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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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As a newer account with the fervor to post and fill my profile page, I initially was tempted to excise this post point-by-point, explaining where my thoughts differed. However, after starting to write, I realized I'm in the same camp as TitaniumButterfly - there is a notable lack of specificity here. I am not sure what ideological camp or viewpoint you're claiming to advocate, given your language avoids the usual COVID buzzwords. It seems you expect us to know what you're referring to by "enemy doctrines" and "grim smiles of doctrinaires," but they're blowing right over my head. I can sort of see what tea leaves you're gesturing to. I just don't know what you mean exactly. A good place to start might be explaining your conclusion so I can reason backward.

...the Vaccine Moment was a malevolent, planned, opportunistic structural attack on a segment of Western Society.

  1. Malevolent, how? Malevolent because of the direct medical consequences of using "genetic technology"? Malevolent because it showed that the technocratic establishment was able to shape public will given the right cause? I can tell you generally disapprove of the way that scientific authority was wielded during the pandemic, but what do you believe the negative consequences of the COVID reaction are, exactly?
  2. Planned, how? Information about COVID was very scare and contradictory at the beginning. The global population was incredibly scared and confused and looking toward authorities for some guidance. Those authorities did not want to find themselves without that guidance. They did not want to appear incompetent. I find it much more likely that the response to the pandemic was one that was necessarily imperfect due to the political and biological realities of pandemic life and the incredible demand for solutions. If it was planned, what aspects do you believe were coordinated and for what goal?
  3. Structural, how? The structures that led to the rollout of the vaccine were largely in place prior to the pandemic and I don't believe they've been dramatically changed since. Perhaps you mean structural in terms of our social relationship to science. What do you mean by structure - even in the Foucaltian sense?
  4. Which segment of Western society? Why that segment in particular, why Western society, rather than the world? The entire world experienced the pandemic, most countries had inconsistent and fraught COVID responses, and large portions of the world received exported American vaccines.

I'm not being intentionally glib here, I just haven't participated in COVID discourse in quite a long time so I'm failing at the word association game you're trying to play.

I think he’s referring to two things:

  1. The significant evidence that COVID was genetically engineered, and the sketchy circumstances of its origin. Jeffery Sachs has spoken about this at length, and about how members of the scientific community that were reporting on the likely man-made origin of the plague were shouted down and suppressed.
  2. Various governments using COVID as an excuse to try and roll out all sorts of different authoritarian measures (lockdowns, quarantine orders, travel restrictions, mask mandates, vaccine passes, crackdowns on “misinformation”).

Those are definitely externalities that I considered, but even when taken together I don't think they encompass precisely what OP is objecting to. Nor do they illustrate the reasons behind OP's apparent discontent.

I can sort of see what tea leaves you're gesturing to. I just don't know what you mean exactly.

This is a tactic that allows mottes and baileys and is why we talk about speaking plainly. If he were to post that the vaccine is dangerous, it could be rebutted.

The main thing that distinguishes that from a troll post is that there is a lot of Covid skepticism here that he could be trying to appeal to, but the skepticism here is about lockdowns and the political handling of Covid, which is only his point 1. Everyone here (minus the lizardman constant) thinks vaccines work.

Everyone here (minus the lizardman constant) thinks vaccines work.

I'd note that this kind of demonstrates one of OP's points — the lumping together of "all vaccines into one monolithic product and doctrine." That you either believe "vaccines work" — all things that we choose to label a "vaccine," regardless of how novel the technology — as a whole, or you want to bring back polio. That anyone who so much as doubts the mRNA shot must be a scientifically-illiterate moron who thinks Edward Jenner was a fraud and the MMR shot causes autism.

Plus, it's also consensus-building.

In theory, you could believe that one vaccine works independently of the others. In practice, not so much.

Broadening the scope, it's uncontroversial to believe that some medications work, some medications don't really work, and some work but have unacceptable side-effects. I don't see why vaccines have to be any different.

Along those lines, I tried an allergy nasal spray for the first time yesterday and it's the single most effective thing I've ever had at relieving sinus pressure (and being able to breathe through my nose). The problem is I read the side effects list after trying it once and apparently cataracts and glaucoma are side effects of regular use, and apparently this applies to pretty much all other allergy nasal sprays as well.

Definitely not worth going blind to get some sinus relief.

Some medicines have different levels of effectiveness and different levels of side effect severity for different people even. I used Flonase on and off for a couple years, and never had any issues with eye pressure as far as my optometrist could measure. Allergists were thrilled by the stuff, because "maybe it'll give you glaucoma if you're susceptible and use it for years on end and don't check for warning signs" from nasal steroid sprays was still a big step up from "you can clear up your congestion for a few days, after which you have to stop or the rebound effect will just give you double-strength congestion for much longer" from nasal decongestant sprays.

Anyway, you don't want to use anything for years for sinus relief, regardless of side effects. If you've got congestion problems that last longer than the few weeks at a time of bad pollen seasons, get yourself taking allergy shots. They're very inconvenient (for me it was three shots a week, tapering down to one a week as they increased in dosage, for months and months) but very effective (I went for about two years unable to breathe through my nose after moving to a new neighborhood with more and different pollen; a decade or more after my shots I get congested maybe a few days a year during a bad year).

In practice, not so much.

"Some vaccines work and are worth the harm they cause and other vaccines do not work or are not worth the harm they cause" would be a statement 95% of the people regularly labeled vaccine deniers or anti-vaxxers would agree with

even a slight amount of honest engagement with them would reveal that

How about believing that one "vaccine" doesn't work, independently of all the others that do?

I get it, you want to smear anyone who has concerns about the mRNA "vaccine" as a brain-dead "science-denier" who wants to bring back measles and mumps, but quite a few people — including most people I know IRL — accept that all the many real vaccines do work… but not the "clot shot" bioweapon.

In practice, I'm fairly sure a lot more people believe in polio vaccine than flu vaccine.

Everyone here (minus the lizardman constant) thinks vaccines work.

I find OP somewhat frustrating for those motte/bailey/tea leaf reasons, but the CDC had to change their definition of vaccine because the COVID vaccine turned out so mediocre.

I think this was more due to the arrogance of the average public health agent combined with a heaping serving of sunk cost fallacy than some planned maliciousness, but it wasn't exactly encouraging as a development.

Everyone here (minus the lizardman constant) thinks vaccines work.

There probably are few here who would claim that no vaccines work, but if referring to the COVID vaccine specifically, that's a lot of lizardmen.

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