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 Well, one way to improve the GDP per capita…
@cstross If you want to reverse the demographic transition, you have to kill a lot of infants.
If you don't reverse the demographic transition, patriarchy goes away.
("The environment produces the organism" is always the case; other things are the case, too, but what you can have is constrained by the environment which exists, not which could exist. And for humans, cites are an environment and culture is an environment.)
Anti-vax is a "kill babies, keep patriarchy" movement.
@graydon So, a death cult.
@cstross Not precisely; they're not about generalized dying, they're willing to kill a lot of kids to maintain their status.
Can't enjoy that status if they're dead.
(Real death cults tend to be powerless people who want everyone to die as a means of escaping their circumstances. There's certainly some death cult members getting sucked into the grift but even those are mostly built on histrionics about a lack of white supremacy rather than material misery as such.)
@cstross RFucK Jr is a pedophile-protecting infanticider.
@cstross I wonder when the rest of the world will start requiring USians to have proof of vaccination before entering the country
@cstross callous and selfish people like the MAHA folks need callus and selfish responses. Its all they understand. One such response in the 'my tax dollars range' : It is my tax dollars they are wasting. Why should my tax dollars pay to treat you when you could have been vaccinated? My tax dollars paid for that vaccine, why are you wasting it. Its not the government, it's my tax dollars. Etc blah blah.
@cstross My stepfather had polio. As a child he spent a year in isolation, thinking he would die. For the rest of his life he has had a hunched back and almost no use of his left arm and hand. He would tell you he was one of the lucky ones.
@cstross Ironically, this is going to be that white genocide that previously existed only in their broken little minds. Just like the cabal of paedophiles, the corrupt swamp, and fascist leaders coming to power it was projection all along.
@cstross better access to nutrition, housing, sanitation maternity care and drinking water also occurred at these times.
@cstross Reminder that in industrialized countries, for some diseases, mortality had already dropped before vaccines were even a thing.
@jpages Massive public education campaigns and immediate isolation of outbreak patients put the brakes on. As did better living conditions (it's hard to isolate in a slum with eight people sleeping to a room; also hard to isolate when there are ten kids in a family).
There would be more kids left disabled or permanently harmed from these diseases, even if they did survive.
I've heard these 'common sense' views before but they're unscientific - the immune system doesn't get stronger from exposure to disease. It doesn't need to be exercised.
@cstross Trump is already the most prolific mass-murderer in history. They should give him an award. Something like a golden swaztika.
@cstross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Alexander_(polio_survivor)
Considering he died not that long ago means there are polio survivors probably still floating around, so it isn’t that long ago polio was killing people. I also remember my mom talking about her mom taking them and standing in line for the vaccine when it came out because she knew how deadly it was.
@cstross …and infant mortality is already much higher in the US than in any other comparable country.
@cstross We improve with education. Our breed is HUMAN. UGH!!! People can be so evil! We are one species, on race.
I have this picture saved to my phone for just that reason
@cstross When I was growing up in Madrid in the late 60s, there were still lots of very young people around who had contracted and were scarred for life from polio.
My friend was about 3 years older than me. She had contracted polio at the age of 5. It had attacked her spine, and she had to wear a metal brace 24/7 around her torso and chest to keep her upright so her body wouldn't double over and suffocate her by collapsing her lungs.
It was incredibly painful. She moved slowly and jerkily...
@cstross Not to put a too fine point on that, but people in iron lungs also don’t breed easily.
Pure eugenics.
@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 bereft parents.
@Infoseepage
Literally, just go to ancestry.com and map out your own family a couple generations back and find all the great uncles and aunties you don’t have because THEY ALL DIED OF CHILDHOOD DISEASES THAT THE US ADMINISTRATION IS INSANELY SUGGESTING WE DROP, LIKE A BUNCH OF GODDAMNED HOMICIDAL MANIACS #CantMakeThisShitUp #SureGoAheadKillMeAndMyEntireFamilyWhyDontYou #ActuallyNoYouCanGoFuckOffAndDieYourselves
@suzannealdrich @Infoseepage @cstross I was coming here to say exactly that. Just five generations ago, in Germany, my ancestors lost six of eight children before the age of three. Two survived to adulthood.
@morgan @suzannealdrich @cstross And this sort of thing cut across all divisions of class and wealth. I was at Versailles last week and they had an exhibition about the Grand Dauphin and his family. The Grand Dauphin was You're a parent to Louis XIV for most of his life, but his father outlived him. He died of smallpox at about the age of 50. A bunch of the dauphin's children and their wives and grandchildren were wiped out by "just measles" and other maladies.
@morgan @suzannealdrich @cstross These people lived in gold encrusted marble palaces, wore the finest clothing, never lacked for a warm fire and ate the best foods and had the best doctors of their era. It didn't save any of them. What would have saved them are a series of inexpensive, widely available childhood immunizations with extremely high safety profiles.
@Infoseepage @suzannealdrich @cstross I binged through the @empirepoduk podcast, haven't finished it, but listened to 150+ episodes. It's good.
There was a fascinating one where a British woman brought the concept and technology of #smallpox #inoculation home with her from #Turkey...
Here it is:
'She was a pioneering scientist, proto-feminist, and letter writer extraordinaire. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu escaped a marriage to Clotworthy Skeffington to become one of history's most incredible women. Listen this week as William and Anita are joined by Katie Hickman to tell the tale of her life.'
'Clotworthy Skeffington,' I think that might be my next fake name.
@cstross That means they’ll need even more white babies. Don’t these people talk to each other?
@bart Not to worry, Project 2025 is promising "marriage boot camps" for young white folks, along with subsidies for childbearing and obstacles to divorce. (Facepalm.)
They really *are* intent on taking the USA back to the 50s—the 1850s, that is, not the 1950s.
