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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

It's capitulation to coercion, which has its own side effects.

At my restaurant we save money by never cleaning the kitchen. No one should coerce me into doing something where it is not necessary. Cleaning wastes my time and money and it's my freedom to not clean! No one should take that freedom away in a free country!

Sure, but do you get to pretend your kitchen is clean at the same time?

That's why I drink and drive as much as I want. Can't let the man tell me what to do! /s

Don't forget about seat belts!

The reason why drunk driving is so dangerous is because of the choices of past governments to make implicit subsidies for cars and urban planners making car dependent suburbia.

Our choices are already constrained before we even realize it and yet people chose to die on the vaccination hill.

You employer is checking what you drink before you drive? If not, that's a pretty bad analogy.

When I was driving a company vehicle for my job? Hell yes they were.

So they were checking every morning when you were taking your company car that you had no alcohol in your blood? How did that work? Your boss was waiting at the door?

You're talking about employment where the employer makes much much of off your labor than you will ever receive, and you are powerless to demand your fair share. Yet instead, a safe workplace is the coercive part?

If you don't want to be coerced, you had better not be an employee with wages. Go out there and start your own business.

It’s hilarious to see HN flip from “I dream of a future where no one has to work and fall under the yoke of greedy employers” to “just get injected with this drug and be thankful you have a job; don’t get it and you deserve to starve”.

The vaccines are the magic future where a small bit of technology prevents disease and death.

> don’t get it and you deserve to starve

It's not by chance that you have to make up ridiculous words and put them in my mouth to attempt to criticize the comment, either in this part where I quoted you, or in the weird assertion about no one having to work.

> The vaccines are the magic future where a small bit of technology prevents disease and death.

That's the part I've found so disappointing about this: a couple of decades of development and we have a massive breakthrough in our ability to rapidly create and update vaccines which precisely target near-arbitrary targets. Seeing what would have been a sci-fi technology when I was a kid being the target of so many conspiracy theories must be incredibly disappointing to all of the actual medical experts who worked so hard on this.

Those medical experts should look at themselves for why people react this way.

An absolute refusal to accept any legal liability for harms done by the product, whilst simultaneously insisting it's perfectly safe? Check.

Claims that anyone worried about long term effects is a crazy malicious person when Moderna was failing to progress beyond animal trials due to multi-dose toxicity as recently as 2017? Check. [2]

Fanatical insistence on forced vaccination, even when the logical basis for mandates has been invalidated by equal infectiousness? Check. [1]

Constantly shifting claims about effectiveness, invalidated within months yet all presented with absolute confidence? Check.

Insistence that nobody look at the database of injuries and papers which do so should be retracted, despite it existing specifically to be analyzed? Check.

A million different non-vaccine explanations for the sudden spike in public heart attacks, none of which are remotely plausible? Check.

We could go on for many pages of this. The medical/public health establishment has consistently wrecked their own credibility and acted in untrustworthy, suspicion-raising ways. They don't then get to make a sad face and say "but sci fi". Let us know when Pfizer/Moderna can be taken to court for injuries and deaths caused by their sci-fi tech, and interest will grow.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

[2] https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/

If I wanted antivax propaganda, I could get it myself. You're just copy-and-pasting things you don't understand so I won't be spending time on further replies.

Even if you think his arguments are silly, it would be more effective to use facts and data to destroy his argument instead of a ad hominem ("you don't understand") attack on his intelligence.

Your approach of dismissing and saying you are taking your ball and going home is not really a convincing counter-argument.

I agree in the abstract but I have seen nothing in his posting history which suggests he's interested in rationally evaluating this or has made an effort to understand what he's pasting any better than the people he copied it from.

That's just another empty insult. Anyway, consider that half of the reason people debate or take positions on forums isn't to directly convince just the person they're talking to, it's to convince people who are watching. Right now you aren't convincing people who are watching.

Also, really, I should be convincible. A few years ago I was quite like you. I even occasionally used anti-vaxx as a slur, a shorthand for crazy illogical conspiracy theorist, although I'm now ashamed to admit it. I didn't ever review their arguments because I already "knew" they were wrong. Well, and because it was irrelevant as there were no vaccines I was being asked to take. Things changed a lot in just two years.

Moreover, like many people on this forum, I'm a specialist who owes my position and status in society to expertise. I don't like the idea that huge numbers of specialized experts appear to be in the grip of some sort of mass hysteria or collectivist ideology in which the downsides of massive social interventions are simply taboo to discuss. That degrades respect for all kinds of specialism and expertise, in all fields, even if not equally.

Really the most concerning and effective anti-vaxx propaganda, as you put it, is exactly the sort of responses you're posting now. Not "here's evidence that point X is wrong" but rather, almost boastful proclamations that they aren't going to engage in the discussion at all because they are too intellectually pure to do so. It looks and sounds like a sort of fanaticism.

You are just making up ridiculous claims that don't pass even a basic sniff test, much less ant tiny amount of skeptical inquiry.

I'm not sure why you have been convinced of these falsehoods, or why you think anybody else could be swayed a bit by them.

Which claim specifically do you think is wrong? They are all correct. Some have citations. You may not like them, but they're correct.

For example if you don't believe the claim about legal immunity, maybe you'll believe CNBC?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...

At any rate, your comment is unsubstantive, which is against the HN rules.

There's been a lot of this, though.

HN used to be firmly anti-FBI/CIA and pro-Assange. Something flipped that around such that the FBI and CIA are Real American Heroes and Assange is some sort of Russian asset. The NSA is still a bit of a bogeyman here, but even that may not hold.

HN is also filled with people who were OccupyWallStreet or AntiWar types who now bloviate endlessly on portfolio management and advocate for the invasion of Iran/Syria/Russia/China/etc.

And don't even get me started on the cypherpunks, the phrack guys, etc. There might be one or two of them left who aren't actively wiping their asses with the CAM or Hacker Manifesto daily.

I suspect that evolving from eating Ramen and reading zines in a communal hackerspace to being paid $400k/yr to analyze the click habits of a billion people changes a person.

The anti-war/free love/hippie/flower power boomers did precisely the same thing, of course. Money and status will always kill lofty ideals. Always.

There are bigger, better and more productive hills to die on if you don't enjoy being told what to do.

It hadn't occurred to me that this might lead a whole bunch of people, who didn't previously, to regard the employment relationship as fundamentally coercive. Hm. I'm now torn on this.

Like rickets?

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