Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Eh, I'm not buying your argument here. The partisan toxicity you mention very strongly pulls everything into it all on its own, so vaccination is not special in that regard. Practically speaking all policy gets a cost/benefit analysis. The libertarian ideal is fine with say, massive infrastructure/legal/military cost so that it can set up idyllic every-man-is-free-from-every-other-man society, but then it gets to choose to opt out of a communal response to deadly viruses? As a conservative who is not a libertarian, I would like an health insurance system that in fact charged the obese and motorcycle riders what they take out of the system. Indeed the latter should probably have insurance rates several times mine, or indemnify all other drivers no matter who is "at fault" for the accident, since choosing to be on these mean streets without several thousands pounds of steel and airbags around you is not an accident.

Vaccination, viruses, and healthcare systems do not fit into a libertarian "my choice is my choice and your choice is your choice" worldview very well.

 

This is my source - what are yours?

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762

How so?

How? People can chose to protect themselves through the vaccine. How is choosing not to protect yourself showing disregard for those who can chose to protect themselves?

Risky for whom? If someone is needlessly endangering others, lets by all means demonize them (or better yet prosecute them). But again, in this case people can chose to protect themselves through vaccination so it's unclear whom you are trying to protect through your outraged demonization. Originally in the post I first responded to it was the added costs to the healthcare system. You've seemed to have moved the goal posts, arguing that we should demonize the unvaccinated for failing to use the highly effective vaccines that people can use to... protect themselves.

 

If you want to charge people based on the expected cost of their actions to the healthcare system, we can talk about a policy that would do that. For example we could use GPS to track our speed and bill accordingly in proportion to the increased risk of accidents at higher speeds. But this is a task for policy, not demonization.

If vaccination protects the vaccinated but is not going to eradicate the disease, how is whether or not to get vaccinated a public rather than private choice?

 

This is actually a way more difficult thing to do than people think.

There's this view that obesity is exclusively a personal choice, that it's just fat lazy people who can't control themselves. Not true. What if the obesity is due to a genetic mutation in leptin, orexin or ghrelin hormone systems? The "its a hormonal thing" is a big joke, except it's completely true. What about exposure to gestational diabetes, which predisposes someone to metabolic syndrome? FASD that impairs impulse control? Any number of other medical conditions over which a person may have no control?

Point is, obesity is extremely complicated. Vaccination for COVID is far, far simpler.

 

The way you try to make it sound like it is a sane choice to not choose to be protected from serious illness and death.

Because the virus is contagious. A choice not to protect yourself is simultaneously a choice to increase risk to other people, because vaccination reduces risk to self AND others.

Even if we can't eradicate the virus, even if we can't achieve what would traditionally be seen as herd immunity, every additional person who is vaccinated reduces their own, and the collective risk. Every person who is not vaccinated is a higher risk to themselves, and to others. And to come full circle to the original post you questioned, *everyone* should be gunning for higher vaccination rates because that is a fiscally responsible thing to do.

 

Not directed at me, but we are trying to protect the healthcare system itself. A few months ago, my Canadian province had to airlift ICU patients to other provinces because we had no space left for them. Many thousands of elective surgeries have been postponed over the last year and a half because the doctors and nurses were needed to treat COVID patients. The suffering imposed even on people who do not have COVID has been huge. And we are tired of it.

And now we have vaccines that while not stopping infections, they keep people out of the hospitals. If everyone was vaccinated, this pandemic would be basically over. Problem is there are still more than enough unvaccinated people to overwhelm the health care system yet again if we let them all get infected at once. So the pandemic goes on thanks solely to them.

On the bright side, people here are not happy about the unvaxxed dragging this out for the rest of us, and have decided that vaccine passports are a way for us to get our lives back. Lockdowns are no longer required, the vaccinated can get their lives back, and all the burden and inconvenience is put on the backs of those freely choosing to keep this pandemic going. The joke is kind of on them now. Ha ha.

 

It is one of the most clear communal choices (and thus non-personal choice) I can think of, up there perhaps with "let us all drive on the right and stop on red, or the opposite, but let us choose because such a choice is not "personal"". @Beefy did a good job of parsing the "eradication" and "immunity" arguments the libertarian mindset likes to use.

True story: The hospital my wife is medical director of had a general employee meeting two weeks ago to lay out the policy (imposed by the state of New Mexico) of how all of them have to be vaccinated to work in health care. Several (all nurses it turns out) started belly aching about how it is against their rights, how there are microchips in the vaccine, how the vaccine causes HIV (had not heard that one yet). Turns out there is a "religious exemption" to the state mandate, and now about 30 of these employees have had an evangelical experience and got religion, some "internet church" in Hawaii that charges a small fee to sign your religious exemption paperwork.

I'm ready to demonize these people and the system that allow these sorts of silly loopholes, because all this is from Hell.

 

Hospitals being overwhelmed to the point of having to turn down people to me is the strongest argument for the public/social utility of vaccination. But during the pandemic we can apply that same argument to people who are taking other risks that burden the medical system unnecessarily.

I don't see how the pandemic goes on solely thanks to the unvaccinated, unless we define pandemic only in terms of some threshold level of hospitalizations. The vaccinated can still contract and spread COVID19, so it doesn't seem that it will go away through vaccination.

At a higher level, I'm not sure if demonizing actually works well to change behaviors. It does feel good, but my intuition (I'm happy to be corrected by evidence) is that it doesn't work unless it's by those within your close community or family. It's otherwise easy to dismiss the demonizers as an outgroup and ignore them.

 

Why can't we attach the same negative social stigma of getting STDs to getting COVID?

"I should have the freedom to attend a large indoor church gathering regardless of whether I have tested negative for COVID"

"I should have the freedom to participate in an orgy regardless of whether I have tested negative for HIV"

Also, I find it mildly amusing when folks with true conservative belief systems object to even the hint of fat-shaming. If someone can't figure out how to drop 20 pounds, how are those bootstraps gonna fare?

 

It is my observation that pushing too hard against them doubles them down. For SURE. In some areas of politics, it simply must be opposed. But I think when the option is available it's better not to fan flames.

These people have their own beliefs with their own core axioms. And the thing to understand is that they are deep, gut axioms. They will not move from those axioms. They will only argue from them, and will not accept arguments that discredit or deny the relevance of them. Honestly, this isn't entirely unreasonable. Most people do this, as a matter of sanity. You've gotta have those core axioms to structure your beliefs and know when to just say "Ahh... not going down that road." or you will find yourself existing within an indecipherable slurry of forces. It's neither possible nor wise to be 100% open-minded to everything. You lose yourself in the process and ultimately stand for nothing. Very few human beings can really exist in that state. It's something a little like a soft ego-death. The ego stays online, but doesn't connect normally. Dark place.

They have built up their own framework, and they will put a lot of energy into holding that together, same as anyone else. If you approach them from within yours, they take pieces from it and develop a matching anti-structure in their framework. This is where things get a bit... psychotic, as you are essentially building up a framework for reality NOT based on lived experiences and choices, but rather one that merely exists to be in opposition to what is essentially just another framework for reality.

The end result is just a lot of noise in your head. Unlivable, conflicting ideas. But this goes across the board. Certain kind of arguments bring it about, and it only serves to put increasingly more abstract and tangential ideas into a person's thinking. It starts augmenting your sense of the social reality after a while, without really giving you any meaningful info. What I'm saying is people get mired down in this forceful thinking. It's a trap for all involved IME.

I think ultimately the only solution is to try to meet people where they're at... just understand that it is a very different place with different rules. If you wish to dissolve the framework that resists basic communal action, you need to deconstruct the axioms that support it. They don't even have to go away, they just need to be understood differently. But to do that, there needs to be a certain level of social trust and understanding.

I'm not a fan of the choice narrative at all, I have a hard time seeing how it doesn't encourage people to stay in that mindset.

However, I do think this is something that can only unravel slowly. I think that narrative is a symptom of the overall understanding we have of each other, that this is where we are says a lot.

Eyes are being opened to so many things about our world and many are just at a loss. Powder kegs exploding left and right. People are scared for both their material and spiritual well being. EVERYBODY feels it right now. Everybody. We all need to be together on it, but we all have a lot of learning to do about ourselves and each other. I don't think we can ever sing kumbaya together but on some level we do all want the same things. I think that in this highly dichotomous and yet paradoxically atomized sociopolitical climate, we can't afford to alienate too many people. I kinda see that as going further into the chaos. I can speak from personal experience, I believe in living alongside ideas if you are to speak of them. But the further you push with absolutes, the more you feel that alienation within yourself. The world around you simply becomes stranger and harder to interface with, as you butt up against more and more until you only see opposition.

I think people are in a big hurry to get everyone moving in the same direction but I think at this point in human history, it simply is not possible for myriads of reasons. Is that an excuse to not do the best we can? Fuhhhhck no. What I'm saying is that if anyone, as an individual, is concerned about people not getting vaccinated or otherwise taking this seriously, be somebody one of those people you know can talk to. Take the time to move at the pace of humans.

I think we greatly overestimate our pace for change. My core beliefs are with change. I'm not a fan of our status quo. But I also recognize how big the motions that drive these wedge points in communication and collaboration really are, and how slow democracy can be, just inherently. In a democracy you can't just change laws without people changing. The laws have to reflect the change already occurring to really hold. The rules are only as good as people's willingness to follow them.

It is beyond me to conceive of how to alleviate that at a point of true scale. But I can say that several people I know personally have come around over the course of many alternating conversations and personal experiences. It's all very cultural and personal. The reasons are different for everyone, even if they all seem to say the same things. Those are just the kite shields they plant in the ground a lot of times.

It's not always what it seems to be. When people sense a threat, they tend not to say how they are really feeling about anything, even if they are behaving in a very impassioned way. Somewhere in there may be some contradictions they wrangle with. You have to get past that before anything can really happen. Shit, I experience that! I know what it is to feel cornered and unseen, what it does to your perception of other people... and their words.

Again, I don't really know what the answers are. Just depositing thoughts. Being one person, I find it easier to consider things on a basic human level. Stuff I can use in my own life. So that I'm not just living in my head, thinking about these people I don't interact with, painting them in the light that suits my understanding of things. I don't see a personal benefit to that, even if stricter approaches are favored on a broader scale. I still have to live with these people.

Maybe I say this because of where I am in Florida, and how people are around here. But it does give me the unique perspective that it's like trimming weeds. The mindset is all around me. Head-on approach looks ridiculous from my vantage. It's too deep and pervasive here for that. The causes are not so simple that they can be mandated or booed out of our society. That's superficial stuff to me. Just not what I'm seeing in these situations. Nothing changes from that point of view, no matter how much time passes. I can't live with that.

 

Funny how when you look at old footage of American life before like the 80s there was no obesity epidemic. And fwiw obesity kills far more people than covid as well as being one of the biggest factors in how well your body is able to fight off covid and yet we see almost no talk from the powers that be about how people need to eat better, exercise, lose weight, etc.

One of the main points of the narrative now is how more and more kids are needing to be hospitalized but what they don’t tell you is that the lockdown imposed by the regime increased childhood obesity from like 37% to almost 50%. And as above we know we obesity is one of the main comorbidity factors in poor outcomes with covid.

 

There's no doubt that changing nutrition and exercise has had an enormous impact in the last 50 years. But why are these things primarily affecting certain individuals? Why are the effects stratified across socioeconomic status, just like every other chronic health condition? Because there are enormous confounding factors above just personal choice and lifestyle 'decisions'.

 

In NL the obesity issue was also raised. Very awkward issue but hey.

A week ago or so a new guy at work called in late.

Why? Cramps, f'ing cramps on an electric bicycle.

He is on the firm side and 20 at most. Nice guy but when cramps hold you back because you are not used to moving around I cannot consider you even fit enough to move light boxes (10 kilos max).

I have to stay polite to him. Thing is as a skinny kid I always had to prove I was not weak. I scared the big gym kids at one point.

I am still on the skinny side but once the big guys know you have grit, they step aside. My strength is not for show.

Dude complained about f'ing cramps. I will generally refuse his help until he proves himself...

 

Beefy, I agree completely. Obesity is not a personal choice.

Kernel, I think there is a solution for your suffering (and for all Canadians' suffering). This solution will free up lots of ICU beds across Canada, increase the overall health of the population, reduce health care costs, and will have permanent benefits.

The solution is to mandate bariatric surgery for people overweight past a government determined BMI threshold.

This government program could be done in conjunction with corporations -- making the bariatric surgery necessary to be able to keep working at the corporation. In addition, long distance travel (trains, boats, planes) could be disallowed for BMI-challenged people. Most public social interactions could be limited until the bariatric surgery is completed. A phone-based BMI passport app would be implemented with help from high tech companies to insure compliance.

Another powerful incentive would be an intensive Canadian mass media program that drafts friends and relatives to put pressure on the BMI-challenged -- using peer pressure, reason, and in difficult cases, breaking off relationships.

I'm not Canadian, but as a disinterested observer, it seems that the time might be right for a "BMI Freedom Passport" and mandatory bariatric surgery. It will help keep Canada healthy and safe, with plenty of ICU beds available.

 

I haven't given enough thought to the entire sequence of arguments you're making @Stuff Jones, so this reply isn't intended to contradict your wider points. Having said that, though, I'm not sure about the validity of the assumption I'm quoting above.

I've seen arguments that run as follows: vaccinations reduce the rate and extent by which COVID 19 is transmitted; each time the virus is passed from one person to the next, the virus has an opportunity to mutate; accordingly, the more times the virus is transmitted, the more chances it has to mutate; the more frequently and freely the virus mutates, the greater the likelihood is that COVID 19 becomes more transmissible or lethal (by getting around the protections offered by the latest vaccines). If this is accurate, it would seem to follow that not getting vaccinated might indeed contribute to keeping the pandemic around. Isn't this what happened with the delta variant?

Let me hasten to add, though, that I'm not a medical doctor, much less an epidemiologist, and I'm getting all this from newspaper articles, so I could well be wrong.

 

I appreciate your irenic thinking here, and you rightly point to the reality of human complexity of it on multiple levels (psycho, psycho social, governmental, etc.). That said I do appreciate how there have been mandates and social pressure (let's even call it stigmatizing and demonization). I would be for sending a square jawed staff sergeant armed with a needle to every home in America - resistance is futile. Like you say that is just not realistic, as America is not really a "society" or "culture" in the normative sense, or rather its culture of individualism and has lost something profound - a true sense of the community, of neighbor, of unity. Classical Liberals have argued since at least the 18th century that this lack is a strength, but I am with those believe that other things (e.g. circumstantial and technological fortune, the historical accident of the 'American Empire', etc.) have papered over this weakness.

As you point out for now we can all live in our silo's of belief and "information", and even a deadly pandemic of 600,000 dead can not penetrate these walls for a significant minority of us...

 

Bariatric surgeries have been cancelled because the hospitals are full of COVID patients. It would be much better if they were just fat instead.

 

From my understanding, the only way for COVID19 to go away is if the R0 number goes below 1. Also from my understanding, the R0 number with vaccination is above 1. Therefore vaccination will not end the pandemic but does largely protect those who are vaccinated from serious illness leading to hospitalization and death.

I have not read anything suggesting it is realistic that we will eliminate COVID19. I would be happy to be wrong, obviously.

 

The end of the COVID-19 pandemic will not be the elimination of COVID-19, it will be when COVID-19 becomes an endemic disease with manageable transmission rates and a much lower incidence of severe illness and death. High vaccination rates are the key to that happening.

 

I don't believe that's the technical definition of a pandemic. Nevertheless, the vaccine allows all who want to avoid serious illness and death to reduce their risk significantly. Why should we be imposing this on others, any more than we should be imposing all sorts of other self harm risk reductions?

The vaccinated can proceed with their lives normally protected by the vaccines. The unvaccinated can proceed with their lives as they wish, having been given the opportunity to reduce their risk but choosing otherwise. In other words, by your definition, the vaccine has been eliminated for those who want it to be eliminated and not for those who don't want it to be.