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Monday 22 September 2014

Cracked Monday: The Bipartisan (but mostly liberal) Stupidity of Vaccination-Denial

Today, the smug aristocracy of the know-nothing branch of the left wing is literally killing their own children by failing to vaccinate, with vaccination rates in some parts of L.A. (and not the poor hispanic or black parts) being lower than in sub-saharan third-world shit-holes.  And these leftist Hollywood celebrities might start an epidemic that could kill your kids. Why? Because even if they recognize the dangers, they feel that their own child must receive special treatment. They are indoctrinated in a self-absorbed society that they helped create, where whatever they FEEL has to be considered as equally valid to fact, and where what they feel is always that they are special people who deserve special treatment.

Or as one doctor in the article puts it: it's "ignorance sheathed in arrogance".


Meanwhile, an utter idiot representing the "college-is-for-snobs" branch of the Right-wing stands up and applauds the hollywood liberals in question.

And yet, what I see over on G+ is a bunch of (self-styled progressive) people saying "Fuck Glenn Beck for cheering people who don't vaccinate!", never mentioning that the people he was cheering weren't racist arkansas backwoods rednecks, but ultra-leftist super-environmentalist woo-woo-science crystal-waving DEMOCRAT-VOTING lunatics.
Funny how those filters work there, Cam Banks.


Statistics don't lie: outside of certain particular ultra-religious conservative communities (and we're talking like, ultra-orthodox Jews, or fanatical religious communes; not just standard bible-belt), the area with the worst rates of vaccination in the US are by far the capital of the celebrity-machine of the Progressive-left.   But all the wanna-be progressive spokesmen have instead spent the last few days shitting on Glenn Beck while ignoring the 8-ton-log in their own eyes. 


RPGPundit

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14 comments:

  1. Many Catholics are hesitant to use certain vaccines because these vaccines were prepared from cells derived from known abortions. The claim that some vaccines are morally problematic in this way does not come from some ultra-conservative Catholic fringe group but rather from the Vatican itself as expressed through a number of forums including here: http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/on-vaccines-made-from-cells-of-aborted-fetuses. There are many nutty reasons not to vaccinate. But there are also some reasonable ones. And whatever my own preferences or beliefs I think the existence of a certain level of skepticism towards it within some communities (even if much of it is irrational) is healthier than a blind conformity to the teachings of the medical establishment (which has historically been wrong on all sorts of things). At a minimum, parents (whether leftist, rightist or whatever-ist) should be allowed to make these decisions for their children (yes, even if they are the wrong ones).

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  2. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2386034

    TL;DR version: it's mostly people who identify as Republicans who hold anti-vaxxer views, but the margin is narrow. The majority of people on the Right and Left think that the anti-vaxxers are idiots.

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  3. With respect to a fellow gamer (whose blog posts and comments I have greatly enjoyed), I think one could make the case that if there's any group where bizarro social, political and moral views have historically tended to cluster, it's Yale law professors. :)

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    1. Well, it's actual data in there, rather than subjective, anecdotal impressions. So, take it or leave it. All I'm saying is that it isn't any one political wing that holds these views (and a narrow margin like that is simply statistical noise), and most people realize that the people who do are idiots in the same way that breatharians are.

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  4. Oh sure, the data is actual, just as it would perhaps be actual in a report on spirituality written by, say, Goebbels or the Soviet Committee for the Advancement Atheism on how to successfully 'manage' the elimination of religious belief. And, as stated, that the unintentionally humorous commentary--'sometimes the peasants can be really really stupid (Lipkus and Mnook, et al). Thank the goddess we're not'--comes from a Yale law professor makes it especially rich.

    What pretentious and condescending tripe. (Not you, I'm talking about that Kahan guy.)

    When I became a Traditionalist Catholic I was pleasantly surprised to find that on some issues I was in agreement with leftist atheist hippies. I felt that I was doing my part to embody the value of diversity.

    Isn't that a good thing? (Oh darn, I guess they didn't really mean it).

    Evaluate things based on logic and the evidence. And recommendations from others with a good track record on those two things can help. Everything else--whether from the majority, the minority, the establishment (medical, business, academic or whatever) or a quirky group of 'law' professors who have spent an average of 2% of their careers actually practicing law--is just, well, bullshit.

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  5. As a leftist myself (and strongly so), it always struck me as very strange that people who considered themselves "leftist" were opposed to vaccination and antibiotics, especially to ones paid for by the public and thus bringing cheap healthcare to the masses. Anti-vaxxing always seems to me to be a more appropriate approach for far-right libertarians, especially of the "government shouldn't tell me to do anything even if I would benefit for it" crowd. But it has crept to the "left" especially by the big Trojan horse sent by the system to wreck the left - the post-modernist anti-scientific rhetoric. Nothing has caused more damage to the left than this Trojan horse, and those who follow it.

    Post-modernism and new-age destroyed the Left. Instead of fighting for a better world for all, many leftists now waste their time and efforts on dead ends - identity politics (i.e. taking people apart rather than finding common ground between them), new-age (i.e. a reactionary return to the Middle Ages in terms of thought and science), animal rights (I won't be surprised if soon they'll fight for the rights of inanimate objects!), deconstructing everything and the worst, cultural relativism ("it's OK for a man to murder his wife if he's a Muslim living in an Arab country" - what about the right of the woman to live?).

    As a leftist I fight for universal healthcare including universal vaccination all over the world. This alone will greatly increase life expectancy everywhere and is very cheap relatively to "high-tech" expensive medicine. I think that anti-vaxxers should be put on trial for deliberate child neglect.

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    1. I feel your fucking pain. Hell only reason I use to be a lefty was because I wanted to help people. Now these nut jobs ruin that and I don't think it can be fix. I think the only route is to leave the left and go independent. Focus on the causes you want and damn dogma that people demand you follow.

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  6. This is NOT a left-right issue. There are conservatives denying vaccination science as well. There just happens to be a couple high-profile celebs who happen to be left wing.

    Correlation is not causality as any scientist knows... and you are correlating a few left wing celebrities with it being a "left wing" cause... which is bs.

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    1. I do agree that it's not a left-right issue, it's a moron-nonmoron issue. But the left tends to like to imagine that it's smarter than the right, and they mock that branch of the right that's all stuck on reality-denying fundamentalist christianity, while ignoring the very significant branch of their own side that's all stuck on reality-denying new-age-woo and gaia-worship (the cult of "natural", anti-science, anti-technology, anti-civilization thinking).

      Also, the left tends to glorify it's proper-thinking Hollywood celebrities; but the thing is, Billy-bob Podunk from Inner Georgia who thinks that the bible forbids vaccination is not the one convincing anyone in the general public, but when some celebrity-mom gets taken seriously just for being a celebrity and says that "as a mother, I feel that vaccinations are Un-Natural", they influence millions and millions of idiotic middle-class housewives that idolize them.

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    2. That is the real issue. My sisters and mother love to watch celebrity news. They eat it up and the last thing I want to see is for them to take advice from celebrities. Mainly because some of them are dumber than rocks.

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    3. The two aren't really equivalent. The Christian Right makes up a significant percentage of the population and a much larger share of the Republican electorate. Any Republican with national ambitions has to take them seriously. When was the last time a major Republican presidential candidate dared openly support the theory of evolution? The left wing new age woo crowd is a much smaller percentage of the population with far less clout - they can't make Democratic politicians heel, and they're pretty unpopular with liberal intellectuals. Still annoying and repulsive but frankly not that significant on the left.

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    4. infornific: you clearly haven't been seeing the figures for sales of everything that would qualify as new-age books, products, and services.

      And the thing is, I agree that Creationism is a serious intellectual problem in the United States (worldwide, there's relatively little influence outside the U.S., whereas 'crystal healing', 'reiki', 'homeopathy', etc. have insane levels of adoption all over the place, to the point that (to give one example) Homeopathy has its own government-funded Hospital in the U.K.).

      But acknowledging that Creationism is a problem, there's a significant difference: no amount of creationism is likely to start a plague that will potentially kill thousands or even millions of people, cripple children, etc.

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  7. I would argue that voting Democrat is not a sign of being liberal. It might have been, for a brief few years--like 1964-1980. But the Demos are back to their usual support of privilege over common people, which is of course why some of these celebs--like Jenny McCarthy, who as I recall, is only famous for showing her boobs--vote that way. I assume they are confident that if their children ever do contract something their wealth and celebrity status will mean they will live. Sadly, measles etc do kill kids.

    I myself wonder why, if intelligence and attitudes are passed down from parent to child, we would bother to convince anyone to vaccinate their children--other than uneducated people who don't know that such things are available. I find it especially ironic that some of these yahoos use the rarity of epidemics as evidence of vaccinations being unnecessary, rather than evidence that they work and work most effectively. One of the hotbeds of anti-vaccination in my area is Marin County, California, which is a rather affluent area (i.e. an area where prices went up and regular people were squeezed out). Not surprisingly, there is an ongoing pertussis epidemic in Marin County.

    I would let them go to hell their own way, except that part of the reason vaccinations tend to be so effective is that having everyone vaccinated stops disease much better than having only some of the people vaccinated. My vaccination protects me, but wouldn't be as effective in protecting me were I the only vaccinated person in my area.

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    1. Well no shit. In their illness they might look at you with a great deal of jealousy. Given the fact you have a vaccine and they believe that vaccines are evil it could be possible they would blame you for the illnesses that you are immune from. Talk about a witch hunt.

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