They hate vaccines not because of any knowledge or experience they’ve had with vaccines, but because it’s a useful vehicle for otherwise-shapeless anti-establishment resentment, directed against people they enjoy attacking (experts, the educated, diverse institutions of higher ed, foreigners, etc.)
Also, too, vaccines are all sciencey. Science tells us there is no such thing as race. That can't possibly be (permitted to) true - so science is just going to have to go. All of it.
It's all psyops. They research and poll test topics that inflame morons (aka their base). Then they exploit the issues to take/keep power. In the case of the trans hysteria the cynically sacrificed were less than 1% of the population. With the vaccines it's more like a majority that are put at risk.
I like the world that Ezra imagines: that you can win ppl over with abundance, good policy, compassionate listening, and technocratic compromise. Does no good to endlessly pretend this is how things are working tho.
Also, vaccines very easily lend themselves to mass opposition on any excuse no matter how filmsy because: people don't like getting jabbed with needles! If you see it as a kind of reverse treatlerism — ideology sculpted around avoiding immediate discomfort/pain — it's really straightforward!
The turn against vaccines all emanated from their instinct to defend Trump's handling of COVID-19. Everyone on the right abandoned modern medicine rather than their god-king. Remember, your average GOP voter insisted the whole thing was a hoax until well into March of 2020.
Or they believe they're literally the devil, this gets kinda under-regarded.
Cultivate within yourself the utmost possible contempt for the far right and only then will their behavior become comprehensible and predictable to you. They’re animals masquerading as people
No, they're people, and people are terrible. The far right has spiraled down a very dark path that is causing great harm, but that's just a thing people do sometimes.
Okay, but they’re still going to have to be hanged for doing that harm. The hand-wringing can come later.
Don't care for dehumanizing framing here. I do think you're better off assuming they're not arguing in good faith, but that's a very human thing to do.
Man how can you look at the last ten years in this country and think the right is operating with the slightest amount of good faith?
Going back a decade, the best way to predict Trump’s behavior & statements has always been, “What would a particularly shitty 11yo boy do in this circumstance.” Literally never fails, yet our wise leaders are daily caught flat footed.
that 'wise' is so soaked in sarcasm I can barely read it
sorry to protest too much, but while I have as much contempt for the far right as I can have for my fellow human beings, they are people. Dehumanization of anybody, even them, leads down a bad path, in our hearts and souls
That's mysticism.
They surrendered the thing that makes them human - their critical faculties - to live in a world of pure libidinal indulgence. They’re worse than animals because they had a choice not to be and gave it up for the pleasure of inflicting pain without ever having to think
I can’t disagree with that. But given historical permission structures regarding people who are no longer considered human, I can’t use that rhetorical framework. You’re not wrong about the choice they’ve made though.
It’s a road to a dark place and they deserve everything it contains
You need to judge individuals as individuals, always. But MAGA as a political movement and everything associated to it - their ideas, their rhetoric, their various complaints and other emissions - has forfeited the right to be taken seriously, except in the way one takes seriously a rabid dog.
Bene Gesserit approved.
They hate vaccines because they're eugenicists who think people that need vaccines are polluting the gene pool. I think your point is also true, and they're not mutually exclusive. But don't underestimate how much they think people who are "weak" should just die.
Plus, to b able to peddle dietary supplements ... the ones that *they* won't tell you about (and are lightly regulated).