As a related aside to this, I follow elsewhere a page that supports GMOs and vaccines, and yesterday they shared a meme that through a pastiche of scientific language ended with the diagnosis that anti vaxxers were 'fucking idiots'. This seems the wrong way to me to win over people, and I replied, too harshly I think now, that it was patronising wank. This prompted people to attack me and also say that anti vaxxers were like rapists and murderers, that they shouldn't been allowed to breed, and that they should be put into camps. My attempt to point out that many were just scared and ill informed just got more of the same.
The problem with this seems like the approach that has been highlighted in the thread - that people are portrayed rather than arguments made to persuade them, that any genuine questions are swept aside because they are the other. It's all too easy to fall into this way of thinking, and I'm often guilty of it myself and my initial post in reply to the meme is an example of that. And it's really difficult to maintain a balance when if you do you get 'shot by both sides'. You can't have any grey areas because it is all black and white. And this leads to innocents such as Rhiannon after the birth of her first child to be sacrificed on the altar of certainty.
