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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.

We'd lose disproportionately smart, educated, employed people relative to dumb, uneducated, and unemployed people.

Well, if the vaccine is that deadly, how smart are the "smart, educated" people who went ahead and got it, versus the "dumb, uneducated" who were suspicious and sceptical?

This kind of class-sneering drives me batty. Oh no, all the morons and idiots will survive! What do you care, if your smart, educated, employed corpse is in the grave?

This isn't the gotcha you think it is An intelligent person who made one mistake is still more intelligent than a dumb person who made one lucky decision

Dead smart guy is still dumber than lucky live dumb guy.