There we were, in a world where USSR had collapsed, China not risen yet, with a USA as the uncontested dominant power. It has the unique chance in history to steer the world in one direction or the other.
Building international legal standards, multi-lateral cooperation, ensuring that whoever had the most power at one point would be limited by the world community, was something within US reach, and was a realistic hope. As a bonus, the first thing the community would work on would be tackling the climate change, as it was an obvious field where every country of planet earth had a common interest.
Instead, because of a few hundred "miscounted" votes in Florida, the US president was a zealous anti-intellectual evangelist, who decided that US interests trumps human rights, that denying climate change was a respectable political stance, and instead of spending a mountain of dollars on research, energy transition, diseases eradication, social net improvements, he spent it on invading 2 countries despite experts warning that it would not solve any problem.
A lot of countries that converted to democracy did this because their populations looked up to US and wanted to have better lief.
You also put pressure on other countries when they claim are democratic but fail to do this in practice (which is the case of Belarus or Poland where I live).
US does this actively and frequently in many forms, by voicing "concerns" or putting embargoes on countries that break their own rules.
Obviously, that pressure is much less effective when you do same things you try to pressure other countries to not do.
Case in point, a system that does not care about rights of their inhabitants is usually much more effective at running large scale projects. For example, China just deciding to shut down everybody in their houses in Wuhan and shoot if you don't comply. And just like that they got their pandemic under control.
> One of the reasons strongmen rise to power in third world countries is as a reaction to imperialism
No, they rise because they can.
And not just in third world countries. Germany was definitely not a third world country when it allowed Hitler to rise and start a global war. What about Putin?
We see these guys mostly in third world countries now mainly because without democracy it is difficult to keep up with democracies without some special situation (like Saudi Arabia being gifted with huge oil reserves).
In non-democracies normal people have trouble preserving their wealth over long periods of time. You need to be "in favours" of the ruling entity to be wealthy and the wealth vanishes if you fall out of it.
Democracies are on the other hand, by definition, people ruling themselves, and this should in theory mean a lot of focus is on personal security and freedom. This should mean it is safer to conduct business over long periods of time, accumulate wealth and generally contribute to GDP.
I am the first one to be vocal of US imperialism, but you can't deny that it is US influence that caused several modern countries to be democratic.
But I feel after the 1960's the US has slowly lost that ideal, and the visionary leaders (Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt or Eisenhower) are no longer anywhere to be found (whether the electorate don't tolerate or desire them I'm not sure).
Both the Japanese and Korean antidemocratic moves took place in that pre 1960 era for example.
Really?
Do you really think any international body would hold Saudi Arabia, China to account?
He who holds the purse, makes the rules. And they hold a pretty big purse.
Of course China and KSA would never join. And that would give other countries a clear and objective criterion to apply sanctions and international pressure.
Instead, judging what sanction a country deserves is an arbitrary exercise of executive power.
North Korea, China, KSA, are easy cases, but what do you know of Moldova? Of Hungary? Of Malaysia? Knowing that a country is held to some international standards judged independently would be a huge progress for human rights globally.
You could maybe ask the other 26 nations how they might see things?
Remember the EU is not just 1 lady who had a bad daddy. And her tenure is not forever.
The same is also true of the US, every 4 years the whole country gets to vote for either the worst of their instincts, or for the person that embodies a higher ideal. So a lot can change over the next few decades.
I'm with C. Hitchens, a short term pessimist, but a long term optimist :)
One of the things that got her famous in Germany was her persistent lying and schemeing, including "think of the children", including showing actual child porn to journalists[0], to get her internet censorship and surveillance scheme passed. Definitely her father's footsteps.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/blockade-illegaler-sites...
Well yes she is a pretty bad person, remember McKinsey? Internet Censor at ISP level? Trying to buy Drones with weapons on board? The probably buy d dissertation for her Dr. Med?
Could you tell me, where to find more information about this? Thanks!
Not saying she should be responsible for what her father did, but it is noteworthy because her career was mostly being his daughter.
ps. What most people mean when they say "democracy" is "IMF conditionalities", et similar.
People have been used to so many cynicism that they have forgotten that countries doing the good thing is a possibility.
It never was. If we want to talk about the powerful being held to account by the international community, realise that at some point that means canvassing the idea of invading China/India/the United States/Europe when they get out of line. That isn't an option. That would potentially reduce big chunks of the world to sand and anything less can't constrain the powerful. WWII alone levelled an entire continent, and that was with primitive weaponry compared to what is available now.
Trade sanctions aren't effective at changing behaviour and it isn't obvious if they would do more good or more harm if deployed against a superpower. Note that most superpowers' economic problems were due to internal not external policy.
That's why "Corporate Values" are so empty. They get tossed as soon as they conflict with the profit motive. Google's "don't be evil" being the classic example.
Here in Poland we have a saying "you get to know a real friend in bad (times)" (Prawdziwego przyjaciela poznaje się w biedzie).
When you feel the values or friendship will not stand the test you will not invest yourself in it and it becomes empty words.
Just as democratic values that are set aside when it doesn't exactly align with profit or power goals.
People will not stand for something they believe to just be empty words and that's why things like Assange case are so damaging to democracy.
It's interesting when something almost identical appear in different cultures.
I think this is the closest to "absolute moral truths". People discover these because these are not some arbitrary rules, the are actually absolute, universal laws.
People understand subconsciously, for example, than a person that does good for no reason expresses higher form of being good that a person that does good in exchange for some kind of benefit.
It doesn't mean that mutually beneficial relations are not good, the society is basically built on spoken or unspoken contracts.
But we understand that a person that does good altruistically, not expecting any benefit for it, is much more likely to be trustworthy in all situation. And a person that does good expecting benefits may (not must, just may) turn on you when they stop seeing benefits.
And I think the same goes for countries.
When we see US performing their foreign relations game but only ever putting their weight when we can later find they were expecting some kind of benefit, and almost never for countries that have nothing to offer, it becomes transparent to us that US is basically much less likely to be trustworthy than if it did its actions based on principles.
A friend, in need, is a friend indeed.
> Einen guten Freund erkennt man in der Not (A good friend is recognized in times of need).
Edit: Formatting
Many of those same people don’t do anything about it. They still vote the same exact way they have for 15-20 years, they don’t get active and write anyone, etc.
The real travesty about Assange is that he’s not even a US citizen. He tried to reach out to the state department to redact sections and they refused to respond. Then they go after him for publishing what some other person leaked. Not only that, but the leaker had a publicly funded transition and a short prison sentence. Assange is charged and has endured much worse.
My principles (and many others) still stand. But our “deep state” doesn’t represent the majority.
Not sure that's true, go to reddit for example, and you'll see the majority are already brainwashed into thinking Assange is a Russian asset. US mainstream media is working on it overtime.
Ask some random person on the street about Assange and the best they can come up with is probably something about fleeing from the Swedish police for rape, something Russian agent, maybe something about how he treats his cat horribly or doesn't clean his toilet properly.
The Five Eyed propaganda machine [0] was very effective in smearing him, and even Snowden, among the general public in these past years.
First they banned many communities and users who was right leaning or even moderate in the past two years.
Then you just have an echo chamber plus propaganda and bots are everywhere.
Finally, Reddit is the whole world, not the US. Many of the US specific boards were more right leaning and have been banned.
If that is your excuse to compromise on freedom of expression, than you don't support it in the first place. Just be honest with it then.
What you've done there is pure partisanship: defining "the other side" by the worst among them while ignoring the behavior of the worst among your own side.
To be frank, I think we have a one party state with a global military dictatorship.
I had this motto in mind after I once witnessed how political decisions were made within one of the youth organizations of one of the two mainstream parties here in Germany and was disgusted by it.
> The parliament is the theater, which is performed, so that the citizen believes to live in a democracy. While the actual power is exercised elsewhere.
1. Be active in campaigns to boycott the vote. This can be presented both as a permanent stance against the regime in the US, or against the two-party duopoly; but it can also be presented as "I am withholding my vote from party X because it currently has unacceptable positions on issue Y - and I would like them to be punished by losing elections and know that they lost because of Y". If your choice is the deeper/more permanent one, you would likely to try invest effort in non-party organizational forms such as local popular committees, labor unions, protest movements etc.
2. You could join and support one of the existing third parties. Currently, the most viable seem to be: The Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and the recent initiative of the People's Party. The last one is new and is of particular interest, as the other two have been beset by internal trouble for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_a_People%27s_Part...
That’s what elected trump btw... a populist movement effectively trying to take over the Republican Party.
In my opinion, it’s also why the corporate media then attacked him (who btw I think is an idiot and don’t support)
I think it becomes more and more obvious by the day you’re correct. I honestly didn’t see it this way until some of the stuff in 2021.
Case in point So... 12 / 18 people in the michigan plot to capture the governor and stormed the court house were feds (FBI agents or informants directed by FBI).
From the buzzfeed news article...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/michigan-k...
> Panic rising, Dan slipped away from the group for a moment and spoke into the recording device he was carrying, which he knew was being monitored live by his FBI handlers. The Watchmen, he said, were preparing to breach the Capitol. The agents couldn’t speak back to him, but he hoped they could at least warn the police about what was coming.
> Then something surprising happened. The Michigan State Police stood down and let the protesters — including those in full tactical gear — enter the building unopposed. They could even bring their guns, so long as they submitted to a temperature check for COVID-19.
Media goes wild and blames Trump few weeks pre-election. In reality, the documents filed in court make it look like the fbi entrapped people (remains to be seen in court).
It seems impossible to fix this (or even improve the situation) with voting. Both parties seem to be in agreement on how they would treat Assange. They only differ on unrelated hot button issues.
Is there any indication that stuff like this happens _more_ than in the past? Or have the world's standards just risen?
Or I’ve gotten older and more sour on this type of stuff?
Honestly I feel like the change has been, for me, more awareness and less attachement to the narrative forced down my throat. I also don’t believe it to be (as a native US citizen) a US thing. I see it in a huge swing in many countries towards authoritarianism in many ways and towards many goals. It isn’t so much a left or right thing (although I believe it to be more right leaning) but just a greater willingness to use power structures to control others.
Kaiser Wilhelm II took power after Bismark, and abdicated at the end of the first war. Wilhelm died in 1941.
Bismarck unified Germany in the latter 1800's as a constitutional federation with suffrage and elected legislatures, I don't know the fine details except it was some form of confederation and is considered a constitutional monarchy with elected legislature.
Technically both Belarus and Russia area also democratic countries. Both countries have this written in their constitutions.
Values is about what you believe in and strive for, and when you don't reach the standards you set for yourself, you figure out why, and adjust to be inline with your beliefs and goals.
These two statements seem to be at odds. In order to know if we're improving, we have to know if the behavior is becoming more frequent or less.
I'm not sure what you think "mattering" means, but I was responding to a comment that said "the US is loosing[sic] more and more of its standing". I'm not sure why you're so convinced that the relative decline of the US's reputation shouldn't be talked about, but it's pretty bizarre behavior to insert yourself into a conversation about it and assert so.
Oh, so it is fine to sin against democracy as long as you are not sinning more than in the past?
This topic being another shard of the US' soft-power armour lost.
The more it appears that the US reached and maintains it's global superpower status with force, coercion, underhanded tactics, and other abhorrent behaviors that contravene the Geneva Convention (which are handily side-stepped by conducting these behaviors in countries that don't adhere to such laws), it only works to justify extremists groups to use whatever means they consider necessary to achieve their own manifest destiny.
In that context, almost anything becomes justified - which is nightmare fuel for the moderate middle majority.
So, if they are a majority, why don't their values dominate?
1: Moderate doesn't sell eyeballs and clicks, so extremism gets the attention, which is what it wants because it will attract more of the "curious disillusioned" for potential indoctrination
2: Until unknown critical mass of perceived-threat-paranoia, there's no need to publicise / protest / soapbox one's moderate-ness because it can be relatively assumed. ie. I don't need to explain that I'm not one of those nutjobs.
If you're asking "why don't their values dominate" on a foreign policy level, well, I'm unqualified to answer that, except to say that realpolitik is far removed from most citizens' day to day lives (the conundrum semi-explored by A Few Good Men seems appropriate to mention here).
I am no fan of the Taliban or Hammas - and US probably correctly labeled them terrorist organizations - but it must also be acknowledge they are also “political parties” that have won democratic elections.
"How to Hide an Empire", Daniel Immerwahr
None of this was ever covered in public schools. I realize there's a lot of history to cover and kids can only absorb so much, but when people talk about "only focusing on europe and the middle east" it's good to have a couple of concrete examples. The Philippines actually has a larger english speaking population than the UK. Anyways, it always seemed that the Philippines got conveniently swept under the rug when discussing things like WW2 and American Imperialism.
Can you document this? I'm a southern California resident, and I keep hearing stuff like this from people online, but I know no local examples of this at all.
This is…. Reprehensible
Equal opportunity is a universal value that everyone can agree to strive for.
Equalized outcomes is a dystopian nightmare (equity).
The move to blur the lines between these two concepts is disturbing.
“ Equal opportunity is a universal value that everyone can agree to strive for.
Equalized outcomes is a dystopian nightmare (equity).”
Typically the state legislatures dictate what is in the curriculum broadly, sometimes extra specifically, and the administrators and teachers create their lessons to satisfy the legislation.
How does the teacher's union suppress subject matters in the history department?
It's very hard to get elected in this state without a teachers' union endorsement.
It's also hard to get elected without people voting for you, or funding for political campaigns.
But all his podcasts are phenomenal
I just read this post on Popehat[0] recounting an event while Ken White was working for an LA federal judge back in the day. He was brought to a ceremony conducted by Judge Ronald S.W. Lew where numerous, VERY elderly Filipino WW2 veterans were granted US Citizenship. This was promised to them in addition to veteran's benefits by FDR in exchange for recruitment into the war effort, and after the war quietly swept under the rug by the congress.
[0] - https://www.popehat.com/2020/07/04/the-fourth-of-july-rerun/
There are only 750-800 US military installations around the world. Most of these are small. This number has been reduced by about 1000 since the peak in the 1980s (cold war era). The majority of large installations are in the US.
There are 326 bases in the US. https://militarybase.net/u-s-military-bases/ (see the CSV list at the bottom). The US has a total of 50 states and 6 protectorates (Guam, Puerto Rico, etc...). There's no where near 80 bases per state unless you count National Guard Armories (parking lots with a gym in most cases) and recruiting offices. The US has a big military, yes, but not that big.
In retrospect, you are a bit right here. Pardon the bike shedding, but maybe that is not a precise definition due to the vagaries of what "military", "base" and "installation" means. Does room 641a count? I'm not sure. The US Military has its own very special definition, but the general public would know its own.
Under this expanded rubric, National Guard, Coast Guard and Reservist armories would definitely count, CIA black sites[0] would certainly qualify as well (and they are not in your list to be sure), in addition to listening posts, air fields, possibly also foreign naval supply points if they meet some of those continually manned criteria (and hell, why not? Its in the spirit of this thing, we'll just consider them 3/5ths an installation for the purposes of statistics), some forward operating bases if they are continually manned and resupplied for, lets just hand-wave 11 months. Also, private contractors are definitely in this if they have their own separate facilities and especially if they conduct military operations such as "security forces" in Iraq. Now that I'm thinking about it, air craft carriers should be included as well if they are on deployment ... I know, I know, thats pretty rare.
But you are right if you point out that this isn't a precise measure, that it changes continually, and that I don't actually know how many there are--it could easily be tens of thousands! Just scale the definition until it feels most comfortable for you.
That is the real point, anyhow.
[0] - https://prisonphotography.org/2010/03/30/extraordinary-rendi...
"only" was used because the op said "thousands".
Don't fuck with America she doesn't forget and never forgives.
The US was only ever seen as a spreader of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union/Fascist Europe/European Empires. And it was, but no one knowledgable of the US thought it was an unmitigated assessment! You can definitely compare the US favorably to China in regards to democracy and freedom but no one should be fooled that we don't have perpetual work to make a more perfect union.
+100
To me democracy is also the failed form of it, you cannot just pretend that democracy is that part which you like. And also, you have to consider what better things it prevents us from having. Also, you cannot compare things out of their historical context. Of course democracy is not very bad when we have food and iphones, but you don't have to look very far (North Korea, Venezuela, Africa - you will be surprised how "good" democracy some of these countries have, yet they do not prosper) to see what happens when we don't have them.
One good book on the topic is "Democracy: The God That Failed" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It goes into massive amount of details and is not a pleasant read. Still, probably the best book in existence, for someone to understand what is wrong with our world.
On the contrary I think Hoppes criticism falls apart at empirical evidence like the cases you mentioned and his ideas of freedom will inevitably result in feudalism, not even a monarchy because the ruler would lack legitimacy and would face constant challenges. Monarchs as government can only exist if constituents can live completely removed from state influence. But that isn't possible in the world of today.
"Having an election" does not make it a democracy. The people choose who rules makes it a democracy.
It’s pretty hard for Joe Bloggs to workout who you trust in 2021.
We’re lied to all the time by politicians and government, then when they want us to comply, we’re just supposed to go along with it?
I’m not arguing against the fact that getting the vaccine is probably the right path to take. I am arguing that if governments want people’s trust, they need to earn it, doing this to Assange is doing the opposite and does things like prolonging the pandemic, it fuels mistrust.
Does anyone have a quantifiable number. I'm again, not doubting what you're saying, but I hear a lot of "thousands of scientists are vetting the medicine etc".
Are they really ?
I think about this with open source software too, I run Linux, but I do actually wonder sometimes how much "vetting" is really going on.
>Aren't scientists at the various drug companies "independent" from each other, given that vaccines are mostly zero-sum and so drug companies have strong financial incentives to invalidate their competitors' tech?
Vaccines are very much not zero game. They are largely interchangable in that governments are under severe pressure to get something / anything into peoples' arms if it means quelling the masses and shaking off COVID-19. We are seeing countries mixing and matching for the double dose vaccines, not to mention every country approving at least two vaccines for usage. If this were zero-game, then governments would seek to only buy the most effective vaccine and do everything possible to secure supply.
As a phramaceutical, choosing to pick holes in your competitors' products may increase your market share temporarily, but will bring scrutiny from your competitors and overall decrease confidence in vaccines. As an example of the prisoner's dilemna, the best way to maximize everyone's share is by just focusing on your own product.
>Aren't governments independent from drug companies, given that rolling out an unsafe vaccine would be political suicide?
At the absolute highest levels, sure. But at the level of the faceless beaurocrats actually making decisions, it is very much a revolving door between industry and government (oversight bodies in particular). Governing body (decision maker) one day, lobbying on behalf of drug makers the next.
>Aren't the scientists who actually work for the government regulators independent from the governments themselves, given that they aren't political appointees and have nothing to gain politically from getting a bunch of people to take an unsafe vaccine (and presumably are motivated by public health, given their career path)?
Same as previous, and it is also very easy for there to be conflicts of interest... even if we assume ample competence in scrutnizing the pretty pamphlets drug makers try to deceive with. There are many ways drug makers can subtly introduce bias or error into their trials. Well intentioned oversight bodies could still be deceived and later have to recall products they have approved (many drugs are recalled after data about effectiveness and side-effects appear from actual use in the population).
>Aren't the academic scientists doing COVID-related research and peer-reviewing COVID-related publications independent from all of the above?
Same as previous, wrt. source of money for studies and journals themselves. We have also seen people acting out of self-interest when their entire field was pulled into question (scientists working in the field of gain of function publishing letters and articles clearing their field of all doubt without substantiative arguments made, e.g. the origins of the virus).
Anyway, when using Google to find information on the topic, top of the search results are news articles from Reuters about the fact it's a known problem, but it's ok.
Do you know who is on the board at Pfizer ? The CEO of Thompson Reuters! James C Smith [1]
I'm the same, not really into pedaling conspiracies, but this definitely feels like a conflict of interest, and it would also disincentive people to speak out, I'm sure someone in his position could make a high-profile persons life difficult if he wanted too.
[1] https://www.pfizer.com/people/leadership/board-of-directors/...
1. what are the side effects of the vaccine? 2. what are the side effects of infection with the virus?
In addition, there is the question of what is the probability of the corresponding side effects of vaccination and infection.
All study data that I know of say that serious side effects are 5 - 8 times more likely to occur with an infection with the virus.
In addition, one would have to ask how likely it is that one will be infected with the virus. Here, one can only base ones thinking on mathematical models. At present, it does not look as if we will be able to achieve herd immunity worldwide. That would mean that sooner or later everyone who is not vaccinated would be infected with the virus.
This from the peer reviewed studies I have searched and read via pubmed in the last few months.
This is like asking “what incentive does the government have to keep up the airport security theatre?”.
To play up the pandemic, increase the FUD, rule by fear and panic, keep the population permanently locked down, restricted, controlled, … a lot of very juicy incentives for a lot of politicians.
I recommend https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ as a starting point.
Note that nowhere did I mention YouTube videos, celebrities, or talk radio blowhards.
Simple understandings of biology and medicine should inform you that taking a vaccine to the worst pandemic in living memory is the right course of action.
I really don’t know why I’m paying taxes half the time.
Do your own research, and trust that person to understand the things that would take too long for you to learn, then make your choice.
I would never let the government do my thinking for me, for free or for pay. They aren't good at it.
If you're not in the field, it's pretty hard to know who to trust or what is real.
Luckily, we all have brains, and can use them to understand things from first principles. Listening to other people thoughts about what you should be doing is generally stupid. They aren't you, and they have themselves to look after.
Also, no freaking idea why you tangented from vaccines, to taxes, to fake media generation, but unless you pick a topic we are done here.
I’m not sure this is a reasonable strategy. 2 years ago, the “worst pandemic in living memory” was some annual flu. Did you take the vaccine against that?
If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the government for everything. You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.
Trust knowledge that has been gathered over decades, statistics and research that has been gathered by many research institutions (unless you can claim all of them are in collusion). Vaccines do work and we desperately need everybody to get vaccinated. Every country that has implemented vaccinations vigorously has seen immediate, large drop in cases. People who are going to hospital at the moment are almost exclusively unvaccinated.
A person or institution or government that shows it is not trustworthy in one area undermines itself in other areas and so it is understandable that it may sow confusion. But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".
Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine.
> You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.
> But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.
If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world.
So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be.
Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it.
This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks.
As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another.
So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.
How do you explain that, even though significant proportion of populations is already vaccinated, new hospitalizations are almost exclusively people who were not vaccinated?
If vaccines were not effective wouldn't it be true that we should see both vaccinated and unvaccinated in hospitals?
While vaccinated people still can get Covid, they have much lower chance of passing it further. In a vaccinated people the virus cannot multiply as much and with lower and shorter presence of the virus in the organism and much less chance of symptoms that aid spreading the virus (like caughing) there is much less chance you infect other people.
The reality is that Covid is now mostly spreading in circles of unvaccinated people and vaccines are effective at stopping spread of the virus.
It's also worth pointing out that "some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days" is strictly less than that of the virus, because the virus also puts those spike proteins in your body.
And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
Further, GGPs 33% number is actually 39%, and applies specifically to the delta variant. Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
That doesn't follow. My point was simply that making an association does not prove causation. Which is true. Observing that giving someone a vaccine reduces their hospitalization is a separate matter, and one I literally stated in my comment (that they reduce COVID hosps by 80-90%)
> And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
You're wrong about the guillain-barre. Unfortunately I can't find the study I'm looking for. There is a paper that looked at the rates of Guillain Barre in the mRNA vaccines and found them 4-5x higher than normal ("normal" is a low base rate obviously), and specifically criticized the misleading math/wording coming from Pfizer and the like where they falsely claimed that the Guillain-Barre was not more common.
> Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
This is why getting naturally infected is so important! You get near 100% infection reduction for a couple years and then immunological memory for the rest of your life. You can't beat those numbers with the vaccines, not even close.
BTW:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...
If you look at the 6 month Pfizer trial, the vaccines made no difference in all-cause mortality. In fact there was one more death in the vaccine group. (My interpretation is that the vaccines spared some COVID deaths - a small but real amount - but caused more deaths from the side effects of being injected with a massive bolus of spike protein mRNA (acute clotting disorders, stroke, myocarditis, that kind of stuff))
AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sinovac, Sputnik etc all use existing vaccine approaches.
And collectively represent the most widely used vaccines.
They've now put well over a million jabs in arms (New Zealand's population is about 5 million) and are starting their "big" population wide rollout at the end of July. There is no sign of any significant problems.
The very rapid success of the trial programmes is actually because we did such an abysmal job stopping the pandemic. Trials work by comparing people who got the test jab against people who got a placebo. For many diseases it might take several years for enough trial participants to get infected so that you learn anything. For COVID-19 it took only a few months for strong signals to emerge, because, (outside of New Zealand and to some extent a handful of other countries that had control) the virus was everywhere, so very quickly your placebo group began to get infected and sick.
HN deals more with technology. Imagine your project takes six hours to compile. You have ten hypotheses for the cause of an important bug. Will you fix it this week? Probably not right, that's sixty hours just for compiling -- maybe you can leave it overnight and manage two tests per day? But best not to chance it. So you tell management you hope to have a fix "the week after next". Sorry, that's the best you can do.
Now, imagine a new compiler version speeds up builds, and they only take 15 minutes. You can try all ten hypotheses in a morning, get a fix reviewed, go to production and it'll be done by Friday close of business no problem.
Management are suspicious. How can the new compiler make such a radical difference? Surely you've cut some corners, you'd better go back and test it "properly" this time.
In this analogy lay people are suspicious management and the vaccine manufacturers are the developer. Also being completely useless at preventing a predictable respiratory pandemic is somehow a new compiler version. That part of the analogy doesn't work very well. Sorry.
I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular.
So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine.
Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.
You also seem to be implying if the government is pushing something than it is safer to do the opposite. Go outside during tornado warnings? Spend all day outside if they forecast extreme heat? Ignore a mandatory evacuation if a hurricane is coming? Keep your seat belt unbuckled? Fly on an unlicensed airline?
Exactly when should you ignore the gov’t and when should you listen?
It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law.
I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.
I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!
I don't know. How many are there?
Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?
You're right that there's a "political" covid vaccine push, in that sense. It's because getting vaccinated is your civic duty. If the risk of complications were 10 times greater it would still be your civic duty. The pandemic - a society-wide threat to public health and social integrity - ends only when everyone has sufficient antibodies to prevent the virus from multiplying out of control - the so-called "herd immunity". It'll keep going until it gets there, so you don't really have a choice - you're getting those antibodies, one way or another. You can do that the easy way - through a vaccine - or the hard way, by catching covid, in which case you'll further strain an already overloaded health system and likely pass it on to someone else, risking their death or permanent injury.
So, yeah - you ought to get vaccinated. In a simpler time, it might have been called "the patriotic thing to do".
It isn't you civic duty. Herd immunity isn't achievable, that is scientific consensus by now. You should take more care with demands from others. Much more care.
Further, if anything about the vaccine push made any sense whatsoever, you might have a better case during these "exigent" circumstances. For instance, insisting people who've already recovered from covid and have robust, longer-lasting immunity also get vaccinated... That should make everyone's eyebrow raise up to heaven. And, since I personally note that strangely aggressive angle, among many others, it makes me even more suspicious of these vaccines.
Then again, I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid. So anyone telling me vaccines make sense for me is pretty out-of-touch.
Firstly, vaccine immunity is superior. Secondly - what are you implying with your eyebrow raise? An undisclosed ulterior motive? Short of kooky 5g-microchips-flat-earth-lizard-illuminati trash, what motive could any government have for deliberately compromising the health of their citizens, never mind all countries - including all the great rival superpowers?
> I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid
Close to zero risk? I'm skeptical. Unless you live off-grid somewhere and have no personal contact at all, in which case - sure, forget vaccination. But all the youth and vitamin D in the world won't stop you from catching and transmitting it the moment you step into civilization.
Here's proof that's totally wrong: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
Most recovered COVID-19 patients mount broad, durable immunity after infection
Neutralizing antibodies show a bi-phasic decay with half-lives >200 days
Spike IgG+ memory B cells increase and persist post-infection
Durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells recognize distinct viral epitope regionsSecond, you can't prove that "vaccine immunity is superior". That has never once been the case with any vaccine in history, there're no studies that show it, that's just BS parroted by drones.
Third, you don't need to know the motive when the behaviour is suspicious, you just need to know the creepy, suspicious behaviour. If someone is creeping around my house sneakily, repeatedly, I don't need to know exactly what they plan, but I have every right to want them to gtfo my space.
Fourth, another of the super-suspicious things about these vaccines is just how many of the hoi polloi have been programmed to accuse anyone unvaccinated of being wild 5g-magnetic-brain-impant believers. As though there can be no reasonable way to be suspicious of these experimental vaccines that were rushed to market--you have to be an insane person. That drones like you come out and make these stupid accusations every time I mention that the vaccines aren't some obvious lock on canning this virus is really, really suspicious.
Fifth, asymptomatic spread has NEVER been proven. Pre-symptomatic spread has, but not nearly as widely prevalent as we thought. Since I'm in a category of people--not fat, healthy, young, vitamin-d enriched--that basically never gets covid, I can basically never transmit it.
I'm sorry, we could argue the toss about the other stuff but this is dangerously delusional. You're going to hurt people with that attitude. All of the factors you mentioned just mean you're more likely to survive. They have no bearing on how easily you can catch covid, or pass it on. In the UK, spread is almost entirely driven by the young now.
LOL
"For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death."
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
The #1 additional condition is, you guessed it, obesity.
I'm not fat. I have zero underlying conditions. I am healthier than the vast majority of people. Good bodyfat ratio. Good muscle mass. Really high-quality diet. Zero stress. I don't take any medications.
People like me almost never get sick from covid.
You seem to think that people who never get symptoms also can transmit the disease (so-called asymptomatic spread). This has never been proven to happen. There has been some, much more limited than initially thought, pre-symptomatic spread, but that means that the person doing the spreading without symptoms will get sick in a day or three.
The healthy and young of this world have no observed impact on spread.
You may not take much personal responsibility for your health, and thus may be fat or otherwise at risk. You may have some rare condition beyond your control that puts you at risk. If so, maybe you should take experimental vaccines.
It makes zero sense for people like me, who have taken care of their health and thus have robust immune systems that handle this virus with zero problems and develop robust immunity to it, to take experimental vaccines. You'll have to have some more actual data to back that up, though.
LOL
Says the person suggesting that web devs on HN can't Google Scholar and critical think their way to an overridingly authoritative understanding of medical science (which is nothing compared to being a Node ninja)
Like I'm deeply sympathetic to what has happened to Assange. But I don't see how it has anything to do with democracy, given that he's not a US citizen, and US law rarely applies to non-US citizens outside of US borders.
When a nations legal system is manufacturing false evidence, the target of that become irrelevant. A legal system can't manufacturing false evidence, against anyone, and still be trusted.
While it is true (that you need a functioning legal system), it is also worth mentioning that a lot of regimes have excellently efficient legal systems and judicial branch that put any democratic system to shame.
The issue is what regulations you put in, how independent the judicial branch is and whether it is corrupt or not.
Source please?
Tangentially- what do you think about whistleblower protections where you are protected by law for reporting govt wrongdoing?
>prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing?
So the US govt provides whistle blower protections but it is also abusing the justice dept? The govt publishes materials all the time that makes it look bad:
People like Assange aren't whistleblowers, so those protections don't apply to them.
The US Govt publishes embarrassing information almost daily. The issue is more complicated than this forum leads on but its clear to me which side of the issue you all fall on judging by all my downvotes.
When your judicial branch does what executive wants then there is no protection
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/wochenende/interview-un-sond...
As per the article, prison has three functions: punish, deter, and reform the prisoner. In regards to the deter function: any attempt to imprison a person can be viewed as an attempt to "ruin them" (through loss of freedom and through the scarlet letter of a felony conviction) in order to "scare... people from running similar actions."
The question in this case is: why is the U.S. trying so hard to extradite Assange? If it is because they don't want a repeat of wikileaks, then the grandparent statement is very reasonable. And I suppose another reference would be the U.S. relationship with whistleblowers. I don't have the energy to do the research myself, but I too have heard they come down on whistleblowers like a ton of bricks. But maybe someone else can supply that reference.
The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government.
US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country.
Principles aren't really principles if they are being tossed aside when they become uncomfortable.