Respectfully, i'm not sure you can both claim to be a critical thinker and make a falacious argumentum ad logicam argument at the same time. You kind of have to choose one.
Sure, you're right. Maybe I should've asked more questions, even though I was being vilified, unfriended, and hated for it. It's just so incredibly weird to me that even in the Tweede Kamer (I guess the Dutch House of Representatives?) they just wouldn't seriously answer questions some people had. I watched every debate, every new item, everything (in the Netherlands). They have NEVER done this as bad as this before.
Either we were being lied to, or they chose the path of "let's make them sound crazy so nobody will think like this" for actual good. I'm not sure, and leaning more to the first (for the first time in my life, mind you), and it has served me well this time. Will keep betting on my own body's ability.
In my experience, if you give the conspiracists a foot they take a mile.
If we're all being a little more honest, I think many of those "just asking questions" types aren't just asking questions. They're working in bad faith and already have an anti-vax position, and so they're prodding hoping for a "yes, but..." so they can say "aha! Exactly!"
Is it the right thing to assume all those asking questions are of this variety? No. Is it the right thing to just lie to these people? Also no. But will they respond well to honesty? no. Does being honest pose a danger in the context of these people that will manifest as real lives lost? I think, yes.
So I think that's how this sort of thing came to be. It's a legitimately hard problem because of the stakes.
"Many of those asking questions" is using a weasel word: many. What is many? It allows hand wavy arguments.
Pre covid, I knew about half a dozen anti vax "it causes autism" people; esp my cousin/neighbors as they blame vaccines for their son's autism despite the information available. Post covid, I knew only a couple more similar people. I also know probably closer to 150 people who are/were "this is a new thing being too aggressively pushed" who otherwise take vaccines. Nearly 10x in my circles.
It is fallacious to group these two together. A common question was, "if I already caught it and developed immunity, why would I want to additionally vaccinate?" And people shut them down as nutcases. Nobody was asking that question in bad faith and even if they were it was a fair question. However, when you are told to shut up and take what we are telling you, it is a normal human reaction to be skeptical. People were actively pushed to the fringe as those were the only people willing to even entertain "these evil thought crimes of not blindly towing party lines."
I don't know because I actually can't read minds. However anecdotally, most (almost all) the people I knew who didn't take the Jab did so because they listened to some alex jones type podcast with a quack talking about crazy conspiracies. This INCLUDES my family, so I am being generous with my descriptions. No I'm not misrepresenting them.
> It is fallacious to group these two together.
They are separate, but it is fallacious to claim they share no commonalities. The entire reason the Covid vaccine was under any skepticism is because the idea of vaccine skepticism had already broken the mainstream. It was, 25 years ago, accepted as a position people could have.
Some of the people you describe here:
> this is a new thing being too aggressively pushed
Are now FULLY 100% anti-vax. Is that a coincidence? No, it's not, and you know that.
Where is the logical fallacy? Actually, where’s the argument? His post is just a few reasons he doesn’t trust his government; he’s not trying to argue that you shouldn’t trust your government (you probably shouldn’t, though, for reasons I won’t go into).
Respectfully, I'm not sure that you can both press enter after putting together this string of words and be taken seriously as somebody that isn't full of themselves or in the "I am very smart" camp.
Humans are mushy and can hold opposing views at the same time. They say they lost trust. I would say that even a critical thinker should be suspicious when a liar says even obviously true things.
Of course, losing trust is a completely human thing. Like most emotional reasoning, its a heurstic that works pretty well in most cases. Nothing wrong with that.
My only objection is to the term "critical thinker". It literally means the opposite of what you are talking about. To quote the dictionary: "the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.". If you allow emotions to cloud your judgement, than you're not thinking critically, by definition. That would be true if you got the covid vaccine primarily because you thought the gov PR person was pretty. Its just as true if you don't because you don't think the PR person is trustworthy. Either way you are jumping to conclusions based on your personal opinions about some random gov employee who had nothing to do with the vaccine and is reading a statement that they probably didn't even write themselves. Like maybe it would be different if the gov is the one making the vaccine, but they basically have nothing to do with the actual manufacture of it. You can get much more relavent data by actually going closer to the source.
It’s not “some random gov employee” btw. It’s our Minister of Health, Hugo de Jonge. He was on stage weekly (sometimes multiple times a week) to inform the population.
What I’m saying is that he didn’t do that correctly, knowingly or unknowingly. And for that, I lost trust in him (and Mark Rutte, who was always next to him).
I would expect the Minister of Health of my country would at least know that no vaccine is 100% safe. But alas.
Now Rutte is Sec. General of NATO, as a side note.
It was not a formal argument that could be easily dismissed due to a logical fallacy, it is a critique of communication and trust. There is no logical fallacy in the OP's comment. Do you trust the Government with your life? If you do, great, but do not silence ("cancel") people who ask fair questions (i.e. have critical thinking).
