This isn't "darwinism in action." These are people, and they're being murdered by selfish assholes spreading misinformation and selfish assholes who decide to believe it.
But even the selfish assholes are people, and their health impacts all of ours.
We are a society.
This idea permeating modern thought that's as much a virus as covid: that we are nothing but an association of individuals.
But we're a society. We're connected. It's not optional. The virus knows even if we don't.
A decision to not get vaccinated isn't a personal decision.
Or: a decision to not get vaccinated is a personal decision insofar as a decision to drive drunk is.
It's personal, in that a person can make it.
It's not, in that it disrespects the *fact* that we are a society.
So, quite appropriately, we have established consequences.
It's appropriate to establish consequences for driving drunk. It's not an infringement on personal liberty.
Or, if it is, it is an appropriate infringement. Personal liberty springs from society, which must be respected, if either society or personal liberty is to survive.
Likewise, it's appropriate to establish consequence for deliberately spreading vaccine misinformation during a pandemic.
And different consequence for failing to get vaccines.
Each commensurate to the level of failure to respect our society, from which personal liberty springs.
People deliberately spreading vaccine information aren't shouting fire in a crowded theater.
More like this: they're blockading the doors and directing people away from the exits, cutting the fireman's hoses while a real fire rages.
That isn't free speech.
They're murderers.
People who can get vaccinated but don't because they've chosen, for whatever reason, to listen to these murderers, have mistaken their decision as a personal one, which it isn't.
They are opting for a society where some people can't exist in public space.
So it should be them.
This isn't an impingement on their liberty. It's a *natural* consequence for deciding to help create a society in which some people can't exist in public space.
It shouldn't be at-risk people, who can't get vaccinated.
It should be them. The ones who chose this for us.
Failure to respect the *fact* that we're a society is to piss into the spring that feeds personal liberty.
Suppose I could get jabbed and choose not to.
Everyone could have attended indoor events. Now someone is going to have to stay home.
It should be me.
This seems obvious.
The consequence for the person who chooses to listen to the antivax murderers on TV should be that they are the ones who have to stay home in the society they chose, because THEY CHOSE IT.
I don't want it to be begging for the vaccine just before dying.
See the difference?
Antivaxxers are creating a house arrest for somebody.
It's either them, who have chosen to make themselves a risk to spread it, or vulnerable people, who can't choose to avoid it.
Antivaxers made the cell. They should be the ones to sit in it, until they're ready to leave.
Antivaxxers think they get to decide whether or not society exists. They don't. Society isn't optional. Any virus will tell you.
They can go out in the unsafe society they've chosen.
The consequence then is, they may well be the ones to die. A tragedy, albeit one they chose.
The murderers on the TV, meanwhile, don't care who dies. They just want the virus to spread.
They didn't want the vaccine to work—for society, that is. They were perfectly happy to let it to work for them. They're all vaccinated.
They should receive a murderer's consequence.
Covid is a tragedy, inevitable in a way, for viruses and diseases will inevitably come.
But also, this was a tragedy deliberately created by murders, then chosen, or forced upon us, by fools disinterested in society.
Make consequences commensurate to the nature of the choice.
It's quite clear that the reason some people want the virus to spread is that they think it will selectively kill the people they want killed.
There are many reasons people listen to the murderers on TV, and complicity is one of them.
Imagine just one article, ever, that asked the reverse.
The problem isn’t that nobody has heard the concerns of the people who refuse to listen, the people who won’t shut up. The problem is nobody ever listens to anyone else. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Nobody has ever been heard more lavishly or thoroughly than Trump voters, who least deserve it.
Someone explain to me why those who cry the loudest about our divisiveness never direct their laments at the people who elected a corrupt and mean racist bully.
We’d be a far better kinder and yes more unified country if everyone who wasn’t a mean asshole stopped: treating mean assholes as if they had something vital to share, treating ideas that deserve no respect with respect, listening to propositions that shouldn’t be heard.
I really think we need to start treating people who vote for Republicans as if they were the sort of people who come over to your house and leave a shit in the sink.
Oh how sad that you would shun a friend over a small political difference like taking a shit in your sink and leaving it there.
Oh so you just call people who shit in your sink “sink shitters” over politics, very divisive, you’re the real problem.
Maybe the most pernicious thing to happen to modern society is letting people think “doing your own research” into complex subjects equates to “critical thinking.”
Every aviators baseball hat goatee whiteboy discovered flat earth theory videos and thinks he’s the new Galileo.
It isn’t the hidden menu at in and out, it’s global viral epidemiology, Chad, maybe just eat your fries animal style and listen to the smart people and shut the fuck up, you haven’t discovered a new truth you’re just experiencing gas.
You aren’t Leonardo Da Vinci, Bryce. You run marketing for your dad’s landscaping company. You haven’t thought of something that Dr. Fauci hasn’t. Consider getting stuck underneath something heavy for a few months.
If what Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Alex Berenson, and others are doing is free speech then me altering road signs into optical illusions that make people drive off of cliffs is free speech.
If what Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Alex Berenson, and others are doing is free speech then me putting Kool-Aide labels on antifreeze containers and leaving them in elementary schools is free speech.
I have family members all the way up the Fox News Facebook misinformation hole, and they didn’t get vaccinated because they felt respected; they got vaccinated because their children told them they wouldn’t get to see their grandchildren until they got vaccinated.