Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

Realistically it would create vaccine hesitancy in some percentage of people that heard about the story. I already had to talk my dad into getting his booster in a few months because after he heard he became concerned about getting it.

For this reason and probably more structural reasons nobody in media is willing to report it. Unfortunately there are certain media members who are hungry for the story but these are not the kinds of groups we want to talk to. They will simply use the story to fuel their silly vaccine conspiracy theories they push.

The Mayo clinic folks will eventually publish their research paper that includes both cases. We have no idea when that will be but they are committed and legally bound to provide the final copy to my friend.

You mean like anti-vaxxers dragging down the overall protection rate until there's outbreaks occurring despite everyone else's best efforts and then people die? Like how 50 Samoan children died because of them? https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/anti-vaccination-a...

Is that what you meant?

Or can we not use mean words against anyone even if they threaten our childrens' lives?

As best as I can tell, the reason democratic processes have produced the best government in history isn't because the electorate is making well-reasoned assessment of various policy options.

It's because it provides a relatively quick feedback cycle, and because people can vote according to their interests and the wounds of previous policy will get treated. The way to keep it safe from abuse by far right extremists ("populists") is to have broad-based parties that reflect economic classes and which can provide direct connections between the different parts of the community and the political system.

Parties based on ideology are less capable of compromise so they're less responsive to genuine needs. A business-owners party and a workers party can agree to free trade or protectionism, mandatory public holidays or freedom of contract: the agreement can be believed to be a win for both sites that makes everyone stronger. But, say, a business-libertarian party can only concede it didn't have the power to force both free trade and freedom of contract, and can't call the law they got through an agreement. Ideology is also something that is interesting to fewer people, so they will have narrower bases, more subject to whim and fancy.

Democracy isn't perfect, but is there a better system? It seems like everything that is better than democracy done now is just democracy done better. Do you think it would be better to adopt a Saudi-style absolute monarchy or a PRC-style party state?

I disagree with the bit after the semicolon quite strongly. I described my alternative opinion elsewhere in this thread. Democracy has survived very well without sufficient education; it works because it means representatives from the whole community can negotiate an outcome that addresses their actual concerns. For this to work, you need representatives of the whole community and the ability to negotiate, both of which are hard to find in the current US for various reasons. The representatives need to be motivated to find a negotiated settlement that address their core concerns at least, which is impossible under ideological parties where promotion is predicated on purity. But these conditions aren't very hard to reach, and certainly much easier than the idea of a well-educated electorate. (PS: No one has a "core interest" of, say, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Everyone who has an interest in that could be migrated to other areas: coal miners want respectable and well-paid work; mine owners want the value of their investments to remain. This means that once negotiated settlements are possible, those which are needed but not well understood are possible too, even with poorly educated electorates.)

As to the bit before the semicolon, I guess someone must've done studies. Is democracy more stable or less stable than alternative constitutions? How do you even measure stability? Obviously the US hasn't been stable for the whole time since the constitution was written, but it was even able to recover after it lost its footing. I think that alone demonstrates that democracy can be robust (not everyone could vote, but I think the ways in which the US was a democracy were sufficiently clear that it would be wrong to attribute it to some alternative style).