I wanted to write more but the software makes it so difficult to do so using an IPad (gets so like I’m typing in treacle!) so I’ve changed to Tapatalk which uses different software.
Listening to people like this lady or Andrew Wakefield, or individuals like John Kiriakou or Stuart Murray has shown me that going against the mainstream is not good for one’s health. Alex was so right when he says ‘facts don’t matter’ which is so ironic, when the loudest voices who that oppose such individuals are often those who champion science and hold it up like a sacred torch. They are frequently arrogant.
It is scary. It really is. A Facebook friend recently put up a comment to his own post which was about deaths from measles in Europe, suggesting that ‘parents should be charged with manslaughter if they didn’t have their child immunised and they subsequently catch measles and it proves fatal’.
This is from a man that has worked for the BBC and may still do, as a Technology Reporter, in any event he’s a voice of the mainstream. I just know that he is unmovable on this topic, his mind is made up. Anyone who even asks questions challenging his thinking will run the threat of being ridiculed as an idiot or worse. He recently unfollowed me with this parting volley ‘trying to explain things to me was like trying to describe string theory to a rodent’.
I accept that I’m not able to understand some complicated things very well, string theory among them, but the thing was, I understood very well what his viewpoint was, it revealed much about his bias and dogma and wasn’t complicated at all. He was simply frustrated with my disagreeing with him.
Now I’m not saying that he’s wrong in his general attitude to vaccines, but he’s definitely wrong with his certainty about it being ‘definitely sorted’. Like climate change is definitely sorted, or ‘the supernatural’ or the ufo question, and many others. If I, like my unfortunate friends, really believed that the MMR vaccine had caused autism in my child, then my mainstream ‘definitely sorted’ friend might well find an equally determined, hard arsed opinion to oppose him. And who can say with 100% certainty that ‘they’re right’. Especially when evidence that whistleblowers’ and those opposing the mainstream ‘thinking’ - as opposed to objective factual evidence - may itself be highly dubious on the mainstream side.
This is a major, perhaps fatal, flaw in the 21st century that we are wilfully ignoring. It’s a tricky one to solve. The revealing thing is that my Facebook ‘pal’ is a decent guy, but his dogmatic view of science turns him into someone who’s stopped listening. A religious extremist would not be any different. That’s what’s scary.
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