warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
A lot of your talking points come straight from the anti-vaxx handbook, so I don't really feel much of an urge to engage all your points, since I know you have a retort ready to go for every single one
Can we similar mass-measures to mitigate climate change as we've taken w Covid?
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TheMeInTeam
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Well isn't that convenient. You get to label someone who is (conditionally) pro-vaccine as "anti vax", claim the arguments are "anti vax" without basis (despite that I've only argued against mandates in this context), and assume that as a result any possible refutation to your arguments must not be legitimate, before even seeing those.
So not legitimate, in fact, that you can't even be bothered to address what reasons do/don't work, or why. Or maybe you have seen those...but then why would it be hard to refute them?
But never mind any of that. We're "trying" to discuss here, after all, by refusing to discuss while misrepresenting the others' stance (aka claiming it's some "edge" position when it obviously isn't).
This is strikingly funny, coming from you. I'd have thought you'd be the first person to respect someone's belief that a conservation isn't worth having.
Anyhow, the main thing I wanted to reply to was this:
All drugs start off new. Legal immunity - the thing you're challenging here - is common practise, and not unique to the Covid vaccines.
Really, the answer to any attempted fearmongering (or sympathising with fearmongering) of the Covid vaccines is a very simple one word reply: polio.
Polio vaccines were incredibly experimental, and in a lot of early cases had horrendous and lethal side-effects. But the polio crisis needed something. Anything. That's the problem with a pandemic. You can't just sit around and twiddle your thumbs. You have to do the best you can with the resources you have.
And unfortunately, thanks to the Internet, quack doctors, and whatever else contributes to conspiracy theories like 5G towers causing Covid, pretty much every country has a problem where vaccination rates need to be high, but folks are refusing to. Which harms the overall effort. This is of course only one problem among several, but it's still a problem, and one that mandates can solve (or mitigate to the point where it's not a problem).
This isn't as analogous to climate change, because fossil fuel companies have a huge amount of sway in political spaces where genuine science often doesn't. Much like how business frequently wins against Covid restrictions. Money talks, and science is something that tends to cost money rather than generate it.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
You finally bring up some good points. I admit I am just so tired of going through this whole routine. I also admit that's not very conductive to holding a discussion, but I also feel that not every point made is necessarily made in good faith either.
In the end this is a global pandemic and now endemic (IIRC) and a global crisis. In extraordinary times extraordinary measures are needed. Show me evidence that the vaccines aren't safe in any sort of way that would differentiate them from any other vaccine we are using on a massive scale.. or show me government plans to use the mandates to further restrict our freedoms.. show me anything like that and then it will for sure be worth having a discussion. But until then this is a goddamn pandemic and nitpicking over these stupid little details is just not worth my time. The focus has to be on how we move forward - and how to do that with the least number of people dead or otherwise negatively affected
TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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A disease with < 3% baseline death rate with vaccines ostensibly moving that to a small fraction of 1% for anybody choosing to take them does not strike me as an extraordinary threat, for any reasonable standard of "extraordinary". Nor has anybody presented standards of "extraordinary crisis" that constrains anticipation to post-vaccine COVID.
The evidentiary burden is on demonstrating the vaccines are safe, not to accept mandates requiring proof of non-safety that (depending on the risk) can't be demonstrated yet. Something our institutions agree with. Most of them are not yet FDA approved, for the same reason that treatment options like Paxlovid are not yet approved. There is a reason that new drugs go through a process. That many of the COVID vaccines have not yet completed this process is, in fact, evidence that they are different from vaccines that have gone through that process, have proven histories, and work differently than the mRNA vaccines.
I do not anticipate that COVID vaccines will turn out to be more dangerous than risk of getting COVID w/o them. But that's my decision to make, not somebody else's.
It's also worth pointing out that while some vaccines are mandatory for school/work/etc, others are not.
Right, how we move forward. People who want the vaccine get it, no disputes there.
COVID kills people. Lockdowns kill people. Economic decline kills people (and yes, this will include economic damage from climate change, while also including economic damage from climate change policies). If you want to limit the the number of people negatively effected as a policy maker, you must actually do cost benefit for these choices, and make tradeoffs that are going to suck even if you somehow come up with the best solution in hindsight.
Saying "this is a goddamn pandemic" is virtue signaling/shouting loudly at best. Yes, we are aware there is a disease, that it kills < 0.1% to 3% of people (depending on vaccine, age, and other factors) of people. That's not good enough. Each policy implemented must show that it's doing more good than harm, and we haven't been placing a lot of emphasis on the harm of just "doing something" so far https://nypost.com/2021/03/22/the-data-shows-lockdowns-end-more-lives-than-they-save/
A vaccine "mandate" implies more than just telling people they need to get it. You need to enforce it, which has direct monetary and indirect costs. You need to account for the effects non-compliance has on the labor pool. You need to fight legal battles over people who demonstrated they already had COVID/have antibodies, because if you don't you get sued (and will probably correctly lose and pay out). You need to demonstrate consistent standards in court, for the mandate to hold, which doesn't have good optics when a federal mandate fails at the highest level.
And what do you get in return for those costs? A "statistically significant increase" in vaccination rate. Okay. But you need that 5-10% marginal increase to actually do more good than harm. Do you even know direct and indirect costs of implementing a mandate, offhand? If you're not a policy maker, it's might be okay if you don't. But it seems strange/abrasive to make strong assertions about it in the context of not knowing, considering you're advocating compelling action on pain of lost livelihoods at minimum.
Insisting on framing the number of deaths by percentage without comparison to relative mortality of other viruses, just because the % number looks small on paper, is also a form of signalling. I wouldn't call it virtuous, but given that "virtue signalling" is a construct anyway, the pattern fits.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
I don’t even think all of the people in this thread have been vaccinated and we know it works and we know what problems the coronavirus causes.
Are we really going to try to address a problem that is even more abstract when we can’t get past this one?
Are we really going to try to address a problem that is even more abstract when we can’t get past this one?
I had to look up greenwashing, so this might not correlate perfectly, but "virtue signalling" as adopted by those right-of-centre / in the "culture war" nonsense is about "moral grandstanding" (I've only skimmed the piece, but The Conversation seems to have a good writeup on it).
In context, greenwashing could be seem as a form of that, I think. But given that greenwashing specifically focuses on the environment impact of a company's products, I'd argue it's dissimilar enough to stand by itself. The problem with "virtue signalling" is it's generally a bad faith accusation (as per the piece linked), whereas greenwashing is a thing we all know corporate media engages in to avoid reckoning with things like carbon footprint and so on.
Narz
keeping it real
Speaking of abstract why not cut the passive-agression and be specific? I assume you mean meinteam & myself and I'm not 100% about him altho he's repeatedly said he 'believes' in the vacc but is against mandates (which is my position as well) but I'm vaccinated not that it's your business.
Climate change is about as abstract as cancer. Just cause something is confusing to you personally or you've heard mixed things about it back in your hard-right days and can't make up your mind doesn't make it abstract.
Your while premise is nonsense that one doesn't get to want to do good or have an opinion if one has 'wrong' views/actions on another issue. I went to a personal training w a woman who is a smoker. To me it's kinda nuts to smoke cigarettes while trying to get fit/learn about health but she was also one of the most motivated students (she worked way harder than me). This whole business of 'you have this opinion therefore screw everything else you have to say' is why say many 'righteous' types find themselves so impotent and get angry that someone like Joe Rogan w so many 'bad' views (not to mention 'platforming' 'problematic' folks) can have such a following.
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I think nearly everyone here has. What you might be noticing is the people who're complaining about the process and assuming that this means they're better labeled as being opponents of vaccination rather than critics of the current situation. This is why you'll note that some people engage in suppression of the disagreements rather than using them as bellweathers for people elsewhere.
AGW is a bit of a different story. Vaccination should be able to occur with people just individually making a personally rational choice. I got my vaccine originally to protect my antivax loved ones, and with Delta (etc.) it turns out that my vaccine mostly just protects me. If the vaccine is perceived as being personally beneficial (regardless of motive), then people would take it. If the vaccine were good enough, we'd take it at levels sufficient to matter.
AGW is different. Right now, all the momentum is being done by people who're willing to sacrifice on behalf of others. It's more of a Prisoner's Dilemma than the vaccines are, since the longterm benefit of my efforts entirely depend on your participation with AGW. There's a strong rational case that I should care about AGW, but whether I'm willing to sacrifice on that front entirely depends on total buy-in. There are enough people willing to free-ride on my efforts, such that my efforts get diluted.
We are well-past the stage where AGW can be handled by the efforts of people who care out of a sense of equity or the precautionary principle. We need more buy-in from people who only (implicitly) kinda care about the future.
If people were merely critical of the process, we wouldn't have endless posts discussing how "low" the mortality stats are, how "flawed" or "dangerous" the current vaccines are, etc, et al.
Some people are complaining about the process. Some are complaining about more than that, and as such their positions shouldn't be reduced to the rather understandable stance of being critical of merely process.
All the things you're describing are, fundamentally, criticisms of the process. In an ideal scenario, voluntary uptake would solve the pandemic. That's balanced against the reality that mandates are required. At that point, the entire discussion is full of dilemmas. As I keep saying, the only solution is to not have the problem in the first place, which means that the solutions need to be available before the problem occurs.
It will be the same problem we'll experience with AGW later. In 20 years time, there will be massive social tension caused by climate refugees. People who plan on being xenophobic about desperate and poor people would be vastly better served by being proactive about AGW mitigation now, but that would require long-term thinking over short-term pleasure.
You could argue that in an ideal scenario, there never would've been a pandemic (cue "to not have the problem in the first place"). That's the problem with idealism, there. We have to be able to separate out criticism of actions taken, vs. combined efforts of people like scientists to create a vaccine, and so on. They shouldn't be evaluated in the same way. I feel it's a bit too abstract to reduce them all down to "process".
Claiming the vaccines are "dangerous" isn't a criticism of any process, because it's not rooted in any adherence to the evidence we have to hand. It's never backed up by medical opinion, statistics, or anything. I appreciate your pushing back generally here (even when I disagree) - I think that's a necessary presence. But we need to have a think on the motives of the criticism, as pointless as it is in the grand scheme of things. But in the grand scheme of things, stuff like this thread doesn't matter either. So here I am, in the things that don't matter
Nuclear power would largely solve global warming.
Chernobyl and Fukushima are only uninhabitable for 300 years.
I'm not just engaging in wishful thinking when I talk about my solution. This interlinks with this thread's AGW discussion, because I'll continue to point out that this might be our last global pandemic set to 'easy' mode, due to the escalating threat of bioterrorism or accident.
Having the tools for early detection and early suppression of the virus would have made all the difference. But the only way to get these is to have sufficient social will in place ahead of time. Like with AGW, it's not just governmental efforts that matter, because it's partially a function of sufficient resources invested.
Whether someone's concern is future equity or future liberty, the game-winning move is to invest sufficiently to not have the problem actually actualize. With regards to the free-riders, either the investment has to overwhelm the damage they do or they have to be brought on board to help.
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TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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If you know of a better way of calling it out, let us know.
Though in the context of arguments, it's usually used to demonstrate that the person using virtue signaling is lacking in arguments with substance, and are instead substituting said signaling. It's a useful tool for doing more harm than good.
It is real in the sense that cancer is real, but I would argue that with their common use as of today, cancer better constrains anticipation of what someone means than "climate change". Climate change usually means "human caused climate change" in modern use, but the general version of the term implies all of the factors/history of climate change in aggregate.
Both can be difficult to trace cause precisely, or efficiently handle.
Narz
keeping it real
Cause doesn't really matter as much as solutions.
The Buddha had an allegory about a man who, after being shot w an arrow, demanded to know who shot it and why before taking action to remove it.
But the problem w solutions is that they'll require coordinated sacrifice where the gain to be had for those not sacrificing is very large. Even if the world world 'loses it's shirt', w $100 billion you can likely survive in an underground luxury mansion.
TheMeInTeam
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Not sure that's the best analogy, since for climate change cause will inform solution.
Though I guess if there are immediate risk of additional arrows, you might also not want to stop to remove one. That they're non-trivial to pull out was often part of their design, so maybe there's more to this
.If damage outstrips the cost of sacrifice, it's not really a sacrifice so much as it's loss mitigation. And by "you", I'm pretty sure you don't mean either of us specifically wrt that mansion:/.
On the "bright" side, we might end up solving this as a species with WW3 nuclear winter or just killing ourselves off. Not the best answer, personally I'd rather see some good cost benefit analysis.