If anything, this should tell us the trolls won.
Or at least have been more successful then they ever should have been.
5G hadn’t been invented yet. They had nothing to worry about back then.
/s
I think social media algorithms have fried people’s brains. Imagine we’d ban them, go back to content being kinda diverse and random, without adversaries able to game the system and push massive swaths of propaganda to people. The fact alone that most youths get their news from freaking TicTok of all places…
If it’s propaganda to make people believe the truth, is it bad?
Interesting hypothetical, but not what’s happening.
It’s a question. You know what a question is, right?
You people are so used to these weird games that every question must be an insinuation.
Well, you said that, not me. But thanks for the outing.
Am I wrong?
This guy’s awesome. It reads as if he’s trying to dilute the great news by suggesting wars ending a decade before or moon landings 10 years are are really why everyone’s cheering.
In 1955… Most people personally knew someone aflicted with polio. They knew how bad it was
i mean unless you were like 10, chances are everyone was aware of fdr
In Appalachia, it was unlikely to not know someone on a vent or dead from Covid, yet…
Trust me. I’ve been along live enough to recognize that if people don’t want to believe something, then they won’t.
I knew three people who died from COVID and another after they recovered from COVID, unfortunately unless it’s their direct family they would just assume ‘theyre just making it all out to be covid’
I assume most people would blame social media for this, but here’s my c/unpopularopinions take, it’s inevitable with a profit oriented news platform, where they try to scaremonger in both ‘we are all going to die’ and ‘government is putting chips in our bloodstream’ directions
In other nations, unless a blunder by government policy, they werent as affected by the anti vaccine shenanigans, even though they were as affected by social media and such
Fox News tells you not to believe your eyes, and conservatives trust Fox News more than their own eyes.
Why wouldn’t they trust Fox News over their own eyes? Fox News is the most trusted name in news. At least that’s what the viewers get told when they come back from commercial breaks. It’s not like Fox would lie to them. They are the most trusted name in news after all…
Circular logic at its finest.
I didn’t see anybody die of covid. 2 relatives died after getting the shot tho, of apparently unrelated cause.
Tell me what to believe.
Believe the mass graves and filled ERs.
I didn’t actually see mass graves or filled ERs.
You’re not alone. I also didn’t see either of those things, or know anyone that died from it.
I’m also not denying those things exist, I’m simply affirming your reality.
I guess you can’t see if your eyes are closed.
Their final, most essential command.
Stark contrast to the reaction most people had to the invention of seatbelts in cars.
Honestly, they are compared a lot, and while seat belts should be encouraged, I don’t think they should be mandated for adults.
Unlike masks, you’re only going to hurt yourself.
Then again I strongly believe in the right of any adult to end their own life, even if they’re physically healthy, or it’s not their life.
Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. We know what kind of country we live in, a nation of proud, almost patriotic willful ignorance. By design. An ignorant laborer ignorant to who is fucking them is a dependable laborer, after all.
So in the spirit of playing to the audience we have, have we tried rebranding the “vaccines” as, and I’m just spitballing here, Freedom Blessings, Robert E Lee Juice, The Joe Rogan Vein Experience, or the Prove You Hate Commies Test?
How about we rearrange a little and try Joe Rogan Juice? Joe Juice for short. It makes your immune system swole.
I can find no fault in this whatsoever. Nothing else seems to get through to them, not even death.
Vaccines protect the workforce and allow individuals to produce more. People being against vaccines cannot be good for capitalism, can it?
Congrats, even this you managed to turn into a class struggle.
Every struggle is either created by or exacerbated by class struggle.
Many cannot be addressed at all without first addressing class inequity.
Antivaxxers were largely made ignorant by for profit media.
I think you meant to reply to the parent comment?
It’s more important to the owners to keep us largely uneducated and ignorant for their own continued dominance than it is to maximize our longevity. Also they would have to pay honet to God taxes to fund public education, something they’ve spent decades installing loopholes to get out of, despite profiting directly from a pre-literate workforce Pool.
Just look at our for profit deathcare system, you would think, as they demand Healthcare largely be tied to employment to keep their employees desperately loyal, that it would be in their best interests to approve claims and keep their labor force healthy enough to labor, but it’s a numbers game and there’s just too much profit to be had, just as with their tax loopholes, in letting laborers die when they get sick or injured rather than approve their claims and letting them eventually recover. That’s a lot of lost profit when they can just replace them with someone ready to work tomorrow.
I had a thought along the same lines. I was thinking we should coin the term “immunition,” and tell people it was a way to arm your immune system to defend itself. It’s not even all that misleading.
We are entering a stupid age, for which we may never recover.
for which we may never recover.
um, it’s FROM which, not “for which”
you wouldn’t say “I’ll never recover for this”, would you?
I’ll never recover for this comment
You’ll never recover for this
I’d argue we ushered in the Stupid Age in November of 1980.
I agree though, we never recovered.
Quite the difference from how half the US population reacted to a Covid vaccine. The power of political propaganda and social media conspiracy theories.
I used to think one of the biggest reasons there’s so many antivaxx people is that, because they’re so effective, people no longer have the fear of seeing their children in an iron lung, struggling to breathe. Then Covid respirators happened and antivaxx fucks somehow got worse
My brother had to be convinced to get the vaccine.
He’s legitimately removed (I’m trying to say “re-tar-ded”, but apparently it automatically saying “removed.” Seriously? We’re not allowed to say “re-tar-ded”, a completely accurate medical term?) and had to go to a special school because of it.
I think a lot of conservatives fall into this camp, but don’t realize it because of how poor social programs are in red states.
It’s also why Trump is president-elect currently. People are stupid and are forgetting just how bad things can be.
They forgot about 4 years ago.
Most people on this planet are idiots.
😆 what do you mean dude
The average person is quite stupid and about half the people are even stupider (sic)
It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?
If being pro-polio isn’t disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.
There are many influences. One is pure resentment of elites as know-it-alls which propagandists amplify. A bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at the same time as people without specialized training can’t even comprehend what they don’t know. Another is how difficult it is to think probabilistically so that people can’t easily appreciate risk. And as more and more people proclaim conspiracy theories as truth there is peer pressure to confirm.
History should be mandatory especially to vote. Some people don’t even remember the holocaust and they’re repeating it again.
There are people who are still in congress who had polio.
Mitch has done nothing but enable the incoming administration, and helped to get it in power, so he has no leg to stand on now in all of his hand waving about the polio vaccine.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? I
I think it’s education, so many of us are now "educated ", this makes us confident idiots, a superb pinnacle of that example might be Linus Pauling and vitamin C for example.
If my hypothesis is correct, more education wont help.
Empathy is always lacking, just have to look at the refugee debate, its not new. Jews were turned away when Hitler sent them overseas, telling other countries to take then or he’d start killing them,
Japense interment camps in the US in WW2, slavery, endless wars prosecuted on other countries and participants lionised, it’s part of our makeup that’s difficult for most people to overcome,. I’d posit they don’t want to overcome it. . Then there’s the whole treatment of native peoples all over the world. US, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, Russia and on and on.
The one thing that unites Demorcats and Republicans ? disdain for the homeless, again a lack of empathy.
If that’s true, you’d expect to see more conspiracy theories among more educated populations. People with PhDs and MDs would be the most likely to be antivaxxers. Do you have statistics to confirm that?
Sometimes it feels like it’s all done to grab headlines.
It works, they eat cats and dogs.
Stupidity.
Paraphrasing from a recent episode of Behind the Bastards on the Vioxx scandal: There’s a lot of recency bias in humans where it’s difficult to look past the fuckups of the pharma industry. If their “current” MO is to make a shit ton of money at the cost of human lives, then why would someone with lesser critical thinking skills trust them? One needs quite a bit more faculties to separate the capitalism from the good they are doing and tell apart what’s trustworthy and what not.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust. And that’s very sad considering how important they could be if they wanted to.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust.
It goes farther than that, because of how aggressively the US has resisted drug imports and fear mongered against foreign science and development.
The post-COVID “vaccine diplomacy” of European and Chinese state pharmaceutical providers (hell, Cuba even developed a variant) was matched with a flood of early US reporting that amounted to “don’t trust any vaccine that isn’t American!!!” Then there was a dirty war between domestic providers over whose vaccine was the best.
All that propaganda took its toll.
I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I’ve taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I’m currently burying my head in the sand and screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.
Maybe I’ll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe…
The above link will give you the overview of the historical background on antivax movement since vaccine invention.
It basically boils down to two arguments, which feed each other.
-
Risk => Vaccine are/can be/will be/may be/ought to be dangerous to someone somewhere, somehow. I don’t understand and I’m scared.
-
FrEeDoM => I do not contract and I am free to decide what treatment I get, I am not a sheep and I participate in no herd and the only immunity I accept is from overbearing big government.
In spite of my sarcasm, I do think the second argument has merit, a government should of course be extremely careful with mandatory medical treatment of any kind and bear the burden of proving regularly that the benefits continues to far outweigh any and all alternative.
That reminds me, I have a 10am appointment for my flu shot. Almost forgot.
I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.
-
I see it as a sign of health that people working with vaccines only use them when they are beneficial, and don’t use them when there are reasons not to.
I don’t know the reasons he has in this case. Would be interesting to know more.
I think I can understand your reasoning but I disagree with it.
A few years back, a vaccine was removed from our national vaccination plan. It was deemed as unnecessary, as the disease was considered erradicated. The decision was mostly political, with our National Healthcare Council keeping a very terse silence on the matter.
Precisely two years after the alteration, a sudden, unpredictable, with no known vector of origin, series of cases surged. Luckily, no child died, as the our NHS is robust enough to handle this kind of situation but there was a swift public backlash from the National Healthcare Council, on why the withdrawal of the vaccine had opened doors to a ressurgence of the disease. The vaccine was quickly reintroduced.
Smallpox was erradicated because of vaccination efforts. Many more could have been, if wasn’t for stupidity and religious fanaticis. Having an openly admitted vaccine denier take office is a sad joke, made at the expense of who knows how many lifes.
If you want to know more, go read the lawsuit he is associated with to remove FDA approval of the polo vaccine. Essentially, he believes fraudulent research that indicates that vaccines cause autism.
Then, before you take what he says at face value, go read a history of polio.
If you give the materials an honest read, you’ll find that polio is horrific, that the vaccine was one of the greatest medical achievements of the 20th century, and that the evidence indicating that the vaccine causes autism is all junk.
Ooooh no. No, fuck off. This disingenuous “just asking questions” shtick can fuck right off. This is about polio you fucking lunatic, get a fucking grip.
Is it a lack of empathy?
Yes, it’s a disregard for human life
I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.
What is quite scary is that it doesnt have to be vaccines, they could be convinced of anything given time and right approach.
Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.
Don’t sell RFK Jr short. He might be crazy but he’s also an evil POS.
Agreed. It takes more than Trump, his cabinet, and MAGA to get here, though. It requires complicity and complacency from a ton of other people.
Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn’t prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.
Yeah I think those other people are conspiracy theorists, like you said.
