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Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

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Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#331
post #327
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libertarianism doesn't rely on all people making individually good choices. It relys on power being extremely spread out so the blast radius of bad choices is contained and the law of averages comes into play because the median person makes ok to good decisions. And people keep proposing systems that do worse than that and refusing to critically assess how their ideas work out in practice vs a free market.

Note the rest of the sentence where I specified to be a desirable place to live. Outliers matter: if you live on a block with 10 houses, you care more about the one which is falling apart and full of rats than the ones which are mostly okay. > And people keep proposing systems that do worse than that and refusing to critically assess how their ideas work out in practice vs a free market. Can you provide examples of t…

> Outliers matter: if you live on a block with 10 houses, you care more about the one which is falling apart and full of rats than the ones which are mostly okay.

What is the plan? Imprison the person living in the ratty house? Fine them into oblivion? I've never heard of a case of a town council taking over someone's house to repair it - I'm sure it happened somewhere once but that is quite the outlier.

I've seen plenty of dilapidated houses, and lived near some quite large rats. There is no reason to think it would be worse in a more liberal society.

> Can you provide examples of the baseline you’re using to say that other systems do worse? Successful implementations, not idealized imaginings.

goes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index and scans down the list

Hong Kong, jewel of Asia? Switzerland is probably pretty decentralised too, they certainly have the most democratic government I know of. And the highest-ranked superpower on the list, everyone's favourite USA, is famous for having some of the strongest constraints on their government in the world.

To be honest, I'd be happy if we all just did what Switzerland does. I'll take extreme democracy over any specific ideology if pushed. We can argue the details later.

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#332

As a part-time libertarian, one of the frustrating parts of the pandemic has been discovering how many people need the nanny state to step to stop them punching themselves in the face. Near the start of the pandemic, I thought the most intrusive state powers would barely be needed. Why would you ever need to make a vaccine mandatory? What rational person would refuse a lifesaving medicine offered to them for free? We…

List of folks who refuse it:

1. Young, healthy and fit people who don't have any prior medical conditions. I checked the stats in Canada and I have a lot more chances of dying in a car accident than COVID in my age group.

2. Minorities who have had very bad treatment by the medical community in the past. Numerous examples of blacks, Latin Americans, indigenous being used for experiments.

3. Similar to point 2, anyone who's low income and therefore had poor treatment by the medical community.

4. Everyone who's already gotten natural infection immunity. There's numerous studies of this being much stronger and longer lasting. While they also say that an extra vaccine might boost the immunity slightly more too, there's very little benefit imo, especially if you are already young and healthy.

5. Many vaccinated folks also oppose vaccine mandates because that requires disclosing personal information. Quebec's vaccine passport app already got hacked including name, date of birth, IP address and which vaccines. And the Quebec government was very dismissive of this whole thing too which didn't instil any confidence in them.

Vaccine mandates are also opposed by many in the minority community as they know this is just another reason which will cause more law enforcement actions.

Here's Aba & Preach, 2 of the largest black YouTubers of Canada, explaining why they oppose such vaccine mandates even though they themselves are vaccinated. They explain how historical poor and unethical treatment explains why many minorities or those from poor families are skeptic of the health care institutions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6yHSIqsT9g

https://youtu.be/Kt1FsXdrX5I

So there's many reasons of not getting the irreversible, non-long term tested, declining efficacy and short lasting vaccine. There's no guarantees of how many boosters and how often they will be required. Israel is already talking about the 4th booster shot.

Also this whole mandate thing just makes the public even more accepting of more surveillance.

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#333

You just need to raise the bar to see the difference between those who will/won't and where their will to resist expires. For most people it's a pretty low bar and when it comes to paying your mortgage then most folk won't jeopardize their job.

> For most people it's a pretty low bar and when it comes to paying your mortgage then most folk won't jeopardize their job.

Maybe so, but when you use naked force to make people do things, you make an enemy for life. Anyone forced to choose between his bodily integrity and feeding his family will never, ever, not a million years, forgive you, even, and he will hate you for the rest of your days.

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Truly held" false belief is still false, and no justification for undermining public health, or being a parasite on other's contributions to it. As the MAGA fascist Q-cultists are so fond of chanting, f--k their feelings.

Yeah! After we force inject everyone then we can round up the fat people next and get rid of the number 1 and 2 killers of humans and bring our healthcare costs down. /s Totally not a fascist stance.

There are plenty of non-fascist things the state could do that might help address the obesity problem (like stopping massive maize subsidies) but the state won't do any of them. Sad.

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#335

As a part-time libertarian, one of the frustrating parts of the pandemic has been discovering how many people need the nanny state to step to stop them punching themselves in the face. Near the start of the pandemic, I thought the most intrusive state powers would barely be needed. Why would you ever need to make a vaccine mandatory? What rational person would refuse a lifesaving medicine offered to them for free? We…

Punching yourself in the face, or nanny state discussions, is more akin to something like a seat belt law. We have seat belt laws to stop the individual from hurting themselves, not because we're afraid they're going to launch out as a projectile and hurt others. But vaccination is a community thing more than an individual thing. If it were just about hurting yourself, then I'd agree that the discussion should be fra…

Can you imagine ICUs already overwhelmed by covid in a world without seatbelts and airbags? Or ever-increasing safety standards in general. Times like this emphasize how what seems like individual choices can have major social consequences.

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are not rational creatures. Our beliefs can override rationality & that's true regardless of how smart you think you are. That's why you have Christian Scientists being convicted for child abuse/neglect for not providing a reasonable standard of medical care ("reasonable" being defined as "commonly accepted behaviors in our society"). Similar issues around beliefs would apply around vaccines, especially with e…

There is some just skepticism of anything that happens under Trump. The dude talked about injecting bleach into your veins. Come on.

He never talked about putting bleach in your veins. He spoke about putting UV light and disinfectants inside the body. Both are obscure, but real treatments.

Edit: https://youtu.be/zicGxU5MfwE

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#337
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's only been hard to get 2/3 of Americans to go along quite recently. Everyone lined up for vaccines in the 1950s and 1960s, numbers well over 90%.

Consider that in 1955 one of the companies producing the Salk Vaccine shipped 120,000 doses with live virus which sickened 40,000 children and sparked a polio epidemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc...

What are we supposed to learn from that example? Companies developed safer techniques, government testing plans improved, it sounds like the system was improved in response to the kind of thing which happens with new technology.

More importantly, however, it happened in an era where everyone agreed that polio was worth avoiding. The modern antivax movement was founded on Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent attempts to cash in on test kits and lawsuits brought against vaccine manufacturers but it also critically depended on people who had grown up in a world of ubiquitous vaccination and preventative medicine, where vague claims sounded dire because the imagined baseline was “life is basically okay” rather than “I know multiple kids who died or were scarred for life” as their parents had known. Finally, there wasn’t a major political movement putting a billion-dollar propaganda machine to work spreading false claims and downplaying the real impact of a disease.

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some just skepticism of anything that happens under Trump. The dude talked about injecting bleach into your veins. Come on.

He never talked about putting bleach in your veins. He spoke about putting UV light and disinfectants inside the body. Both are obscure, but real treatments. Edit: https://youtu.be/zicGxU5MfwE

This is Trump minutes before the infamous quotes:

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/AA47/production/...

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...that is why I could never be a libertarian. People have repeatedly proved themselves unwilling or unable to live up to the libertarian ideal of behaving "rationally."

There's nothing inherently inconsistent between right-libertarian values and a vaccine mandate. Libertarians believe that force should be applied to person A to protect person B from person A in certain circumstances. If person A wants to punch person B in the face, restricting person A by force is perfectly consistent with libertarian values. If person A threatens to infect person B with a deadly disease due to refu…

People are libertarian for different reasons. Some of them just hate government and look for an ideological framework to justify it. I would say that driving licenses are a similar case.

Re: Biden to mandate coronavirus vaccine for federal workers

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDC says vaccines are still better: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/12157/ This paper says natural immunity better: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v... Unfortunately the science is evolving so fast and the variants are coming so fast, it's impossible to keep up!

because the science is evolving so we shouldn't have to mandate those who already have natural immunity. Will coercing someone who has natural immunity to take a shot or lose their job be truly that much more beneficial to justify? I don't think so and it's ethically wrong.

My antibody test was more painful than the pair of injections.

Vaccination doesn't harm people with existing antibodies (they just rebuff it faster) and going through the process serves as a good booster.

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