Reminder that in the UK in 1900, before mass vaccination for childhood diseases began, 20% of all babies died before their fifth birthday (from diseases we currently vaccinate them against).
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If they *were* just a death cult that would also be true.
Not saying it's that simple, but if someone said "Look out, that death cult is coming to get us" I don't think "But they only want to kill people like us, not themselves" would be responsive to the situation. Which is why I think *from outside the cult* there's no important terminological distinction.
If they could be reasoned with, you could apply reason to their goals as they perceive them, yes.
@petealexharris Taking it personally is a barrier to understanding, and understanding is necessary to (reliable) victory.
In a just or kind world, one should not be required to deal with such people, and yet the world we have is one subject to selection.
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@cstross Not to put a too fine point on that, but people in iron lungs also don’t breed easily.
Pure eugenics.
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@cstross Unfortunately, there is nothing that will convince vaccine skeptics.
I once watched the BBC programme "Unvaccinated" by Hannah Fry, who meets seven unvaccinated people in an experiment.
She showed them the evidence, they slowly started to believe the evidence, or said that they did, but they remained skeptics at the end of the programme.
@MartinEscardo @cstross there is at least one coordinated "vaccines are bad" misinfo/disinfo/propaganda op thats been running and evolving since 2013 at least, based out of Russia and targetting Americans and Europeans with very similar points and techniques, just localized to each target audience. I once did some work to try help counter-acting it. for the US State Dept. you know, as one does lol
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@arafel@mas.to @bjn@mstdn.social @cstross@wandering.shop @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org It's not a misapprehension of how evolution works, something that could be corrected by real-world experience.
It's eugenics. It's an ideology with internal contradictions large enough to fly a Boeing through, and one that unfortunately many liberals share (for evidence see US COVID death toll 2020-2024). You only need to see one picture of Francis Galton to recognize that the folks pushing this ideology would not fare well were its dictates evenly applied. But this sort of thing is always about forceful exclusion.
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L luettdeern@plasmatrap.com shared this topic
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RE: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/115963873612884664
Reminder that in the UK in 1900, before mass vaccination for childhood diseases began, 20% of all babies died before their fifth birthday (from diseases we currently vaccinate them against).
RFK jr's appointee wants to kill roughly 20% of all newborn Americans "to improve the breed" or something.
(Not including those paralysed for life by polio.)
@cstross I mean, Polio is a disease I am very interested in. The vaccine came shortly before I was born, so I was one of the generation who felt very fortunate to have it.
And my wife had an aunt who had been paralysed for life by Polio. I knew her - she was one of the very lucky ones. She lived. She was able to have a fairly normal life - married and had children.
I lived at a time when vaccines were saving so many lives. So many thousands of lives.
And this fuckbrained heap of scum wants to turn all that back. The sooner he rots in hell, the better.
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@petealexharris It is, alas, nowhere near 99%.
The distinction may have operational utility in opposing their policies; for example, the "all these babies will die! look at the tombstones in old graveyards!" response to anti-vax policies functions to confirm the objectives and purposes of the anti-vax movement. It's about killing babies; that's what it wants. Telling its members that babies will die is not an effective means of dissuasion.
@graydon @petealexharris @cstross but the set of babies that seem to end up killed by their policies is often their own. Conning *other people* into not vaccinating their children might make sense, but so far, it's mostly their own political supporters (whom of course they might regard as mere meat for the grinder).
To me it looks like panic at the loss of white majority and political power, and they are flailing, destructively, hoping to blow up the world so that the rubble will land "better".
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RE: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/115963873612884664
Reminder that in the UK in 1900, before mass vaccination for childhood diseases began, 20% of all babies died before their fifth birthday (from diseases we currently vaccinate them against).
RFK jr's appointee wants to kill roughly 20% of all newborn Americans "to improve the breed" or something.
(Not including those paralysed for life by polio.)
@cstross Social Darwinism might have been discredited, but that doesn't mean anything to people trying to apply it here.
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@Infoseepage
Tempting to advise a more permanent placement.@Infoseepage ...but that is (also) corrosive to the rest of us.
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@cstross That means they’ll need even more white babies. Don’t these people talk to each other?
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@Infoseepage @cstross Same.
And I've 0 tolerance for parents who literally abuse their children just to prove something: "I do my own research" "It's a government conspiracy" "It's MY child I do whatever I want with it"... -
@graydon @petealexharris @cstross but the set of babies that seem to end up killed by their policies is often their own. Conning *other people* into not vaccinating their children might make sense, but so far, it's mostly their own political supporters (whom of course they might regard as mere meat for the grinder).
To me it looks like panic at the loss of white majority and political power, and they are flailing, destructively, hoping to blow up the world so that the rubble will land "better".
@dr2chase Reducing white women to the status of chattel is important to the project; they can't do that without reversing the demographic transition as it applies to white people, too. And that unconcerned "kid died of measles" couple may well be representative.
They've deeply internalized "women, cattle, and slaves" and a Late Romantic "survival of the fittest" which ignores the actual environment and supposes some ideal person. Facts are not much involved anywhere.
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@cstross People who are anti-vaccination for whatever fruitloops reason need to spend some quality time in old churchyards looking at monuments to dead children put up by bereft parents.
@Infoseepage @cstross It seems like the generations that remember losing siblings, cousins, and friends to what are now vaccine-preventable diseases have mostly passed away so we’ve lost firsthand accounts of what it was like.
My late paternal grandpa, from the Silent Generation, lost one of his school friends to measles.
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@david_chisnall @arafel @cstross @bjn @lauren Tangential, but perhaps worth noting: blanks can indeed kill at sufficiently close range.
Though yeah, it'd certainly be nice if the antivaxers could experiment on themselves in isolation without inflicting the effects on the rest of society.
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@bhasic This is scary.
@Infoseepage @cstross -
RE: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/115963873612884664
Reminder that in the UK in 1900, before mass vaccination for childhood diseases began, 20% of all babies died before their fifth birthday (from diseases we currently vaccinate them against).
RFK jr's appointee wants to kill roughly 20% of all newborn Americans "to improve the breed" or something.
(Not including those paralysed for life by polio.)
@cstross I am not a medical professional, nor do I wish to play devil's advocate, but common sense tells us that at the beginning of the 20th century, hygiene standards and knowledge of medicines were much lower, so it is difficult to assess the impact of one factor or another on child mortality.
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@cstross I am not a medical professional, nor do I wish to play devil's advocate, but common sense tells us that at the beginning of the 20th century, hygiene standards and knowledge of medicines were much lower, so it is difficult to assess the impact of one factor or another on child mortality.
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@gwenh @cstross
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7086672/"The infant mortality rate in 1880 in New York City, a particularly crowded urban area, was as high as 288 per 1000 live-born infants, primarily related to various infectious processes. Infectious diseases such as diarrhea, diphtheria, scarlet fever and tuberculosis dominated as the major causes of morbidity and mortality among children... "
