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Same, but please also make good decisions, not just decisions based on vibes.
What does that have to do with getting a shot?
I was hamhandedly drawing an equivalence, ie, a very expensive signal to show that you don't care about me and mine. Which is fine. I don't want to coerce you into caring about who you hurt. But it might affect my decision to invite you to parties, yeah?
Consider the pledge of allegiance-US school kids recite it every day. Compared to getting a yearly shot, this is an astounding amount of time, and a much clearer signal of conformity. I assume you're US-based, did you refuse that too?
And you never did mention if you got your flu shots.
I never got a flu shot. Why would I? I'm neither old nor immunocompromised.
Here's my good decision: I don't worry about what's not a problem. The flu is not a problem. It comes, it goes, its effects are negligible. Covid was not a problem. It came, it went, its effects were negligible. Nobody I know had any problems from covid more serious than flu symptoms, no matter how sickly or old they were. Yes, damn my lying eyes, the cost is low even for small benefits so just get the shot you troglodyte, and again as per the actual topic of this sub-thread: No. There is an ongoing conflict here, and I will not accommodate the opposition by retreating into mistake theory while they sit on their conflict theory gains.
Getting the shot, especially when there's no need for it, validates the ideological crusaders and policy-makers and nudges the overton window in their favor. Since their policies and ideologies would give away great amounts of freedom, prosperity and social trust in exchange for marginal protection from a fairly harmless virus, and no just "getting a shot" cannot be separated from this memeplex, I would rather spite them for all the harm they've done than cooperate to attain some minor benefit.
Do you care about me and mine? All that I can see is that both care about how our societies behave, where you are afraid of society's vulnerability to viruses and I'm afraid of society's vulnerability to totalitarianism/social engineering/witch hunts.
You assume incorrectly.
Because A) getting the flu can suck even if you're young and B) you might infect a child or elderly person, or infect someone who does.
I suspect you've had colds rather than the flu. When I was young I had a flu which kicked my ass. Though I'd actually been vaccinated, so I suppose that's not the strongest argument for vaccination!
Well not for those who didn't die I suppose.
Your anecdote; mine is that people I cared about died.
My initial post regarding the face tattoo wasn't conflict theory enough?
Let me get this straight: the insurmountably small protection you get from a covid shot is negligible, but the insurmountably small influence on policy you exert by getting one isn't?
This is hard sentiment to sympathize with, because you're hurting everyone to spite them. This is the type of thing I was comparing to a face tat. Or spitting in people's hamburgers because you hate your boss at McDonald's.
I would prefer that y'all not get sick, if that matters to ya.
I see 'surrendering to a virus' as just as dangerous a meme as what you've listed. We are mankind and we make shit extinct, damn the consequences.
That might explain some of the disconnect then. Maybe you live somewhere where the lockdowns were truly draconian. Stateside they, well, weren't. Unfortunately, having not actually imposed a lockdown from the top down, nobody had the proper authority to lift the lockdown either, so you've still got some folks for whom 2020 never ended, which is its own kind of problem, while the rest of us have long since resumed our lives.
Then those are people for whom a flu shot seems like a good proposition.
That might be, I'm no doctor. But then the argument just turns into: Nobody ever gets the flu here anyways.
That sucks and you have my sympathy, but it's my policy to trust my own observations above most else. If it's any olive branch: When I did have covid, I locked myself up tight and didn't leave the house for four weeks. It's not like I'm advocating for running around retirement homes while you're fully symptomatic. Did the people you lost catch it from the unvaccinated?
It possibly was, but the later post seemed to stray into mistake theory.
No, they're both negligible, if I were to attempt objectivity. But covid did me no lasting harm whereas policy did, so there's my enmity.
To my knowledge I haven't hurt anyone. I think
Agreed on the second point. I started out with that position, you know - early on the in the so-called pandemic I was all for closing the borders and exterminating that foreign invader. I changed my mind as a) it became clear that it wouldn't work no matter what and b) most around me were hypocrites who valued being vaccinated for its own sake more than getting rid of the virus or protecting anyone.
As for the first point - I disagree for this specific virus.
I'm a German in Germany. The lockdowns were middle-of-the-road, I suppose. Bad, but nothing like China. What infuriates me is a) how all the measures and the public discourse ended up revolving around punishments for the unvaccinated - no idea whether you had that in America - and b) all the damage done and c) how nobody learned anything from it all.
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