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> I know someone who almost quit a great job because they were mad about a vaccine mandate from their employer. [...] That is what failing the marshmallow test

> I know someone who almost quit a great job because they were mad about a vaccine mandate from their employer. [...] That is what failing the marshmallow test looks like. Or perhaps it's a matter of personal principle. Personal conscience and conviction used to be held sacred in the US ... to the point that conscientious objectors wouldn't be forced to fight in wars (they could be assigned to work as medics in Army MASH units, for example, as my grandfather was in the Korean war). In modern US politics, it has become politically incorrect to have a personal principle or conviction that contradicts the approved viewpoint, or otherwise goes against the grain. Because consideration for personal liberty has gone by the wayside, people are reacting by flatly refusing to be vaccinated. Many are convinced that the vaccine is actually harmful... and I'm convinced that viewpoint only gained traction because of the strong-arming going on in government. It would have been much better to communicate clearly what we know, keep updating that communication regularly as new data comes in, fund efforts to develop and distribute vaccines, and let people choose without mandating anything. I'd bet the world would look very different today, and far more people would be vaccinated, if the US government had taken this route.

sobellian 5y ago
Scattershot vaccine mandates have increased the number of vaccinated. Those left will naturally have resisted some amount of authority, but that observation basically amounts to survivor bias - and it doesn't explain why those individuals failed to get the vaccine before there ever was a mandate.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  we’re dealing in counterfactuals here, so we’ll never truly know. one possibility is that vaccine mandates brought a large portion of those on-the-fence in to get a vaccine sooner than later, at the cost of pushing others on-the-fence way far away from ever getting the vaccine. i.e. a short-term boost in vax numbers at the cost of long-term rates. maybe worth it, maybe not (there’s so many second order effects). in any case, i have friends here in progressive seattle who were part of the “vaccinate and done” group back in Apr/May but once the governor used vaccine uptake as an excuse to enforce new mandates now say “i’ll get the booster once i know doing so means i get to go back to normal”. so mandates definitely do push a certain type of otherwise compliant person away from getting the vaccine. i only have anecdata, but i think it’s worth keeping an eye on that viewpoint. could this “vaccine and done” group grow into a “reject mandates (including boosters) and done” if the mandates prevent them from actually being “done”?
jewayne 5y ago
I think you've got the causation wrong. People didn't start rejecting the vaccine because of the mandates. Mandates came about because large percentages of the population weren't getting vaccinated. And why weren't they getting vaccinated? Because COVID denial poisoned the well of information. Even today, there are virtually no facts about COVID that you could get 95% of Americans to agree upon. My guess is that close to 5% would disagree with the statement "the SARS-CoV-2 virus is real".
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  >Because COVID denial poisoned the well of information. You sure it was "COVID denial" that poisoned the well of information and not: 1) Health officials lying about masks at the start of the pandemic 2) Government officials encouraging people to crowd into primary booths during the height of the pandemic to vote in the Democratic primary. 3) Health and government officials declaring that it was safe to attend riots and mass street protests, but not to go out for any other reasons. 4) That it was a racist conspiracy theory that COVID was created in a lab and not started by people eating bats in China. 5) That the vaccines were safe and effective, and that you couldn't get or spread COVID if you were vaccinated. 6) That vaccines would never be mandated. 7) That its absolutely essential that every receive(at least) a 3rd dose of the vaccine as a "booster" when even the most favorable studies show that "boosters" reduce the odds of serious illness and death only by fractions of a thousandth of a percentage point. At this point the well contains no water at all - just poisons - and it isn't the skeptics who are responsible. At this point anyone who isn't skeptical about what they are being told by our Dear Leaders has their head buried deep in the sand.
- armadsen 5y ago
  > My guess is that close to 5% would disagree with the statement "the SARS-CoV-2 virus is real". I wouldn't be surprised if the number is even higher than that. Anecdotally, my mom didn't believe it was a real virus even after I got it, tested positive, and got pretty sick in 2020. When she and my unvaccinated dad got it in summer 2021 and Dad was hospitalized with severe illness from it, she changed her mind on it being real, but is still convinced there are conspiratorial forces behind it, the vaccine, public health measures, etc.
efficax 5y ago
When your "matter of principle" is avoiding a vaccine you're rationalizing an irrational choice through the mask of a "principle". There's no principle involved (personal liberty? do you also refuse to pay taxes, drive without a license, etc. freedom is a complicated thing)
- powerslacker 5y ago
  One principle would be the belief that the US federal government has not been granted the power to mandate a vaccination. Many people opposed to vaccination in the US believe that states, municipalities, and private organizations can enforce such a mandate but that the federal government cannot. As for not taking the vaccine there is the principle of prudent decision making and informed consent: that each individual has the right to decide what is best for their health even if they are wrong. For example, you might choose to be a lifelong tobacco smoker. The current scientific narrative says that smoking tobacco is bad for your health - but at the end of the day it is a decision of personal conscience whether or not you choose to smoke.
  - AlexCoventry 5y ago
    The power was granted by Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/ > Harlan ruled that the vaccination law did not violate the 14th Amendment because the police power of the state may be allowed to constrain individual liberties through reasonable regulations when required to protect public safety. He reasoned that individual liberty does not allow people to take actions regardless of the harm that they could cause to others. Harlan felt that the plaintiff had failed to show that the vaccination law was arbitrary or oppressive, or not reasonably required for the safety of the public. He noted the increasing presence of smallpox, which prevented the plaintiff from convincingly asserting that the rule had no real or substantial relation to protecting public health and safety. Although the plaintiff presented evidence that some doctors believed that the smallpox vaccine was not effective and could cause further diseases, Harlan pointed out that the opposite view represents the common medical belief and is followed by more reputable doctors.
seph-reed 5y ago
Why not both? Personal conscience and conviction -- as overwhelmingly stupid as the vast majority of people are with or without it -- is at least extremely important for the minority of people who end up being front-runners for society. But so too is society a super-organism, in which we are but cells. And cells which actively spread disease for their own sake are kind of independent to a flaw: cancerous one could say. Maybe there's a better world in which context is a factor in whether or not a persons convictions are the most valuable thing in the room. Personally, I'd say if you're killing others for your beliefs, then your beliefs should be allowed the same treatment. Whereas if your beliefs are merely unpopular.. well, I wouldn't fix a car with a popularity contest, let alone a toaster or an entire fucking government.
- humanrebar 5y ago
  There are ways to make this point without comparing human beings to cancer.
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    Perhaps an allergic response then? The point being, units of the super-organism are causing the death of things they shouldn't be. Perhaps out of selfishness (like cancer), or perhaps out of a misplaced response (like allergies). But the super-organism has every reason to evolve them out.
- nathanaldensr 5y ago
  Are you implying that some people are "cancer" and deserve to be eradicated? Why not just come out and say what you really mean without the plausible deniability and euphemisms?
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    ofc at least some people are enough like cancer they should be at least be changed... there's a lot of people. But no, I don't think this alone would be a sole distinguishing feature in that regard. It would be more "cancer-like," but there should definitely be more nuance before it's decided that a person "is cancer" and eradication should only be a last resort after everything else had been tried.
gilbetron 5y ago
I think you're inventing a past that didn't exist. Were this pandemic to strike in the 70s or 80s (or earlier), we would undoubtedly have given people little choice to be vaccinated, but we also probably wouldn't have forced people nearly as much. Today we are stuck with these people running around talking about their freedom, when one of the main reasons for government is public health.
- valachio 5y ago
  I think if this pandemic struck in the 70s or 80s, it would have been shook off as a moderately more dangerous version of the flu, and there would have been no lockdowns or anything like that. Life would go on as normal until natural herd immunity is achieved.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - soperj 5y ago
    We had smallpox for centuries, same with measles, mumps, rubella, polio, etc etc. AIDS came about in the 80s. How's that natural herd immunity for AIDS going? You would have ended up with full hospitals everywhere and people dying in the streets, and the Delta variant way before a vaccine was ready if we didn't do lockdowns.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      I'm a strong supporter of strong measures to combat covid, but your question about AIDS is obviously disingenuous. AIDS kills almost every one who gets it (e: in the 70s - of course as a reply mentions, it is not nearly as deadly today and very few caught HIV cases progress to AIDS in the first place now), but it didn't spread very far compared to covid, so of course no herd immunity would develop.
      - Schiendelman 5y ago
        Your information seems out of date - AIDS is now mostly survivable and has been for perhaps a decade.
blululu 5y ago
Historically conscientious objector status was not just given out to anyone who asked for it. In general you needed to be an active member of a religious community with clear theological beliefs about war specified well in advance of the war. Even the Quakers didn't get a free pass - they still had to serve the country in some non-violent capacity as medics or the like.
notJim 5y ago
I'm very skeptical of this thesis. Biden's mandate (I'm assuming this is what you're referring to) was not announced until September of last year, and there was already very significant vaccine refusal by that point. Up until that point, they had been doing exactly what you want, and vaccination had essentially stalled.
- nradov 5y ago
  Biden had stated in December 2020 that he wouldn't impose a mandate. https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-joe-biden-no-vaccines-mandatory-december-2020-1627774 https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-joe-biden-no-vaccines-ma...
Nbox9 5y ago
> Personal conscience and conviction used to be held sacred in the US […] it has become politically incorrect to have a personal principle or conviction that contradicts the approved viewpoint, or otherwise goes against the grain. I think you might have a grandiose mental image of America’s past. The 1798 Sedition Act ‘made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or its officials’[0]. A congressman went to jail for speaking critically against President John Adams. President Nixon tried to suppress the 1960s cultural revolutions. The US has always had a bit more of an authoritative twist than the American History books write. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams#Alien_and_Sedition_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams#Alien_and_Sedition_...
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I am fascinated by this sort of thing. So many people perceive there to be some great American democratic republic tradition being aborated in recent years... but we didn't even get majoritarian democracy until the mid-20th century, and there was certainly not the sort of strong deference to the bill of rights historically that people seem to imagine. I feel like this mythical conception of the history of America has been increasing with time.
  - solveit 5y ago
    It probably helps that the US spent half a century fighting a propaganda war against the Soviet Union.
- adventured 5y ago
  The 1798 Sedition Act - during the second Presidency in the history of the country - expired in 1801. Which does a better job of debasing the point you're trying to make than supporting it. It was less than a blip. > I think you might have a grandiose mental image of America’s past. And your attempt to use the historically trivial 1798 Sedition Act in the manner that you did indicates you may have the opposite and mistaken mental image. If anything the US learned from the Sedition Act and became better for that very short-lived mistake.
kube-system 5y ago
> Personal conscience and conviction used to be held sacred in the US ... to the point that conscientious objectors wouldn't be forced to fight in wars (they could be assigned to work as medics in Army MASH units, for example, as my grandfather was in the Korean war). On the contrary, I think we're at the other extreme. There would be an uproar if people were even forced to work as medics today -- or to do nearly anything at all beyond their own self-interest. I was forced to be vaccinated as a child to go to school, and there were no exceptions for personal convictions. There was also no uproar. Everyone did it because it was normal and there wasn't any legitimization of "alternative" information.
- defgeneric 5y ago
  > there wasn't any legitimization of "alternative" information It seems to me this is really the cause far beyond any other factor. The fragmentation and "democratization" of media over the past 15-20 years led to a devaluation of expertise and qualification. It's not so much anti-elitism anymore (although they seem to overlap) but simply that nobody cares what your credentials are, they are no longer necessary to reach a mass audience.
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  My understanding is that this was only during the generation that started with the polio vaccine mandates. Because those children got it and were normalized to it, then it became normal subsequently. Prior to that there was indeed massive resistance and skepticism towards the polio vaccine and vaccinations broadly. (This is also the cycle against seatbelting.)
abrahamepton 5y ago
> Or perhaps it's a matter of personal principle. Personal conscience and conviction used to be held sacred in the US ... to the point that conscientious objectors wouldn't be forced to fight in wars It's a great argument, so long as "rejecting a vaccine during a pandemic" meets the same moral tests as "opposing war". In fact it does not, and so this "personal principle" is quite silly and actively harmful. The government has not done anything in mandating vaccination that it has not done, over and over again, with total societal unanimity. Until some people decided there was political hay to be made with a bad, dumb argument about "personal principle" and now tens of thousands of people are dead for no good reason. It's super dumb, and the "personal principle" argument fails every test you could throw at it.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  > It's a great argument, so long as "rejecting a vaccine during a pandemic" meets the same moral tests as "opposing war". In fact it does not You say this, but you don't name any criteria by which this judgment should be made. Could you elaborate?
  - ChrisLomont 5y ago
    Me opposing war doesn't kill my neighbor. Me opposing the war didn't kill 800,000 people. It didn't cause lifelong suffering for millions more. It's not hard to understand the difference. Why do the people that accept driving on the government mandated side of the road for public safety, who accept food being cooked to government standards for public safety, who have gotten the other multiple government mandated vaccines for public safety, who don't get into fights in stores for being required to wear shoes for public safety, who don't march against government mandated building codes for public safety, and so on for literally hundreds of items, suddenly obtain "personal liberty" for this particular vaccine, which has killed more Americans than any event in history? Because they've been fed a constant stream of chaos from the grifters milking them, grifters that mostly got the vaccine themselves. It's amazing what culture and virtue signaling can do.
    - 5y ago
standardUser 5y ago
"...consideration for personal liberty has gone by the wayside..." Can you truly say these things with a straight face, in light of the countless laws banning voluntary consumption of drugs and the millions of harsh prison sentences that have been handed out for breaking those laws? People literally lose their freedom - they are put in poorly-maintained cages - for exercising their personal liberty in that fashion. That has been standard procedure in this country for generations with little dissent. Yet the voices that seem the loudest against vaccine mandates (voices that barely exists for the dozen or so other vaccine mandates over the generations) don't seem to be speaking up to these far more grievous and damaging violations of personal liberty.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  No, the freedumb that the commenter you're replying to only exists in their head. Freedom is whatever they want it to be and nothing at the same time. Compare the US's COVID response to China and then try to talk about freedoms.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    Or maybe the commenter is also against the war on drugs? And yeah I'm sure China had more "freedumb" than the US. Actually I'm not surprised that someone who uses China as a positive example would be the type to say "freedumb" unironically as if it's actually a negative thing to want more... freedom.
    - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
      I wasn't using China as a positive example, I was using it as a contract in the negative. As in they don't have freedom during COVID, as they're literally locked into their homes. The United States has had and continues to have "freedom" even in face of the mandates.
- hnuser847 5y ago
  Both liberals and conservatives are massive hypocrites. Neither ideology has a consistent set of beliefs when it comes to personal liberty. Both will use arguments from personal liberty when it's for something they support and will conveniently forgot about those arguments for issues they don't support. Liberals support "my body, my choice" when it comes to abortions, but they don't want you to have a choice over whether or not to get the vaccine. Conservatives support "my body, my choice" when it comes to vaccines, but don't want to you have a choice over whether or not to get an abortion. There, it's settled. You're all hypocrites. And for the record, I'm triple vaxxed, anti-mandate, pro-choice, and think all drugs should be legalized.
picardythird 5y ago
But people didn't want to get vaxxed long before any mandates ever took effect. They don't want to get vaxxed because they are simply misinformed. They are misinformed by politicians (yes, mainly Republicans), they are misinformed by social media, podcasters (Joe Rogan, Brett Weinstein), and various other celebrity clout chasers. This happened long before there was ever a mandate. People believing the vaccines cause you to exert a magnetic pull is not the fault of government mandates which recently took effect, it occurred way before with campaigns and conspiracies comprised of pure misinformation and pseudo-science.
TimTheTinker 5y ago
> Many are convinced that the vaccine is actually harmful... and I'm convinced that viewpoint only gained traction because of the strong-arming going on in government. Some reading I've done recently has changed my mind on this. Check out the recently released unclassified (but suppressed) DARPA documents on the SARS-Cov2 virus. It appears there actually has been a significant information war going on from the top... but I suspect it remains to be seen why exactly the campaign took place.

sobellian 5y ago

Scattershot vaccine mandates have increased the number of vaccinated. Those left will naturally have resisted some amount of authority, but that observation basically amounts to survivor bias - and it doesn't explain why those individuals failed to get the vaccine before there ever was a mandate.

wallacoloo 5y ago
we’re dealing in counterfactuals here, so we’ll never truly know. one possibility is that vaccine mandates brought a large portion of those on-the-fence in to get a vaccine sooner than later, at the cost of pushing others on-the-fence way far away from ever getting the vaccine. i.e. a short-term boost in vax numbers at the cost of long-term rates. maybe worth it, maybe not (there’s so many second order effects). in any case, i have friends here in progressive seattle who were part of the “vaccinate and done” group back in Apr/May but once the governor used vaccine uptake as an excuse to enforce new mandates now say “i’ll get the booster once i know doing so means i get to go back to normal”. so mandates definitely do push a certain type of otherwise compliant person away from getting the vaccine. i only have anecdata, but i think it’s worth keeping an eye on that viewpoint. could this “vaccine and done” group grow into a “reject mandates (including boosters) and done” if the mandates prevent them from actually being “done”?

jewayne 5y ago

I think you've got the causation wrong. People didn't start rejecting the vaccine because of the mandates. Mandates came about because large percentages of the population weren't getting vaccinated. And why weren't they getting vaccinated? Because COVID denial poisoned the well of information. Even today, there are virtually no facts about COVID that you could get 95% of Americans to agree upon. My guess is that close to 5% would disagree with the statement "the SARS-CoV-2 virus is real".

StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>Because COVID denial poisoned the well of information. You sure it was "COVID denial" that poisoned the well of information and not: 1) Health officials lying about masks at the start of the pandemic 2) Government officials encouraging people to crowd into primary booths during the height of the pandemic to vote in the Democratic primary. 3) Health and government officials declaring that it was safe to attend riots and mass street protests, but not to go out for any other reasons. 4) That it was a racist conspiracy theory that COVID was created in a lab and not started by people eating bats in China. 5) That the vaccines were safe and effective, and that you couldn't get or spread COVID if you were vaccinated. 6) That vaccines would never be mandated. 7) That its absolutely essential that every receive(at least) a 3rd dose of the vaccine as a "booster" when even the most favorable studies show that "boosters" reduce the odds of serious illness and death only by fractions of a thousandth of a percentage point. At this point the well contains no water at all - just poisons - and it isn't the skeptics who are responsible. At this point anyone who isn't skeptical about what they are being told by our Dear Leaders has their head buried deep in the sand.
armadsen 5y ago
> My guess is that close to 5% would disagree with the statement "the SARS-CoV-2 virus is real". I wouldn't be surprised if the number is even higher than that. Anecdotally, my mom didn't believe it was a real virus even after I got it, tested positive, and got pretty sick in 2020. When she and my unvaccinated dad got it in summer 2021 and Dad was hospitalized with severe illness from it, she changed her mind on it being real, but is still convinced there are conspiratorial forces behind it, the vaccine, public health measures, etc.

efficax 5y ago

When your "matter of principle" is avoiding a vaccine you're rationalizing an irrational choice through the mask of a "principle". There's no principle involved (personal liberty? do you also refuse to pay taxes, drive without a license, etc. freedom is a complicated thing)

powerslacker 5y ago
One principle would be the belief that the US federal government has not been granted the power to mandate a vaccination. Many people opposed to vaccination in the US believe that states, municipalities, and private organizations can enforce such a mandate but that the federal government cannot. As for not taking the vaccine there is the principle of prudent decision making and informed consent: that each individual has the right to decide what is best for their health even if they are wrong. For example, you might choose to be a lifelong tobacco smoker. The current scientific narrative says that smoking tobacco is bad for your health - but at the end of the day it is a decision of personal conscience whether or not you choose to smoke.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  The power was granted by Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/ > Harlan ruled that the vaccination law did not violate the 14th Amendment because the police power of the state may be allowed to constrain individual liberties through reasonable regulations when required to protect public safety. He reasoned that individual liberty does not allow people to take actions regardless of the harm that they could cause to others. Harlan felt that the plaintiff had failed to show that the vaccination law was arbitrary or oppressive, or not reasonably required for the safety of the public. He noted the increasing presence of smallpox, which prevented the plaintiff from convincingly asserting that the rule had no real or substantial relation to protecting public health and safety. Although the plaintiff presented evidence that some doctors believed that the smallpox vaccine was not effective and could cause further diseases, Harlan pointed out that the opposite view represents the common medical belief and is followed by more reputable doctors.

seph-reed 5y ago

Why not both? Personal conscience and conviction -- as overwhelmingly stupid as the vast majority of people are with or without it -- is at least extremely important for the minority of people who end up being front-runners for society. But so too is society a super-organism, in which we are but cells. And cells which actively spread disease for their own sake are kind of independent to a flaw: cancerous one could say. Maybe there's a better world in which context is a factor in whether or not a persons convictions are the most valuable thing in the room. Personally, I'd say if you're killing others for your beliefs, then your beliefs should be allowed the same treatment. Whereas if your beliefs are merely unpopular.. well, I wouldn't fix a car with a popularity contest, let alone a toaster or an entire fucking government.

humanrebar 5y ago
There are ways to make this point without comparing human beings to cancer.
- seph-reed 5y ago
  Perhaps an allergic response then? The point being, units of the super-organism are causing the death of things they shouldn't be. Perhaps out of selfishness (like cancer), or perhaps out of a misplaced response (like allergies). But the super-organism has every reason to evolve them out.
nathanaldensr 5y ago
Are you implying that some people are "cancer" and deserve to be eradicated? Why not just come out and say what you really mean without the plausible deniability and euphemisms?
- seph-reed 5y ago
  ofc at least some people are enough like cancer they should be at least be changed... there's a lot of people. But no, I don't think this alone would be a sole distinguishing feature in that regard. It would be more "cancer-like," but there should definitely be more nuance before it's decided that a person "is cancer" and eradication should only be a last resort after everything else had been tried.

gilbetron 5y ago

I think you're inventing a past that didn't exist. Were this pandemic to strike in the 70s or 80s (or earlier), we would undoubtedly have given people little choice to be vaccinated, but we also probably wouldn't have forced people nearly as much. Today we are stuck with these people running around talking about their freedom, when one of the main reasons for government is public health.

valachio 5y ago
I think if this pandemic struck in the 70s or 80s, it would have been shook off as a moderately more dangerous version of the flu, and there would have been no lockdowns or anything like that. Life would go on as normal until natural herd immunity is achieved.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- soperj 5y ago
  We had smallpox for centuries, same with measles, mumps, rubella, polio, etc etc. AIDS came about in the 80s. How's that natural herd immunity for AIDS going? You would have ended up with full hospitals everywhere and people dying in the streets, and the Delta variant way before a vaccine was ready if we didn't do lockdowns.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I'm a strong supporter of strong measures to combat covid, but your question about AIDS is obviously disingenuous. AIDS kills almost every one who gets it (e: in the 70s - of course as a reply mentions, it is not nearly as deadly today and very few caught HIV cases progress to AIDS in the first place now), but it didn't spread very far compared to covid, so of course no herd immunity would develop.
    - Schiendelman 5y ago
      Your information seems out of date - AIDS is now mostly survivable and has been for perhaps a decade.

blululu 5y ago

Historically conscientious objector status was not just given out to anyone who asked for it. In general you needed to be an active member of a religious community with clear theological beliefs about war specified well in advance of the war. Even the Quakers didn't get a free pass - they still had to serve the country in some non-violent capacity as medics or the like.

notJim 5y ago

I'm very skeptical of this thesis. Biden's mandate (I'm assuming this is what you're referring to) was not announced until September of last year, and there was already very significant vaccine refusal by that point. Up until that point, they had been doing exactly what you want, and vaccination had essentially stalled.

nradov 5y ago
Biden had stated in December 2020 that he wouldn't impose a mandate. https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-joe-biden-no-vaccines-mandatory-december-2020-1627774 https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-joe-biden-no-vaccines-ma...

Nbox9 5y ago

> Personal conscience and conviction used to be held sacred in the US […] it has become politically incorrect to have a personal principle or conviction that contradicts the approved viewpoint, or otherwise goes against the grain. I think you might have a grandiose mental image of America’s past. The 1798 Sedition Act ‘made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or its officials’[0]. A congressman went to jail for speaking critically against President John Adams. President Nixon tried to suppress the 1960s cultural revolutions. The US has always had a bit more of an authoritative twist than the American History books write. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams#Alien_and_Sedition_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams#Alien_and_Sedition_...

whimsicalism 5y ago
I am fascinated by this sort of thing. So many people perceive there to be some great American democratic republic tradition being aborated in recent years... but we didn't even get majoritarian democracy until the mid-20th century, and there was certainly not the sort of strong deference to the bill of rights historically that people seem to imagine. I feel like this mythical conception of the history of America has been increasing with time.
- solveit 5y ago
  It probably helps that the US spent half a century fighting a propaganda war against the Soviet Union.
adventured 5y ago
The 1798 Sedition Act - during the second Presidency in the history of the country - expired in 1801. Which does a better job of debasing the point you're trying to make than supporting it. It was less than a blip. > I think you might have a grandiose mental image of America’s past. And your attempt to use the historically trivial 1798 Sedition Act in the manner that you did indicates you may have the opposite and mistaken mental image. If anything the US learned from the Sedition Act and became better for that very short-lived mistake.

kube-system 5y ago

> Personal conscience and conviction used to be held sacred in the US ... to the point that conscientious objectors wouldn't be forced to fight in wars (they could be assigned to work as medics in Army MASH units, for example, as my grandfather was in the Korean war). On the contrary, I think we're at the other extreme. There would be an uproar if people were even forced to work as medics today -- or to do nearly anything at all beyond their own self-interest. I was forced to be vaccinated as a child to go to school, and there were no exceptions for personal convictions. There was also no uproar. Everyone did it because it was normal and there wasn't any legitimization of "alternative" information.

defgeneric 5y ago
> there wasn't any legitimization of "alternative" information It seems to me this is really the cause far beyond any other factor. The fragmentation and "democratization" of media over the past 15-20 years led to a devaluation of expertise and qualification. It's not so much anti-elitism anymore (although they seem to overlap) but simply that nobody cares what your credentials are, they are no longer necessary to reach a mass audience.
KittenInABox 5y ago
My understanding is that this was only during the generation that started with the polio vaccine mandates. Because those children got it and were normalized to it, then it became normal subsequently. Prior to that there was indeed massive resistance and skepticism towards the polio vaccine and vaccinations broadly. (This is also the cycle against seatbelting.)

abrahamepton 5y ago

> Or perhaps it's a matter of personal principle. Personal conscience and conviction used to be held sacred in the US ... to the point that conscientious objectors wouldn't be forced to fight in wars It's a great argument, so long as "rejecting a vaccine during a pandemic" meets the same moral tests as "opposing war". In fact it does not, and so this "personal principle" is quite silly and actively harmful. The government has not done anything in mandating vaccination that it has not done, over and over again, with total societal unanimity. Until some people decided there was political hay to be made with a bad, dumb argument about "personal principle" and now tens of thousands of people are dead for no good reason. It's super dumb, and the "personal principle" argument fails every test you could throw at it.

TimTheTinker 5y ago
> It's a great argument, so long as "rejecting a vaccine during a pandemic" meets the same moral tests as "opposing war". In fact it does not You say this, but you don't name any criteria by which this judgment should be made. Could you elaborate?
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  Me opposing war doesn't kill my neighbor. Me opposing the war didn't kill 800,000 people. It didn't cause lifelong suffering for millions more. It's not hard to understand the difference. Why do the people that accept driving on the government mandated side of the road for public safety, who accept food being cooked to government standards for public safety, who have gotten the other multiple government mandated vaccines for public safety, who don't get into fights in stores for being required to wear shoes for public safety, who don't march against government mandated building codes for public safety, and so on for literally hundreds of items, suddenly obtain "personal liberty" for this particular vaccine, which has killed more Americans than any event in history? Because they've been fed a constant stream of chaos from the grifters milking them, grifters that mostly got the vaccine themselves. It's amazing what culture and virtue signaling can do.
  - 5y ago

standardUser 5y ago

"...consideration for personal liberty has gone by the wayside..." Can you truly say these things with a straight face, in light of the countless laws banning voluntary consumption of drugs and the millions of harsh prison sentences that have been handed out for breaking those laws? People literally lose their freedom - they are put in poorly-maintained cages - for exercising their personal liberty in that fashion. That has been standard procedure in this country for generations with little dissent. Yet the voices that seem the loudest against vaccine mandates (voices that barely exists for the dozen or so other vaccine mandates over the generations) don't seem to be speaking up to these far more grievous and damaging violations of personal liberty.

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
No, the freedumb that the commenter you're replying to only exists in their head. Freedom is whatever they want it to be and nothing at the same time. Compare the US's COVID response to China and then try to talk about freedoms.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Or maybe the commenter is also against the war on drugs? And yeah I'm sure China had more "freedumb" than the US. Actually I'm not surprised that someone who uses China as a positive example would be the type to say "freedumb" unironically as if it's actually a negative thing to want more... freedom.
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    I wasn't using China as a positive example, I was using it as a contract in the negative. As in they don't have freedom during COVID, as they're literally locked into their homes. The United States has had and continues to have "freedom" even in face of the mandates.
hnuser847 5y ago
Both liberals and conservatives are massive hypocrites. Neither ideology has a consistent set of beliefs when it comes to personal liberty. Both will use arguments from personal liberty when it's for something they support and will conveniently forgot about those arguments for issues they don't support. Liberals support "my body, my choice" when it comes to abortions, but they don't want you to have a choice over whether or not to get the vaccine. Conservatives support "my body, my choice" when it comes to vaccines, but don't want to you have a choice over whether or not to get an abortion. There, it's settled. You're all hypocrites. And for the record, I'm triple vaxxed, anti-mandate, pro-choice, and think all drugs should be legalized.

picardythird 5y ago

But people didn't want to get vaxxed long before any mandates ever took effect. They don't want to get vaxxed because they are simply misinformed. They are misinformed by politicians (yes, mainly Republicans), they are misinformed by social media, podcasters (Joe Rogan, Brett Weinstein), and various other celebrity clout chasers. This happened long before there was ever a mandate. People believing the vaccines cause you to exert a magnetic pull is not the fault of government mandates which recently took effect, it occurred way before with campaigns and conspiracies comprised of pure misinformation and pseudo-science.

TimTheTinker 5y ago

> Many are convinced that the vaccine is actually harmful... and I'm convinced that viewpoint only gained traction because of the strong-arming going on in government. Some reading I've done recently has changed my mind on this. Check out the recently released unclassified (but suppressed) DARPA documents on the SARS-Cov2 virus. It appears there actually has been a significant information war going on from the top... but I suspect it remains to be seen why exactly the campaign took place.