people who skip vaccinations are incredibly selfish

[smackababy]

I think nobody should be vaccinated. Survival of the fittest! Oh, you can't handle measles? Too bad.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I'm not disagreeing with you at all.

Unfortunately misinformation and fear is what our media drills into our heads all day long.

Of course people are going to act on it.

:|

I don't agree and especially with regards to vaccines. In fact I think that's fostered the anti-vaccine sentiment, as the media, government, doctors, and scientists are all unified in saying vaccines being good. That's a very rare thing, so to them it looks like a grand conspiracy, and then they have nut jobs on social platforms that run with that argument. I guess you could argue that the change in media is the problem, in which case I agree.

The other issue is we're at a stage where people know of arguments but don't know how to actually look at situations and understand when they're not equivalent. For instance, they view oil companies fighting environmental regulations as being the same as a doctors/scientists working for pharmaceutical companies pushing for vaccines. Or conservatives/libertarians who view it as infringing on their freedom. They focus on relative things they've learned and use that to reject rational facts. It's like people what use analogies and fallacies horribly. They learned basically what they are, but didn't learn how to actually make sense of them and why blanket arguments are just stupid. People learn to be afraid of "chemicals" without learning how that term is fairly meaningless. Same with toxicity. And so they've learned enough to have a general idea about stuff, but have not learned enough to know how to actually apply it correctly. A lot of people think they're using rational arguments because they learned the method but they don't understand how their ignorance clouds if not outright nullifies it.