Consept

Im not sure if its rooted in it but you can definitely see signs of it which is the shadow element youre talking about, but there are points that he brings up that are at least worthy of discussion. There was a paper i found before where they were looking at married black mens perspectives on why black women are single which ill link below which was quite interesting. But i think the general point is that black males perspectives on relationships are not really heard enough and can automatically be labelled as misogynist (which can be from years of women being oppressed). But the perspective is definitely necessary even if its wrong, in terms of being able to improve relationships. You can argue whether Kevin Samuels is the best to deliver that message but thats a separate thing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4465800

@Danioover9000 Exactly, great list btw, if we dont all accept basic points then we end up arguing over them which is of course pointless because these points have already been sorted out, at least by actual statistics or better scientific minds than ours. If these are accepted then you can go meta, otherwise its like talking about physics with someone who believes in flat earth.

lol ok i get it you think very meta as youve pointed out a few times now (joking). Anyway we seem to be talking past each other because I agree with most of what youre saying. My only point is that to have the discussion you have to include the scientific consensus position (ie vaccines are effective with some minor risks). The problem with discussions on here or anywhere, is that the science bit is basically ignored or fervently argued against, meaning that you cant really build a discussion from it if you dont recognise that in the first place. But it doesnt seem like youre doing that

Watch succession, its great

I mean you know what I'm going to say, a study of 33 monkeys and 200 mice is almost uncomparable to billions of humans, so i don't think.its worth touching that point. Yeah the Swedish study could be true I don't know, if it helps the vaccine safety then of course as long as it goes through the relevant trials. Your final point is a very personal one but I appreciate you sharing. I understand on a personal level you're thinking there's more risk taking the vaccine than covid because of your experience, that's fine but I would encourage you to think on a wider level and how other people have actually been affected by this.

OK but here's the thing I completely accept the issues with government and big pharma, its not a binary thing that you're either with the government and big pharma and therefore for the vaccine and if you're against government and big pharma you should automatically be against the vaccine, this in itself is very limited thinking. Its kinda like saying when the government made seatbelts mandatory you were against it because you don't like the government or car companies. What would should do if we're to.have a discussion is recognise what's likely to be true. If you don't want to listen to scientists and experts that's fine but leads to a difficult conversation because conceivably any point thrown up by scientific investigation should be thrown out. @Yidaki I agree everyone thinks they're right but if I'm understanding your proposal I think you're saying that if someone thinks they're right we should honor the values that led them to that viewpoint. That could be OK if there wasn't an iminant threat (don't look up the movie makes a good point on this) but the thing is if there is or even if its not iminant but important, then there have to be decisions made that people not be happy about but are the best decisions for everyone. As I mentioned seatbelts are a great example as people protested about them being mandatory and questioned science etc but obviously we can see and probably could see at the time that they would save lives. So my proposal would be to have critical thinking about topics, this would actively have to be taught from a young age, but again even teaching critical thinking is disputed by certain groups lol.

@TDLH What would be your meta analysis of the situation?

So this is a common trope of mis-information, it weights the dissenting voices much higher than the scientific consensus. In this case a huge majority of scientists have found vaccines to be effective, there maybe disputes on the technical details but they are in general agreement, however their voices are not amplified anywhere near as much as those that completely disagree. I found a research paper from UCL that goes into this in more detail - "The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a slew of misinformation, often described as an “infodemic”. Whereas previous research has focused on the propagation of unreliable sources as a main vehicle of misinformation, the present study focuses on exploring the role of scientists whose views oppose the scientific consensus. Using Nobelists in Physiology and Medicine as a proxy for scientific consensus, we analyze two separate datasets: 15.8K tweets by 13.1K unique users on COVID-19 vaccines specifically, and 208K tweets by 151K unique users on COVID-19 broadly which mention the Nobelist names. Our analyses reveal that dissenting scientists are amplified by a factor of 426 relative to true scientific consensus in the context of COVID-19 vaccines, and by a factor of 43 in the context of COVID-19 generally. Although more popular accounts tend to mention consensus-abiding scientists more, our results suggest that this false consensus is driven by higher engagement with dissent-mentioning tweets. Furthermore, false consensus mostly occurs due to traffic spikes following highly popularized statements of dissenting scientists. We find that dissenting voices are mainly discussed in French, English-speaking, Turkish, Brazilian, Argentine, Indian, and Japanese misinformation clusters. This research suggests that social media platforms should prioritize the exposure of consensus-abiding scientists as a vehicle of reversing false consensus and addressing misinformation stemming from seemingly credible sources." Full paper - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.10594&ved=2ahUKEwjW5LPSuov1AhULYsAKHXuECrwQFnoECA8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw31LVkDjeFZJ1ahoyTbAr6D So to have a meta discussion it would first have to be accepted that there is an overwhelming majority of science that agree vaccines are effective and then that the dissenting voices are actually highly amplified. Then you can debate from that point.

@Raptorsin7 I get you, i wasnt necessarily talking about you, it's just something I've noticed from people that follow him. He's obviously very divisive, could be the delivery I don't know, but then if he didn't deliver his message in such a way he wouldn't be listened to, but this means people are going to almost deify him on one side and then absolutely hate him on the other. I think what would be good and which I'm sure he won't do, is if he had a good faith argument with say a well respected feminist or someone who could challenge him on his points, he always seems to talk to the same type of women and just batter them down.

I think Kevin Samuels does raise issues that are important and hes not wrong about a lot of things, there is some delusion with certain women, gynocentricism and issues with the black community. Also it is fair to bring up these issues as they are relevant but arent really talked about it. However if you look into it more he says hes doing it for women but the reality is the audience is mostly male and if i were to take a stab at it i would say theyre not the top 1% high value males he often references. This then leads to delusion in the men that consume his content where they believe all their problems with dating are down to women being delusional and that they are in fact high value men (ill post an example of this below). Whats interesting with KS is that he actually started by doing what he does to women, to men. The only problem was it didnt get much traction and didnt lead to many views, then a video he did criticising a woman went viral and basically led to the success hes seeing now. In May 20 he had i think only a few thousand subs, he now has 1.29 million. Hes not a stupid guy, he recognised that if he continues with this formula, thats what will bring in the views and the money, he does a hell of a lot of content, nightly streams all about the same topic. So it should be mentioned that he at least thinks theres a need to give men similar treatment but it doesnt bring in the money, which also speaks to society in that, whats seen to be women bashing is hugely more popular than men bashing (could also just be because a lot more men are on youtube than women). Hes also obviously modelled himself on people like Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsey and seen how popular they become, so I wouldnt necessarily say he has bad intentions, but his whole persona is a very calculated thing. Truth has to be holistic and i think he is articulating one side of it but to see the full thing you have to look at the whole the picture and i dont think his setup would allow him to do so, but thats why its important to have many sources of information. Video i mentioned - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAt8Nhf093s&t=8s

This is the whole thing with the mindset. What will keep you in wage slavery is fear and the fear you have of being ruined financially. If you take this fear out of the equation it would be nothing to at attempt to find a way out.

Looking into ADE i came across an interesting article that disputes it in this case and also says what i was saying which is millions have taken the vaccine now so there is plenty of data to go on. Anyway heres an excerpt and link for you - "And in my view, the Yahi et al. paper is not aligned with reality. They do work in a line about how "although the results obtained so far have been rather reassuring. . ." with a reference to the Li et al. paper, but they should also refer to the massive amount of real-world evidence now available. We have hundreds of millions of people who have been vaccinated to produce antibodies against the non-Delta coronavirus protein domains and are who are now being exposed to the Delta variant. To reiterate, there is (to the best of my knowledge) no evidence whatsoever of ADE in this situation. In fact, we see the opposite: people who have been vaccinated are far less likely to become infected with the Delta variant, and if they become infected, they are far less likely to experience severe disease. These trends have been seen over and over in different populations, and they are the exact opposite of what you would see if ADE were operating. If the mechanism proposed by Yahi et al. were happening in the real world, then we should see higher Delta infection rates among vaccinated people, with more severe disease. We are not. We are seeing the reverse. The vaccines simply to not appear to be causing ADE, no matter how many reasons one might be able to spin for them to do so. In short, get real." https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-antibody-dependent-enhancement-hypothesis Again from what you said youre worried about long term effects of the vaccine but again you dont seem as worried about long term effects of covid which are not known at all. From Science Daily - "More than half of the 236 million people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 worldwide since December 2019 will experience post-COVID symptoms -- more commonly known as 'long COVID' -- up to six months after recovering, according to researchers. The research team said that governments, health care organizations and public health professionals should prepare for the large number of COVID-19 survivors who will need care for a variety of psychological and physical symptoms." So it just seems werid to me the over concern with potential but relatively unlikely long term effects of the vaccine, but literal, actual long term effects of covid dont out weigh these vaccine concerns.

If you want to analyse and convince everyone, why dont you show how many people have died and then how many have been hospitalsed from taking the vaccine (100s of millions have taken it at this point) and then contrast that with the numbers that have died from covid. If its more from the vaccine then it might be worth looking into, until then its kinda irrelevant proving other things when the numbers are there.

Pretty pessimistic lol, I would say it's possible if someone else can do it especially if they themselves have no particular skills. Ultimately its your mindset that will take you to freedom that's the most valuable asset. Think about it there were people in literal, physical slavery who either literally escaped or worked their way out, if they cam do it think about how many advantages you have over them. Other people who were enslaved didn't even think about escaping because they only saw themselves as slaves, of course the slave owners aimed to do this to them. So now the issue is more that being in slavery is not as bad so there's less motivation to escape (I'm not saying conditions should be worse). You need to find the motivation from somewhere else and get out.

Try and consider my meta point about freedom, helmet or vaccine the point is it's still something the government mandates. So mandates can actually set a foundation for freedom not necessarily take it away. Other examples need to be used as there's too much emotion around the covid vaccine

@Raptorsin7 I get what you're saying in that healthy people are less at risk, but if you think about it unhealthy and older people are always going to be more at risk with any disease, including what we already get vaccinated for. You wouldn't make the claim that we shouldn't vaccinate anyone with the mmr vaccine for example. Furthermore as much as people say we don't know the long term effects of the vaccine, we definitely don't know the effects of covid, if you look into long term covid that has affected a lot of people. So really it's a risk analysis of what is most likely to be worse covid or the vaccine, going by the needs so far covid would be much worse. Next point is interesting, so there's always a balance that the government has to do where you are free but if your actions are particularly dangerous to not just yourself but wider society, those freedoms have to be curbed. So smoking for example is highly taxed and also you can't smoke inside any public places (this is Europe not sure about US), so smokers could say, and I'm sure they have, that they are being discriminated against but of course you can see why that's not the best argument. Food similarly there's a sugar tax in UK, they have to put all ingredients, caloric information etc on food packaging. So I don't think it's about having a mandatory anything you give the information and you apply restrictions on certain things but you're not necessarily forcing people to do things because of course people wouldn't want that. You can argue if they're doing it well or not but to be fair it's a hard balance to strike and any decision will probably have some backlash. You could make the argument with obese people that there should be more restrictions or say they have to go to the gym, but I'm not sure how you would even enforce that. Covid is unusual in that it came about suddenly and everyone is learning as they go and of course there has to be drastic action. I think there is just an over reaction of people who misunderstand what freedom actually entails, I think you get my general point though. But respect for being open minded

I think this is a misunderstanding of 'freedom'. If you think about there are many laws and restrictions placed on you in daily life, let's take one for example, driving a car. To drive a car you need to do a test, practical and theory, you need to have a compliant car, you need insurance, road tax etc etc. One could argue that this is a restriction of freedom as if I think I can drive, I should be a better judge than the government and I don't want to jump through all these hoops. I could say the goverment is creating an apartheid against those who don't want to jump through these hoops by making it illegal to drive. In reality we know its necessary because if we have people who haven't passed all these tests it can cause a lot problems in practise, for everyone who wants to drive. You might say 'well this completely different', I mean not really but if you want a closer example, we've needed vaccines to travel to certain countries for decades, shots for malaria, tetanus etc this is of course to protect the person but also the local population from them spreading it. It would be quite ridiculous for someone to say the government is controlling their individual autonomy if they don't want to take it. So the method of placing restrictions on you if you don't follow a certain measure is something that almost has to be for a functioning society. The only difference with covid is that it's a sudden measure bit of course its a sudden thing that happened, keep in mind when measures such as seat belts came in people protested those as well. If you accept that premise then the only argument would be that you think covid isn't real and the government just want to control you for the sake of it or that they've got it completely wrong. Which I'm not going to argue here but personal choice would be to go with experts over conspiracy theorists research.

Will a writer ever create text that will let you know how it feels to eat a banana if you've never tried one?

@Danioover9000 I get where youre coming from and of course as you say some unlucky albeit few people, will get legit side effects. Ultimately it is a measure of risk, is the virus more damaging or is the vaccine? Imo the virus is way more damaging, as in its not even close, but that doesnt mean the vaccine is perfect of course. But of course stay safe and i wish you the best in getting over these issues. This is true, all meds do have side effects. Did you know for example that ibuprofen has been reported to kill over 16,000 people and hospitalise over 100,000 per year just in the US alone? (Deaths are prob closer to 3200 but either way) As far as i know the vaccine is nowhere near those numbers and this for a med that you can buy over the counter and administer yourself. Also less people take ibuprofen (21m) than the vaccine, so percentage wise its actually a lot higher. But ive never heard anyone complain or protest about ibuprofen, does this not seem hypocritical to you that you would be so against a vaccine on the basis that its dangerous but not even bother with other drugs that have been proven to be much more dangerous? This is before we even get to opiods and other medications, why not focus on these more pressing issues?

Thank you bro. To answer your question im slightly weary about giving direct advice because ultimately i could be wrong, although i am currently studying a financial advisor course im in no way an expert. My intention with the post was to give some facts on what i believe to be happening and then people can make their own minds up as to what to do. The reality is you could very well make money from Bitcoin but just know if you are making money from it youve just know someone else has probably lost money, i also doubt that everyone will make 60x their money, nothings impossible but i just cant see it, what goes up must come down. Also keep in mind it only takes a few of these whales to cash out and bitcoin will drop heavily, a lot of retail investors are not seasoned and will get very worried if it freefalls. That being said even if it does drop bitcoin could go a lot higher before that happens. Another thing to keep in mind is that with something like Madoffs ponzi scheme, a lot of the people eventually recouped their money from those that made money and got out early, this is talked about in this FT article - https://www.ft.com/content/83a14261-598d-4601-87fc-5dde528b33d0 With bitcoin if it does go to zero there is literally no chance of you getting that money back. FT makes the argument that this ponzi scheme is actually safer than bitcoin. What i can advise is to only invest what youre willing to lose and recognise that this is very much a gamble. It shouldnt account for more than 5% of what should be a diversified portfolio. Personally im not a gambler and im perfectly fine with fomo so i probably wont put anything into it, Im invested in diversified funds and looking to get into property next year. I understand the desire to make a lot of money quickly, but really imo that time researching bitcoin would be better spent putting together a business that can provide value to people and make money, i think this is a legit better bet than bitcoin.

The fact that anti-vaxxers keep going on about it is interesting in of itself, why is it you have to convince others on your position? If you really don't want take it then don't. There are consequences for not taking a malaria vaccine if you go to certain countries, so it is what it is, unless you want to protest that too. The pov of the anti-vaxxer, esp on this forum, seems to be that everyone is just stuck in their echo chamber and they don't get the truth that you somehow hold. This forum specifically engages in critical thinking, as well there are many scientists and medical professionals on here. Did you ever consider that your information was considered and then decided that whatever risks you bring up are for outweighed by the net benefits? Either way a decision has been made by the person so realistically you're not going to convince someone, unless you can prove all the experts wrong and show how the vaccine is worse than covid.

They dont pay dividends directly, you are right but as late adopters put in money at a higher price it puts more worth in the pockets of the early adopters, the value is based on more people putting in money which is why early adopters or anyone whos invested, would encourage others to get in. It is beneficial to everyone but it works somewhat like a pyramid where its very beneficial to those at the top and a little beneficial to those at the bottom. When it drops its very detrimental to those at the bottom if theyve bought at a high price, whereas not so much in overall terms for those at the top. OK i want to be very clear on what i mean here, i probably have a similar definition to you though. So speculation is investing in something without much knowledge on it apart from the fact that you believe it will go up in the future. Now youre right, no system can really stop this from happening, but my central premise is that this is a pyramid scheme and that still stands, obviously all pyramid schemes are inherently speculative. The common belief with bitcoin is that its going to make everyone rich and my point is that a lot of people are going to lose out. Essentially an argument against this would be to say that its a pyramid scheme that is going to work out for everyone and i just cant see that happening. True but then land and other investments can pay out as they provide value to someone. If you buy some a rental property, you will probably be able to rent it out for continued income or worst case if no one rents it and it goes to zero, live in it yourself saving money on rent. Bitcoin doesnt pay out dividends or rent so the only way to make money is the price rising which you will need others to keep pumping money into it and storing value there Yes i agree, as a store of value it does make sense, but again i dont think people are putting in money just to store value, i think its about making as much as they can. It doesnt no, but i want to make a distinction between the technology and the way the tech is being used. People are buying in thinking this is some great equaliser and wealth is going to transfer (which ive heard firsthand from bitbros). Its simply not the case and those buying in at the top dont realise that when one of these whales takes a bit of profit, theyre the ones providing this profit. Agree with most of this. The trouble is again though, this hype is not going to last forever and i think when people dont see the returns they expected or another crypto overtakes or a whale takes out a chunk of bitcoin, the price is going to drop heavy. Most of the people in bitcoin dont love or care about bitcoin, they love money and theyre trying to pimp bitcoin for it, when that drys out there will be problems. But overall i like the tech i think it will change society but i think the pyramid aspect comes in because society is mainly orange and this is really a yellow technology.

Thanks for your comments first of all. I agree its not a very good replacement for fiat currency and it may not have been designed as such, however a lot of people are gambling on that being the case. Also my point was that it is purely speculative if its not going to be used for transaction, the speculative bet being that if i put something into bitcoin today, someone will pay me more for that at a later date. I was taking out the use case for it, which i guess you agree with from your comment. Its somewhat speculation as of course bitcoin is anonymous, but there are numerous publications that have looked into it and found out whos most likely to own them. Also this wouldnt really affect the numbers even if those at the top are all early adopters, its still the same pyramid structure. https://currency.com/who-has-the-most-bitcoin https://www.investopedia.com/articles/people/083016/who-are-top-5-bitcoin-millionaires.asp https://river.com/learn/who-owns-the-most-bitcoin/ Theres a lot more Yes we give the value to gold, but of course gold has a reputation spanning centuries, also gold is not priced at 50k an ounce, so in that sense as a store of value its been extremely consistent. Also should be noted people dont think gold is going to make them rich and so most investment portfolios dont have a large amount of gold, maybe 10% or so is usually recommended as a hedge. Regarding fiat currencies, again no one is holding them to make money in the future, the whole point is that it is consistent which is why it has its reputation, bitcoin because of the amount of speculation will have a different kind of reputation. That being said, blockchain is here to stay and can change a lot of things, however if this was a technology that people couldnt personally make much money from, they probably wouldnt care about it. Its the money potential that has led to peoples interest, not the tech itself. A pyramid scheme can still include a valid product, its just the value can be pumped up ridiculously. So im not arguing about the tech, im arguing most will find themselves in the grip of a pyramid scheme.

Im not disagreeing in some aspects, there of course can be a reflex of quick judgement and labels. In some senses this is how human beings almost have to operate as it would be difficult to delve into everything and fully understand it, this is why labels even exist in the first place to make life easier, of course there is the trade off that you will not be accurate in every judgement. I think simply having awareness of this quirk of having a human mind would solve a lot of issues, so for examples you recognise youve made a snap judgement and that you might be wrong. Having said that this snap judgement is based on whats happened previously, for example brands are built up on reputation in terms of good marketing or products, this ties an association of quality to a persons mind if theyve had good experiences with the brand, therefore they may just buy the product because the brand. This works the same with conspiracy theories, if someone looks into conspiracy theories and recognises that theres a certain faulty logic within them, they may not want to look deeper into more of them because of this brand or 'label', but theyre not necessarily wrong and even if they are is it worth the time to go through all claims just in case one might be right? From my personal experience i have some friends that are deep into the conspiracy rabbit hole and what i realised was that there was a massive weight of proof that they put on the scientific narrative as opposed to basically no weight of proof on their conspiracy. I would listen and ask questions but i realised this was more of a belief system than anything else, i spent a lot of time looking into what they said, most of the time i could see why they might think that but ultimately there was so much flawed logic. So then ive got to say do i spend time looking at all these conspiracies or do I look at them as theories that no expert agrees with and have spotty, arguable research, of course i will go with the latter. This information is completely dependent on what your agenda is in the first place. Of course to someone into conspiracy theories, theyll say that Canada is monitoring all its citizens and theres some nefarious thing going on, but their mind is set and already looking for this pattern and things that it can tie to this pattern. There have been countless theories that ive seen pop on social media that turned out to be proven wrong and im not talking about fact checking (although i think thats valid), for example there were military vehicles being transported in London at the start of the pandemic, people started claiming that the military was being brought into lockdown london, of course this never happened. The only information they had was video of the vehicles being transported on the motorway. Because their mind was primed, they saw something which is routine and turned into something completely different. Regarding the Canada stuff, logically it wouldnt make sense that if it is a conspiracy that they say exactly what theyre doing on a government website open to the public. Theres a fear of being watched and monitored which is a consistent worry of conspiracy people, but whats funny is the contradictions, most have phones, most dont live off grid, most have social media, so theyre literally opting into being monitored but then complaining on monitored platforms about being monitored, even after its come out that facebook was violating privacy, you cant make it up. But when the given reason behind monitoring is public health then they want to question that.

Heres a breakdown of the CIA thing, which itself could be considered a conspiracy theory - https://theconversation.com/theres-a-conspiracy-theory-that-the-cia-invented-the-term-conspiracy-theory-heres-why-132117 But going deeper into your original question. I get what youre saying as any theory that is different to the accepted one is labelled a conspiracy theory. This may seem egregious to you if you believe in one of these fringe theories. The question is though, 'should some theories be dismissed?' and I would actually argue that yes some should, probably whatever theory you believe there will be some aspect of it or some other theory that seems like nonsense to you. For example a lot of people might believe in 9/11 inside job but then might also believe that flat earth is complete bullshit, im sure they would argue that time shouldnt be spent researching flat earth when it can be so easily disproven. So people that dont buy into conspiracy theories believe this about most conspiracy theories, its just a matter of degrees. There has to be some criteria for dismissing theories, most people use a scientific criteria or take expert opinion on the subject. In my opinion what takes something into 'conspiracy theory' territory is when its 'self-locking', so for example the expert opinion wont be taking and in fact the expert opinion now becomes part of the conspiracy, as in they must be on it. People will often retort with, well expert opinion can be wrong, look at history, and although this is true, one, its the nature of science to disprove itself, its actually a feature not a bug, two, if they are disproven by someone, that someone is usually an expert in the field not someone who does 'research' without any expertise, and three, a scientific consensus logically makes the most sense to follow, at least more sense than the minority. I understand people dont like to be dismissed for what they believe in, but the emotional reaction would to me signal evidence that one is too attached to their theory. If you were taking a strict search for truth, an attachment to any theory or idea would actually hold you back from finding the truth. A hypothesis is an educated guess that youre trying to prove wrong, not trying to prove right. So theres nothing wrong with having a theory that is where investigation starts, but buying into the theory and attaching your worldview to it is the antithesis of finding truth.