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Red herring. Abusing your citizens is bad. If the government wants to be trusted it should make itself trustworthy.

kube-system 2y ago
Agreed. Now what is the measure by which that is judged? Of course, if we are to say that only the governments with a spotless record are trustworthy, then the only trustworthy governments are fictional ones. That might be a bit unreasonable of an expectation for an organization made up of fallible humans, though, so many reason that some non-zero number of mistakes are inevitably bound to happen, even within bounds of trustworthiness. At the end of the day, trust is a personal judgement call. But it's my opinion that if you have an impossible standard of trust, you may just have an unreasonable opinion.
- odyssey7 2y ago
  This isn’t an engineering problem where you can just hit some metric. Trust gets earned informally on person-by-person terms over a long period of time. People in St. Louis died / were killed at the direction of the US Army. Frankly, if they decide they don’t trust vaccines that government officials recommend, I can’t tell them their distrust is invalid. They’d be right. For decades, administration after administration has lied to them about what the government did to sabotage their health. The course of action in this specific case that would build rapport would be to plainly tell the public the truth. It’s not rocket science where you have to invent a metric. Keeping the secret allows the government to avoid oversight. So that it can do the same sort of thing again? Because it is doing the same sort of thing right now?
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Yes, as I said, trust is a personal judgement call. However, I doubt anyone who distrusts the damn COVID vaccine because of the story in the OP is not going to be convinced by anything. There's such a ridiculously weak association between those activities that the person is simply ignorant of how the world works. Their personal beliefs may be sincere, but they are not a person worth convincing of anything because they draw their conclusions through superficial means.
    - aaomidi 2y ago
      Other than the US using a fake vaccination program to find Osama. I say this as someone who got the vaccine as someone first in the line. I’m pissed at the government doing this, because I can’t blame folks for not trusting the government over this. And what that means is the next pandemic will take so much longer to deal with because of this distrust.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        I absolutely understand why someone might not understand the practical and operational differences between the development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and how that chain of command has nothing in common with CIA operations in Pakistan. It's a very explainable opinion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
        odyssey7 2y ago
        Begging the question fallacy. If a government agency doesn’t use vaccines as a vector for some ulterior purpose, then it’s nothing like the other time when it used vaccines for some ulterior purpose?
        kube-system 2y ago
        The pronoun 'it' in that sentence is referring to tens of millions of different people in different centuries. It is absolutely silly to pretend that they're a single actor.
        odyssey7 2y ago
        I assume you mean “the government.” The number of people (not) involved makes no difference. The government should be accountable to its constituents. Refusing to tell us the truth about St. Louis makes that impossible. It should tell us the truth.
        2y ago

Agreed. Now what is the measure by which that is judged? Of course, if we are to say that only the governments with a spotless record are trustworthy, then the only trustworthy governments are fictional ones. That might be a bit unreasonable of an expectation for an organization made up of fallible humans, though, so many reason that some non-zero number of mistakes are inevitably bound to happen, even within bounds of trustworthiness. At the end of the day, trust is a personal judgement call. But it's my opinion that if you have an impossible standard of trust, you may just have an unreasonable opinion.

odyssey7 2y ago
This isn’t an engineering problem where you can just hit some metric. Trust gets earned informally on person-by-person terms over a long period of time. People in St. Louis died / were killed at the direction of the US Army. Frankly, if they decide they don’t trust vaccines that government officials recommend, I can’t tell them their distrust is invalid. They’d be right. For decades, administration after administration has lied to them about what the government did to sabotage their health. The course of action in this specific case that would build rapport would be to plainly tell the public the truth. It’s not rocket science where you have to invent a metric. Keeping the secret allows the government to avoid oversight. So that it can do the same sort of thing again? Because it is doing the same sort of thing right now?
- kube-system 2y ago
  Yes, as I said, trust is a personal judgement call. However, I doubt anyone who distrusts the damn COVID vaccine because of the story in the OP is not going to be convinced by anything. There's such a ridiculously weak association between those activities that the person is simply ignorant of how the world works. Their personal beliefs may be sincere, but they are not a person worth convincing of anything because they draw their conclusions through superficial means.
  - aaomidi 2y ago
    Other than the US using a fake vaccination program to find Osama. I say this as someone who got the vaccine as someone first in the line. I’m pissed at the government doing this, because I can’t blame folks for not trusting the government over this. And what that means is the next pandemic will take so much longer to deal with because of this distrust.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      I absolutely understand why someone might not understand the practical and operational differences between the development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and how that chain of command has nothing in common with CIA operations in Pakistan. It's a very explainable opinion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
      - odyssey7 2y ago
        Begging the question fallacy. If a government agency doesn’t use vaccines as a vector for some ulterior purpose, then it’s nothing like the other time when it used vaccines for some ulterior purpose?
        kube-system 2y ago
        The pronoun 'it' in that sentence is referring to tens of millions of different people in different centuries. It is absolutely silly to pretend that they're a single actor.
        odyssey7 2y ago
        I assume you mean “the government.” The number of people (not) involved makes no difference. The government should be accountable to its constituents. Refusing to tell us the truth about St. Louis makes that impossible. It should tell us the truth.
        2y ago