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Surely there is a potential for burning credibility depending on how directly one tells a lie.
The best kinds of public reasons are ones where you don't lie about factual information but rather construct an argument that follows from your interlocutors or audiences ethical premises to the conclusions you prefer. I think the potential for backlash in this kind of situation is low. You (hopefully) really did convince them their beliefs entailed your preferred outcome, even if it's not the argument that convinces you personally.
Being deceptive about facts is trickier. On the one hand you can blatantly and obviously lie and then you probably do not even succeed at getting them to endorse your preferred conclusion. On the other hand maybe you overstate certainty in some facts you are less certain about. The potential for backlash on credibility depends on how conclusively the falseness of the factual premise can be demonstrated. If I wanted to salvage the argument above, for example, I might argue that one's inability to change one's orientation or gender identity by will is sufficiently similar to race or sex that they ought be treated similarly, even if they are not as literally biologically unchangeable.
This was pretty clearly presented as a factual question with a claimed factual answer. You were anti-science if you even thought that maybe it wasn't an obviously true brute fact about the world. This is why I think the potential for backlash is much higher and potentially more damaging to the already-abysmal state of our discourse. It's a meme at this point that when the left wants a political victory, they are not opposed to just making up facts, stamping them with the label
PravdaScience (TM), and anyone who disagrees is just too stupid to read a book. It poisons society's truth-seeking mechanisms and does, in fact, lead people to just throwing up their hands and thinking that if Science (TM) is this bloody wrong all the time, they might as well just never listen to it. The even more recent, tangible example was the "masks don't work" noble lie. It took almost no time at all for everyone to realize that it was a straight factual lie, and the discourse never recovered. People simply turned their back on the whole concept that we could make factual conclusions based on solid evidence and that they could guide our decisions. Once you realize you've been duped, rational or not (depending on your definition of rationality), an extremely common game-theoretic response is to simply raise a middle finger to anything and everything the lying liars ever say again and simply reject the validity of their claimed methods outright.This wasn't really the argument, though, because it probably wouldn't have led them to the same political victory. Everyone knew that this was never the standard and wasn't going to be the standard going forward, because there are all sorts of desires/beliefs/what-have-you that people have that they can't seem to just change by will that we don't sacredly protect via pseudo-Constitutional magic. They had to enough of the bald factual lie out there in people's minds... this was "critical", the article says... in order to force through what they had so desired.
Does any of this expected backlash ever happen? The reason we have these bold backlash-tempting movements given prominent placement is that since the left controls culture and counter-culture and the media and basically all of the artificial incentive systems, there can be no backlash except directly from reality. And we're rich enough that we're well-insulated from that at least in the short and medium terms.
Child vaccination rates are falling since the rollout of the Covid vaccines. Here are a few sources: CNN SciAm NYT
Funnily enough in the SciAm piece they mention that polio was nearly eradicated except for Pakistan and Afghanistan. What they don't mention is that in those places confidence in public health was harmed by the CIA using vaccination sites to try to track down bin Laden via family DNA. Public health types are happy to point the finger in this instance though. Public health institutions aren't implicated, after all.
The NYT piece mentions a stunning 43% child vaccination rate in the Philippines, and partially attributes it to a dengue vaccine that turned out to cause more harm than benefit.
None of those pieces even hint at pushing the Covid vaccine for kids as a source of general mistrust of all vaccination. I can't find any mainstream media source that even tries to compare costs and benefits of this vaccine for kids, not even one that stacks the deck in favor.
Virus, or to be more precise, the response to the virus, really did a number on many areas in which human well being was improving. Today PISA, a standardized test organized by OECD, scores for 2022 were released. In reeding and maths they show a general decline in achievement of fifteen year olds. Finnish government says this is "unprecedented".
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I don't know, but I don't think @Gillitrut's response will be, "I'm not worried about it, because my team controls everything."
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