Capco

I want people to stop being obstinate, selfish know-it-alls. I want them to be willing to get vaccinated. But if the government decided it was in the best interest of the welfare of its citizens to compel vaccinations, I would have no qualms about it. It shouldn't have to even get to that point in the first place though.

Yep. South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987).

American exceptionalism at its worst, unfortunately.

Yes, but there are occasionally clever ways for the federal government to coax the states into uniform application of a law across all 50 states, such as judicious use of the Spending Clause. There's one example involving federal transportation funding for highways that I thought had to do with seatbelt wearing laws (something reserved for the states) but I cannot find any evidence for that right now, so it might have been for something else. EDIT: I think I remember now. It was for alcohol intoxication laws across all 50 states.

I think it's also worth pointing out that science is falsifiable (particularly the hard sciences but also the social ones). Scientists and experts are constantly challenging the claims of others in their fields. The entire peer-review process and the scientific method is centered around that. Accountability is built into the system itself. In fact, scientists love being wrong when new information becomes available that invalidates something prior, because it means they have expanded our knowledge about the universe. That's another reason why I have so much faith in the expertise of others. A true expert is never satisfied with the status quo and always pushing the limits of what we know.

My point is that Beasley does not have a Constitutional right to decline a state-mandated compulsory vaccination in lieu of a medical reason. I figured it was pretty clear.

There is currently no state-mandated compulsory vaccination for COVID, but if there were then he, nor anyone else, has any Constitutional right to refuse absent a genuine medical reason to do so. American jurisprudence on this topic is over 100 years old and fairly settled. Individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state. Per Justice Harlan: "[I]n every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand" and... "Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others." and finally... "[In] extreme cases [for certain individuals] in a particular condition of . . . health, [the requirement of vaccination would be] cruel and inhuman[e], [in which case, courts would be empowered to interfere in order to] prevent wrong and oppression." Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905).

I've just had an epiphany. People today wouldn't be so quick to condemn the expertise of others with decades of experience in their fields if they actually had to go to the library and check out a book. Easy access to information via the internet is a double-edged sword.

Where did you get opioid addiction from? Fwiw, the reason why I posted that was to exemplify the sad state of affairs with regards to some people refusing to trust the information, experts, and institutions that allow society to exist in the first place.

Cole illustrated the problem perfectly with this tweet:

Friendly reminder: please refrain from injecting political discourse into this discussion. It makes life easier on the moderators.

I'm very pleasantly surprised to see such widespread agreement on what comrade Kay wrote. These conversations give me hope that we can become less divisive and start getting sh*t done again.

Good post but just a quick aside, you can actually eradicate a virus. It's been done, albeit only twice. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, and rinderpest was declared eradicated in 2011.

Apparently Cantankerous is known for Scrooge McDuck diving into conversations without reading anything.

I think one of the biggest disconnects we are seeing with regards to this pandemic is the act of boiling down everyone to an individual and comparing one individual to another. But that's not the correct framework. Instead, the balancing act is between the individual and the group, and the group will always outweigh the individual when it comes to public health concerns like vaccination. This isn't the case of one person requesting another to take a vaccine. This is a case of society as a whole requesting its individual members to step up to the plate for the betterment of society itself. The state has the power to compel vaccination. Public health concerns absolutely trump individual rights in cases like these.

Inigo, I've always been a big fan of your posts but I cannot count this to be one of them. Vaccination is not a highly subjective or personal issue unless you have a genuine medical reason to avoid vaccination. Vaccination is a broader public health issue that goes beyond the individual.

I thought this depended on the infectious agent itself mutating. Afaik, the biochemistry of the immune response is a kind of "lock and key" system. The only way for the key that the immune system has to cease working is for the lock that is the infectious agent to change in some manner. Then again I'm not a virologist so who knows if I'm even right. Oh wait. Woe is me. I am supposed to verify all founts of knowledge personally and disregard experts like virologists. Derp. My bad Cole.

That doesn't even count the hidden posts.

For sure, and that's essentially what I mean. Ironically enough what you said is more akin to where I stand, but I was trying to convey it in more "classical" terms to get my point across haha. But I should give you more credit; you said it perfectly. My honest answer is that our culture places the burden of stressing such things to our children upon the family unit itself. But there's an obvious, inherent problem with that. If the burden is placed on the family unit to stress the continued idea of the family unit, but the family unit isn't intact in the first place, then that can become a generational issue for certain lineages. Which then begs the question: do we want such a theory being stressed to our children via alternative means so that intact family units in one generation can become complete family units in the next generation? Personally, I think we do want that as a whole society. And I think the best avenue for that is to encourage such behavior to our children in public schools.

I'm sorry but comparing the people of that era to a herd of sheep is going to be taken as an insult most of the time.

Seriously?! And that's not even a good insult when you think about it. You do know why animals herd, right? It's a form of protection. By congregating in a herd, predators only have access to the animals on outskirts of the herd. It's a classic example of individual sacrifice for the benefit of the whole herd.

Like the Pfizer and Moderna RNA vaccines?

All vaccines have that risk. But people took that very, very minor risk willingly because they knew what it meant for the whole country. The benefits to the whole far outweighed the risk to the individual, and they didn't have second thoughts about doing something like that. It was automatic. Something changed in the last 40 years. People somehow became more selfish and less trusting, more tribal and less accepting.

I genuinely don't understand sentiments like this. When you were a child, did your parents make a fuss about getting your vaccinations? Was it such a big matter of "choice" then? Do you have children of your own? If so, have you gotten them vaccinated? The only people being entitled and self-important are those who chose not to get vaccinated, since getting vaccinated isn't just for themselves but also for the sake of the community. Can you imagine the Greatest Generation putting up a big stink about getting the polio vaccine for their kids in the 50s? I just can't wrap my mind around it.

CRT challenges fundamental assumptions in modern American society, and I suppose you can argue there's something to be said for being contrarian, pushing the boundaries of what we accept as "okay," and challenging the status quo. So in that sense, at best it's food for thought. According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, the various proponents of CRT loosely share two common interests: The first is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America, and, in particular, to examine the relationship between the social structure and professed ideals such as 'the rule of law' and 'equal protection'. The second is a desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change it. - Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement Now, on its face that doesn't sound too bad. "Find structural racism in the law, and get it out of the law." As I said earlier, it's a noble objective. But the more I read about some of the specific views that are espoused in search of this goal, the more I just cannot get behind CRT as anything more than something to get you thinking.