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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36586 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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The decision to take a vaccine can only be understood in context of (what I see as) the authoritarian push that surrounded it. I got vaccinated but would have unvaccinated myself in 2021 if I could.

From my perspective you were party to a crime in lending emotional support to a push for mandatory medical procedures. Nevertheless, I do not see you as wearing a 'dystopian social credit system and human domestication for @popocatepetl and all future humans' on your forehead. I understand that you do not believe what I believe and have a different moral ecology between your ears, and so I don't jump to assuming malice or cruel indifference on your part. I do consider it a moral failing that you do not extend the same charity to us.

During the height of the War on Terror, I remember people demonizing the tiny number of Americans who did not extend the "simple courtesy" of standing for the pledge. It's "the least" they could do. As if they were resisting the overpowering wave of social pressure out of simple desire to rest their legs.

The decision to take a vaccine can only be understood in context of (what I see as) the authoritarian push that surrounded it.

I guess we just straight up differ here. I see it mostly in the context of what it costs (practically nothing) and what it achieves (some nonzero decrease in the chance that people get sick.) If you only care about the signaling you can always get vaccinated and not tell anyone.

From my perspective you were party to a crime in lending emotional support to a push for mandatory medical procedures.

I've been careful to repeatedly state my opposition to mandates, which I don't agree with. I have a personal issue with people not doing it.

If you're willing to stretch to see me as morally culpable for mandates, would you permit me to see the antivax movement as morally culpable for the FDA's extremely slow, fatally cautious rollout of the vaccines, leading to excess deaths including people I really would have preferred to remain alive?

I guess we just straight up differ here. I see it mostly in the context of what it costs (practically nothing) and what it achieves (some nonzero decrease in the chance that people get sick.) If you only care about the signaling you can always get vaccinated and not tell anyone.

Is there a way to vaccinate without being statistically logged as having done so? I would consider it if another 2020 Covid situation comes around.

As for getting a booster in late 2022, I see the new updated vaccines as having an unclear cost/benefit ratio (EDIT: for me and for transmission), which I did not believe in 2021. Probably not worth the $110 they apparently cost the government. I guess I'll donate another buck to the Red Cross this year, or incur the equivalent moral debt by not doing so.

You may see that as a ridiculous moral framing, which leads me to:

If you're willing to stretch to see me as morally culpable for mandates, would you permit me to see the antivax movement as morally culpable for the FDA's extremely slow, fatally cautious rollout of the vaccines, leading to excess deaths including people I really would have preferred to remain alive?

Yes, clearly. You can see our decision as woefully morally incorrect. On the other hand, you're not morally entitled to suspend imaginative empathy and micharacterize the intent of our decision.

Imagine were I to say "@evincio wants to create a police state because he'd rather not get a cold". That is a twin of "@Southkraut doesn't want to experience less than a second of pain to avoid killing my relatives". The statements assume that the subject accepts a premise of the speaker's — that Covid measures are a slippery slope to a police state, that not vaccinating will lead to @Southkraut killing people — and frame the subject's decision in the most uncharitable way possible.

@Southkraut may not be able to articulate the principle behind his actions. Those principles may be dead wrong. And yet it is clear from his resistance that it was not out being miserly with his time (thirty seconds walking to the pharmacy counter the last time he swung through CVS) or unwilling to endure the pinch in the arm. This is obvious enough that I feel failing to see it is willful, which is what I'm responding against.

I guess I also don't buy that avoiding a non-mandatory vaccination is in any way resisting the imposition of a police state.

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