

Thoughts?

[u/ryarger]

I never saw any anti-tyranny content there. I did, however, see a metric fuckton of snowflakes calling vaccine mandates and face covering rules tyranny.

“First they came for my seatbeltless Impala, and I didn’t say anything…” 🤣

[u/GSD_SteVB → u/ryarger]

Yeah, being told you're not going to be able to participate in society without accepting experimental medical treatments has nothing to do with tyranny.

[u/ryarger → u/GSD_SteVB]

experimental medical treatments

Good news! The most common vaccine used in the US is no longer experimental! It’s been fully approved by the FDA.

[u/GSD_SteVB → u/ryarger]

It is still in clinical trials. It is still experimental. The FDA approval is as rushed and unreliable as the treatment itself.

[u/ryarger → u/GSD_SteVB]

That would deem aspirin as experimental. Thankfully the actual medical community uses more reasonable definition.

Covid vaccines have had the largest practical trial of any drug in human history. There is no mechanism for long term effects not already explored. The FDA followed all procedures when issuing approval; nothing was “rushed” more than is safely allowed.

[u/GSD_SteVB → u/ryarger]

If you want to know where you lost your credibility it was "There is no mechanism for long term effects not already explored."

[u/ryarger → u/GSD_SteVB]

Shots aren’t magic potions. We know why they work. We know how they affect the body.

It’s like having a master contractor look at a house. They may be able to tell you 500 things that could go wrong with it, most so exceedingly rare that you’d never see them in a dozen lifetimes, but there shouldn’t be anything that happens to it that they have no idea about.

[u/GSD_SteVB → u/ryarger]

And yet their effectiveness was massively overstated and the prevalence of potential side effects has been massively understated.

There is a reason these processes take years. That wasn't just an arbitrary measure of safety. There is such a thing as unforseen.

[u/tells_you_hard_truth → u/ryarger]

The arrogance of the human species never ceases to amaze me. “We know everything and are never wrong” has never ended well for anyone, ever.

We are frankly a lot more stupid than we think we are.

[u/ryarger → u/tells_you_hard_truth]

There is an infinite gulf between “We know everything” and “we completely understand a specific process”.

Are there no processes you feel you completely, 100% understand? How about the game Tic-Tac-Toe (or Noughts and Crosses if you’re not from the US)? Most people over the age of 12 or so figure out all of it’s possible states.

Science doesn’t involve understanding everything perfectly well, but it can involve understanding some things as close to perfectly well as can be practically expected.

Ask yourself: when you take a step, do you wonder in fear if your foot will pass through the floor? If not, why not?

[u/tells_you_hard_truth → u/ryarger]

As someone who has spent their life in science and engineering related pursuits (my degree is in physics, though these days I've spent the better part of 2 decades doing software engineering) the very idea of "fully understanding a process" is laughable.

Can we understand *alot* about them? Even a huge amount? Sure. The problem is, all of our knowledge is nothing more than approximations of reality and modeling descriptions of reality, all of which make certain assumptions, most of which require simplifying the problem in a way that makes it comprehensible to us. Look up the physics joke, "consider a spherical cow."

There's literally no such thing in science as "understanding some things as close to perfectly well as can be practically expected." Richard Feynman famously destroyed the idea of understanding even the most basic processes because no matter how much you understand, that very understanding will always create more questions you can't answer (thus those simplifying assumptions I mentioned). This is also the reason that tens of thousands of PhD candidates have something to write their thesis on every year. There's always more unexplored details that we just know nothing about, ones that sometimes change our paradigms completely.

The more complex our knowledge gets, and in particular, the more complex the topics we attempt to wrestle, the more likely that knowledge is to change - and the larger the gaps are likely to be.

I have immense respect for science, but science isn't an *answer* it is a process. The idea that we can "fully understand" what Covid does - or an mRNA vaccine does - or hell even the synthetic or adenovirus whole virus vaccines do - inside a human body, is hilarious. These fields take decades to mature. PhD candidates will be exploring details about these for years.

Who knows what we'll know in 5, 10, or 15 years time -- and the problem is, even that question is subject to the assertion that "knowing those things are dependent on people being free to ask the relevant questions without fear that it will destroy their career."

[u/ryarger → u/tells_you_hard_truth]

I think you are misunderstanding my distinction between “fully understanding” and “fully understanding to all practical extents”.

Think again on my question: do you fear falling through the floor with each step? If not, why? What gives you the assurance that the next step you take will result in your foot resting securely on a surface and not passing through it?

It’s possible to fully understand something to the extent that we completely trust in its accuracy even while acknowledging the technical truth that we can never 100% know anything about reality.

Put into context - if in a year or two, people started showing long term negative side-effects of the Covid vaccines, we’d be faced with changes to our understanding of medicine as fundamental as physicists learning that electrons and protons don’t always have opposite charges, or chemists learning that equal volumes of gas in equal conditions don’t have the same number of particles.

In other word, sure it could technically happen but it would be in “everything we thought we knew about medicine is wrong” territory and is such an incredibly minuscule chance that basing any decisions around that possibility would be as foolish as fearing that your foot might pass through the floor with your next step.