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I am a tennis fan. On the tennis Reddit page, they are discussing Novak’s comment that he isn’t anti-vax but stood for the proposition that bodily integrity meant he shouldnt be forced to take the vax.
The five bullets you list explain perfectly how the propaganda affected the main heavily upvoted response on Reddit.
The highly upvoted poster makes the claim taking the vax isn’t about freedom but that Novak was selfish putting others at risk by refusing the jab and thereby not getting to herd immunity.
This was a common refrain during the pandemic. It appealed to people’s emotions, it repeated a simple idea, it didn’t wrestle with other arguments, and it vilified a small subset (the selfish people refusing to take a safe jab to protect everyone else).
The poster never seemed to stop and think about the particulars. For example, Novak already had covid. Why did he need a vaccine? Why would a vaccinated person need protection from non-vax? How far did this principle go (ie should fat people be required to have medical surgery to lose weight given that their fatness imposes a strain on the health system)? How effective were the vaccines at creating herd immunity compared to a prior infection? How deadly was covid? If someone was very scared of covid, what protections could they take themselves instead of demanding everyone else take precautions? Did susceptible people have the right to force medical interventions onto others so that susceptible people could live their lives more normally? What amount of risk is appropriate to impose on someone for the good of the collective? Who gets to determine what is the appropriate risk? What process should be used?
There are a ton of meaty issues there. Maybe you determine on net you are still pro socially sanctioned vaccine taking but it isn’t obvious and it isn’t obviously selfish to oppose it. Indeed, in Novak’s case he sacrificed a lot for his principle (skipped numerous tournaments which could’ve cost him the all time slams lead) so kind of weird to even call him selfish — seems a lot more selfless compared to the redditor smugly denouncing him with no cost to the redditor. But I think it’s because propaganda worked. The pro vax redditor repeated the simple talking points drilled into his or her head during an emotional time and identified Novak as a villain.
What’s really odd is that the propaganda still works on vaxes! The redditor continues to make these claims in light of the severe underperformance of the vaccine in stopping the spread. You would think that would cause him or her to say “did I make a mistake somewhere in my thought process” but nope.
Makes me think “where do I have these blinders.”
I sometimes wonder if "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is an even more effective description of human psychology than it was intended to be.
In the technological explanation of how vaccines work, the fact that they resemble the disease-causing virii is a good thing: the closer a vaccine molecule resembles the virus, the more effective the antibodies we learn to produce in response to it will be in response to the virus. We can't make a vaccine resemble a virus perfectly, because we would like to have it be a lot less harmful than the virus, but a virus has a perfect resemblance to itself, so a priori we'd expect the virus to produce the most effective immune response. There are possible second-order complications we might discover, but with Covid-19 we didn't. The benefit of a vaccine isn't "you're more likely to get better immunity than from an infection", it's just "you're much less likely to be debilitated or killed in the process".
In the subconscious magical explanation of how vaccines work, the Law of Contagion imbues them with persistent magical links to other people/objects/contexts, giving them power independent of the mere molecules they're made of. Sometimes these bonds can be removed by a "formal cleansing, consecration, exorcism, or other act of banishing", as Wiki says, so the same molecules which when bonded to Trump's Vaccine Can't Be Trusted might later lose that non-material bond to evil Trump and be instead bonded to The Science, which Says Everyone Needs a COVID-19 Booster Shot—and Soon. But sometimes those bonds are more immutable: a vaccine can be bonded to Medicine and Health and The Science, but a virus is irrevocably bonded to Disease and Death. How could something bonded to Disease and Death make you less likely to get a repeated disease later? That's just not how magic works.
This is my new favorite explanation for the blinders phenomenon
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I think this is a perfectly legitimate analysis of provax propaganda. Especially as we know for a fact that States engaged in deliberate propaganda tactics in this specific issue.
But be careful to consider that such rethorical tools are just that: tools. Anyone can wield them. Indeed you could very well take some antivax discourse and apply this analysis there as well.
The important lesson here is twofold:
It also didn't help that COVID was compared to the 1918 flu; while it was worse than a typical flu season, it's more comparable to the 1957 or 1968 flu pandemics than 1918, which took out a lot of healthy young people. Our public health institutions and memes are in a very real way coasting and riding on the mind-boggling gains we got from the discovery of germ theory to the advent of cheap and readily available antibiotics. COVID's bad, but smallpox it is not.
I'm still amazed people managed to convince themselves to destroy the economy for something this mild. Especially when the same experts who said we should ran simulations before and were quite happy to write down that this was the worst possible thing you can do when experiencing a much harder challenge. We gamed it out to be prepared and then threw away the playbook day one.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised we got a cowardly middle manager response when we select politicians to be cowardly middle managers.
That clip of the republican primary debate where a question is asked and everyone but Vivek is glancing at everyone else to see if they should raise their hand or not is a perfect model of what happened.
Vivek being China of course. For which nothing but a hard response was ever in the cards. And then most of the west aligned because nobody in power had any guiding principles or leadership, so they just followed the lead of whatever seemed to have any authority.
They were convinced to sell the entire manufacturing sector to the Chinese for ...nothing at all afaict, so this isn't that surprising.
Bill Clinton sold trade agreements to the Chinese in exchange for buckets of Chinese cash. The manufacturers sold their capabilities to China in exchange for increased profitability. The American Consumer got cheaper goods and thus cheered it on.
The only people that got nothing in exchange were the manufacturing laborers, but their careers were a sacrifice the rest of us were willing to make.
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Part of it was that we could afford it. Part was our public health institutions being designed a century ago to deal with real pandemics and disease outbreaks.
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