There's no rational discussion to be had between homeopathy doctor and an oncologist, for example. It's just a waste of bandwidth and source of misinformation which is killing innocents.
One could just as easily say that there's no point in trying to have a rational discussion with people who want to compare anyone who disagrees with the worst thing they can come up with.
If you wonder what kind of content is actually on subs like NoNewNormal, you could just go on and see for yourself. Well actually, now you can't anymore, because they're gone. Which leaves their enemies free to smear them as the worst thing anyone could come up with, when they have no chance to respond and nobody has any way to see for themselves what it's really about.
I used to check in on them every now and then. I didn't see much of the supposed extreme stuff about the vaccines being poison or being involved with 5G somehow. I do see things about how they aren't as effective as we would have liked, don't last as long as we would have liked, have more side effects than people are willing to admit, and there's decent evidence that natural immunity from having caught Covid is more effective. It is pretty arguable that blindly mandating everyone take it without accounting for people who have already had the disease or have genuine allergies or other negative reactions to things in the vaccines is not a very good idea.
Assuming your position on any subject, especially novel viruses and novel vaccines, is 100% correct and immune to debate or criticism is irrational. When your position is "I'm right, they're wrong, they shouldn't be allowed to talk about it" you are the censor. If the facts support your position, why silence debate or criticism?
The scientific method requires hypothesis tested by experimentation. Have we fully proven via experimentation any facts about long term side effects from the Covid vaccine? Of course not, we have not had the time! As such, any true scientist would invite debate, discourse and discussion as we as a society attempt to balance the risk of Covid with the unknown risk of vaccinations. We must also analyze and discuss the vital topics of freedom over one's body, freedom of speech, and the intricacies of quarantine restrictions on our civilization.
That conversation is important and should not be casually censored off the internet under the guise of "protecting innocents from misinformation".
If vaccine safety can't be established by anything but time, than debate definitionally cannot inform us about the safety of vaccines. Vaccines can not only be unexpectedly dangerous in the long term, they can also theoretically be unexpectedly protective, and we can't know without waiting.
I've seen no evidence of /r/thenewnormal advancing scientific research in any way, and arguably they are having the effect of having amateurs direct research priorities due to phenomena like them promoting ivermectin leading to a surge in poisoning cases and thus scientific interest. The presence of "debate" does not nessecarily advance the scientific process, debate can be rhetorical sophistry that hardly achieves the same end as for instance peer review.
The best argument I can think of for allowing such communities is to put mainstream science in a position where they MUST respond to heterodox scientists or risk the public heeding their concerns and not getting vaccinated etc. etc. I don't think this is an incredibly convincing argument either, since it's a rather costly way to enforce sufficient scepticism, and it's disputable if it's nessecary.
> Assuming your position on any subject, especially novel viruses and novel vaccines, is 100% correct and immune to debate or criticism is irrational.
The "debate" and "criticism" is always in the form of uncited or poorly cited conspiracies, along with links to extremely unreputable sites. It some cases, the only evidence is a highly shared Facebook meme. The credentials of the "research" authors are frequently lies, too. For example, there's a big one going around from the "inventor of RNA vaccines." However, if you look into it, it's just one of thousands of people who worked on RNA vaccines at some point in its lifecycle. It's like claiming some new grad software engineer who works for Facebook is "the inventor of Facebook."
Mercola, Natural News, Fox, Breitbart, *.win, Zerohedge, Infowars: These sources aren't dismissed because "there's a bias against conservative values" or whatever; they're dismissed because they regularly churn out completely debunked garbage. The times they're right about something is, at best, a fluke.
The people doing and calling for the banning are hardly trained medical doctors by and large, and I've certainly seen COVID contarians cite heterodox doctors who actually had relevant expertise. They love to cite Robert Malone who while a very controversial figure is certainly more qualified than your average boycotter or moderator or admin to opine on vaccination.
I wouldn't exactly call the claims I see in these communities as being irrefutably robust, or immune to criticism. Still there's enough of the "vaccine hesitant" out there they're going to collectively come up with more robust arguments than appeals to homeopathy.
So my mother oncologist also offered alternative medical treatments that were basically homeopathy. I think the truth is that it every cancer is curable. And if you are in a fatalistic situation like that it’s important to have something that modifies your outlook in addition to practical treatment. Otherwise you as a patient might simply give up.
To note my mother was also a doctor herself and worked on trauma cases (military) so she was well aware that homeopathy was just a way to provide hope in a fatal situation.
If you wonder what kind of content is actually on subs like NoNewNormal, you could just go on and see for yourself. Well actually, now you can't anymore, because they're gone. Which leaves their enemies free to smear them as the worst thing anyone could come up with, when they have no chance to respond and nobody has any way to see for themselves what it's really about.
I used to check in on them every now and then. I didn't see much of the supposed extreme stuff about the vaccines being poison or being involved with 5G somehow. I do see things about how they aren't as effective as we would have liked, don't last as long as we would have liked, have more side effects than people are willing to admit, and there's decent evidence that natural immunity from having caught Covid is more effective. It is pretty arguable that blindly mandating everyone take it without accounting for people who have already had the disease or have genuine allergies or other negative reactions to things in the vaccines is not a very good idea.