It doesn't help that major components of the "political class" are being the biggest babies and spreading straight up disinformation. Sure, we shouldn't have to have a mandate, but we are now at the point where it makes no sense not to have one and people can't see that because they are being routinely lied to by people that have the vaccine and by organizations that have the mandate.

> It doesn't help that major components of the "political class" are being the biggest babies and spreading straight up disinformation.

Again, this is your shortcoming. It doesn't get fixed by forcing people to have something injected inside of them and have their movement restricted by sanitary passports.

Where does personal responsibility come into the equation? You say it's someone else's fault they haven't educated someone, but that someone has to carry some responsibility on being receptive and to evaluate information, no?

Being persuaded and being informed are hopefully related, but demonstrably different.

This is not "my" shortcoming. This is a shortcoming of the system that we have to make up for in some way, like having a vaccine mandate.

"The whole point of democracy and freedom is that you convince people with words and not with sticks."

This is just false, though. The whole point of democracy is to allow folks to have a voice in their politics, not to avoid forcing folks to do things. We force folks to do things all of the time. This is what laws do: Sometimes they are easy to follow, but we also know that if we don't have, say, building codes and food safety laws that some folks will cut too many corners building or add weird things to bread (like in the 1800's).

Simply put, you aren't always going to be able to use words. And it seems vaccinations are similar.