@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.
Post
Replies:
0
@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.
@petealexharris It is, alas, nowhere near 99%.
The distinction may have operational utility in opposing their policies; for example, the "all these babies will die! look at the tombstones in old graveyards!" response to anti-vax policies functions to confirm the objectives and purposes of the anti-vax movement. It's about killing babies; that's what it wants. Telling its members that babies will die is not an effective means of dissuasion.
@graydon @petealexharris @cstross but the set of babies that seem to end up killed by their policies is often their own. Conning *other people* into not vaccinating their children might make sense, but so far, it's mostly their own political supporters (whom of course they might regard as mere meat for the grinder).
To me it looks like panic at the loss of white majority and political power, and they are flailing, destructively, hoping to blow up the world so that the rubble will land "better".
@dr2chase Reducing white women to the status of chattel is important to the project; they can't do that without reversing the demographic transition as it applies to white people, too. And that unconcerned "kid died of measles" couple may well be representative.
They've deeply internalized "women, cattle, and slaves" and a Late Romantic "survival of the fittest" which ignores the actual environment and supposes some ideal person. Facts are not much involved anywhere.
@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.
