I"m trying to wrap my head around how you think this in any way excuses a world view that says that society has rules for MY benefit, but I don’t have to follow these same rules.
“I can refuse to follow societies rules because I probably won’t get caught” is not really a defensible position from a moral, ethical or logical standpoint.
So, he wants a society where the law protects him without binding him and binds everyone without protecting them. Privilege.
Character is what you are in the dark.
–Dwight L. Moody
I find myself a neutral-good outlier on a lawful-good message board. Yes, we need some rules for society to function. But we don’t need nearly as many as we have, and a lot of the rules are written with a broad brush, and don’t always make sense.
Have you ever waited 5 minutes at 2AM for a light to turn green when you can see there is no other traffic anywhere near you? I actually have done that, but it’s stupid, and I won’t hold it against you if you ran that red light. Even though those traffic lights are broadly useful and I am happy we have them.
If we want people to get vaccinated, we have to convince them it’s valuable. And it’s more helpful to convince them it’s valuable to them than to rely on pure altruism.
It will help protect you from a nasty illness
It will reduce the risk of “long covid”
The risk of myocarditis is greater if you catch covid than if you are vaccinated
Your elderly mom is less likely to catch covid from you if you are vaccinated
Those are all somewhat persuasive.
The CDC says you should do it
is not terribly persuasive. The CDC also tells me to cook meat well-done and never taste the raw cookie dough. Notably, the CDC likes to over-simplify, and doesn’t talk about how you can also pasteurize meat with a longer time spent at a lower temperature. I don’t know why not. But I know that I don’t generally trust the CDC to give me complete information and advice I want to follow.
The cop that pulls you over, or the red light camera that takes your pic will.
Sometimes we follow rules because they are the right thing to do, and sometimes we follow them because there are imposed consequences for breaking them.
But, we can also try to change those rules. I have sat at such lights, then went and complained to the city about them, getting them changed to blinking yellow and red lights during low traffic times.
But the CDC says you should do it specifically for the reasons that you just said were persuasive up above.
No it doesn’t. It recommends 145, which is medium. Sure, rare and raw are discouraged, but that’s because those are the temps where there is an elevated chance of getting something nasty from it.
For good reason. Now, not saying that you will always, or even often get sick from doing so, but there is a high enough chance that you will that it’s best practices not to do so.
Mostly because it’s not so easy to do, and mistakes or shortcuts will end up with something that can make you sick.
If these things are handled properly, then your risks are pretty low. However, many people do not handle their food with the level of safety and sanitation that they should, and so things like rare steaks, uncooked cookie dough, or pasteurized meats present an elevated chance of causing food borne illness.
Then you can find other sources of information that tell you what you want to hear. The CDC isn’t perfect, and will not necessarily cover every situation, but it’s still giving you far better advice than if you choose to follow the advice of those who are simply confirming your beliefs.
The CDC publishes the data and studies that they used to come to their conclusions about best health safety practices. I don’t know what more information you could want. Now, if you just don’t want to follow their advice, because you would rather do something they advise against, then that’s just you choosing to take risks that the CDC can give you information on how risky they are, and how to mitigate those risks.
If everyone followed the CDC’s advice, then we’d have fewer sick people. We wouldn’t have 0, and there are those who may never get any illness in spite of actively going against their recommendations, but the more people who follow their guidelines, the healthier the populace will be.
I mean, the fire marshall comes by and tells me that I can’t use extension cords, or a space heater under my desk, and that I have to have a sprinkler system with specific coverage per square foot and per room. They are not doing this because they think that by me not following their guidelines, I will have a fire, they are doing this because by everyone following their guidelines, it will reduce the number of fires.
Yes, but all our meat and poultry would also be overcooked, and less delicious than it can be. There are real costs to following CDC guidelines.
I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t follow the CDC guidelines. I am trying to explain to a bunch of people who think “if it’s the rule, I should follow it” (which is far from a uniform sentiment) why that’s not a persuasive argument, and why it’s counter-productive to wag your finger and say “bad person, you didn’t follow CDC guidelines” if your goal is to increase vaccination compliance.
I’m not aware that the CDC or ( anyone else ) regulates the temperature to which you cook food for your personal consumption. They may issue guidelines or warnings about undercooked food but the purpose of those , IMHO, is to make sure you have as much information as possible. You are free to weigh the benefit of tastier food against the health risk of undercooked food. You are even free to roll your food around on a dirty floor if you think it improves the taste.
But if you want to start a business cooking food for other people, you may find that you can’t be so free-spirited. The freedom the government gives to you to make yourself sick for the benefit of tastier food does not extend to making other people sick for the benefit of tastier food.
(The cooking temperature thing isn’t really the best example, because most jurisdictions seem to realize there’s a great benefit to tastier food, and let you serve certain undercooked foods, like rare steak, as long as you warn the customer.)
But if you do decide to run a food service business, you are going to be subject to many rules that may be very burdensome and you may feel that the benefits are dubious. There may not even be a good argument for these rules that plays to your self-interest. You may feel strongly that the cost of complying with these rules is greater than the minuscule chance that your business may be the cause of a cholera outbreak. But that isn’t your calculation to make.
Even if you don’t agree with rules, you will probably follow them - not because you are the kind of person that blindly obeys rules, but because you want to avoid the civil and criminal penalties associated with breaking these rules. These penalties are in place for the purpose of affecting your cost -benefit calculations so that you will - in all probability - make the choice that benefits the community rather than yourself.
The vaccine situation is somewhat different because, unlike other regulations, the cost- benefit analysis is so strongly weighed in favor of vaccination that it’s hard to imagine how a properly informed person would make a decision to decline vaccination.
But apparently many people are either not getting the correct information or weighing the information correctly. The correct information is not hard to find and weighing it should be easy.
Yes, we absolutely should be encouraging people to make a voluntary decision to get vaccinated based on the overwhelming evidence that it is the correct decision. That’s what governments and civic organizations and responsible citizens everywhere have been urgently trying to do for about a year now. And we should keep trying to do that.
But I also see nothing wrong, at this point in time, by changing up the decision-making process by throwing some civil and criminal penalties into the mix. Even though it shouldn’t be necessary, it’s becoming clear that it is- and regulatory enforcement is a time honored method of keeping the citizenry safe.
Roughly 500 per course of treatment for Pfizer, and about 700 for Merck. Vaccination is still cheaper, but these clowns seem to think that paying $500-700 to be treated is better than being vaccinated and avoiding it in the first place.
Because the vast run of people are flat-out stupid and will try and cheat/fudge as much as possible. We see this with the colossal number of idiots who wear masks, but keep their noses exposed, for example. They’re obeying the rules, but doing so stupidly because they don’t get it.
So you have to simplify it down to “cook to 165” or whatever, instead of providing a chart of pasteurization time vs. temperature, because people won’t get that, but they will get 165, and if they cook it to that temp, it’s basically instantly pasteurized.
We’re discussing this very issue over in the Canada and coronavirus thread:
(Right at end of thread)
I’m fine with regulating food service businesses, and I’m also fine with requiring a lot of people to be vaccinated, or excluding the unvaccinated from certain riskier activities, like sports events or restaurants. I’m not fine with punishing people for not feeling like “the CDC recommended this” automatically meant they went ahead and did it, unless they were self or evil.
I often get a sense of anger at “those bad people”, and I think that’s mostly misplaced. Those who haven’t been vaccinated are not, in general, bad people. They are a mix of misinformed, stupid, and stubborn people, including a lot who distrust whatever authority has been contacting them. Sure, proactively say “get vaccinated by this date or the following bad consequence will happen”. But don’t do it with a subtext of punishment for “selfish bad people”.
Oh, I don’t think anyone should go around calling people that refuse to get vaccinated “bad” or “evil”, either. It’s not productive. Neither is the anger.
But, I also think that’s a claim that’s been highly amplified by the anti-vax crowd, who love to claim to be persecuted - you know, the ones that equate vaccine mandates with Nazi extermination camps. Talking about “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is not the same as saying that unvaccinated people are bad and evil. Saying that unvaccinated people spread disease at a higher rate is not the same as saying they are bad or evil. Saying that you think it’s OK if unvaccinated people get fired for refusing the vaccine is not the same as saying that they are bad or evil.
Yet I have heard right wing media cite these points as examples of anti-vax shaming. I’m not saying that anti-vax shaming doesn’t happen but it’s highly amplified by people with a persecution complex.
Also, I don’t believe for one second that anti-vax shaming has anything to do with vaccine refusal. I think it’s bullshit.
It’s an abuser tactic writ large. The victim asks the abuser to do something perfectly reasonable, and he refuses. They concede that request is reasonable, but they refuse based on the way they were asked. They didn’t like your “tone”. They saw you roll your eyes. You shamed them with their attitude.
In short, they are refusing to do this perfectly reasonable thing because of something YOU did wrong.
Now most of this comes from the top, the right-wing and anti-science influencers that are propagating the anti-vax skepticism. In many ways, your average vaccine refusing individual is just the victim of bad information, bad information that also encourages a willful refusal to listen to good information.
I’m not sure how we combat that.
I agree fully with you that we shouldn’t expect people to get vaccinated just because the CDC says they should. If that were the situation I have a lot more sympathy. But there is a lot of other information, widely available information, that strongly supports getting this vaccine other than the CDC recommendation. I’m not expecting people to get vaccinated based on the CDC recommendation, I’m expecting them to do it based on the totally of the available information.
No, it’s worse than that. Willful refusal to listen to good information happens because of willful refusal to know good information, i.e., it’s very deliberate. And their belief in some of the crazier misinformation is a result of critical thinking failure beyond anything actually plausible.
These people are ready to believe that the vax will magnetize you with Bill Gates’s 5G microchip surveillance trackers and are killing more people than the actual disease (which is a total hoax anyway).
No, that’s beyond willful stupidity or any believable failure of critical thinking. That is outright oppositional definat disorder and death cultism.
And a certain bigly degree of angry is in order, because THEY are a very definite and definable danger to US.
I think I agree with your whole post. I was reacting to the discussion above about “following the rules” when we haven’t even HAD rules about vaccination, except for CDC guidelines. And also to stuff in I’ve been seeing (not in this thread) about people wanting unvaccinated people to suffer. I’ve seen the latter both on this site and elsewhere.
I’m not wild about the OSHA mandate on all large employers, because it feels like executive over-reach to me, but I’m all in with the federal mandate for federal employees and employees of federal contractors, and I’d love to see mandates in all the schools, state mandates covering state employees and contractors, and everyone who enters restaurants, theaters, and stadiums, and higher health insurance prices for those who refuse to get vaccinated.
Let’s face it, it’s also ‘Sticking it to the Libruls’. Let’s make sure to never tell them NOT to jump off the bridge. COVID’s already causing enough death.
Specifically, it’s a self-inflicted mental disorder called Denialism, and I write about it at the link below. Holocaust denial was the first wide-spread evidence of this disorder, but with the advent of the internet and the ability for people to create self-reinforcing information bubbles, what is usually a reflexive defense mechanism used to adjust individuals to drastic change has now manifested to become a society-threatening mental disorder.
If self interest were the ultimate yardstick, D Day would never have happened and Hitler would have conquered the world. Rational people think of more than themselves, and getting vaccinated helps society as a whole by giving the virus less opportunity to spread. You also help those who for legitimate medical reasons cannot be vaccinated or who have compromised immune systems. Societies where everybody looks out only for themselves are not societies at all.
Once again, AH has cut to the heart of the matter. We have the mods and the SDSAB. Is there an position for Official Explainer?
Many companies have open enrollment for benefits in the late fall to cover the next year. My employer’s period was last week. I suspect many companies have penalties for not getting vaccinated and we will start hearing about it more and more.
My wife’s employer, however, does not, as they mandated vaccination as a condition of employment. My employer has been encouraging vaccination, offering an extra vacation day and prizes, but they decided not to mandate vaccinations. My guess would be they do not wish to piss off the governor in the state where they are headquartered.
“Annsplaining?”
(and I mean that in a good way) 