politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
They can't figure out a winning strategy because their position on the issue is very dicey. Their credibility has been eroded with that particular audience, and without the credibility to really speak to them, all they can really do is make things worse.
Since the anti-vaxxers have lost trust in establishments and given their trust to individuals instead, it becomes only individuals operating outside of an established structure that have any real chance of possibly getting through to them.
In other words, since it's randos online causing the problem, there's really only one group that can effectively combat it--other randos online. Offline we'd call this grassroots. Now though, welcome to the Information Age.
The problem is that the anti-vaxxers aren't just believing any individual, they're believing a conspiracy theory. Anyone with evidence showing that their conspiracy theory is false is told that they are either part of the conspiracy or are a sheep falling for the conspiracy.
You can't just talk people out of this. If there's a pile of 100 points in favor of a vaccine and 1 point against it, they'll ignore the 100 in favor, focus on the 1 against, add 20 more points that have been debunked repeatedly but still circulate on Facebook, and declare the vaccine too dangerous to use.
I don't have a solution because "force everyone to say X online under penalty of law" is NOT a good solution. At the very least, imagine what another administration might do if that was the law. What other topics would we be forced to repeat the "official government sanctioned view" on? I don't think this is a problem with an easy solution.
Certainly. I'd also depart from the evidence-based approach. Evidence-based approaches only work on people that believe in evidence-based approaches. If this was believed in, then the problem would not exist in the first place. Evidence-based approaches are a prevention method, not a treatment method. Once illness is established, they become useless for treatment.
Fortunately, the evidence-based toolbox is just one of many that people have access to. It's just that being trained to prefer the evidence-based one makes the others unpalatable. They can, however, get results where evidence and rationality fail.
edit: I think the most powerful, reliable toolbox is humor, incidentally. Being able to make people laugh is frankly a superpower sometimes. But people have different senses of humor, so it's never easy, comedian is just a tough job. Much easier to be a scientist, and have a reliable, proven methodology to work with imo.
The problem is the instant someone disagrees with them they ignore everything they say. If one of their own changes their mind even a little, they ostracize them. It's a self-reinforcing delusion which are really hard to break people out of.
Harder than really hard, nigh-impossible usually.
That's better than legit-impossible though, which is the odds all major establishment sources get. If you've been taught that doctors, politicians, educators and media are all lying to you, who is left remaining?
I’ll do my part.
The vaccine is good. Get the vaccine.
Hopefully this helps. :/
When the vaccine became a litmus test for ideologies you know that folks who would gain from fewer constituents would go full bore in denialism… got my shots and standing on the balcony watching the pure bloods choke on their sputum and succumbing to Darwin’s kiss
If only it was that easy. Life, unfortunately, is much harder than that though, and if someone says its supposed to be easy, they're selling something.