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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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So there have been a lot of people suddenly collapsing or dying recently. Or have there? My Twitter feed certainly seems to think so. Off the top of my head we have Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well. This does seem... odd? I can't remember a lot of people just suddenly collapsing and dying in the past although I remember Hank Gathers from 1990 as a rare exception.

Now, I'm willing to accept that it's possible that sudden deaths of healthy people may be normal-ish thing. Possibly this is just signal-boosted noise. As a heuristic, no one I know personally has collapsed so it's presumably not incredibly widespread. We also have the possibility that Covid itself, not vaccines, is causing these deaths.

The problem is that, as a layperson, it is nearly impossible for me to obtain unbiased information about this phenomenon. I encourage you to search Google for "vaccine death". The results are a muck of "fact checks", opinion pieces, and out-of-date articles talking about how many lives the vaccine saved.

On the other hand, on Twitter, (where free speech is truly allowed now), #vaccinedeath is allowed to trend. However, the results for that hashtag tend to be a lot of anecdotes of sudden collapses mixed in with spurious assertions about vaccine safety.

What's a normal person to do in this information environment? For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself. However, I have little confidence in this assessment. And I have no faith that I will be able to reach a confident assessment. When counter-narrative information is suppressed by the media and by the scientific apparatus, how can we trust anything they say? But it doesn't mean the counter-narrative is correct either. It just means there is no way to be confident without a free exchange of ideas.

They haven't released a cause of death for Adam Rich or Victoria Lee yet, so it's inappropriate to count them toward some current trend. Celebrities die all the time without the family releasing a cause of death. When it happens to younger people it often means suicide or that drugs were involved, which seems a bit apt with respect to Rich as he has a known history of mental illness. As for Lee, her sister said:

Please give our family grace and respect during this most difficult time. And please, check on your loved ones. Keep checking on them. Give them hugs and tell them how much they mean to you. You just never know.

This isn't the kind of advice one gives in the wake of a sudden death from an unknown cause. As for the ODU basketball player, he collapsed during the game, was responsive the entire time, spent the rest of the game on the bench, rode home on the team bus, and was supposed to follow up with ODU medical staff upon returning to campus. This isn't exactly in the same league as Hamlin's injury, and probably wouldn't be in the news at all (At least outside of the Hampton Roads area) had the country not been on edge due to what happened last Monday. So that leaves Hamlin as the only person who had a sudden, life-threatening cardiac event, and I'd hardly call one person a trend.

So that leaves Hamlin as the only person who had a sudden, life-threatening cardiac event, and I'd hardly call one person a trend.

Come on son. It doesn't leave shit, all you have done is claim Rich (54) was young and had a history of mental illness (he was a child movie star) and so he might have oded or killed himself.

Then we get to Lee, where you tell us that people don't advise others to check on your loved ones and tell them you love them when someone dies suddenly of an unknown cause? The conclusion you reach being - I think - that she committed suicide too? Why wouldn't your loved one dying suddenly of an unknown cause prompt you to check on your loved ones and make sure they know how much you love them - before it's too late you know, before they die suddenly from an unknown cause?

Lastly we have the ODU player, who didn't die, so his life wasn't threatened enough to count. And now you have made up just so stories for three of them, you can declare Hamlin the only person who had a sudden, life-threatening cardiac event! Except you can't expect any of that to convince the op - he is concerned because he doesn't know what information he should be believing, and you throw even more possibilities into the mix! Or to put it another way, jeroboam expressed his hypothetical possibilities to promote gathering more information. You expressed your hypothetical possibilities to promote gathering less information.

  • -11

I speculated based on the available evidence. If you find this insufficient, then I'm willing to concede that we don't know anything about the cause of death/cause of collapse and should avoid speculating about it at all. The lease reasonable course is to insinuate that these must have all been related to the COVID vaccine, of which no evidence exists at all.