Amazing how badly the United States is regressing. Literally measles is making a comeback due to idiots like RFK.
"We have a vaccine to prevent some very serious cancers."
"But it might turn my daughter into a hussy."
What happened to "I just want my children to be happy" ?
Prior to Covid, the antivaxx scene was vaguely left-and-green oriented, biomoms, vegans and other "very natural" people; you would expect them to vote for Greens or even more alternative parties. This changed abruptly and now the antivaxx scene is mostly rightwing, but the common base is still the same distrust.
I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors.
Such people have always existed, unfortunately. I don't think it's a result of anything particularly new.
In the 1990s, you had maybe 15 minutes a day on average to consume news, either from a paper newspaper, or from an evening TV relation. Now, quite a lot of people spend 20 times as much time doomscrolling. Of course the impact will be much more massive.
And 'nutjobs' may be pejorative, but I'll hold on to it as apt. At the same time I assign no blame, for it is an issue of cognition. The best way I can describe it is, intelligence is not a single factor. And it's not even a few factors. It's a massive bar graph, with 1000s upon 1000s of bars, each delineating a different aspect of intelligence.
A lucky few may score high on all those bars, yet even the most intelligent of us tend to score high on only some of those bars. And my point is, I've seen people immensely intelligent on some of those bars, yet astonishingly deficient on others.
We love to make fun of politicians, so I'll use one as an example here. Politicians tend to be incredibly personable, and very difficult to dislike in person. They exude congeniality, they read you like a book, and can often orate your wallet completely out of your pocket, and you'll thank them for it too. It's how they managed to go so far politically, yet some of these same politicians have severe and massive deficiencies in cognition.
Back to the pointed sticks, and the nutjobs who would wield them pre-tech, these people are simply as they are. Yet in the past, you'd see one nutjob in a community, and they'd be surrounded by normalcy, it would temper them, mitigate their effect, sand off their edges so to speak.
Yet as our communities grew in size and scope, these individuals could finally meet more of their ilk. A large city might have dozens of them, larger still cities hundreds, and they'd meet up. And as technology grew, and access to the printing press become possible for all, and for less and less cost, these same people could then send their madness in newsletter form to even those small communities where maybe only one nutjob existed.
But those people needed to still connect in some way. Maybe through an ad in the back of a magazine, or something akin yet far less gated by 'normals'.
Yet today? Now? Algorithms match you up with all those nutjobs. Where before you might live in isolation, and the friends you had might scoff at that weird idea you have, now you've found a community of hundreds, or thousands just like you! And they all affirm your madness, they pat you on the back, they congratulate you for seeing the light! They whisper all those sweet nothings into your ear, all those secret things you knew were true, and they listen to all you say on the subject.
For the first time in your life you have a home, a community, and before TikTok, or some weird forum, it would have never all been possible. You'd have been isolated, even in the age of magazines, and print, for you'd have never found one another.
And worse, now profit enters the system. Those who would steal, or thieve, or build bridges with sub-standard concrete for profit, or anything for money regardless of cost to us all, appear on this scene. They see those nutjobs, and they seek to profit from them. They own youtube, or tiktok channels, and often do not believe in anything but profit. They'll tell you anything you want to hear, espouse any crazy idea, and like that bridge built with substandard concrete, they'll take the money and run as society collapses around them.
This profit motive was always there, see cults. Yet the reach and scope was just not what it is today, there is so much more range given to a single person now.
Recognizing that technology is now so convenient, psychology manipulative, and operates in a furiously fast feedback evolutionary regime, and that it has radically increased the spread of cultural irrationality isn't about "blame" in a judgy moral way.
It is about characterizing major factors behind the problem.
The enormous amount of near instant coordinated (by intention or dynamic), interactive misinformation, made so conveniently available that large percentages of the population routinely and enthusiastically expose themselves to it, participate in reinforcing it, throughout their typical day, is very new.
> "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -- James Baldwin
Your local crazy used to get patronizing nods. Now they get 100 million views.
Unlike the paper products, which just lie around when not actively seeked for, the algorithms determining your feed have a lot more agency.
This is similar to the myth that people communicated less before the messaging apps: they were glued to their phone for hours, sent telegrams and even sent very short letters (delivered same day!) to just say "thanks for the lunch that was very nice" (I found some in my grand-parents’s papers)
Our (social) communication appetite has always been quite insatiable.
with radical information transparency, id expect both views to be equally easy to parse and to be recommended both, in which case the choice would be obvious to everyone, or at least they could very well describe their risk tolerance to different risks, or laziness, for why they made a certain choice.
i expect im not up to date on all the vaccines i should be, but its on laziness rather than gwtting bad information. ...also a lack of information on which ones i should have.
The fraudulent Wakefield paper may be one of the most destructive pieces of information released upon mankind.
Measles and polio are terrible diseases which were almost eradicated with vaccines. We are not talking about covid.
Like, anti-vaxers died at higher rates in Covid [1]. This will continue across disease outbreaks, particularly ones for which we have near-comprehensive vaccines like measles. And given antivax sensibility is heritable (through parenting, not genes), one would expect this to stabilize the population over several generations to one that doesn’t have this defect.
A slur.
in your fish analogy, you eat mecury directly, but wont eat fish that might have mercury.
the communicable disease is itself quite dangerous
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048286
The docket shows us that pharmaceutical companies are serial felons who have paid some of the largest fines in history for lying about their products. It is prudent to be skeptical until proven otherwise.
Edit: To all the pro-Pfizer downvoters, feel free to take some Zantac. You have learned nothing.
I had seen attempts to engage with these arguments in good faith. It was wasted effort.
> “anti-vax" is a term used to dismiss [dissent]
No, it’s a term used to dismiss people who keep bringing up the same arguments that have been refuted over and over.
I don't have any issue with what you're describing. The J&J COVID vaccine would be an example of caution being advisable, since you never know what unusual interactions (e.g. with blood clotting) might occur in a larger population than the safety studies looked at.
But that's not the usual definition of an anti-vaxxer.
Anti-vaxxers carry on about things like thimerasol which (1) were removed from most vaccines 25 years ago and (2) give you an exposure to mercury equivalent to eating something like a single can of tuna.