Nobody sane says that. Such rhetoric is a divisive wedge.
Same people would have liked to see an open honest discussion about the vaccine. Instead you had political figures, “experts” and tech sites suppress any and all discussion. All medicine has side effects… but these fuckers were on a mission. Anything remotely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, not everybody should get a vaccine… oh boy can’t have that.
But if you want to mis-characterize things, by all means do so.
Heh, who's mis-characterizing things? As I recall there was a lot of "the risks are within limits", rather than the authorianism you're characterizing...
What's ironic here is the other responses - vehemently defending this authoritarian thought control; while for the last two weeks, we get daily posts reaching the HN front page criticizing EU chat control/age verification/VPN ban/etc.
It's true what they say - "you don't oppose the boot, you just want to be the one wearing it".
People were allowed to have open and honest discussion about things. I saw plenty of discussion about myocarditis at the time from reputable sources and in reasonable manners.
But they were all pointing out that this is just an aspect of flu vaccines, that we had known it could happen even with regular flu vaccines for a long time, that the incident rate is lower than just getting covid (or the flu) in general, and that the severity was also less than that of if you had gotten it as a result of covid.
Because that's a better picture of reality because it gives you the full context.
Instead of pointing out that whole context, a whole lot of people left it at "it's the clot shot! it gives you myocarditis!"
And despite this apparent widespread suppression that everyone claims was going on, this bad-faith misrepresentation of the reality of the situation was all over the place. I saw many times more people spouting misinformation than I did the actual full details of this stuff. Like .01% of the potentially fatal misinformation got cleaned up and people are acting like there was this brutal suppression of the truth.
This is absolutely untrue: what were suppressed by various sites were outright lies and misrepresentation. There was continuously a vigorous discussion about vaccine efficacy and safety, who should be prioritized, etc. and the people who engaged in it scientifically had nothing to fear. The people who were lying about vaccination now claim that’s what they were doing but anyone who watched it at the time could easily see the difference.
Similar to the question of criminalizing "hate speech" - who gets to decide whether an engagement reaches the scientific threshold?
Is it not obvious how policies like this can be weaponized to quell valid dissent?
> That’s a vague hypothetical
Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.
> I saw a number examples of people asking questions which were obviously based on known falsehoods or presupposed answers
This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.
Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.
> it wasn’t surprising that they encountered forum policies for acting in bad faith. I saw many people acting in good faith who had no negative consequences for exploring questions like this, too, so it’s really doesn’t seem like there was a problem here and the people who lied about why they suffered consequences only had their speech suppressed to the extent that they had to go somewhere else so the consequences were minimal.
The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.
Yes, people are going to say wrong things, and mislead other people. But the cost to suppress this speech is far, far more detrimental than letting it be.
