We’re publishing an original piece today by a lecturer at a Russell Group university about the poor reasoning of those who advocate for vaccine passports. Here’s an extract in which he draws attention to the use of false dilemmas in an attempt to persuade people to embrace a Covid status certification scheme.
Debates about vaccine passports often involve people experiencing a false dilemma. Consider a professor at the Harvard Law School for whom the alternative to a vaccine passport system is “stay at your home, or don’t come to college, or don’t come to the employer at all”. For those who want to do such extravagant things as go out, continue one’s education, or go to work to earn a wage, there may seem to be no acceptable alternative.
Many people, it seems, see the debate as one between accepting vaccine passports or facing a punishing future of restrictions, social disruption and isolation, and all their social and economic harms – ones that disproportionality impact ethnic and racial minorities. Given just those two options, vaccine passports will doubtless seem the lesser of two evils. But those aren’t the only option: a false dilemma is imposed by obscuring alternative possibilities. Israel, for one, recently announced the early closure of its Green Card system, barely five months after introducing it, due to encouraging case data and vaccine uptake rates. One obvious alternative is therefore to study up-to-date data on cases, hospitalisations, and deaths and weigh these against vaccination rates and plausible collective immunity levels.
We’re often susceptible to false dilemmas: many of us tend to stick to the options given to us. It also takes expertise, research, and exercises of the imagination to identify alternatives. Moreover, many prefer simplified decision-making situations in which there’s a limited set of simple alternatives. Sometimes, artificially simplified options are acceptable: not all false dilemmas concern important topics (what shall I do tonight – watch Netflix or have a bath?). But vaccine passports raise important issues, so we must take more than the usual amounts of care when considering them. If there are other ways to ‘return to normal’, then vaccine passports are not the only way and perhaps not the best way.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
In the drive to waste OPM Kneel’s Labour Party vandals have a lot of catching up to do but I am confident they will give it their best shot.
It used to be “the toilet papers too rough, out brothers”
Now it’s ” he called me he! Out comrades!”
The four ways of spending money, in descending order of preference:
1. Spending your own money on yourself.
2. Spending your own money on someone else.
3. Spending someone else’s money on yourself.
4. Spending someone else’s money on someone else.
Labour and the unions flip-flop between 3 and 4 (OPM) and denounce anyone who wants to do 1 and 2.
But then, what exactly has the Tory party been doing?
Folks, it’s all fucked! I don’t know what the solution is. But solutions tend to find themselves… when it’s too late.
They already have the solution. ———Print more money (Modern Monetary Theory)
Union bosses competing on which of them can circle closest to the drain…
All aided and abetted from on high by the politics of dependency and division.
Plus ça change…
Well I’m completely baffled.
”Data from Clalit Health Services (Israel’s largest healthcare organization representing more than 50% of the population)
CARDIAC ARREST Diagnoses per 1M population increased 225% from 2021 to 2022!
Up 431% from 2020!
What happened in 2021??”
https://twitter.com/_aussie17/status/1680580184603328512
Well I think on the trans issue I stand with Russia. It’s just a shame that will never happen over here. I think what the trans extremists have succeeded in doing is shooting themselves in the foot due to their disgusting behaviour and massive over-reach with their ideology. They always did have human rights but they wanted to trample on women’s rights and dominate by erasing us. The ominous as hell amount of energy put into targeting kids obviously crossed a line for many who were previously disinterested or ambivalent towards these people. Now I just swing between pity and hate. No wonder Putin is looking to many other countries and feeling the need to stamp it out, like a cancer that’s spreading. We must look like a complete and utter shitshow. ”Civilized society”? Show me what’s civilized when it comes to much of this trans movement because I only see societies disintegrating with a goal to reconfigure in a way which is so at odds with the world as I always knew it. And the worst thing being that this isn’t just some grassroots movement that will fade away, like some transient phase. Many powerful people are behind the scenes enabling and empowering all of it. No idea how it’ll all end, if it ever will.
”Russia’s lower house of parliament has passed a new law banning gender reassignment surgery, in the latest attack on LGBT rights in the country.
The State Duma approved the bill, which will also ban people changing their genders on state documents, on Friday.
Speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, said the bill would “protect our citizens and our children”.
In a telegram post on Friday, Mr Volodin also called gender-affirming surgery a “path to the degeneration of the nation”.
“We are the only European country that opposes all that is happening in the States, in Europe and does everything to save families and traditional values,” he said during the debate on Friday. “And we need to understand that there won’t be any future if we don’t adopt the law, if we don’t ban gender change.”
Fresh amendments added to the bill on Friday during its final reading included banning individuals who have undergone gender changes from adopting children, and annulling marriages where one party had undergone gender reassignment.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66200194?xtor=AL-72-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at_medium=social&at_bbc_team=editorial&at_ptr_name=twitter&at_link_type=web_link&at_campaign=Social_Flow&at_link_id=132BD456-227F-11EE-9A69-3B5E3AE5AB7B&at_link_origin=BBCNews&at_campaign_type=owned&at_format=link
I have no problem with a trans person. I am infact happy for them. I hope they are live a full and happy life including a great sex life. ————I do though have a problem with biological males using the same dressing rooms, changing rooms and toilet facilities as my daughter or wife or any other WOMAN. How that situation can be resolved without redesigning every facility in every building in the country is unclear, but it cannot be solved by insisting women just shut up and accept it.
The Not-a-Conservative-Party should legislate to ban “Civil Servants” whose full time “jobs” are basically acting as a Trade Unionist (Labour-Party) activist.