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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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He is an obvious crank (or troll pretending to be a crank) making terrible arguments, but your response is not a good one. I doubt there is anyone here who finds his arguments convincing, but if there was your post would not be a good reason to think otherwise. There are many people who believe that, for instance, they have lost a family member to the COVID-19 vaccine because he had a stroke months later or something. Many millions of people say they lost a family member to the vaccine if we go by the survey a while back and assume not all of them were people misreading the question (unfortunately I didn't save a link, it might have been posted here or somewhere else like Zvi's blog), implying numbers that are completely insane unless we assume that all the official studies and statistics are outright fake. For that matter, there are plenty of people who will tell you stories like "my father got the vaccine and had a heart-attack days later", something which is biologically plausible to attribute to the vaccine, and yet even then the statistics probably work out such that it is a coincidence most of the time. Their anger at vaccination-supporters for killing people they loved, though based on far weaker evidence, is in many cases just as sincere and wholehearted as yours. Those personal experiences and feelings aren't a convincing argument when they use them, and they don't become a convincing argument just because you are supporting a position that happens to actually be true.