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Notes -
https://apple.news/APEuOPHP2TWqeUTR_h8QypA
So the Republican speaker of the house has decided to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s business dealings with hunter. I have serious doubts that this will go very far as democrats still control the senate. This looks like an attempt to stir up the base for re-election season.
I personally see this as a big distraction as we have a lot of very serious problems that need to be addressed. BRICs, Taiwan, Ukraine, inflation, and
AP covers it with the stock phrase "claiming without evidence" that we saw so much of in 2020.
Is there a word for that kind of use of cliché? I think Orwell wrote about it being omnipresent in '30s propaganda.
It's just classic propaganda principles:
I am a tennis fan. On the tennis Reddit page, they are discussing Novak’s comment that he isn’t anti-vax but stood for the proposition that bodily integrity meant he shouldnt be forced to take the vax.
The five bullets you list explain perfectly how the propaganda affected the main heavily upvoted response on Reddit.
The highly upvoted poster makes the claim taking the vax isn’t about freedom but that Novak was selfish putting others at risk by refusing the jab and thereby not getting to herd immunity.
This was a common refrain during the pandemic. It appealed to people’s emotions, it repeated a simple idea, it didn’t wrestle with other arguments, and it vilified a small subset (the selfish people refusing to take a safe jab to protect everyone else).
The poster never seemed to stop and think about the particulars. For example, Novak already had covid. Why did he need a vaccine? Why would a vaccinated person need protection from non-vax? How far did this principle go (ie should fat people be required to have medical surgery to lose weight given that their fatness imposes a strain on the health system)? How effective were the vaccines at creating herd immunity compared to a prior infection? How deadly was covid? If someone was very scared of covid, what protections could they take themselves instead of demanding everyone else take precautions? Did susceptible people have the right to force medical interventions onto others so that susceptible people could live their lives more normally? What amount of risk is appropriate to impose on someone for the good of the collective? Who gets to determine what is the appropriate risk? What process should be used?
There are a ton of meaty issues there. Maybe you determine on net you are still pro socially sanctioned vaccine taking but it isn’t obvious and it isn’t obviously selfish to oppose it. Indeed, in Novak’s case he sacrificed a lot for his principle (skipped numerous tournaments which could’ve cost him the all time slams lead) so kind of weird to even call him selfish — seems a lot more selfless compared to the redditor smugly denouncing him with no cost to the redditor. But I think it’s because propaganda worked. The pro vax redditor repeated the simple talking points drilled into his or her head during an emotional time and identified Novak as a villain.
What’s really odd is that the propaganda still works on vaxes! The redditor continues to make these claims in light of the severe underperformance of the vaccine in stopping the spread. You would think that would cause him or her to say “did I make a mistake somewhere in my thought process” but nope.
Makes me think “where do I have these blinders.”
I think this is a perfectly legitimate analysis of provax propaganda. Especially as we know for a fact that States engaged in deliberate propaganda tactics in this specific issue.
But be careful to consider that such rethorical tools are just that: tools. Anyone can wield them. Indeed you could very well take some antivax discourse and apply this analysis there as well.
The important lesson here is twofold:
It also didn't help that COVID was compared to the 1918 flu; while it was worse than a typical flu season, it's more comparable to the 1957 or 1968 flu pandemics than 1918, which took out a lot of healthy young people. Our public health institutions and memes are in a very real way coasting and riding on the mind-boggling gains we got from the discovery of germ theory to the advent of cheap and readily available antibiotics. COVID's bad, but smallpox it is not.
I'm still amazed people managed to convince themselves to destroy the economy for something this mild. Especially when the same experts who said we should ran simulations before and were quite happy to write down that this was the worst possible thing you can do when experiencing a much harder challenge. We gamed it out to be prepared and then threw away the playbook day one.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised we got a cowardly middle manager response when we select politicians to be cowardly middle managers.
That clip of the republican primary debate where a question is asked and everyone but Vivek is glancing at everyone else to see if they should raise their hand or not is a perfect model of what happened.
Vivek being China of course. For which nothing but a hard response was ever in the cards. And then most of the west aligned because nobody in power had any guiding principles or leadership, so they just followed the lead of whatever seemed to have any authority.
They were convinced to sell the entire manufacturing sector to the Chinese for ...nothing at all afaict, so this isn't that surprising.
Bill Clinton sold trade agreements to the Chinese in exchange for buckets of Chinese cash. The manufacturers sold their capabilities to China in exchange for increased profitability. The American Consumer got cheaper goods and thus cheered it on.
The only people that got nothing in exchange were the manufacturing laborers, but their careers were a sacrifice the rest of us were willing to make.
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