Grif Agree with some of what you’ve said here, I can’t get behind calling people names though. There is no doubt that the vaccines have had a great impact, but we do not know yet at what cost, history could yet prove those of us who have had it to be the idiots!
Well, theres the issue. It’s my view, and I did carefully say that it was my opinion, my view, that that belief is idiotic. So what you’re saying is that you support the right to express a view that many experts say is spreading misinformation, and that’s fine, but saying that I think it is idiotic isn’t acceptable to post?
Putting that a different way, freedom of speech applies to people expressing an anti-vax viewpoint is them exercising their freedom of speech, but I’m not sujpposed to exercise my freedom of speech to say I think that that view is idiotic? It seems freedom of speech is very selective.
Okay, I’ll admit I called it idiotic very deliberately, precisely to make the point about why so-called freedom of speech is dangerous, especially in a forum thread. It makes my actual point, which is that such subjects are not in my opinion a good idea in forum threads.
Dave mentioned having discussions “with friends”. A very different situation, IMHO. For a start, that usualy means either people naturally self-filter how they say things like that, in case it offends, or it’s a group of friends where they know each other well enough to be confident it won’t offend. That doesn’t, and can’t, apply to a forum thread.
But, 20+ years administering a number of forums, including some much larger than this, tells me that on any sensitive subject (gay rights, BoJo or Jezzer,, catholic priests and child abuse, the death penaly and …. shudder, Brexit, not to mention many, many more), sooner or later someone is going to get offended. Never mind that it is a freedom of speech, not a freedom to not be offended, it creates ructions. I’ve certainly spent dozens, if not hundreds, of hours trying to keep the peace in such threads. It’s futile, in the end.
The absence of such threads is one of the reasons I post here.