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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?

I think in such a hypothetical, the whole political climate of 21st century neo-neoliberalism will be fundamentally altered. There would be a huge rightward shift on distrust to authorities, especially but not limited to scientists and public health authorities. I don’t think the public would be satisfied with Fauci and other heads being tried, and will demand sentences for the thousands of individuals involved in the decision similar to what we would see in the Nuremberg trials. This would also fundamentally change the political climate, as the “vax-maxxed” lean left.

-- Profound dysegenic effects on the population. I'm not here to argue what the "smart" opinion is, or to generalize to the whole grouping, but the numbers don't lie: and it would be horrifying.

A Kaiser Family Foundation brief from September still showed gaps in vaccination by insurance, education levels and income. Individuals with an annual income under $40,000 had a 68 percent partial vaccination rate, compared with 79 percent for incomes $90,000 or higher.

The discrepancies just get worse as you work into the tails, especially once you correlate with education. We'd lose disproportionately smart, educated, employed people relative to dumb, uneducated, and unemployed people. Simple facts. Fall of civilization level event? Maybe.

-- I think your definitions of Left-Right might be idiosyncratic to mine. One would think that the reaction to such an occurrence would be civil libertarian and a strong enshrinement of bodily autonomy, something like Kulak's dreamland. One could equally see urges towards civil libertarianism leading to 60s/BLM excesses and a corresponding backlash. I don't see a strong Right-Wing gain in the sense in which the Republican party passed the Patriot Act or the sense in which the Right wing favors abortion restrictions. All the political effects will be downstream of the dysgenic effects. If we lost 20% of our engineers, lawyers, codemonkeys maybe we get a safetyism administration that seeks to carefully husband our remaining human resources.

-- I'd like to think that political leaders involved would be permanently discredited, but that has not been my experience of prior disasters. See E.G. the Iraq war; people today say that everyone supported it. I point out that I went to large protests against it and Ted Kennedy fillibustered it, they say I'm nitpicking. It will all be memory holed.

If they're so smart, why did they fall for the psy-op?

I can see smart teenagers fall for it because they're too busy to study to go online and 'do their own research' which has been the easiest thing in history since circa 2005.

Anyone with a certain brain processing power that has lived in the Western world for 20+ years has no excuse.

Weren't you around for the Iraq WMD or any of these dozens of disasters resulting from trusting government and corporations?

What is your exact definition of the psy-op, here?

That young people had a need to turn themselves into GMO experiment.

-injections do not protect from getting the disease

-have negative side effects in a % of the pop, including fertility (imaging wanting children in the future and submitting to a potentially sterilizing procedure)

-below a certain age the disease itself is basically not deadly

-governments prevented travel from pure humans but that's over

-colleges prevented attending but that's on the way out

-some companies prevented holding a job, probably over and plenty of companies did not

In summary, injection was unnecessary, harmful to health, and not taking it relatively easy to avoid for presumably smart people

  • -13

Out of that list, the second one (negative side effects in a % of pop including fertility) remains unproven beyond a fairly small number of verified side-effects, the first and the third one are not necessarily among the reasons for taking the vaxx (even if the vaccine does not prevent one from getting the disease they might still want to mitigate effects and even if it's not deadly you might still want to mitigate otherwise a potentially nasty disease), and the rest (the ones about the mandates) have little do with one's intelligence, beyond that presumably intelligent people will have a larger probability of being in college or holding a high-paying job they can't afford to lose and would thus be under extra pressure to comply with the mandates, if the mandates even where the fundamental reason why they took the vaccine.

The disease is not particularly nasty for under-30s (under-50s IME) either -- hollowing out midwits who just do what they are told would probably be even more harmful to society than the removal of upper SDs of the IQ distribution though, so you are probably correct that this hypothetical conspiracy would be a self-own.

It wasn't nasty for our family, but I know several people who said that COVID was the worst flu they've ever had, or one of the worst. I also know one ~40-year-old guy who was put to the tubes and apparently came pretty close to kicking the bucket (he was triple-vaxxed, and very overweight). Even "nastiest flu you've ever had" might well sound like something that you might want to turn into a mid-strength flu, presuming the vaccine would help do that.

Sure, I've heard people say this too -- but "nastiest flu you've ever had" is... a thing that's gonna happen sometimes? Personally the flu (maybe 'RSV', idk) that I (and roughly everyone else I know) had a month ago or so was way worse than the COVID experience. Still not in the 'worst respiratory infection ever' ballpark, but, like -- shit happens.

Even "nastiest flu you've ever had" might well sound like something that you might want to turn into a mid-strength flu, presuming the vaccine would help do that.

Which doesn't seem to have worked out for your triple-vaxxed friend -- it's almost impossible at this point to separate the vaccine impact on severity from different variants, prior exposure, etc.

But that is why I said "under 30" -- I don't know any under-30s (vaxxed or not) who had worse than a moderate cold over it. "30s-40s + other risk factors" is definitely a group where the trade-off seemed tilted towards vaccination. (not sure anymore given that it's not really clear that the bivalent boosters are providing much improvement against current variants -- certainly not over a reasonable timeframe. I'd have to be pretty frail to consider boosting every ~3 months a good idea, considering cumulative side-effect risk and potential immune system weirdities)