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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?

If you pose a hypothetical about the vaccine killing 25% of the vaccinated, you can't then use your hypothetical evidence to dunk on people for falling for a "psy-op".

It's plausible that the vaccine kills and maims some number of people, but reduces number of people killed and maimed by a larger number. Then it's rational to take the vaccine. But people weren't even working on that much information at the time, and it's a much harder problem.

The person you're responding to is so deep in their own fantasy scenario that they're already rolling out the gotchyas for something that they just straight made up lol.

"Let's assume a hypothetical scenario in which all smart people just punch themselves in the face once a day. Well if they're so smart, how come they keep punching themselves in the face once a day? Riddle me that, ace, riddle me that!"