As long as it’s just the children of the anti-vaxxers who die, I’m okay with this. Clears the stupid out of the gene pool.
Yes - usually in a combined vaccination called the DPT (includes Diphtheria and Tetanus).
If only. The problem is, naturally, that these vaccines wear off with age, or you get children with actual allergies or immunological issues (like being too young) that prevent vaccination.
Yeah, but I can dream.
One of the primary problems with anti-vax stupidity is that it’s contagious stupidity.
There are two kinds of anti-vaxxers. The dipshit new agey liberals and the paranoid anti-government conservatives. As per usual, the continuum doesn’t stretch left to right, it tends to circle around and connects in crazytown.
True.
Phyllis Schlafly on vaccines:
More from her here including whining about a pertussis booster shot:
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59634
:rolleyes:
Confession: I live in rural Thailand and am out of touch with modern American political thought. (There’s only one other American for many miles around; when I teased him about Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize, his response was “Paul who?” :dubious: ) SDMB forums seem one of my best ways to keep in touch. Therefore, when someone describes himself as {fiscal conservative,libertarian,pick your favorite euphemism for right-wing idiot} I often ask: “What does a ‘whatever’ believe?” Responses have, so far, not been particularly useful. I’ve learned that “fiscal conservatives” don’t like to “break windows.”
One teenager(?) posted some long messages describing what a “libertartarian” believes. I learned that he
[ul]
[li] Opposes the Federal Reserve and paper money[/li][li] Opposes mandatory vaccinations[/li][li] Supports appropriate government regulations but not inappropriate regulations[/li][/ul]
If his was a poor summary of libertarian philosophy, a comment in his thread might have been appropriate.
It’s common to measure political views along two axes: beliefs in economic freedom and social freedom. I think a third axis should be introduced, perhaps more important than the other two: propensity for rational thought.
It’s there. Everyone just pretty much sits at zero on the z-axis, though, so it’s usually not included in the interest of being concise.
Libertarians have a wide range of belief, from people who just want to see the size and scope of government reduced considerably, to the extreme of people who want to privatize the road network as such. It may be true that a lot of libertarians oppose mandatory vaccination, but even if that’s the case, why blame them?
The ACLU supports the right of people promoting racist ideology to make public speeches, so should we blame the ACLU for racism? No, the people actually doing the evil are the ones responsible, and even if libertarians think that people should make up their own minds about vaccination, it’s still the idiots who end up choosing not to do it who are responsible.
snip
I’ve never heard that paper money thing. I would thing that most libertarians would want the opposite, and mistrust a credit-based society. Maybe you (or that teen) are confusing it with the gold standard, which wants paper/coin money to be backed by a gold value.
As for what libertarians believe, I’m not sure what you want us to do. Here’s a start, knock yourself out or start a thread and ask for opinions, once you sort out the pro/anti people.
The Pournelle chart has an axis for rationalism (along with statism). See the description; it’s not rationalism in all aspects. Of course this chart was made by a devoted libertarian, and his philosophy is conveniently on the “rational” side. :dubious:
Are you a libertarian? (The way you’ve phrased your response implies either you are, or you’ve missed the point.) The reason vaccinations are made mandatory is so that the general public doesn’t have to worry about those “idiots”. (*)
Similarly people are obligated to pay taxes for police and fire protection whether they intend to use those services or not.
(And by the way, it’s not clear that refusing vaccine is idiotic! Are polio vaccines still given in U.S.A.? The probability of infection is so low, a rational parent may prefer to avoid the risk of side-effects. But it’s a “Golden Rule” thing: The vaccinations are made mandatory to eliminate the risk of epidemic.)
I have some philosophical agreements with many libertarian positions although I’m not sure I’d consider myself a libertarian. Depends on how much tolerance you’d have for pragmantic deviations from the philosophy.
I was trying to say that I was not entirely unsympathetic to the idea that there shouldn’t be a legal mandate to perform medical procedures on people without their consent. Vaccines are absolutely beneficial but I’m not sure if I’m fully comfortable with the government having that power. In a vacuum, if it couldn’t affect other people (if there were no issues of communicability/herd immunity) I’d probably be opposed to mandatory vaccination. But with those issues, I probably grudgingly accept it because of the harm it can cause to uninvolved third parties.
But this doesn’t mean that I’m somehow anti-vax, which is what you seemed to be implying. You can hold the position that people should do something, and yet for it not to be forced upon them by the law. I’m a huge vaccination advocate and I’d never consider not vaccinating my hypothetical kids. And that was my point - libertarians can believe it’s not right to force people to make that decision, but they can think that it’s totally wrong for people to choose not to vaccinate. But in any case, it’s the people who are actually refusing to do the vaccinations who are causing the harm, which in my experience is not libertarians but almost exclusively liberal new age douchebags - basically the same as the alt medicine crowd, or at least a lot of overlap.
The most prominent politician on the side of the anti-vaxers is libertarian hero Ron Paul, and you can find considerable support for antivax nuttiness and other woo amongst his supporters*.
I haven’t seen any polls on this, but I suspect that overall, right-wing/libertarian goofs and left-wing “Big Pharma Ate My Baby” types drive antivax sentiment about equally.
That might seem rational, but the trouble is that it’s not just one parent that makes this decision. We had a thread here while back involving a parent who skipped vaccinations for her kid, then was distressed to find that other parents using her day care center had done the same thing, exposing her darling to the others’ germs. :rolleyes:
Once herd immunity is diluted sufficiently, one case of polio (coming from somewhere in Africa, probably) could start a nice little epidemic here.
By the way, it’s good that Shodan posted here about his permanent hearing loss from measles, reminding us that preventable childhood infectious diseases can cause permanent serious injury in addition to death. Antivaxers, when they admit consequences to these diseases at all, tend to ignore the permanent debilitating and disabling sequelae (which in the case of pertussis, can include permanent mental retardation and seizure disorders). And of course, there’s the wretchedness of having one of these protracted illnesses, even if one escapes permanent damage. But what do the antivaxers care? The great majority of them already have been vaccinated and have much lower risk factors than children - no big deal if the kiddies nowadays get sick.
*my bet is his son Rand Paul feels much the same way, but may have wised up enough to keep his mouth shut on the issue.
That seems to suggest that Paul holds a similar position to what I was mentioning earlier - that he doesn’t want the government to have the power to enforce medical procedures, but that any reasonable person should vaccinate their kids.
You may be right about his supporters, I don’t know. I’m only going from personal experience that the alt med and anti-vax crowd (which as I said isn’t quite the same but has huge overlap) tends to be liberal types. Paranoid libertarian types have their beliefs too, but I haven’t seen them focus on alt med type stuff so much. But that may just be my experience.
There was that libertarian politician who turned blue due to drinking colloidal silver.
Ah, here we go: Stan Jones - Wikipedia
Google images has pictures.
Yes, that is exactly my point.
Take littering as another example. We don’t litter parks becasue we want them to be pretty, but an individual’s own littering in a large park is diluted enough to be effectively invisible. The only reasons not to litter are fear of police, or altruism (“Golden Rule”).
I realize my point here is so obvious as to seem childish. Yet “libertarians” can’t seem to grasp it. Moreover, I’ve been astonished by threads here about health-care which go on and on for hundreds of messages with no one ever hinting that “Golden Rule” compassion is the reason for UHC, a moral principle that seems instinctive in many European countries.
Too many smurf berries?
Oh, this comes up, and at least some conservatives are quite explicit in saying that their right to not be taxed more is more important than someone’s right to health care - something they do not consider a right.