6 ms·

Amazing how badly the United States is regressing. Literally measles is making a comeback due to idiots like RFK.

inglor_cz 1y ago
This is now a global problem. The guy who started it, Andrew Wakefield, is British, and we have long had antivaxxers in Europe too. Prior to Covid, the antivaxx scene was vaguely left-and-green oriented, biomoms, vegans and other "very natural" people; you would expect them to vote for Greens or even more alternative parties. This changed abruptly and now the antivaxx scene is mostly rightwing, but the common base is still the same distrust. I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors.
- squigz 1y ago
  > I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors. Such people have always existed, unfortunately. I don't think it's a result of anything particularly new.
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    The people existed, but a portable always-running conveyor belt of bad news that is addictive enough to make them glued to the screen did not. In the 1990s, you had maybe 15 minutes a day on average to consume news, either from a paper newspaper, or from an evening TV relation. Now, quite a lot of people spend 20 times as much time doomscrolling. Of course the impact will be much more massive.
    - squigz 1y ago
      Sure, but this implies the only source of "manipulation from other actors" is the news, media, or government. Churches, cults, and just other ignorant people existed to cause distrust in authority.
      - macintux 1y ago
        Those organizations didn't have instantaneous global reach. Now everyone does.
        squigz 1y ago
        I'm not denying that there's a difference - obviously technology has enabled the scale of things to grow quite a bit, both good and bad - but it's beside my point, which is that, given that it's not a new phenomenon, blaming it on technology seems doomed to failure. Without solving for the underlying issues, people will continue to mistrust authority, whether they're being told to by news or their neighbor.
        brewdad 1y ago
        People have had a mistrust in authority as far back as when nomadic tribes were the norm but somebody had to decide where to hunt or gather that day or to move on. Good luck changing human nature.
        b112 1y ago
        That's a little like saying nuclear bombs aren't a technology, but a human problem. And you bet, they sure are, but it's a lot harder to wipe out everyone, if the nutjobs in your community just have a pointed stick. And 'nutjobs' may be pejorative, but I'll hold on to it as apt. At the same time I assign no blame, for it is an issue of cognition. The best way I can describe it is, intelligence is not a single factor. And it's not even a few factors. It's a massive bar graph, with 1000s upon 1000s of bars, each delineating a different aspect of intelligence. A lucky few may score high on all those bars, yet even the most intelligent of us tend to score high on only some of those bars. And my point is, I've seen people immensely intelligent on some of those bars, yet astonishingly deficient on others. We love to make fun of politicians, so I'll use one as an example here. Politicians tend to be incredibly personable, and very difficult to dislike in person. They exude congeniality, they read you like a book, and can often orate your wallet completely out of your pocket, and you'll thank them for it too. It's how they managed to go so far politically, yet some of these same politicians have severe and massive deficiencies in cognition. Back to the pointed sticks, and the nutjobs who would wield them pre-tech, these people are simply as they are. Yet in the past, you'd see one nutjob in a community, and they'd be surrounded by normalcy, it would temper them, mitigate their effect, sand off their edges so to speak. Yet as our communities grew in size and scope, these individuals could finally meet more of their ilk. A large city might have dozens of them, larger still cities hundreds, and they'd meet up. And as technology grew, and access to the printing press become possible for all, and for less and less cost, these same people could then send their madness in newsletter form to even those small communities where maybe only one nutjob existed. But those people needed to still connect in some way. Maybe through an ad in the back of a magazine, or something akin yet far less gated by 'normals'. Yet today? Now? Algorithms match you up with all those nutjobs. Where before you might live in isolation, and the friends you had might scoff at that weird idea you have, now you've found a community of hundreds, or thousands just like you! And they all affirm your madness, they pat you on the back, they congratulate you for seeing the light! They whisper all those sweet nothings into your ear, all those secret things you knew were true, and they listen to all you say on the subject. For the first time in your life you have a home, a community, and before TikTok, or some weird forum, it would have never all been possible. You'd have been isolated, even in the age of magazines, and print, for you'd have never found one another. And worse, now profit enters the system. Those who would steal, or thieve, or build bridges with sub-standard concrete for profit, or anything for money regardless of cost to us all, appear on this scene. They see those nutjobs, and they seek to profit from them. They own youtube, or tiktok channels, and often do not believe in anything but profit. They'll tell you anything you want to hear, espouse any crazy idea, and like that bridge built with substandard concrete, they'll take the money and run as society collapses around them. This profit motive was always there, see cults. Yet the reach and scope was just not what it is today, there is so much more range given to a single person now.
- 8note 1y ago
  i dont think its nearly so transparent. its easy to be recommended and read some viewpoints, but very technical and hard to be recommended others. with radical information transparency, id expect both views to be equally easy to parse and to be recommended both, in which case the choice would be obvious to everyone, or at least they could very well describe their risk tolerance to different risks, or laziness, for why they made a certain choice. i expect im not up to date on all the vaccines i should be, but its on laziness rather than gwtting bad information. ...also a lack of information on which ones i should have.
- p1dda 1y ago
  That was the most ignorant comment I have seen on this matter. Nothing about vaccines, just attacks on the people questioning vaccine safety. If you truly believe all vaccines are completely safe I have a bridge to sell to you.
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    I don't believe that any medication is completely safe, but I am fed up with all the "Gates puts 5G chips in vacciness in order to sterilize humanity" kooks who are the flag-bearers of the entire movement, and I am also fed up with the somewhat less crazy people marching behind them, who nevertheless cling to the long discredited Wakefield paper and scream 'autism, autism!' The fraudulent Wakefield paper may be one of the most destructive pieces of information released upon mankind.
  - whatevaa 1y ago
    If you trully believe all vaccines are completely unsafe I have a different bridge to sell you. Measles and polio are terrible diseases which were almost eradicated with vaccines. We are not talking about covid.
_moof 1y ago
And even before the antivax nutters here went from fringe to a significant social force, HPV vaccines were already being decried for "promoting casual sex." Our culture is so broken in so many ways.
- Fomite 1y ago
  "Why haven't you cured cancer yet?" "We have a vaccine to prevent some very serious cancers." "But it might turn my daughter into a hussy."
  - Spivak 1y ago
    Of course, I for sure held off on having casual unprotected sex with multiple partners as a teenager because I was worried about contracting HPV, but thanks to Gardasil my slut era was legendary and enduring.
    - Fomite 1y ago
      Teenagers are notorious for making decisions based on consequences that are decades away from manifesting.
      - Spivak 1y ago
        I can't tell if you think what I said was serious, I tried to hard to convey the /s.
        fknorangesite 1y ago
        Don't worry; it was very obvious.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    Also, forget "She might die of cancer" just exactly how bad is it if your daughter is a whore ? What else are we ruling out, independent business owner, politician ? What happened to "I just want my children to be happy" ?
skdhhdj 1y ago
[flagged]
- tchalla 1y ago
  Sorry, can you explain how this relates to immigration?
  - Fomite 1y ago
    Especially ironic given how hard a number of South American countries are having eliminating the MMR diseases due to import cases from Europe and the U.S.
- LorenPechtel 1y ago
  Immigration has nothing to do with it. Measles is highly infectious, you need a very high percentage of the population immune in order to maintain herd immunity. So long as you have herd immunity the only source of infection is travel--but note that this works both ways. It's much more likely to be Americans catching it while traveling than immigrants bringing it. They at least used to trace the original case in such outbreaks, it was normally someone who had been abroad. We saw the same thing with Covid--quarantine against Chinese people, while ignoring Americans returning from the very same places even when they said they had symptoms. (And irrelevant besides, the strain from Europe quickly dominated.)
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
Maybe we’re seeing selection pressure against those prone to addictive cycles of social-media influenced misinformation? Like, anti-vaxers died at higher rates in Covid [1]. This will continue across disease outbreaks, particularly ones for which we have near-comprehensive vaccines like measles. And given antivax sensibility is heritable (through parenting, not genes), one would expect this to stabilize the population over several generations to one that doesn’t have this defect. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10123459/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10123459/
- boxerab 1y ago
  very few people are against vaccines per se, they are just against *unsafe* vaccines. "anti-vax" is a term used to dismiss dissident without having to deal with their arguments i.e an ad hominem. As an analogy, if I object to high levels of mercury in fish, am I anti-fish? or anti-poisonous-fish ?
  - delichon 1y ago
    > "anti-vax" is a term used to dismiss dissident without having to deal with their arguments i.e an ad hominem. A slur.
  - 8note 1y ago
    "unsafe" is a loaded term in your fish analogy, you eat mecury directly, but wont eat fish that might have mercury. the communicable disease is itself quite dangerous
    - boxerab 1y ago
      I think you missed the point. Granted the disease is dangerous, but what if the cure is worse ? If we don't know this is true, we ought to assume the risk outweighs the benefits until PROVEN otherwise- that is the precautionary principle. As an analogy take Vioxx, a headache remedy that caused thousands of heart attacks. Merck the manufacturer started an advertising campaign for the drug AFTER the learned it was killing people - they were ultimately fined 4.5 billion. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048286 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048286 The docket shows us that pharmaceutical companies are serial felons who have paid some of the largest fines in history for lying about their products. It is prudent to be skeptical until proven otherwise.

This is now a global problem. The guy who started it, Andrew Wakefield, is British, and we have long had antivaxxers in Europe too. Prior to Covid, the antivaxx scene was vaguely left-and-green oriented, biomoms, vegans and other "very natural" people; you would expect them to vote for Greens or even more alternative parties. This changed abruptly and now the antivaxx scene is mostly rightwing, but the common base is still the same distrust. I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors.

squigz 1y ago
> I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors. Such people have always existed, unfortunately. I don't think it's a result of anything particularly new.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  The people existed, but a portable always-running conveyor belt of bad news that is addictive enough to make them glued to the screen did not. In the 1990s, you had maybe 15 minutes a day on average to consume news, either from a paper newspaper, or from an evening TV relation. Now, quite a lot of people spend 20 times as much time doomscrolling. Of course the impact will be much more massive.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Sure, but this implies the only source of "manipulation from other actors" is the news, media, or government. Churches, cults, and just other ignorant people existed to cause distrust in authority.
    - macintux 1y ago
      Those organizations didn't have instantaneous global reach. Now everyone does.
      - squigz 1y ago
        I'm not denying that there's a difference - obviously technology has enabled the scale of things to grow quite a bit, both good and bad - but it's beside my point, which is that, given that it's not a new phenomenon, blaming it on technology seems doomed to failure. Without solving for the underlying issues, people will continue to mistrust authority, whether they're being told to by news or their neighbor.
        brewdad 1y ago
        People have had a mistrust in authority as far back as when nomadic tribes were the norm but somebody had to decide where to hunt or gather that day or to move on. Good luck changing human nature.
        b112 1y ago
        That's a little like saying nuclear bombs aren't a technology, but a human problem. And you bet, they sure are, but it's a lot harder to wipe out everyone, if the nutjobs in your community just have a pointed stick. And 'nutjobs' may be pejorative, but I'll hold on to it as apt. At the same time I assign no blame, for it is an issue of cognition. The best way I can describe it is, intelligence is not a single factor. And it's not even a few factors. It's a massive bar graph, with 1000s upon 1000s of bars, each delineating a different aspect of intelligence. A lucky few may score high on all those bars, yet even the most intelligent of us tend to score high on only some of those bars. And my point is, I've seen people immensely intelligent on some of those bars, yet astonishingly deficient on others. We love to make fun of politicians, so I'll use one as an example here. Politicians tend to be incredibly personable, and very difficult to dislike in person. They exude congeniality, they read you like a book, and can often orate your wallet completely out of your pocket, and you'll thank them for it too. It's how they managed to go so far politically, yet some of these same politicians have severe and massive deficiencies in cognition. Back to the pointed sticks, and the nutjobs who would wield them pre-tech, these people are simply as they are. Yet in the past, you'd see one nutjob in a community, and they'd be surrounded by normalcy, it would temper them, mitigate their effect, sand off their edges so to speak. Yet as our communities grew in size and scope, these individuals could finally meet more of their ilk. A large city might have dozens of them, larger still cities hundreds, and they'd meet up. And as technology grew, and access to the printing press become possible for all, and for less and less cost, these same people could then send their madness in newsletter form to even those small communities where maybe only one nutjob existed. But those people needed to still connect in some way. Maybe through an ad in the back of a magazine, or something akin yet far less gated by 'normals'. Yet today? Now? Algorithms match you up with all those nutjobs. Where before you might live in isolation, and the friends you had might scoff at that weird idea you have, now you've found a community of hundreds, or thousands just like you! And they all affirm your madness, they pat you on the back, they congratulate you for seeing the light! They whisper all those sweet nothings into your ear, all those secret things you knew were true, and they listen to all you say on the subject. For the first time in your life you have a home, a community, and before TikTok, or some weird forum, it would have never all been possible. You'd have been isolated, even in the age of magazines, and print, for you'd have never found one another. And worse, now profit enters the system. Those who would steal, or thieve, or build bridges with sub-standard concrete for profit, or anything for money regardless of cost to us all, appear on this scene. They see those nutjobs, and they seek to profit from them. They own youtube, or tiktok channels, and often do not believe in anything but profit. They'll tell you anything you want to hear, espouse any crazy idea, and like that bridge built with substandard concrete, they'll take the money and run as society collapses around them. This profit motive was always there, see cults. Yet the reach and scope was just not what it is today, there is so much more range given to a single person now.
8note 1y ago
i dont think its nearly so transparent. its easy to be recommended and read some viewpoints, but very technical and hard to be recommended others. with radical information transparency, id expect both views to be equally easy to parse and to be recommended both, in which case the choice would be obvious to everyone, or at least they could very well describe their risk tolerance to different risks, or laziness, for why they made a certain choice. i expect im not up to date on all the vaccines i should be, but its on laziness rather than gwtting bad information. ...also a lack of information on which ones i should have.
p1dda 1y ago
That was the most ignorant comment I have seen on this matter. Nothing about vaccines, just attacks on the people questioning vaccine safety. If you truly believe all vaccines are completely safe I have a bridge to sell to you.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  I don't believe that any medication is completely safe, but I am fed up with all the "Gates puts 5G chips in vacciness in order to sterilize humanity" kooks who are the flag-bearers of the entire movement, and I am also fed up with the somewhat less crazy people marching behind them, who nevertheless cling to the long discredited Wakefield paper and scream 'autism, autism!' The fraudulent Wakefield paper may be one of the most destructive pieces of information released upon mankind.
- whatevaa 1y ago
  If you trully believe all vaccines are completely unsafe I have a different bridge to sell you. Measles and polio are terrible diseases which were almost eradicated with vaccines. We are not talking about covid.

_moof 1y ago

And even before the antivax nutters here went from fringe to a significant social force, HPV vaccines were already being decried for "promoting casual sex." Our culture is so broken in so many ways.

Fomite 1y ago
"Why haven't you cured cancer yet?" "We have a vaccine to prevent some very serious cancers." "But it might turn my daughter into a hussy."
- Spivak 1y ago
  Of course, I for sure held off on having casual unprotected sex with multiple partners as a teenager because I was worried about contracting HPV, but thanks to Gardasil my slut era was legendary and enduring.
  - Fomite 1y ago
    Teenagers are notorious for making decisions based on consequences that are decades away from manifesting.
    - Spivak 1y ago
      I can't tell if you think what I said was serious, I tried to hard to convey the /s.
      - fknorangesite 1y ago
        Don't worry; it was very obvious.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  Also, forget "She might die of cancer" just exactly how bad is it if your daughter is a whore ? What else are we ruling out, independent business owner, politician ? What happened to "I just want my children to be happy" ?

skdhhdj 1y ago

[flagged]

tchalla 1y ago
Sorry, can you explain how this relates to immigration?
- Fomite 1y ago
  Especially ironic given how hard a number of South American countries are having eliminating the MMR diseases due to import cases from Europe and the U.S.
LorenPechtel 1y ago
Immigration has nothing to do with it. Measles is highly infectious, you need a very high percentage of the population immune in order to maintain herd immunity. So long as you have herd immunity the only source of infection is travel--but note that this works both ways. It's much more likely to be Americans catching it while traveling than immigrants bringing it. They at least used to trace the original case in such outbreaks, it was normally someone who had been abroad. We saw the same thing with Covid--quarantine against Chinese people, while ignoring Americans returning from the very same places even when they said they had symptoms. (And irrelevant besides, the strain from Europe quickly dominated.)

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

Maybe we’re seeing selection pressure against those prone to addictive cycles of social-media influenced misinformation? Like, anti-vaxers died at higher rates in Covid [1]. This will continue across disease outbreaks, particularly ones for which we have near-comprehensive vaccines like measles. And given antivax sensibility is heritable (through parenting, not genes), one would expect this to stabilize the population over several generations to one that doesn’t have this defect. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10123459/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10123459/

boxerab 1y ago
very few people are against vaccines per se, they are just against *unsafe* vaccines. "anti-vax" is a term used to dismiss dissident without having to deal with their arguments i.e an ad hominem. As an analogy, if I object to high levels of mercury in fish, am I anti-fish? or anti-poisonous-fish ?
- delichon 1y ago
  > "anti-vax" is a term used to dismiss dissident without having to deal with their arguments i.e an ad hominem. A slur.
- 8note 1y ago
  "unsafe" is a loaded term in your fish analogy, you eat mecury directly, but wont eat fish that might have mercury. the communicable disease is itself quite dangerous
  - boxerab 1y ago
    I think you missed the point. Granted the disease is dangerous, but what if the cure is worse ? If we don't know this is true, we ought to assume the risk outweighs the benefits until PROVEN otherwise- that is the precautionary principle. As an analogy take Vioxx, a headache remedy that caused thousands of heart attacks. Merck the manufacturer started an advertising campaign for the drug AFTER the learned it was killing people - they were ultimately fined 4.5 billion. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048286 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048286 The docket shows us that pharmaceutical companies are serial felons who have paid some of the largest fines in history for lying about their products. It is prudent to be skeptical until proven otherwise.