>One takes a couple minutes and the other is something requiring an hour or more of dedicated time per day for potentially years (or a whole lifetime!
Nope. You don't have to dedicate time to exercising to lose weight, you can just eat less.
Nope. You don't have to dedicate time to exercising to lose weight, you can just eat less.
Not only would it be for Their Own Good™, but if it saved just one innocent life due to reducing the load on the healthcare system, it would have been worth it.
/s of course - I'm not a lunatic.
I lost 80 pounds eating mostly hot dogs and kimchi. I doubt the government would prescribe that though.
There's so many people who seem to draw a completely arbitrary line between authoritarianism and paternalism despite them being exactly the same thing with different justifications. I don't care if it's "for my own good" or "because I said so", I oppose authoritarianism in general on principle rather than justifying authoritarianism towards things I happen to like with a different name.
(Full disclosure: I'm vaccinated and disagree wildly with them, but they are still my friends and these are very capable engineers/programmers, they just don't trust authorities in this case.)
I’ve very recently found that a lot of very smart people are still quite capable of doubling down on stupid.
It’s not even really wrong. They just weigh the risk disproportionately against the benefits (for the person themselves and society). I just cannot understand how a rational person can do that.
Being consistently the smartest person in the room can lull some to believe they are smarter than everyone, everywhere, every time.
Sometimes the lack of intellectual humility is an independent personality trait, but I've encountered a number of very smart people that held really weird beliefs which bordered on conspiracy thinking, but was self-reinforcing because they thought everyone else was not smart enough to cotton-on to "the man" (one believed in over-unity energy,the other one is basically synthesizing a new religion(/cult?) by gaining "insights" into "correct" aspects of multiple existing ones, whose current practitioner's "get it wrong" in one way or the other.)
«Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him.» Proverbs 26:12
This chapter was probably written around 2700 or so years ago according to my reading of Britannica :-)
Add some political urge to stand out and make disproportionate regulations and I cannot call many of them irrational. I am vaccinated but surely that is irrelevant for the argument.
We will get the invoice for Covid in a few years in any case.
I have lost a lot of faith in people and their ability to argue and this doesn't really stem from the anti-vaccination camp, far more this comes from people asking for restrictions.
Many in the "people asking for restrictions" camp will not see these arguments as reasonable because they don't comply with "the science" (which is actually a crafted narrative).
Part of the problem is that we aren't just dealing just with a morphing dataset being communicated very imperfectly across digital mediums to the entire globe. We have all of that, and then that already fantastically complicated scenario is being ham-fisted into a narrative, and the narrative trumps all the data.
So yes, not an explicit time dedication, but you’re being pedantic at that point and the practical reality that a vaccine is a minimal inconvenience is reasonably unavoidable.
Obviously exceptions exist, which is what medical exceptions are for etc etc.
Yeah but you could just mandate it. Force them to eat small amounts. Fire them from their jobs, prevent them from traveling, and lock them out of civil society if they do not comply. Make them submit to weekly weigh-ins.
They wouldn't like it of course, but neither do the people being coerced into taking vaccines. Point is it's for the greater good, and if reducing their load on the healthcare system saves just one life, it all will have been worth it. Right? I mean while we're just here completely making up values and cost/benefit out of thin air, we can mandate pretty much anything.
Nobody is going without necessary surgery or treatment because some other people eat too much food from McDonald's.
[1] </sarcasm> -- it wasn't made for this purpose.
The point was always to save lives. I don't remember quick ever factoring into any calculations when people were forced to stay home, their workplaces shut, their education disrupted, their jobs lost, for indeterminate periods of weeks, months, years. Over this past two years we could have collectively lost many tons if only we had some mandates.
So I reject your assertion that quick is a material difference between these two scenarios, and my analogy stands.
How was that tradeoff decided, who decided it and where is the justification? And you can start losing weight in your own home, on day 1. That's faster than even a single shot of vaccine, let alone two shots with a delay, plus boosters etc. So that's not a very satisfactory answer as to why some mandates for the greater good are acceptable and yet others are not.
We aren't stopping restaurant and party access as some kind of punishment for the unvaxxed. It's because this is one of the major vectors for disease transmission.
But it does tend to result in worse outcomes when you catch covid, which you can when you go eat at a restaurant. From the vaccinated patrons who can still transmit it.
> it doesn't cause the people you meet at the restaurant to also increase medical load.
The vaccinated can contract covid and can transmit it to other vaccinated though. So this can't be the reason to ban unvaccinated, because allowing the vaccinated to restaurants will also increase medical load.
> We aren't stopping restaurant and party access as some kind of punishment for the unvaxxed.
Oh? It sort of seemed like it was since the science on natural immunity was being ignored.
> It's because this is one of the major vectors for disease transmission.
Being vaccinated doesn't mean you are not contagious.
Being vaccinated reduces contagion (with known variants other than Delta, it reduces probability of contagious infection, intensity (viral load) of contagious infection, and duration of contagious infection; with Delta it does the first and third.
Is there data comparing previous infection to vaccine in terms of contagious properties listed above?
Your argument could equally apply to DUIs:"Driving sober doesn't mean you won't be involved in an accident" - sure, but the likelihood is lowered by a measurable amount.
So? What are the numbers? You seem to have it all figured out, so all I'm asking is how the situations are different, and how exactly you arrived at the conclusion that one merited forced medical procedures and the other did not, based on those numbers.
Handwaving about more or different doesn't really cut it because I want clear, unambiguous hard criteria and step by step reasoning for why one particular set of numbers justifies this serious step and another does not.
The narrative wants you to trust it and set aside such petty questioning! "The science" will prevail! The elites no better! How dare you ask for specifics, a practical dataset and explanations. You might be labeled a anti-vaxxer over such things! /sarcasm
Also, people who chose not to get vaccinated chose to expose others to their disease. People who chose not to lose weight hurt no one but themselves.
The amount of burden you put on someone when you make them take the vaccine is nothing like the amount of burden you put on someone when you make them lose weight. The risks for you if I don't get vaccinated is high, the risk for you if I remain overweight/obese is 0. So, one is an acceptable compulsion, the other is not. How is this so hard to understand?
You can also view it the other way around: there is no compulsion or punishment for those who don't get vaccinated. The government can and must mandate a quarantine for everyone. However, since some people are immune, they are exempted from this quarantine.
Mandating overweight people lose weight would benefit their own health and it would take pressure of the healthcare system. Pretty straightforward analogy.
The government, in practice, can only issue mandates and bans that are relatively easy to follow, and extremely urgent. That's why banning radioactive material is easy and has wide support, but banning alcohol or tobacco is not.
While the government is extremely corrupt and oligarchic, it's still not a dictatorship that can actually up and decide to ban dancing on some idiot's whim.
Mandating overweight people lose weight is not more invasive than mandating people undergo unwanted medical procedures. Forced medical procedures are actually an incredibly serious and problematic issue with a long and dark history.
The problem I have is not any one particular procedure, it is the idea of coercion, and the bullying and excluding of people (disproportionately disadvantaged, non-white, etc too, I might add).
You have to be kidding. The difficulty and invasiveness of different interventions for covid alone has been constantly under discussion.
> Mandating overweight people lose weight is not more invasive than mandating people undergo unwanted medical procedures. Forced medical procedures are actually an incredibly serious and problematic issue with a long and dark history.
You're being vague on purpose.
When you replace "unwanted medical procedure" with a much more specific "approved vaccine shot" that stops being true.
> The problem I have is not any one particular procedure, it is the idea of coercion, and the bullying and excluding of people (disproportionately disadvantaged, non-white, etc too, I might add).
You can't take a hard-line stance against coercion unless you're asking to abolish government. Any reasonable analysis takes the particular coercion into account.
I'm not kidding. Who has weighed it? Where was it decided that coercion and forced medical procedures was the right balance? Because it wasn't long ago they were off the table. Where did this most recent re-weighing occur, can you give me a link.
> You're being vague on purpose.
No I'm not, that's what it is. You're minimizing the seriousness of it because "it's just a jab".
> When you replace "unwanted medical procedure" with a much more specific "approved vaccine shot" that stops being true.
What does "approved" have to do with anything. Medical experimentation, forced sterilizations, and things of that sort were all "approved" somewhere, and many were "just routine procedures". And it's not a slippery slope, these are things which all have happened within living memory, likely even with some of the same people still in positions of power in governments and institutions responsible.
> You can't take a hard-line stance against coercion unless you're asking to abolish government.
I certainly can and am.
> Any reasonable analysis takes the particular coercion into account.
And forced medical procedure of any kind whatsoever is a gravely serious issue to me.
Another issue at play here in the US is that Americans are divided on where the line should be drawn between what can be allowed in the name of the collective good. I think it's quite obviously that the nation is very split on this. There isn't a constructive debate going on about the interplay between these two positions or a compromise.
One side (people mandating restrictions) are trying to brute force mandates without interacting, constructively discussing and persuading the other side.
I hope it is obvious I don't actually feel this way toward overweight people -- it's hateful, discriminatory, divisive, bullying, and it goes against everything I believe about freedom people should have to live their lives.
And yet being overweight is a detriment to health. And it places additional burden on the healthcare system. So I think it is a good analogy to use, if there was an equally effective one that was less shocking, I would gladly use that instead.
See, I can see the "perfect" society where everything is done for "the greater good". Where the ruling class and their alleged experts hand down edicts by which we much live. Everything is mandated accordingly. Nobody may question the mandates or the rulers, lest they be bullied and branded grandma killers / fascists / baby killers / etc. And I can see how yes you might micro optimize this society by forcing people to take vaccines. And by forcing overweight people to lose weight. I don't deny that maybe some people could be "saved" if we had all these mandates. That is not the society I value or want to live in though.
And I think that's a very underhanded bullying argument to coerce people into giving up their freedom or having medical treatment they don't want, to suggest that they are responsible for killing others because of choices like this. Because there are hundreds of ways we could all change our choices and indirectly save people,it does not always mean we are responsible for them if we don't.
I mean, you take it to the limit and you might well say elderly have passed their used by date, no longer contribute to the greater good, and are increasingly a burden on the healthcare system, so let's turf them out. Every hospital bed they selfishly take up is stealing the life of a sick child who could not be admitted due to the shortage. Or that you are personally responsible for the death of anyone around the world who dies of hunger so long as you have not donated every last penny of your income beyond what you require to barely survive on in a tent.
My position is that actually the most dangerous thing facing our society and our children and their children is authoritarianism and the unaccountable and unchecked expansion of power of the ruling class over our lives. Unimaginably more dangerous than covid-19. And I think mine is quite a reasonable position to take.
So if someone can be bullied and told they are responsible for killing grandparents and responsible for continuing lockdowns for not wanting to take the vaccine then fine, and we can say with similar intellectual honesty that those bullies calling for mandates are responsible for the next Stalin.
EDIT: And one last thing, it's not "those hateful others", aka your fellow citizens, who are responsible for the breakdown of trust in authority and their "experts". It is entirely the fault of the ruling class. Their greed, lies, lust for power and willingness to divide has caused this. You really wonder why people might not have complete blind trust in the politicians, journalists and other self-proclaimed experts who told them we had to invade Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, we had to destroy Syria and Libya, etc.? That it was for their best interest? Remember that? And then they stole their money and sent their sons and daughters away to die? And then they laughed all the way to the bank and did it again.
That is a frankly ridiculous and immoral attitude. If you refuse to make minor accomodations when presented with choices that can reduce the amount of risk you cause others, you ARE responsible.
If you choose to dive drunk, you are responsible. If you choose to lie about the the status of your STD testing, you are responsible. If you actively discourage people from taking a safe vaccine, you are responsible. If you choose to go un-masked and unvaccinated when there is significant local spread, you are responsible. I don't beleive the best response to this is vilification or shamming, but that doesn't change the moral truth here.
If you have "hundreds of ways" we can make minor changes to save the lives of others lives, please share them because that sounds likr really useful information.
I think communication is best done with honesty and politeness and without censorship. That does not mean we absolve people of the responsibility of theor choices
The descent into authoritarianism is also a significant risk, but vaccine mandates are NOT that start of a slippery slope. They have been around for many decades and they haven't resulted in any slipping. If anything, getting people riled up about vaccines is a way to justify censorship and distract from the ever growing power of the surveillance state.
I know that's what you believe, it's not what I believe. I believe it is ridiculous and immoral to coerce and force people into medical treatment for a relatively minor illness that others have freely available access to effective vaccines against. To be sure it is worse than the flu, but this is not smallpox, the bullies and fearmongers making comparisons like that were simply lying and spreading misinformation. And if it was similar to smallpox, I think it would be quite clear and people would be far more inclined to get vaccinated.
And I disagree with your idea of blame, as I said above the same argument can be made about overweight people and others. Maybe you are responsible for the death of starving children right now because you were browsing the internet instead of donating your time or money?
And it absolutely is authoritarianism because it is not about the virus or even the vaccine itself really. It is a totally politicized tool that authorities are using. That should have been clear when people were flip flopping between being skeptical of the "Trump" vaccine and calling border closures racist and refusing to acknowledge natural immunity and all that other nonsense. It's not the slippery slope because this is already authoritarianism. Telling people they can not go about their lives, they can't work or go to school, tracking and controlling where they go, who they meet, what business they do. It's already here.
If mandates were such a non-issue, why was it just a few months ago the experts and politicians were all lying and denying there would be mandates? Are they just pathological liars who will lie about trivial things that don't matter? Or did they know the seriousness of the issue and decide to lie and mislead until the opinion polls looked better for them? Neither option inspires a lot of trust in them.
The internet is exhausted with you, dude. With people with no scientific background to speak of misreading and mischaracterizing the conclusions of an abundance of the medical community. Trying to convince you why giving a shit about others (who can’t get vaccinated for legitimate reasons, e.g) is important, or why you could be host to mutations whether you like it or not if you are infected, and will statistically be host to an extended period in which mutations can occur for the unvaccinated, risking the rest of the population? And it can all be addressed with a couple shots and maybe a sum total of 30 minutes out of your life? A couple days if we count being a bit ill from the nervous response?
We’re at the adults table now dude. And people are tired of this goofy shit. Mandates wouldn’t be necessary if this was a country of adults.
You honestly don't believe you are responsible for the knowable results of your own actions?
> a relatively minor illness
I don't see how you can honestly use this phrase to describe the worst pandemic since HIV.
> others have freely available access to effective vaccines against.
The vaccines both reduce spread and reduce the risknof serious illnessm. They do not eliminate that risk so choosing to remain unvaccinated bis choocing to increase the risk for both the vaccinated and the other unvaccinated people around you. This is risk that you ARE RESPONSIBLE for so you better make sure it is worth it.
As for the rest, please try reading what I actually wrote rather than making assumptions and arguing against partisan strawmen.
Where did I advocate for vaccine mandates?
Where did I advocate for continued lockdowns?
Where did I call border closures racist?
Where did I compare covid to smallpox?
Natural Immunity does seem superior to vacination alone, but having both is even better.
You seem to be projecting partisan talking points onto me to divert from the serious flaws in your moral philosophy and grasp of reality.
I don't see how you can conceivably believe that covid vacinations should be a choice but that the people making that choice are not responsible for the effects of that choice. Being responsible for the results is part of having choices.
And I know many people find it inconceivable that I have an anti authoritarian aversion to forced medical treatment, and that worries me for the future far more than covid. I'm not expecting to change any minds, but I'll put forward my position now and again.
I completely understand the other point of view, even if I believe a lot of people have arrived at it due to a campaign of fearmongering and politicization.
I see no part of the context makes that would make your statement accurate.
> And I know many people find it inconceivable that I have an anti authoritarian aversion to forced medical treatment,
That isn't what I find inconceivable. I entirely understand why people are opposed to this. What I find inconceivable is that you believe that people who choose not to get vaccinated don't bear a moral responsibility for the effects of that choice.
You seem fixed on thinking I am arguing something I am not.
And yet you managed to cut it neatly away, what are the odds?
relatively minor illness that others have freely available access to effective vaccines against. To be sure it is worse than the flu, but this is not smallpox
> That isn't what I find inconceivable. I entirely understand why people are opposed to this. What I find inconceivable is that you believe that people who choose not to get vaccinated don't bear a moral responsibility for the effects of that choice.
I don't say they don't bear a moral responsibility for the effects of that choice. I said that choice does not make a person responsible for the death of another who might have died because they couldn't get a bed (for example). And accusing them of it is dishonest bullying.
Countles choices we make every day directly and indirectly affect the world around us including others.
Choosing to go to the beach and drive your car, increasing traffic on the road and contributing to the chance of someone else being in a wreck and dying does not make you responsible for that. You could quite easily have chosen not to go to the beach though. You had no compelling need to go. It was a selfish choice to go. And that's all fine.
I cut away the rest of the sentence because it didn't provide any modifier or qualifier that change the meaning or strength of your highly inaccurate claim.
Take a look at how the sentence would read if you removed "relatively minor" from it? Your overall point would remain intact.
Point in fact, you haven't even tried to justify the "relatively minor" claim and instead complain about being taken out of context when that context is easily available to the reader.
> I said that choice does not make a person responsible for the death of another who might have died because they couldn't get a bed (for example)
If you choose to not get vaccinated and your area runs out of ICU beds to such a degree that people start dying due to lakc of care, then yes, you are partially responsible for their deaths.
> Choosing to go to the beach and drive your car, increasing traffic on the road and contributing to the chance of someone else being in a wreck
The choices you make affect your culpability. Were you tailgating, driving through residential streets, driving an unnecessarily large vehicle, did you let your elderly parent drive or were you texting while driving? Somehow your moral theory seems to end up excusing every possible contributory choice that increases the risks for others.
It is fine to make selfish choices, but you should make them with an attitude that minimizes the risks you place on others. If you don't want to get vaccinated, you should find ways to avoid indoor public spaces, maskless social gatherings and anything else you can do to manage those risks.
Personally, I find ways to minimize driving and when I do drive, I drive carefully and slowly. I think driving is an activity we tend to be unreasonably callous about the risks of. I think society at large should place more responsibility on drivers for the risks they create.
I mean, according to CDC's data, it is a very minor illness. Affects very few seriously, and kills even fewer: CDC believes (they obviously don't know for sure) only about 5% of their "total COVID deaths (deaths with COVID), are actually attributed specifically to COVID. As of right now, that would put total deaths from COVID at around 33K, that's over 18 months that we've started tracking. Total deaths from car accidents, yearly, around 36K and rising quickly over the last two years.
I've had it twice, 18 months apart. Yes, it was not nearly as bad as the flu, and definitely not as bad as the antibiotic resistant strep I had picked up at a hospital.
> I know that's what you believe, it's not what I believe. I believe it is ridiculous and immoral to coerce and force people into medical treatment for a relatively minor illness that others have freely available access to effective vaccines against.
A minor illness??? This is the worse illness that has affected the world since the Spanish flu. It's worse than AIDS, malaria, it even beat tuberculosis in terms of raw people killed in 2020. Calling COVID19 a "minor illness" is simply delusional at this point.
And this death toll was only kept somewhat in check because of the biggest social disruption and curbing of liberties since WW2. If social isolation weren't forced, we would have seen situations like we did in Lombardia in the early days - not 1% death rates, but 10% or more because of overwhelmed hospitals.
It's more acute than HIV was, but HIV still has an order magnitude more deaths. I remain hopeful that covid deaths won't reach those levels.
If we can stop Covid19 with vaccinations, lockdwons, contact tracing, then hopefully it will not reach HIV levels of cumulative historical deaths. But otherwise, it would reach the same death toll as HIV did in 40 years in about 12 years like 2020.
And note, HIV was enough to completely change human sexual interactions maybe forever - at least for ~30 years.
Malaria has killed ~2 million in 2 years. It's actually just around half of Covid but while Covid deaths are slowing, Malaria is steady.
> There would absolutely not have been 10% death rates.
But that's exactly what the death rates looked like in all regions that didn't impose lockdowns soon enough. The case of Lombardia is perfect - it's one of the richest regions on Earth, and while local hospitals were overwhelmed, it was surrounded by other rich regions that could accept patients. And even so, it had ~10% death rates in the early days of the pandemic, before lockdowns.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
A lot of places around the world have had little or no lockdowns or vaccinations and have not seen anything like 10% fatality rate over the population. This is fear mongering.
without trying to talk about vaccination and politics, a recent personal mandate, i'd like to bring something up.
there is a weird change in scope within your example.
You choose to drive drunk and are responsible. Sure, got it. You personally lie about an STD and are responsible. Sure, got it. You convince someone else to not take a vaccine and you are responsible.
Well.. wait a minute. Why does that responsibility fall one actor back?
Why isn't the actor who refuses the vaccine the guilty party?
If we can continue this line of thinking, when does it become OK to blame parents for the birth of murderers?
It occurs to me that liquor companies convince people to drink via advertisement, same as car companies woo potential customers over. And while not as legal as the under endeavors, the STD laden sexual partner certainly convinced their victims to continue.
Why not mention the role of the 'convincers' here, too?
In other words : I think 'moral truth' is kind of bullshit. More like "social truth".
Just jumping in here to reply to this statement... if you're talking about someone expressing their opinion to others that they shouldn't get the vaccine, the person expressing that opinion isn't responsible if the other person decides not to get the vaccine; the other person is the one who is responsible for their own actions and decisions. It's on them to weigh that advice with whatever other advice they are hearing.
I do agree that people are responsible for consequences of driving drunk, or lying about the status of their STD testing.
If you would, then why not consider the same about the vaccine?
By any reasonable standard, just like you're not allowed to smoke indoors because it hurts others, you're not allowed to be indoors with a potentially lethal disease that can kill others. It's that simple. You can choose to not be indoors with others, or you can choose to take a vaccine to eliminate that risk. But it's not your right to choose to risk anyone else's life by being around them in a closed environment while potentially infected.
I'm a big believer in personal responsibility. Yes I think they would be responsible and even should be criminally liable in some circumstances (e.g., if they knew they had HIV). I would also bear responsibility for my own actions of course.
> If you would, then why not consider the same about the vaccine?
Consider the same what?
> By any reasonable standard, just like you're not allowed to smoke indoors because it hurts others, you're not allowed to be indoors with a potentially lethal disease that can kill others. It's that simple. You can choose to not be indoors with others, or you can choose to take a vaccine to eliminate that risk. But it's not your right to choose to risk anyone else's life by being around them in a closed environment while potentially infected.
First of all, we aren't talking about going somewhere if you are sick or not, we are talking about going somewhere without being vaccinated. And I don't think that's a reasonable standard. Before 2020, people weren't banned from society if they didn't have a flu vaccine for example. Nobody thought this was unreasonable despite the seasonal fl being potentially lethal disease that can kill others.
Some places, e.g., where certain vulnerable or compromised people were (nursing homes), would mandate vaccines presumably based on reasonable evidence.
Now covid may be worse than the regular flu, but I think the numbers involved matter and so I don't just blindly agree it's reasonable that people should be banned from their work or public places if they haven't had it. Fear mongering aside, I don't think the evidence is there.
Doing reasonable measures to avoid that. Driving can result at death, but we allow people to drive under some speed limit, with a lot of rules on how to do it. You're not supposed to break them, and if you do, then you're at least fined.
^^ This is where you go off the rails. You don't "eliminate" that risk with a vaccine. Nobody who produced the vaccine has ever claimed this.
There is no reason to abandon looking at it that way. Eating healthier will not result in you losing weight if your caloric intake remains the same. Feel free to continue eating $1 burgers, just eat fewer of them.
Try doing the German prisoner of war diet for a year, and accurately track on a daily basis how many calories you eat, and how much weight you lose.
Then you can come back and tell us your anecdote of how you personally respond to reduction of calories in your diet. And we can put that drop into the ocean of knowledge.
This screams misinformation.