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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27039 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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A number of stories I vaguely follow have largely been ignored by this space. To start discussion:

Ukraine

Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk, encirclement of Ukrainian troops and collapse of the frontline:

Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore

It seems like the capeshit arc rages on, and yet another prediction of Ukrainian (or Russian, for that matter) collapse goes in the dustbin. Deepstatemap shows the UA holding onto a corner of Pokrovsk, the ISW map doesn't seem to have moved significantly, there haven't been any MSM news articles on Pokrovsk since December (?!), Russian economic collapse seems yet to materialize. Does anyone have more insight?

Measles makes a comeback in the US - who wants some lockdowns?

2025 recorded ~2500 measles cases in the US, and 733 recorded so far in 2026. This is the highest number of cases since about 1990, and for the 90s/2000s we saw low double-digit numbers of cases. A handful of children have died. Solely based on the numbers, I think you'd expect a case or two of encephalitis but I'm unsure. The biggest outbreaks are in Spartanburg county, South Carolina (Trump - 66% of the vote), Gaines county, Texas (Trump won 91% of the vote) and Mohave county, Arizona (Trump won 77% of the vote). As far as I can tell, there are no real cities in any of these counties. We're seeing a remarkable inversion where historically infectious disease outbreaks would start in the cities and people would flee to the suburbs/countryside. Maybe my next startup idea should be a chain of sanatoriums (sanatoria?) in NYC or SF.

Trans identification decreasing?

Several months late to the party, but in October a study came out suggesting the number of trans students applying to Brown had roughly halved, yoy. I suppose it's early to be declaring victory given that the data/methodology don't seem particularly rock-solid, but I'm definitely chalking it as evidence supporting my claim that there is a hardcore group of genuinely trans people, while the significant increases were rebellious teens and some better way to rebel will crop up to replace it. At the least, it's evidence that the doomers and blackpillers claiming lines go up are wrong.

Anecdotally, I've heard gen Z college students get off on being offensive. In 15-20 years Millenials will be even more deeply uncool and taking the place of boomers, while the alphas and betas rebel and move leftwards to areas we can't even imagine (but get ready for AI girlfriends. They'll be called AI-Attracted Individuals, and I'm planting a flag in the AIAI acronym right now).

Poopgate

In the most momentous news since Biden fell off a bike, leftist social media has been circulating a Forbes video claiming to show Trump soiling himself at the 0:34 mark (you'll have to find it on youtube yourself, sorry - and turn up your audio). We've now been blessed with Yahoo News' headline 'No credible evidence Trump pooped himself during executive order signing', which is interesting given the video that millions of people have watched.

It will be interesting watching Trump's mental faculties evolve over the next three years. Biden was notably sharper in 2020 than in his disastrous 2024 debate performance. Presumably Trump won't tolerate handlers the same way Biden did, so it seems like a situation that could rapidly dissolve into a ahem shitshow.

Poopgate is just the natural result of the claims that Trump wears suit jackets with large tails so he can hide evidence of soiling himself. The story was, and is, that he's not just Evil, he's also dementia-riddled and hence losing control of his bowels.

If you really want a selection of Youtube videos of the clickbait form where "medical experts" diagnose all the ailments Trump suffers from "look at the colour of this skin patch on his hand", the algorithm will happily serve them up even if you don't go looking for them. I'm not interested in Poopgate or any of these.

Though I do note how you wove in that last sentence about Trump's mental faculties: are you claiming the Poopgate et al. videos are true, or is it simply a case of "who cares if they're true, so long as the stick beats the dog?"

Regarding what future generations will be doing, it's as likely that they will move hard rightwards as hard leftwards. Millennials are the tolerant generation, so yeah a reaction against all the Coexist and QUILTBAG stuff is likely in the kids/grandkids, but that could be severely socially conservative as much as 'seize the means of production cottagecore Communism'.

Your point about measles outbreaks is interesting, I would ask what those areas have in common besides being rural. Looking at your linked map, for instance, there's an odd clustering on the Connecticut/New York state border. And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.

You might indeed do well with a chain of sanatoria in NY, given the low immunisation coverage!

Yet this BBC report tells me "The measles vaccination rate for school-aged children is about 90% in Spartanburg County, the epicentre of the outbreak." So if kids are being vaccinated, what is behind the outbreak? This story tells me:

The majority of cases remain centered in Spartanburg County, mostly among people who were either unvaccinated or didn't know their status, the South Carolina Department of Public Health reported Tuesday. There have been 89 new cases confirmed since Friday, a clear sign that the outbreak isn't under control.

Okay, but are these any people in particular, or from all demographics in the population? It's sounding like adult cases, not children, though again, there's an outbreak at a school:

More than 170 people under quarantine in Union County, North Carolina, are connected to a case at Shining Light Baptist Academy, a private Christian school that has children as young as 6 weeks old.

The quarantine orders stem from an unvaccinated child who attends the school, according to a Union County Public Health alert, “and contracted measles connected to an outbreak in South Carolina. The child attended school while contagious.”

According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, just 60.1% of students at Shining Light Baptist Academy are vaccinated against measles. A vaccination rate of at least 95% is the accepted level of herd immunity needed to protect against a measles outbreak.

“If you have schools that have very low vaccination rates, you essentially create a tinder box for measles, because it is so incredibly contagious,” said Dr. Deborah Greenhouse, a past president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “That’s what happened in the upstate of South Carolina, and that’s exactly what can happen over and over again if the disease spreads to other areas with low vaccination rates.”

Okay, so again I ask: who are these people?

It’s close, tight-knit communities with the lowest vaccination rates that have been hit hardest, according to an NBC News data investigation.

South Carolina’s outbreak, health officials said, was first reported among families who immigrated from Ukraine to Spartanburg County in recent decades. The county has one of the highest percentages of nonmedical vaccine exemptions at 8.2%, meaning schoolchildren are opting out of vaccination for personal or religious reasons.

In West Texas, cases occurred mostly in a Mennonite community in Gaines County where nonmedical vaccine exemptions are at 19.5%.

The outbreak concentrated along the border of Arizona and Utah is mostly linked to residents with ties to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mohave County, Arizona’s nonmedical vaccine exemptions are at 15.9%, and neighboring Washington County, Utah, is at 19.6%.

So, uh, let's blame those Ukrainian Mennonite Mormon Trump voters?

Poopgate is just the natural result of the claims that Trump wears suit jackets with large tails so he can hide evidence of soiling himself. The story was, and is, that he's not just Evil, he's also dementia-riddled and hence losing control of his bowels.

Did you watch the video? Someone was having a bad time. I don't have Trump's soiled diapers to rub in your face, but even if I did, you wouldn't believe me then. /shrug

Though I do note how you wove in that last sentence about Trump's mental faculties: are you claiming the Poopgate et al. videos are true, or is it simply a case of "who cares if they're true, so long as the stick beats the dog?"

Again, the video itself is 'true' insofar as it exists and isn't doctored by AI to my knowledge. The point of the last line is that Trump could deteriorate fairly quickly in the next few years similarly to Biden. I'm not sure why you'd leap to insinuating that the point is to undermine the public's confidence in Trump, why my point is that the ground truth could be mental decline.

Looking at your linked map, for instance, there's an odd clustering on the Connecticut/New York state border. And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.

Looking at the state level is misguided. Every red state has blue urban centers, and every blue state has red rural counties. More granularly:

The Northeast, Midwest, Northwest, and Pacific coast had high MMR vaccine uptake, and clusters of high coverage were concentrated in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Low coverage was seen in West Texas, southern New Mexico, northern Arizona, parts of Mississippi, and the rural Southeast.

At the state level, county-aggregated estimates ranged from 61.6% in New Mexico to 79.1% in Massachusetts (median, 71.3%). County-level estimates showed even wider variation, with a median uptake of 71.4% (range, 35.8% to 86.8%). Counties with the lowest uptake were mainly in Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas, with the highest coverage in parts of Indiana, New York, and Oregon.

So, uh, let's blame those Ukrainian Mennonite Mormon Trump voters?

I grant that they aren't garden-variety Trump voters, but do you think Mennonites vote for Harris?

Friend, there are things called adult diapers for elderly people with incontinence problems. I don't need to watch a doctored video about "Trump poopy!" to know when I'm being offered partisan clickbait. If Trump really had such problems, he would be using those garments and not "ooh ooh I soiled myself ooh ooh".

You can try to serve me up shit as chocolate mousse, but I'm not buying it.

I grant that they aren't garden-variety Trump voters, but do you think Mennonites vote for Harris?

Mennonites are notoriously non-federalized, but AFAIK the conservative ones don't vote at all. (with possible exceptions made in the event of the Second Coming, but even then you'd want to watch out for the Antichrist!)

IIRC Trump ran a specific outreach to the anabaptists on the basis that democrats would take away their customarily higher-than-usual levels of religious freedom, and this was successful in increasing his voter rolls.

And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.

Makes sense to me. Anti-vaccination tendencies, as far as I can tell, are prevalent among middle-class suburban wine moms, especially the ones that are natural medicine nerds, and that demographic is largely Blue-coded. I imagine they are also prevalent among all minority groups, religious or otherwise, that are characterized by a general distrust of state authority. Average, run-of-the-mill working class people, on the other hand, such as a big segment of the West Virginian population, only rarely adopt such views, because their attitudes towards healthcare, and pretty much everything else, are inherently practical.

It seems like the capeshit arc rages on, and yet another prediction of Ukrainian (or Russian, for that matter) collapse goes in the dustbin. Deepstatemap shows the UA holding onto a corner of Pokrovsk, the ISW map doesn't seem to have moved significantly, there haven't been any MSM news articles on Pokrovsk since December (?!), Russian economic collapse seems yet to materialize. Does anyone have more insight?

Pokrovsk and Mirnograd have effectively fallen, but there's simply no way Russia can convert this or any other conquest into a massive rout to the Dnieper. It can push and probe along the whole frontline and exploit any local weaknesses until Ukraine scrambles enough reserves to plug the hole. It can slowly move the frontline in the Donbass so it can, in the worst case, neutralize the contradiction between Russian and Ukrainian demands.

But both countries are basically looking at the economies more than they are looking at the front. Ukraine's is on European life support, Russia's is circling round the drain. The real "not-loser" will be the one that can recover better, that's why Trump with his "let's just all make more money together" approach to diplomacy is so vital for Russia, Europe has whipped itself into a frenzy and keeps sabotaging peace talks by insisting on terms that ensure Russia will have a harder time recovering from the war, knowing full well that this only prolongs the fighting.

The real "not-loser" will be the one that can recover better,

I disagree. It is perfectly possible for two belligerents to both lose as opposed to the counterfactual of not fighting a war. Ukraine will most certainly be worse off than if they had just written of the Crimea and the two 'rebel' oblasts. Russia will most certainly be worse off than if Putin had never invaded.

that's why Trump with his "let's just all make more money together" approach to diplomacy is so vital for Russia, Europe has whipped itself into a frenzy and keeps sabotaging peace talks by insisting on terms that ensure Russia will have a harder time recovering from the war, knowing full well that this only prolongs the fighting.

If the West had simply wanted to stop the fighting, we could just not have supported Ukraine, thus allowing Putin to win decisively. We supported them both for moral and pragmatic reasons: punishing defectors to the international rule-based order when we can is good, and weakening a big NATO opponent by making the wars they are waging disastrously expensive in people and materiel is sound strategy.

Last time I checked (which is a while ago), the main obstacles to a peace deal were that Russia wanted territory it does not currently hold and Ukraine wants some security guarantee so that it does not find Russia coming for the next slice in a decade.

At the end of the day, the people who need to be convinced of a peace deal are Zelenskyy and Putin. If they want to make peace, there is little the US or Europe could do to stop them. Europe being more willing to support Ukraine than Trump is hardly feels like 'evil EU thwarting Peacebringer Trump's visionary plan for peace'.

I disagree. It is perfectly possible for two belligerents to both lose as opposed to the counterfactual of not fighting a war.

You and I mean the same thing, there will be no winners in this war. But someone will be able to say they haven't been shafted as much as the other.

Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk

This sort of nonsense is why I do not follow the war news. It's disgusting seeing people, especially foreigners, cheer on two Slavic teams slowly grinding each other into nothingness, hype up a minor breach (in reality "a group of Russians maybe spotted slightly ahead of their usual positions") or interpret troop movements in the rear as a sign of impending collapse.

My dad used to repeat that the strongest bet in WWII on a day-to-day base was «nothing changes». But WWII was quite dynamic compared to this. It's actually hard to take territory in this kind of a war. Most gains are ephemeral digital map-painting, but losses are very real, and yet very gradual and insufficient to undermine either side's long-term warfighting capacity. Of course there's no decisive defensive line or «logistics hub» the loss of which will doom Ukraine – they can retreat just a little, to a more thoroughly prepared set of fucking trenches, and continue eroding Russian troops with the usual drone-centric tactics. There won't be gallant armor brigades thundering over the steppe, armor burns easily these days. With steady Chinese support of Russian military industry (bought and paid for) and steady European life support for the entire Ukrainian state (presumably Russians will end up paying for that too), it can go on like this for many years more.

Any plausible upset can only come from those external forces – either China ramping up its engagement, actually selling military assets rather than just dual-use goods and some sneakily rebranded «civilian» lasers and such (at the cost of losing European markets and goodwill, won largely through Trump's buffoonery), or the EU/NATO committing forces, or providing Ukraine with F-35s or something to that effect, or maybe the US getting serious. Nobody seems interested, however.

given that the data/methodology don't seem particularly rock-solid,

For a discussion on the study and it's issues, you can check this article by SEGM

At the least, it's evidence that the doomers and blackpillers claiming lines go up are wrong.

Chris has me blocked, so can someone ask him who is he talking about? "Social contagion" and "trans trend" have been the dominant narrative on the anti-trans side for years.

A number of stories I vaguely follow have largely been ignored by this space

I stopped doing regular dispatches from the Trans Wars because even relatively major developments don't feel like fertile ground for discussion, but since we're already here: the first detransitioner has won $2 miilion in a malpractice lawsuit. A few days later, in a move completely unrelated to the recent news, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a statement recommending against gender surgeries for youth below 19. There's about two dozen more such lawsuits in the pipeline, and they all started prior to the resolution of this case hitting the news.

I'll echo Chris' "too early to declare victory", but I'd say it's safe to assume this will put a major damper on the process of transing kids. Even sympathetic providers will likely find themselves putting some effort into exploring alternatives, to cover their own ass, if nothing else. They'll hopefully also think twice before pommelling parents with "would you rather have a happy son or a dead daughter?".

I stopped doing regular dispatches from the Trans Wars because even relatively major developments don't feel like fertile ground for discussion

Remember, it won't affect you in your normal life! So I was thoroughly informed in response to my own little dispatch from the Wars, Irish front. Naturally everyone is ignoring these nothingburger stories which have nothing at all to do with ordinary, non-trans people in their ordinary, non-trans lives. When they said "you must" they didn't mean "you must"!

I wish you'd include a link to the old Ukraine discussions, as it would be nice to go through and downgrade my opinion of certain forum posters' forecasting ability relative to the confidence they projected in Ukraine's impending doom.

This forum has a lot of pro-Russian (or anti-Western is probably a better term for them) posters who are smart enough not to go full "just 2 more weeks!!!" but who still fall for a lot of the pro-Russian propaganda overall. I vaguely recall a post involving a new Russian missile that would be a wunderwaffe.

As always, Ukraine could experience upsets at any time, but the likelihood of that at any given point is relatively low compared to just muddling along as usual.

You fell head over heels for the obvious fake Selzer poll despite being tell you otherwise. Have you downgraded your forecasting ability?

Excuse you, "obvious" fake? Not at all, it was just muddled in what it was picking up! I have that from the horse's mouth 😁

The Des Moines Register released a poll saying we were up, 47 to 44. Sheila, for one, didn’t believe it. “We’re not winning in Iowa,” she said. But since the polling firm, Selzer & Company, was one of the most reputable, she suspected it was picking up something positive for us: perhaps a shift in the votes of suburban women, or perhaps Republican women moving to our corner."

Harris, Kamala. 107 Days (p. 268). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.

I'm blocking Zeke since he mostly just posted ad hominems instead of actual arguments when responding to me. I can't see his comment. What does this have to do with Ukraine?

  • -18

Blocking is petty, and announcing you have blocked someone is extremely petty. If you want to know what someone you have blocked is saying about/to you, you need to unblock him or view the board without being logged in.

Blocking people certainly isn't petty if they consistently resort to ad hominems. Attacking the speaker rather than their arguments ought to result in a mod action unless there are exceptional circumstances IMO since it almost always degenerates to heat > light, but that's not really enforced here. I wish there was something like Twitter's mute functionality as that's what I'd prefer over full blocking, but if blocking is the only thing I have then that's what I'll use.

But you're right, I should probably have just ignored this. Fruit from a rotten tree.

but that's not really enforced here

Yes it is. We just don't always agree with you what constitutes an attack. Many people are maximally sensitive to anything said to them, and want maximum charity when interpreting anything said by them.

If you consider your behavior in posts like these to be fine, then I would not consider you to have a very good definition of what constitutes an ad hominem

Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.

you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll

you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.

You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit

Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.

More comments

I don’t mostly pet ad hominems. I just find it beyond rich that you are gloating about people’s forecasting opinion when you were taken in by the most obviously bad forecast. Glass house and all.

In fact you blocked me for pointing out your failure of forecasting due to your worldview.

Sorry, I was actively looking at the thread I had in mind and just forgot to link it. It's this one.

Thank you for the link. That's a pretty juicy one. That sneering, spiteful attitude. Claiming America started the war. Getting pushback in the comments and responding that other people offsite had unrealistic expectations without linking anything. Even seeing "majestic capeshit arc" in context is worth a chuckle.

As one of the sort of pro-Russian regulars who otherwise never happened to make such predictions I can only make the following observation for now: during every single winter the USSR was engaged in WW2 they completed at least one successful offensive. Compared to this the Russian performance in this war is indeed found wanting. However, it's also true that as of now the Ukrainians had three whole summers to complete the victorious final counteroffensive they and their Western propagandists have been predicting since Spring 2023 which was supposed to be some sort of re-run of North Vietnam's Spring Offensive of 1975 or the Croatian Army's Operation Storm in 1995.

I'm staunchly pro-Western and have been following Ukraine relatively closely for its entire duration. I recall the hype for the summer 2023 offensive, but I don't recall much widespread hype for summer 2024, and I really don't recall anything for summer 2025 nor upcoming 2026.

Fair enough. I guess this depends on one's willingness to subject oneself to trashy FAFOist Twitter feeds and comment sections of various sorts (Youtube, Reddit etc). I've seen some people confidently predict a counteroffensive that will definitely succeed the coming summer. Either way, my point is that the Atlanticist promotion of the Ukrainian nationalist cause only makes any conceivable sense if such a swift counteroffensive happens and succeeds. The other options are a war of attrition or a peace deal, and even you're the biggest cynic on the planet whose only priority in any of this is weakening Russia, I think it's probably still a bad idea to compel the Ukrainian state to eventually grind itself down to dust and thus leave the Southwestern borders of Russia without that bulwark.

Gaines county, Texas

A short while ago, someone made a comment which mentioned that technology and wealth seem to be utterly failing at making us happier, and (IIRC rhetorically) asked who could have foreseen that. I was starting to write up my non-rhetorical response, about how the Mennonite wariness of technology is in part specifically due to their having foreseen the risks of being trapped into dependence on some technologies (and the wealth they bring) which end up decreasing our interdependence on our fellow human beings, which weakens the bonds of community we form, which are far more important to human happiness than material wealth.

And then while doing a few searches to get quotes, I ran across the deaths of Kayley Fehr (a 6 year old Mennonite girl) and Daisy Hildebrand (an 8 year old Mennonite girl).

There's still a lot to be said about the distinction between religious laws (Mennonite communities do not prohibit vaccine use!) and religious culture (Mennonites in West Texas only have something like an 80% measles vaccination rate, well under what's believed to be needed for "herd immunity"), or about the pain of balancing Type I vs Type II errors, but I can't bring myself to write it.

As someone who never heard of Gaines county I looked up the Wikipedia article on it out of curiosity after I read your comment. This part stood out:

A large population addition to Gaines County came in 1977 when a group of conservative German speaking "Russian" Mennonites from Mexico arrived to start farming and ranching.

I'd say whatever their overall attitude is towards measles vaccination it probably has more to do with the 'German speaking "Russian" Mennonites from Mexico' part than with anything else.

I mean Trump did campaign to anabaptist groups by claiming democrats would take away their customarily high levels of religious liberty. Vaccines falling under that doesn't seem implausible.

Russia is waging a territory-centric war to secure the Donbas, probably so they can declare victory and wind down operations as much as possible. Ukraine is more attrition-aligned but territory is still necessary because it's good PR when Pokrovsk/Kupyansk/??? Holds. Syrsky is known as General 200 and loves his 'meat' counterattacks, but the Russians are performing similarly brutal operations. The Europeans have tried to pick up the slack from Trump but Belgium refused to liquidate frozen Russian assets. So, who really knows what's happening?

it's good PR when Pokrovsk/Kupyansk/??? Holds.

It’s not just that. Once Ukraine gets pushed off its major fortification line around the Donbas and into fields and open steppe, preventing a major collapse of front line gets much harder and more costly. Notice how fast the front is moving along the southern sector. That offensive spent three years jammed up on the Avdiivka-Donetsk-Vuhledar fortifications but once it got passed that it accelerated rapidly.

@Chrisprattalpharaptr

It’s not going great for Ukraine. Losing Pokrovsk is bad because it was a major logistical hub for the whole front. The last major fortification line at Sloviansk-Kramantorsk-Konstantivka is rapidly being surrounded. Once that goes the eastern front is basically cooked. There are also minor incursions into Kharkiv oblast that are gradually being developed into a more major offensive. The Zaprozhia axis is collapsing.

And like @Lizzardspawn was saying, their air defense is basically gone and their logistics are rapidly being diced up with airstrikes. I don’t know what the casulties/manpower situation is but my guess is “not great”.

Overall I would say July-August is when the oh-shit moment comes and it becomes obvious they could lose the eastern half of the country.

Overall I would say July-August is when the oh-shit moment comes and it becomes obvious they could lose the eastern half of the country.

Alright, we'll see if I remember to check back in this summer.

I have heard variations of this every few months for four years now, it’s always the same. Some random town I’ve never heard of with a population of 300 is about to fall which will cause the entire Ukrainian defense to collapse in a matter of days. Nobody is more consistently wrong than pro-Russian “realist” posters on The Motte. I know nothing about the situation but I know you’re wrong

The entire incident has convinced me that "cold hearted realism" is as much a fantasy of the speaker as any idealism.

Nobody is more consistently wrong than pro-Russian “realist” posters on The Motte. I know nothing about the situation but I know you’re wrong

Hey, if this is what you actually believe I have a proposal for you - I'm willing to bet a few hundred USD that Russia ultimately wins the war, the same wager that I offered back in the days when this forum was on reddit. If us pro-Russian "realist" posters are so consistently wrong, this is just going to be free money for you.

You won’t be talking so tough once Stinky (population 265) has fallen.

Repent, westoid. The spare room in Kovalenko's dacha has been captured with only 300 casualties.

Deepstate are as reliable as the numbers that Ukraine MOD produced about their AA effectiveness. ISW are marginally better. How many hours per day there is electricity in Kiev is better indicator how the war is going. Not saying this sarcastically - Russia right now is doing their best to keep Ukraine in the dark. So by how dark is - you can think of how the war is going. Also this hurts their GDP quite a lot - it makes the funding gap even bigger.

Measles makes a comeback in the US - who wants some lockdowns?

In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns. Lockdowns are just a bad idea.

As far as I can tell, the outbreak is mostly among religious communities who have low vaccination rates (though apparently not actually for religious reasons). There has been a small general drop in vaccination, but it's not clear if it has had a significant effect. The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.

In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns.

How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.

There has been a small general drop in vaccination, but it's not clear if it has had a significant effect.

It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?

The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.

No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead. Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?

Gaines County

Mennonites

Mohave County

Fundamentalist Mormons

Spartanburg County

Slavic-language church

centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor

Come on, man. You should know better than this. At least do the 30-second google research instead of jumping to the convenient correlation. I recall you being not so far away from this field professionally, and I've spent some time at the coalface on this, and when it comes to outbreaks of easily-avoidable communicable disease it's pretty much always oddball religious sects or low-trust immigrant communities or, in the latter case, apparently both. I'm totally happy to make the argument that "a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor", because it's right.

Feel free to cite this post smugly in a couple years if the possible trend continues and normie republicans do get memed into antivaxxing below herd immunity, or just down to the level of granola moms that have caused minor outbreaks in the past. Until then,

Edit: CPAR has mea culpa'd elsewhere in the thread - good on him.

Minnesota has low vaccination rates, due to - uh, the Somali community and fears about vaccination there? Gosh, who knew there was a secret nest of Trump voters in that community!

In 2006, 92% of Somali 2-year-olds were up-to-date on the measles vaccine, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Today's rate is closer to 24%, according to state data. A 95% rate is needed to prevent outbreaks of measles, an extremely contagious disease.

...Estimated autism rates in Somali 4-year-olds are 3.5 times higher than those of white 4-year-olds in Minnesota, according to University of Minnesota data. Researchers say they don’t know why. And in this vacuum of scientific certainty, inaccurate beliefs thrive.

Many blame the measles, mumps and rubella shot — a single injection proven to safely protect against the three viruses, with the first dose recommended when children are 12 to 15 months old.

In November, at one of Maalimisaq’s last Motherhood Circle gatherings, Somali mothers and grandmothers volleyed questions at facilitators. Won’t a shot for three viruses overwhelm a baby? Why does autism seem more prevalent here than back home?

...Most parents here vaccinate their children eventually. Many Somali families prefer to wait until a child is 5, despite a lack of evidence that doing so cuts autism rates. Measles is endemic in Somalia, where war and international aid cuts have crippled the medical system, and elsewhere in East Africa where residents here often travel.

“Measles is just a plane ride away, and measles is going to find the unvaccinated,” said Carly Edson, the state health department’s immunization outreach coordinator. “We are always at risk.”

Oh, look. The reason is not correlated with voting for Trump. Impeccably Blue and vaccinated California has outbreaks, one traced to someone who visited Texas and picked up a case from the outbreak there, plus exposure traced to international travellers (one of whom visited Disneyland).

In 2006, 92% of Somali 2-year-olds were up-to-date on the measles vaccine, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Today's rate is closer to 24%, according to state data.

Such a huge drop in 20 years is baffling.

It seems to be a combination of (1) higher autism rates (there's a bit in the article I didn't quote about a gathering for Somali mothers who asked the nurse leading it "Why does autism seem more prevalent here than back home?") being diagnosed in the USA amongst the kids and (2) from that, picking up the anti-vax attitudes around "vaccines cause autism" and (3) cultural habits of vaccinating the kids when they're older plus (4) the article can't resist blaming (a) the pandemic when everything was locked down, people couldn't go out, and thus visits to get the kids vaccinated also fell off and of course (b) it's all the fault of ICE scaring everyone so they stay home and don't go out in case they get picked up by them.

Plus the funding for vaccination initiatives such as outreach to the community got cut and such efforts were start-and-stop anyway, and on top of that back in Somalia measles is endemic, so if people travel home and back to the USA then there's a greater risk that they'll bring infection with them.

Thanks for the summary. I'm somewhat skeptical regarding 2) though, as I imagine these Somalis have long been acculturated in a Blue Tribe milieu which is rather antagonistic towards anti-waxxer activism. And 3) and 4) do sound a bit like Blue Tribe copium. Either way, a drop from 92% to 24% these factors do not really explain.

Somalis may not be running with rednecks very often, but they aren't running with the normal blue tribe locals either- they're probably exposed to antivaxxers because that's in the water, and it's kind of unpredictable what they choose to go with, because this is a fairly inward-looking community.

They aren't the same Somalis.

My apologies but I don't get it.

The Somali parents in Minnesota in 2006 were a different group than the Somali parents in 2025. Once a foothold had been obtained and a Somalia-to-Minnesota pipeline had been set up, it was much easier for the less functional to migrate.

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In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns.

How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.

"Ancestors" is rather an odd term since 1964 is well within living memory (not mine, but that of many actual Boomers). They just realized the world couldn't come to a stop because of a disease.

It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?

Already answered. It is spreading among particular religious communities who, while they are not religiously scrupulous of vaccination, intentionally don't have a lot of contact with the public health system. This includes having their own schools. Since those communities have contact with each other, it has also been spreading between them, both within the US and internationally. This has been going on for a few years now.

The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.

No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead.

You can do that if you want to be hardheaded, but burning the credibility of the CDC had a cost nevertheless. But as far as I know it has nothing to do with the current outbreak.

Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?

I wouldn't go quite so far but it's just open-and-shut correct that many people can't properly evaluate the things that we use to establish the safety of vaccines, like randomized trials. Add in the possibility of fraud/bias (which is a legitimate concern in academia and science) and that almost certainly rises from "many" to "most." Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?

Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.

Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?

Not if they just make up or fudge the numbers. In my field I can catch most of the bullshit that isn't outright lying. If it's far enough outside my wheelhouse, almost certainly not.

Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population? If Fauci had noped out day one and been replaced by a COVID mega-dove, you still would have burned credibility with half the country. We'd just be having this conversation with inverse valence.

I maintain that:

  1. The lockdowns were popular in the beginning.
  2. Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.
  3. It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

I am sympathetic to the problem here, because I do think it is a real one, but "not lying" (or perhaps with unnecessary charity, "not giving confusing, contradictory, or wrong advice") is a good place to start.

Of course, given that there were geographic cleavages in a lot of the response, having a state-by-state approach to these questions is also an underrated solution. We actually got to see that in action during COVID, as a lot of COVID rules were made on a state-by-state basis, and it seems to me that was mostly ignored on both sides in favor of arguing about whatever the CDC had said most recently. Which is unfortunate!

Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.

What counts as "corrupt" is open to a lot of discussion, but I don't think the institutions have always been this incompetent. Just look at NASA.

It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.

I think this really depends on the institution and circumstance. Sometimes the institutions actually are hostile to you.

What counts as "corrupt" is open to a lot of discussion, but I don't think the institutions have always been this incompetent. Just look at NASA.

HIV was discovered in the early 1980s, a few years after AIDS was recognized as a disease. The first drug was AZT 4 years later (6-7 years after the pandemic started), and that was a stroke of luck in that they repurposed an oncology drug that just happened to have activity against HIV. The first protease inhibitor (something designed specifically to target an HIV protein) was mid 90s, or ~15 years later.

Contrast that to COVID-19, where we had a bajillion genome sequences within months of the virus spreading, RNA-Seq datasets from infected patient lungs which led to a number of therapeutic trials (unfortunately didn't pan out, but still good shots on goal). We had paxlovid (a COVID-19 specific protease inhibitor) within a year. We had mRNA vaccines in a similar timeframe, which were more effective than anything we'd seen prior and outperformed anything the Chinese could do - how many other American institutions can say the same? That's about a 10x compression in timelines for identifying, characterizing and developing drugs to an emerging virus.

All of this, pearls before swine. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? of man hours by people like me all so some retard on twitter can go viral (no pun intended) for writing some hysterical slop about how the mRNA vaccines are going to cause mass infertility/blood clots/insta-death (how did all those predictions pan out?). The public has no idea how much effort is expended on things you would never think of - pharmacology, every manufacturing/storage/distribution step, toxicology and safety, in vitro and preclinical models. The public is ignorant of how far we've come, and the oceans of sweat and tears and grinding in the lab that have built this edifice to improve their lives.

Half the country saying the FDA moved too quickly, mRNA vaccines are dangerous, blah blah blah. Other half saying they have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands. Half the country saying lockdowns are ineffective (as if China didn't exist), the other half that the government doesn't care about their safety and people are dying. Maybe in addition to the internet, the other thing that's changed is everyone with a twitter account feels entitled to weigh in on every issue.

Just look at NASA.

I don't think NASA is a good example; their mandate means they were always going to have much less friction surface with the general population than most of what we call "institutions".

Perhaps you're right. On the other hand, though, we should expect this to increase their competency, though, since they are going to be less distorted by that friction; instead it seems their competency has declined.

NASAs competency has been consistently lousy since the end of the Apollo program, no?

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The effects of slightly more COVID deaths would have been way less visible in people's lives than the effects of long-term lockdowns turned out to be, and scared people could have just stayed home; work from home could have continued for email people without lockdowns.

They could have just ended the lockdowns after two weeks like they said they would. Or after doctors declared COVID was less dangerous than racism. Or after the vaccines became available. Instead they waited til May 2023, and by that point maskies had become subculture; I still see maskies every day. I tried going to fucking speed dating last year, and they handed out masks and required proof of vaccination.

In the mirror universe, is there a subculture of people in perpetual mourning for those who died from COVID? They'd be indistinguishable from goths.

I tried going to fucking speed dating last year, and they handed out masks and required proof of vaccination.

Last year?!? If you don’t mind saying, where do you live? Or was this hosted by some oddball organization? Genuinely curious. I live in a deep-blue city, I do still see “maskies” out and about, but I haven’t seen an event hand out masks in a very long time. And asking for proof of vaccination in 2025 is basically incomprehensible to me, that was already dying out here (again, deep-blue area) by 2023 at the very latest, and realistically I don’t recall actually being asked to show it later than 2022.

West side Chicago.

Wild. Is that relatively normal, asking for vaccine proof at an event? Or was this one just run by committed weirdos? Either way that really is crazy to me, I had no idea people like that were still out there at a scale where they could end up running a speed-dating event, especially if it wasn’t explicitly branded as a “special” zero-covid event.

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When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

The same two things every technical expert wanting to preserve their credibility should do:

  1. Say only things you are confident about
  2. Stay out of the political side of debates

They violated the first by making a lot of confident claims that later turned out to be incorrect. They violated the second by advocating for the implementation of a bunch of specific solutions which had non-medical trade-offs.

If they'd done neither and kept to relatively generic advice and a little bit of carefully-phrased speculation they might get criticism for being useless but would have avoided much of the trust loss from saying wrong things. I think you would have also seen much less aggressive fights over lockdowns and masking without The Science pushing specific solutions.

Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.

A lot of the credibility current institutions are burning came from past institutions getting things right. When they said that vaccinating everyone against measles would get rid of measles it actually did do so. The same was not so for the coronavirus.

Past institutions could just have been lucky, but I think a more sensible default assumption is that they got better results because they were better.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob.

During COVID, the scientific and medical communities enforced conformity, by ostracizing those like Bhattacharya and calling his ideas "unethical", and pulling the licenses of dissident doctors. They intended to be seen as a solid front.

I think Arjin responded to the first part more eloquently than I can. I'll just add that to the degree that this was pushed by scientists as a group then scientists should share blame for it as a group.

People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.

I've seen this argument before and the aim is usually to imply that because some of the lower-level scientists were correct you should not lose trust in science from failures of science-driven policy. Sorry if that's not what you're getting at here.

That idea is bullshit because nothing has changed in the pipeline of science to policy. When the public next gets some more fancy science-based policy it won't be from the random scientist who has sane opinions but from the same kind of people who got things wrong last time. If scientists want credit for being correct they need to actually speak up when the public is being told incorrect science. Otherwise what the scientists are saying among themselves is irrelevant to whether or not the public should trust the science that gets to them.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob.

And this was something deliberately cultivated by the scientific community itself. During Covid there were credentialed experts coming out against lockdowns or MRNA vaccines, etc., and the response was that it's the scientific consensus that counts, not individual opinions.

[H]ow exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

They could start by admitting that they are capable of being wrong, and when they update their advice, not pretending that We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken!

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

My suggestion would be to not inflame the population over it with a massive fear-mongering media campaign combined with insane unconstitutional regulations -- the lockdowns might have been popular-ish for the first few weeks or so, but without all the media and 'nudging' I think this would have faded pretty fast. Indeed it probably could have been nipped in the bud by China coverage along the lines of "look what the crazy totalitarians are doing now" and some pictures of Tank Man rather than "what a good idea!"

Public opinion is super malleable at the moment, is what I'm saying.

It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.

That's taking it a tad far.

I caught my garage in a lie the other day.

They tried to claim my windshield wipers were worn out even though I had replaced them just a few weeks before. They were embarrassed when I said so and at least did not try to push it further. But they did try to cheat me, and they tried to cheat me for about 50 bucks to boot. They have recently been bought out by a different owner, who I'm sure told them to try this, as before they didn't try such tricks.

My brake pads were also worn out. Or so they said. I chose to believe them about the brake pads despite their lie about the windshield wipers, as the brake pads had been on there for about 100k miles and the previous set didn't make it that far. Despite that, I had to restrain myself from telling them to go fuck themselves.

I'm sure that someone who is a bit more hot-headed, and/or with a bit less of an idea of how long brake pads last, would've given them the middle finger they did surely deserve for that stunt right then and there, and gone on to drive another 100k miles with worn-out brake pads. "Oh, sure, the brake pads are worn out. That's what the last guy said, and I know for damn sure he was a cheater and a liar." That would be the wrong thing to do, but I would completely get it if someone did react in that way.

I'm going to go find a different garage. But I can't just go find a different medical establishment.

And while I may have some idea of how long brake pads last, because that's the kind of knowledge you gain just by living your life and paying a little attention, I did not study medicine. I only know about my own field. You can't expect people to have in-depth knowledge about fields other than their own. But you can certainly expect people who've been lied to, to react badly.

In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns.

How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.

Isn't it, compared to influenza, 10x as infectious, with 10x the hospitalization rate and 5-10x as deadly?

If we had a vaccine that reliably stopped influenza (instead of the bullshit yearly one people try taking which misses 75% of the time) I can't imagine why we wouldn't all be on it? But the measles vaccine is a lot more reliable than the influenza vaccine? And you don't have to take it annually?

It seems like a tragedy that our society is rejecting the measles vaccine. What am I missing?

If we had a vaccine that reliably stopped influenza (instead of the bullshit yearly one people try taking which misses 75% of the time)

Supposedly it reduces symptoms more than prevents you from getting sick in the first place, but I haven't dug into the clinical literature.

As for the rest - I was joking. I am pro MMR.

It seems like a tragedy that our society is rejecting the measles vaccine. What am I missing?'

There has been a marginal change, likely due to the reasons @ABigGuy4U gives -- backlash from all that pushing of the COVID vaccine, which seemed to work about as well as the flu vaccine. Especially the pushing of it on children, who were at very low risk from COVID.

Can you maybe offer some information regarding regulations of measles vaccination in the three federal states OP has mentioned? I guess it'd be relevant here.

South Carolina requires measles vaccination for kindergarten students; they allow both medical and religious exemptions. Texas requires it for pre-K students, and allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions. Arizona requires it for daycare and kindergarten and allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions. As I understand it, these particular Mennonite communities have their own schools which are simply not covered by any of this.

What am I missing?

When you flood your country with a firehose of malignant propaganda the people eventually stop trusting you, even about basic stuff.

It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?

You're an actual expert on this stuff. I am very much not. But the common rebuttal I've seen from right-wingers is that Canada is seeing a proportionally worse increase with no RFK. The "other" factor they point to that both nations have in common over the relevant time frame is mass immigration from nations with much lower overall vaccination rates.

At a quick glance, that doesn't look like it holds much explanatory power for Spartansburg, but Gains County does seem have a high immigrant rate.. Mojave looks like it might be lower levels of immigrants than the surrounding area.

You're an actual expert on this stuff.

The bitter lessons of COVID were that my colleagues and I aren't epidemiologists, our actual specialty is worthless for making predictions in the real world and internet autists with sufficient time and motivation are at least as knowledgeable about the literature. At this point, a literate caveman with GPT terminal debating me about the literature would be like watching stockfish demolish a grade school chess class.

But the common rebuttal I've seen from right-wingers is that Canada is seeing a proportionally worse increase with no RFK. The "other" factor they point to that both nations have in common over the relevant time frame is mass immigration from nations with much lower overall vaccination rates.

I was actually unaware of the outbreak in Canada. Seems like I was wrong and @The_Nybbler was right, it's the mennonite communities in Canada/Texas and apparently 'Slavic' (Ukrainian? Russian? Apparently services are held in both) immigrants in South Carolina. Not really your garden variety Trump supporters. Mea culpa.

I was actually unaware of the outbreak in Canada. Seems like I was wrong and @The_Nybbler was right, it's the mennonite communities in Canada/Texas and apparently 'Slavic' (Ukrainian? Russian? Apparently services are held in both) immigrants in South Carolina. Not really your garden variety Trump supporters. Mea culpa.

FWIW, I'm not giving a lot of credit to the right-wingers on this one either. "Mennonites who came from Mexico in the 70's" is maybe the finest split possible between technically correct, but also really not what I took away from what those guys meant by "immigrants". Just so with "Russo-Ukranian Evangelicals".

When I was looking for links for that last post, I found this ranking of nations by MMR vaccination rate, and it does have some hotly topical immigrant source nations near the bottom, like Somalia, Haiti, and Venezuela. But that doesn't seem to have actually translated into outbreaks.

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