@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.
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@cstross I am not a medical professional, nor do I wish to play devil's advocate, but common sense tells us that at the beginning of the 20th century, hygiene standards and knowledge of medicines were much lower, so it is difficult to assess the impact of one factor or another on child mortality.
@cstross I mean, Polio is a disease I am very interested in. The vaccine came shortly before I was born, so I was one of the generation who felt very fortunate to have it.
And my wife had an aunt who had been paralysed for life by Polio. I knew her - she was one of the very lucky ones. She lived. She was able to have a fairly normal life - married and had children.
I lived at a time when vaccines were saving so many lives. So many thousands of lives.
And this fuckbrained heap of scum wants to turn all that back. The sooner he rots in hell, the better.
@cstross Unfortunately, there is nothing that will convince vaccine skeptics.
I once watched the BBC programme "Unvaccinated" by Hannah Fry, who meets seven unvaccinated people in an experiment.
She showed them the evidence, they slowly started to believe the evidence, or said that they did, but they remained skeptics at the end of the programme.
@cstross wow, what a moron - we had to monitor our sewage systems and proactively vaccinate children to get rid of the damn thing.
I remember growing up with kids my age wearing thick metal frames around their legs because of the disease.
Don't see them anymore because we eradicated it.
Get rid of the idiots soon guys!
There are only two kinds of person who believes in eugenics: those who think it applies to people they don't like, but not to them, and …
Sorry, I'm wrong. There is only one kind of person who believes in eugenics.
@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.)
They're aligned with all the other anti-human movements on the right (anti immigration, forced birth, fuck everything to fulfil the prophesies in Revelations, cops do murders whenever they like, healthcare for profit, prisons for profit) so death cult is a convenient shorthand.
Whenever a new policy question comes up that hasn't been assigned to Woke or MAGA yet, MAGA will pick the option with more death a statistically significant amount of the time.
@petealexharris A death cult is about everybody dying, usually because $DIETY has become disgusted with mankind and will slaughter everybody and the goal of the cult is to bring about that end of the world.
The Right contains some death cultists (Premillennial dispensationalism is extremely death cult) but most of what we're seeing is eliminationist; they want to extirpate everyone else and dwell alone in the earth. They themselves don't want to die or the world to end.
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@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.