Nobody has said this.
Nobody has said this.
Everything has risk. Even safe things.
I think this discussion belongs in the vaccine thread, but it appears that this is what you would call a “bad faith” argument. My complaint in this thread is the moderators allow such things to go unchecked when it’s you posting, but my (generally well-supported) posts are temped at random.
That’s bullshit. You’re not a mod, you don’t know what goes on behind the scenes.
I’ve been moderated before. I have made mistakes. So have other mods too.
Would you like us to parade every mistake we make?
We delete it, learn from it and move on.
I will attempt a constructive suggestion.
If a moderator think something looks wrong but does not have the knowledge to determine one way or the other (and bearing in mind that absolute truth is hard to come by in a topic as politicized as COVID), it’s better to let the discussion run instead of randomly clipping and moving things. Let people justify themselves, and perhaps the truth will out, or something close to it.
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I don’t moderate health and fitness nor living in Taiwan.
If it looks wrong from a rules based perspective to me in those forums, I flag and let mods over there decide.
A good rule: Slam the topic, opinion or data . Not the person. Many people could stand to improve on that…! Myself included probably.
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You’re not supposed to be flagging things for being (in your opinion) wrong. Nor are the moderators supposed to be removing or temping things that are (in their opinion) wrong. There is nothing in the rules that says anything about the moderators acting as fact-checkers.
While I can understand things being moved sideways to some other COVID thread, it is singularly inappropriate to temp an otherwise reasonable post simply because the moderator doesn’t like what is being said or has made a gut-feeling judgement on whether something is true or not.
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What do you think I mean by ‘looking wrong’?
Looking wrong from a RULES-BASED perspective. @finley. Looking wrong as in whether the post breaks rules.
If I was to do something so egregious as flagging/deleting based on opinion, the entire humbug thread would be gone. lmfao
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Seems like this is your justification for this thread, innit
huh? I was suggesting that if Marco wants to talk about vaccines then there’s a thread for it.
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Agreed. And I think that’s something I still need to work on. I was rude to a poster recently and was righly pulled up on it. I’ve banned myself from posting for a while because I over stepped the line.
People used to fling insults at each other on here in the past, but the culture has changed massively, for the better. Getting out of that habit has been something I’ve needed to actively work on. I get it wrong from time to time, but I think I am much improved.
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Wow. I do trust greater minds than mine can moderate such discussions …I certainly would not be able to do so.
For Covid what has been posted spans the full spectrum of opinions and pseudoscience. I mean when you have the following:
-vaccines are killing more people than Covid
-vaccines are not preventing the severity of Covid
-herd immunity would be more effective than utilizing vaccines
-the long term health detriments of vaccines far exceeds than of Covid
People can argue all day long that the above is true. But just like all the possible hazards of a new vaccine…not all is known yet so most is still conjecture at this point. How to moderate such opinions?
Oh the irony of “extremely dubious assertions”
My point is: why bother?
Some of the things you mention are conjecture, some are pretty damn solid, some are inherently unknowable, and some are a matter of opinion. I think people get very confused over which is which. For example, there are currently 12 million vaccine injuries recorded in the US and Europe. That, in itself, is a fact. ‘Conjecture’ might be “is that all of the vaccine injuries?” or “are there injuries recorded there that were due to something else?”. ‘Opinion’ would be along the lines of “so if those numbers are true, what are the implications?”. I don’t see much room for fact-checking here.
Unless any of the mods have several PhDs in an assortment of sciences, I doubt they’re better placed than anybody else here to judge what’s true, false, or anything in between. I’m suggesting that the site will work perfectly well if the rules are just applied as written, to everyone. Someone (Gus?) clearly put a lot of thought into the wording of those rules, and I can’t see anything wrong with them.
If the mods wish to act as fact checkers, then, as I said at the beginning, they should state that clearly and not leave us guessing. If they’re claiming to be impartial then I would like them to act impartially.
EDIT: 12m figure is incorrect. That was easily sorted with @eldrich’s correction. No need for moderation required!
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Also from the rules:
A moderator-friendly website. We think of Forumosa as a “Moderator’s Forum”. The rules are designed to help the moderators moderate the forums. Decisions about content are ultimately made by that forum’s moderator(s), who have paramount authority in their respective forums.
Mods have a great deal of say here in what’s valuable content in their forums. You need to accept that mods have this authority here if you want to post here. Of course we understand if mods are arbitrary, things are going to break down, but I don’t think that’s happening at present. It’s worth noting that at present we’re in an epidemic with all of its impacts, and that will be reflected in our assessments of what is valuable or otherwise to the community.
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The implication of the above - if you think what is being said may have real-world impacts - is that you have a duty to make sure your decisions are correct, because making the wrong decision could have bad outcomes. Ergo, if you aren’t sure, wouldn’t it be simpler to just leave well alone?
Pointing out that eg., a population the size of Belgium has experienced problems following a medical experiment - an unprecedented event in human history - is not, IMHO, “valueless”; and furthermore I’d wonder what was going on if you asserted that there was nothing to see here, move along.
This looks a somewhat dubious claim to me, according to the European medical agency, the number of side-effects after vaccination in the EU/EEA is around 1.2 million, which means the US number would have to be 10x higher for roughly the same amount of people. that’s from ~880,000,000 vaccinations.
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For gods sake don’t argue that here
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I’m looking at numbers of 1.5m, 4.3m, and 6.1m for the UK, EU and US respectively. Most other countries aren’t even bothering to count.
Those are, of course, all claimed injuries, including ones that are non-serious, transient, or nothing to do with the COVID vaccines. As I said, though, the recorded number is an indisputable fact. Where you go with that (“how many of these are important?”, “how many are under-reported?”, etc) is then a matter for discussion. I don’t think anybody has divine insight into eg., what the under-reporting factor actually is. There’s a range of possible values.
EDIT: hang on, I think you’re right. Something amiss here. I’ll check.
EDIT2: bugger, you are right. I’m looking at a tally of individual symptoms reported. The UK has about 350K people who have filed yellow card reports. US is about 1.3m, EU about 3.5m.
Maybe @finley should help Mick in IP for a while instead of just complaing about how other people do this unpaid job that can’t please everybody?