[GHung]

Anti-vaxxers are not the enemy: Science, politics and the crisis of authority

My kids got their shots! But climate denial is far more dangerous, and a larger cultural crisis looms behind both



One of the central characteristics of our age – which those of us with fancy educations often call the postmodern era, although even that term is starting to feel old – is a widespread crisis of authority. It isn’t quite true that nobody believes in anything and nobody trusts the experts, as in the rootless world of moral relativism feared by conservatives. It’s more that everybody gets to pick their own beliefs, their own experts and their own evidence. This is something like the crisis of meaning that Nietzsche foresaw when he pronounced that God was dead, but he was only half right. The old God whose judgment everyone in the Western world feared is gone, all right – but he has divided and multiplied, like cancer cells, into an endless pantheon of new gods.

It’s entirely expected for somebody with my media platform to rage against right-wing kooks on television — or right-wing kooks in elected office, for that matter — who claim that climate change is a hoax or that vaccinating children against preventable diseases is dangerous and unnecessary. I agree that those people are deluded or misinformed, and in the case of climate denial they are serving as the agents of larger and darker powers. But those issues are not the same, no matter how closely they have become linked in the liberal and conservative hive-minds. For one thing, anti-vaccine sentiment is found across the political spectrum, although it’s most common among the libertarian-minded right and the anarchist-minded or New Agey quadrants of the left. Attempts to cram the vaccine issue into the binary discourse of partisan politics or the “culture war” are intellectually lazy, and misrepresent its true significance. Furthermore, the dangers of climate denialism are many orders of magnitude worse than the dangers of anti-vaxxer hysteria, which feels like one of those sideshow issues in American politics that’s really about something else.....

What links the anti-vaccine movement to climate denialism — and to many other things that may appear unrelated — is that both are manifestations of the crisis of authority. As represented by people like Glenn Beck and Rand Paul, they also display that crisis in its relatively new and intriguingly crazy right-wing costume. Know-nothing congressmen and vapid TV hosts stand courageously against the pointy-headed Ph.D. elite: They are not scientists, they assure us (scoring points with their core audience), but they know what they believe! Meanwhile, bicoastal liberals are granted an irresistible opportunity to proclaim their own enlightenment and decry the stupidity of others. As gratifying as it may be to congratulate ourselves for composting our coffee grounds and watching Neil deGrasse Tyson’s show and believing in Science, it’s missing the point...

Keep reading: http://www.salon.com/2015/02/07/anti_va ... authority/

I wasn't quite sure how to characterise this, but it seemed relevant to many issues we discuss here,, and the clear trend of individuals/groups becoming less collectively oriented. As I often point out, there is no "we", which is why we have little hope of solving our collective problems, or adapting collectively to our predicaments. Whether it's people acting on their own, or things like Roy Moore, Alabama's Chief Justice thumbing his nose at the US Supreme Court, it's looking more like Rage Against The Machine these days. As the song "Killing In The Name" concludes:

"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!
Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!
Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!
Motherfucker!
Uggh! "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ

Is this your future? "A Nation Divided......"

[Pops]

The old God whose judgment everyone in the Western world feared is gone, all right – but he has divided and multiplied, like cancer cells, into an endless pantheon of new gods.

So true, none of us are about to be converted from our natural knee-edness.

Here is a great paper by Robert D. Putnam:
Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital


P.S. and the paper was written before we began to commune with our phones 24/7.

[Sixstrings]

The "my kid has a peanut allergy," anti-vaccine, munchausen by proxy syndrome, helicopter mothers crowd -- is about 50/50 split far right and far left.

You can't put it all on conservatives.

These anti-vaccine people, a lot of them, are vegan types and all that too. I think it's a symptom of OCD, for starters. People obsessing over their food. And everyone thinks they are an MD these days just because they have google.

A disturbingly large number of parents no longer vaccinate their children. It's insane, and very dangerous -- there's a measles outbreak in the country. Measles has a 90% contagion rate. If you're even in the ROOM -- it's 9/10 you're gonna catch it, even hours after the infected person was in the same room.

Not vaccinating is dangerous to all infants and newborns, who haven't had a chance to get vaccinated yet. Vaccinating protects all babies. Idiot parents not vaccinating, has created a public health risk and THAT is where individual freedom meets a brick wall against the right to life of OTHERS.

It's really outrageous. People are just idiots these days. In the old days, they listened to the doctor and took their shots and all these diseases were eradicated. And now we've got a measles outbreak again.

P.S. Could some of this vaccine thing be lack of healthcare access? Are some just falling through the cracks, and don't have a pediatrician? It needs to be looked into. Measles outbreak, and maybe POLIO coming back -- it's outrageous. How did this vaccination thing even become voluntary to start with? I thought schools required proof the kids are vaccinated?

Is it the homeschool / internet-school crowd that's not getting vaccinated?

If that's what it is, then this is something government needs to crack down on. There's got to be some kind of federal law passed about this, social services in every state need to enforce vaccination for the home school kids. Again -- the main issue on that is that the non-vaccinated put ALL infants at risk -- who haven't had their chance to get vaccinated -- now nobody can say that's right, you can't expose babies to measles and maybe polio and all these old diseases.

[Paulo1]

I'm 59.

I remember being very young and lining up with my family to get the polio vaccine in front of Capwells department store, in Walnut Creek, Calif. It was on a sugar cube. It was a moment indelibly etched in my mind and one of my first memories. My mom kept saying, "Thank God". Later, I went to school with kids who had leg braces.

There is an expression my ex-wife used to use, occasionally. "Too stupid to live". I am an independent SOB in many ways, and a redneck to boot, but I sure as shit got vaccinated and so did my kids.

Taking this further, when climate change really starts to hurt will folks say, "not me, nobody is going to make me _______" (fill in the blank) . How about watering restrictions?

Some people just need a slap in the face.

[Ibon]

One of the central characteristics of our age – which those of us with fancy educations often call the postmodern era, although even that term is starting to feel old – is a widespread crisis of authority. It’s more that everybody gets to pick their own beliefs, their own experts and their own evidence.

Whether it be government, religion or academics, these were authorities that were respected not too long ago. Every authority is imperfect, the turf wars in academics or the corruption in government or the patriarchy of religious institutions have always been present. Nevertheless each disseminated their authority through very limited conduits; Peer reviewed scientific journals were THE reference that mainstream publications would refer to not too long ago for disseminating facts.

It was about 2 or 3 years back when I posted something related to this here on po.com. It was on one of my rants on some thread about the digital malaise I see that has corrupted the masses. The Internet and digital media has allowed for the conduits of information to become fully unregulated and unhinged from what used to be an imperfect hierarchy of authority that at least in the sciences had the integrity of the peer review process.

Facts don't matter any more. Instead of the broad middle class being held by an imperfect authority that could be looked up to and respected as a hierarchy of imperfect excellence we now have a huge middle class empowered with dumbness.

Empowered with dumbness..... That is it.

I want to leave you all with an image of an old one room country school house in the first half of the 20th century where teachers would teach latin, where students would learn the classics, where literature was dissected. Where a belief in the common good prevailed and authorities in their imperfection were respected.

Imagine bringing Mark Twain forward into the 21st century. What would he think looking around?

We have become a mass citizenry empowered with dumbness with thousands of conduits by which to disseminate like a virus our inanities.

This is not an endemic problem of the extreme conservative right or far left fringes. This is ubiquitous through out the political and socio-economic spectrum.

[Lore]

Taking this further, when climate change really starts to hurt will folks say, "not me, nobody is going to make me _______" (fill in the blank) . How about watering restrictions?

Some people just need a slap in the face.

Eventually all of humanity will be in a very wide and deep foxhole together. And as they say; there are no nonbelievers, or those that won't be praying for help in one.

[Sixstrings]

I mean -- folks -- the law requires that DOGS get their shots. Dogs. Animals.

So how can people not vaccinate their kids, human beings. Who then go to daycare and Disneyland and expose the small percentage of kids that can't get vaccinated for genuine reasons (not all can get vaccinated, I forget the details, but the way it used to be with most getting vaccinated that would protect all the newborns too plus the non-vaccinated. Now we've got measles outbreaks going on. Started in Disneyland now it's spread to most of the states.)

Sometimes government is not the problem. Fighting contagious disease is the same as basic public safety things like having a fire department. And your dog has to get a rabies shot. And having traffic rules. Etc.

One can't just opt out of society, and all norms and responsibility to others' safety.

We saw this same thing with ebola, and even nurses who treated those patients just going on a cruise ship right after or several of them flying off out of state. Wtf. And these were nurses, who should know better.

Vaccination is such basic stuff. There was a measles outbreak back int he revolutionary war. Doctors back then would scrape measles puss off the infected and then smear that on cuts, and that was a slower infection rate and an effective vaccination. If that hand't been done, Washington's whole army would have been wiped out just from the measles.

[SeaGypsy]

Of my 3 kids with 2 mothers, only the eldest had problems with vaccination, a serious fever & convulsions from his first & only round of MMR. His paediatrician grandfather agreed he should not be further vaccinated. The younger two were fine & completed the full schedule.

I was a natural born lefty hipster who grew to despise much of the scene there, these days I'm a redneck with some lefty ideas. I find hipsters these days incredibly sheepish, lazy & intolerant of any views contrasting their own. Hate em all equally has become a familiar colloquialism.

[Sixstrings]

Of my 3 kids with 2 mothers, only the eldest had problems with vaccination, a serious fever & convulsions from his first & only round of MMR. His paediatrician grandfather agreed he should not be further vaccinated.

It would be interesting to see some hard data, if it exists, whether there are more bad reactions to vaccines now compared to decades past.

If it's always been the same, then we should continue as we've always done -- a pediatrician such as in your case recommending to stop the vaccinations and then that is that percentage of kids that genuinely can't be vaccinated. At present, too many are opting out of vaccination though and in the US we have a measles outbreak.

Some of this ivaccine tinfoil hat stuff is true, I vaguely recall some flu vaccine from the 70s that (in the US) that killed a lot of people.

It may be a tough public health call; some can't get vaccinated, yet enough must be vaccinated so you don't get polio or measles spreading or that all newborns aren't at risk to catching it before they can be vaccinated.

[Nubs]

A big unintended consequence of the internet has been to raise the noise level such that the signal is very hard to perceive. Couple that with the fact that few people understand any of the technology that they use, and it was inevitable that we enter a new age of magic. At least that's how things are out here on the left coast of North America.

I was at a meeting last night where the discussion leader began by asserting that it is a scientific fact that by opening our hearts to each other we will change our magnetic fields. I interpreted this as metaphor, but I'm pretty sure that she did not.

A friend's son who recently had a baby asked me whether he should vaccinate her. I said yes. He asked why. I said "social responsibility". He repeated the phrase with a quizzical look and the conversation ended there.

I have an acquaintance who is involved in a local movement to block the installation of a cell phone tower near his house based on proven health effects of 900-1800 MHz radiation. He recently tried to enlist me in the movement, and gave me some scientific papers to read. I read several of them very carefully and was not convinced, but I did not take the time to read them all (there were more than 100 on the list). I also borrowed his meter and measured field strengths at the base of local cell phone towers (400 microwatts per square meter, max, which seems inconsequential to me). I did a literature search and read some reviews. The whole effort cost about a week of my increasingly finite lifespan. I was not convinced, but there is indeed a substantial published more-or-less scientific literature claiming to find health effects from cell phone towers, and it would probably take about a year of full-time effort to really get a handle on the literature.

How many people have the time and training to really understand even one of the many critical issues that we face. Does peak oil loom? Is climate change real? Are vaccinations worth the risk? Are GMO foods safe enough to eat? Which of the thousands of recently introduced chemicals in the environment have important health effects? Is Obamacare going to improve health care and/or save money, or will it do the opposite? Are Obama's proposed tax increases going to help me or hurt me? Should I lay in a year's supply of food and buy the guns needed to protect them? Is Sasquatch real? Do extraterrestrials visit our planet? Is the gubberment hiding secret zero-point energy technology? Does the man on the land line with an Indian accent really work for Microsoft Tech Services?

Well, maybe not all of these questions are as critical as the others, but the list is nearly endless.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law)

.

If it's all just magic, then which magician should one believe? It's not an easy question for most people to answer.

[SeaGypsy]

There is a big difference between making a decision on such a matter based on presupposition rather than a specific child's specific reaction. Vaccination is a very tricky area to research as the debate has been very vocal & extreme on both sides. My choice was to give the system a go & the result has been 3 very healthy kids. One only vaccinated once.

[Ibon]

Pathetic, revealing and funny

http://www.upworthy.com/he-was-inside-f ... c=hpstream

[forbin]

You're not the boss of Me! ... and the crisis of authority

Hmm, factors

* Authority has made a few blunders - reporting of which is greater and spread more

* Acidic reporting in MSM

* Internet - the good, the bad and the down right fradulent are a click away

* Emphasise on the freedom of you and your ideas above all others .

* Emphasise on we are all equal ( when clearly we're not ) confused with equal opportunity


I am clear that the last bullet point will upset some but give it some thought please , given the factors of genetics and how each of us through out our lives has been subject to different enviromental imputs .... leads to

* individualism

* Same As Yesterday - its claimed that most people want exciting and adventurous lives when actually all they want is tomorrow to be same as today .


Forbin

[Ibon]

How many people have the time and training to really understand even one of the many critical issues that we face. Does peak oil loom? Is climate change real? Are vaccinations worth the risk? Are GMO foods safe enough to eat? Which of the thousands of recently introduced chemicals in the environment have important health effects? Is Obamacare going to improve health care and/or save money, or will it do the opposite? Are Obama's proposed tax increases going to help me or hurt me? Should I lay in a year's supply of food and buy the guns needed to protect them? Is Sasquatch real? Do extraterrestrials visit our planet? Is the gubberment hiding secret zero-point energy technology? Does the man on the land line with an Indian accent really work for Microsoft Tech Services?
.

Fragmented in a maze of complexity we have become unhinged...

On this greater theme here is a quote from JMG from his latest essay

The difference between experiencing something and watching it on TV or the internet, that is to say, is precisely the same as the difference between making love and watching pornography; in each case, the latter is a very poor substitute for the real thing.



And here is a lengthy but very relevant article on the death of natural history

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/art ... ol_Twitter


“The current push to connect every classroom in America to the Internet demonstrates how quickly elected leaders and the public can be galvanized to address what is rightly perceived to be a critical educational need. Meanwhile, the demise of natural history goes unnoticed, increasing the likelihood that future generations of schoolchildren will spend even more time indoors, clicking away on their plastic mice, happily viewing images of the very plants and animals they could be finding in the woods, streams, and meadows they no longer visit.” — David Wilcove and Thomas Eisner, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2000

[Simon_R]

As far as I can see the problem is when you remove an objective set of guidelines, you are only left with subjective guidelines.
An attempt to patch that up is
'ethics' -- essentially subjective
'humanism' -- guess what that is subjective too
since we are left with nothing but subjective judgements, as the song sais, 'anything goes'.
its a brave new world out there

[SeaGypsy]

Ibon, I lost track of where but last year I stumbled on some research about the effects of internet porn on relationships. The research started off broadly before zooming in on the devastating impact on very young people. The prime symptoms of porn saturation being a severe resistance to any personal challenge by a sexual partner or by a potential sexual partner.
Interestingly boys are much more interested & affected than girls. The only winners are SNAG's of whom there are ever fewer. Everyone who knows a teenage girl these days has heard them say "he's a porn obsessed wanker!" In a few years they will be saying "they are ALL porn obsessed wankers!"

[Ibon]

Everyone who knows a teenage girl these days has heard them say "he's a porn obsessed wanker!" In a few years they will be saying "they are ALL porn obsessed wankers!"

Young people have nervous systems that have become aligned with a digital habitat. The digital ecosystem now defines style. It is obvious that the reason young people are removing all their body hair on their genitals is because they have been raised on images from a 2 dimensional digital display of porn.

Young people who never played out door in nature but grew up playing video games now as adults look upon nature through their conditioned nervous systems that are pumped up and adrenalized. That's why extreme sports like mountain biking off of cliffs attracts attention. The most insidious example of this for me are these bullshit "eco tourist" destinations that promote zip lining through rainforest canopies. You put on a harness and helmet and go whizzing for two minutes through the canopy. Disneyland brought into the rainforest. You don't see an orchid, bird or insect. Your experience in the rainforest becomes a superficial disneyland adrenalized video game. These are kids that never knew the wide open summers of playing in the woods or looking under rocks for salamanders. These are kids who grew up playing video games and now want the video game experience when they go into nature.

We way under estimate how being raised in fake digital habitats is creating a severely handicapped culture.

[ROCKMAN]

Gypsy – Interesting direction the thread has taken. I’ve just jumped in since the title didn’t seem very interesting. But now that I’ve read the latest comments it brings to mind what I often tell the oil patch engineers who are heavy into reservoir modeling. I think such models are great because, if done properly, they show what the more sensitive elements of the system are.

But also that modeling (and apparently internet porn) is a lot like masturbation: there's nothing at all wrong with doing either…as long as you don’t start believing it’s the real thing. LOL

[SteveO]

IMO this whole situation with loss of trust with "authority" is because we have been, and are being lied to almost continuously.

Look at some of the big ones we've been told:

The recession is over.
Iraq had an atomic bomb in development that they were going to give to al qaeda.
Anyone can beat the market with their 401k.
Housing prices will always go up.
We will never run out of fossil fuels.
Unemployment is (insert percentage here).

Not to mention the ones we hear daily on the main stream propaganda machine and in advertising.

I think most people know, somewhere deep down, when they are being lied to and this whole denial of reality thing is a backlash against the "authorities" that are lying. That's why it cuts across normal political boundaries.

[Paulo1]

Ibon

re:
"I want to leave you all with an image of an old one room country school house in the first half of the 20th century where teachers would teach latin, where students would learn the classics, where literature was dissected. Where a belief in the common good prevailed and authorities in their imperfection were respected. "

You forgot to mention...where the children sat quietly and listened. They took turns and raised their hands. The also knew if they got in trouble at school it would be dealt with at home. An A was an A and a C was a C and people actually failed. At recess they played hard and rough outside. Not one child used the phrase motherf#@!er. Not one little girl wore makeup or was dressed as a hooker. When parents visited the school they did not sport tatoos. The women did not wear wife-beater tee shirts with their boobs hanging out. The men wore their hats as they were designed.

My wife was an elementaary teacher for 25 years. When I picked her up after work I was horrified. I taught elementary school for 3 years. I remember one day seeing a couple of moms fighting...calling each other crack whores and sluts with boobs heaving as they tried to swing on each other. (I soon transferred back to teaching carpentry!! )

It is pretty grim out there. My wife had a 7 year old whose Dad bought him "Call of Duty"? video game for Christmas. It is harder to get a drivers license than it is to get married, for sure. As for popping out kids, well who needs marriage anymore? Like I said...pretty grim out there.