here are at least 3 different things being argued in this thread.. Joe Rogan's impact on people, vaccines, and Bill Cipher's style of communication.
1-
Joe Rogan is an entertainer, a comedian, an mma color commentator.. He is not a health expert by any means. He self-deprecatingly calls himself a moron many times and often says people shouldn't listen to him, including in the
vaccine issue.
I certainly wouldn't go to him for advise on matters not pertaining to his expertise, just like with many other people and other subjects. Michio Kaku is wrong about psychedelics, Bill Gates is wrong about bitcoin, etc. At the same time, Joe Rogan has been right about many things, for example has led a lot of people to start exercising, doing jiu jitsu, which can absolutely be a positive transformation in one's life. So how do we measure the good vs the bad?
Is it the responsibility of people talking if they defend positions that are wrong, or responsibility of the listeners to discern, as grown adults, what is right or wrong?
As Bill Cipher asked, what is the limit though? If he started denying the holocaust, or defending dictatorship or whatever, is it the same?
In my personal opinion, and anyone should feel free to disagree, it would be the same, in the sense that it should be the responsibility of the individual listener to discern. There is plenty of wrong information in the world, and we can't shelter people from it. If I think about my child, for example, who is too young to understand Rogan, but say he was a teenager... I'd rather trust that I do a good job teaching him to discern so that even if he listened to Rogan he'd not be influenced negatively by being misinformed, but that he'd be positively influenced by the good aspects and thing he can genuinely learn. I'd much rather that, than to "cancel" Rogan because he is wrong about some things.
2- Vaccines are an incredible invention that has saved countless lives since their invention. Look up smallpox for example. We are currently living a pandemic that has also taken many lives, way more than the flu, and vaccines can definitely help save many lives now too.
Most of the fears people have regarding vaccines are misunderstandings or wrong.
This is a great wikipedia entry that goes in depth about many of those fears.
That being said, it is also true that pharmaceutical companies have often done bad things and that there have been fake vaccination schemes (as described in that article when they tried to find Bin Laden), or vaccines that caused problems. In the case of vaccines I think those are minor cases compared to the benefits though.
Also this particular research and production of covid vaccines has been done at a record pace, and sometimes it may take a longer time frame to realize what are the side effects or other problems. There were some issues being found along the way (mostly with AstraZeneca's and J&J's thrombosis cases or Sputnik's tainted batches sent to Brazil), and I don't find it surprising that some people are more wary and would like to take more time to decide if they take it or not.
Say for example, they found that vaccines based on adenovirus do cause thrombosis specially in young women, or its only if they are taking birth control pills.. Well, a young woman would not be unreasonable to have waited a bit before taking those vaccines because she now has learned she has much lower risk of issues if taking the pfizer vaccine instead. It's complex though because if most young woman would not take vaccines for example, this could mean more infections, and more deadly mutations. We may be trading someone's life for someone else's life with these decisions, and to value a life over another is very complex ethically.
That being said, I still personally think most people can and should take the vaccines available to them. I'm waiting for my turn. I just think that it's
3-
Bill Cipher was chosen as the sole person to not be restrained by the attitude rules. Even Trav, the admin, or other mods like me, we still have to abide by the attitude page.
This was done because we think the forum should definitely be a peaceful place with good attitude. At the same time, long ago we decided felt that to deal with certain trolls and people with bad attitude coming to the forum, they needed a verbal "slap in the face", someone that ruthlessly tells the truth.
This decision was specifically regarding trolls and people with bad attitude. Bill Cipher has lately, though, been (understandably imo) been very concerned with political issues, and this is what brings him to post in the way he does. I don't agree with him in some things, but I still think it's good to have a watch dog in the forum that makes no concessions.
I understand some people are not happy with it, but I also think we need to consider that it's a forum with thousands of people and posts that do follow the attitude, this is a great respectful place, and you can always ignore a single poster if you don't like him. If it was multiple people, it would be harder to ignore, but if you don't like his posts, just don't read, and understand.
