To be even more clear however, the kinds of people pushing these viewpoints within their community are actually evil and doing it in bad faith for their own self gain. Even the mainstream conservative voices like Tucker Carlson, who is vaccinated and works at an institution with a vaccine requirement, is using his platform to deliberately cast doubt on its efficacy and safety. He knows better, but he is sending the message his supports want to hear. This is evil. Senators who are going out of their way to make sure nobody can be made to wear a mask in certain settings are doing it deliberately for political points and are objectively evil for this.
I don’t fully spite the average person who is listening to and hearing all these voices that align with the rest of their politics and choosing to take the position for no other reason than it’s being fed to them, but there is a limit. And maybe I’m just not aware enough but there is a ton of intentional gritting in the conservative/right-wing space now intentionally pulling on the talking points for a profit motive that I don’t see in left-wing spaces. And that might be okay even, except their also a total scam and bullshit. Selling people a “freedom phone” which is just a rebadge of a cheap Chinese phone (the irony) for a huge markup because it won’t let you be censored. This kind of behavior. Preying on their own audience that they’ve cultivated to specifically exploit them.
There is a lot of evil there.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to dunk on people dying. But it isn’t really surprising that there is that level of response among some people on the left-leaning space. It’s equivalent to the “owning the libs” on the other side. I’m not in for it personally, but I don’t think it’s any more or less popular on either side. Just the general shape of overall disgusting polarization we’re at now.
If people want to live in their own version of reality I don’t care. But when their version of reality is ruining it for the rest of us, it is a problem and there isn’t a lot of room for discussion with someone who isn’t willing to engage with reality.
Are you sure that is a true statement? What exact ruination are you referring to? Are you saying that we would not have had a delta wave in the U.S. if more people had vaccinated? Or that lockdowns would have gone differently? Or schools?
Australia still has a covid problem, despite their lockdowns. Israel is still having covid breakouts, despite their high vaccination rates. It's putting a strain on many health care systems.
What do you think will change if we had closer to 100% vaccine compliance?
> and there isn’t a lot of room for discussion with someone who isn’t willing to engage with reality.
Quite the contrary, there's plenty of room for discussion. You obviously don't understand their point of view. Not everyone thinks the way you do. This ending to your comment struck me as quite dismissive. That's a lot of people you just wrote off.
Where does it leave us if we can't talk about these things, and respect our different values?
As far as people not living in reality, this isn’t even primarily about COVID. It also isn’t a refusal to try and have a discussion on my part. It is what happens when people reject information that doesn’t reflect what they believe. They have written themselves off. You’re right. I don’t understand the point of view of someone who thinks there is a satanic cabal of liberals who prey on children. I don’t understand the point of view of someone who thinks 5G is going to read their minds. I don’t understand the point of view of someone who thinks the vaccine is the mark of the beast. I don’t understand the point of view of, based on various polling, 70-80% of republicans who don’t believe Biden won the election legitimately.
Or rather, I do. Or at least I can see how they got there. But what I can’t do is convince them that these things aren’t true. I can’t convince them that someone on the internet who claimed to be an insider and now hasn’t posted anything in like over a year wasn’t actually able to predict all the future events leading up to Donald Trump being reinstated as president and rounding up all the Democrats and liberals and child abusers. These people have already bought into something that is so far out that there is no reaching them. It isn’t for lack of trying. They aren’t willing or ready to accept anything else.
Eventually some of them will find their way out of it, but that is a place they have to get to on their own before anyone can help them out of it.
To answer your final question, it leaves us in a terrible place and exactly where we are. I don’t enjoy this. I’m not reveling in it. It’s fucking depressing. It’s sad. It’s an actual tragedy. We’re in a bad place and I don’t see that changing or getting better any time soon.
I’ll happily discuss things of this nature with people who don’t agree with my general beliefs but I don’t have a lot of patience for someone, and I’ve interacted with more than a few, who flat out deny things that are objectively recordable, let alone anything subject to interpretation. They closed the door, they shut down the conversation.
While Israel got far out ahead in its vaccination campaign early on, it’s current rate of vaccination isn’t particularly high, still below 65% of the population has completed the full course of vaccinations.
Heard immunity estimates have always been at the 70-85% level, so there’s no reason to believe Israel was immune to such outbreaks, especially with a more virulent variant such as delta. All that matters is whether the replication rate is above or below one, if you don’t have the level of population immunity to keep that R value below one, you will see outbreaks.
On the topic of covid specifically, I think that people have vastly different outlooks on the personal and/or societal risks of dying versus the impact of extended lockdowns. I don't think it is an unreasonable position. It's hard to point at definitive data proving that anything works for certain, there's a lot of confounding factors and surprises in the numbers. Some people can't get past the individual tragedies. Some people only look at the population scale numbers. Some people are more educated than other. Lots of people make up their minds on a hunch, as you said, and look for sources that confirm their biases.
A fascinating book I read called "The Republican Brain" talked about this stuff, theorizing that some of the partisan divide is due to personality differences, that people are born with different feelings about authority, hierarchies, individualism, communitarianism, etc. I was left with the impression that this was an evolutionary advantage as a species, that the variety of ways of thinking makes us better as a group.
I don't think that it's the end of the world that we as a group don't agree on everything. We could celebrate that and support each other in our differences, or at least respect each other. But so many do not, both on the left and on the right. They'd rather win 51% of the vote, and impose their point of view on the losers, winner take all. Mass media and further removing isolating people make the problems worse.
> And we still have a non-trivial segment of the population who can’t get vaccinated (under 12) who are quite literally the victims of people who are largely unvaccinated
You called out some things the other side say that are unreasonable. I think the language you used above is a bit strong, and I'm not sure how much fact vs feeling it is. Not a lot of kids die of covid. It's similar for them to the risk from the flu in other years. And RSV. And the vaccine is not 100% effective, lots of people will still die, just like people die of the common cold every year. It seems unreasonable to draw a "quite literally" connection between the vaccinated and the small amount of kids who die, some every year, from respiratory ailments.
Also there is no country in the world who has a 100% vaccination rate, so maybe it is outside the bounds of human nature to expect that amount of compliance on such a short notice controversial issue? Perhaps it would be better for politics to account for the strong beliefs that large segments of their populations hold? For instance, why haven't we build more hospitals in the last 18 months? Are there better ways to support the vulnerable? What are the numbers used to justify various decisions? Can we admit what we don't know? etc