You wanted him to be ill enough to “learn his lesson,” and “more ill than he was” (but short of dying)
You’ve shown no evidence of that. He apparently didn’t care much if he himself caught it, but then quarantined when he had symptoms. That doesn’t say “reckless disregard for others” to me.
I’ve already addressed this, and pre-symptomatic people spread it too. He went to the gym at least a day before he had symptoms, and likely had symptoms at the gym.
I think not getting vaccinated, and in some cases not masking, is similar to drunk driving.
Much of the time, nothing bad happens. Sometimes only minor bad things happen. People only die rarely. That doesn’t mean it’s not reckless.
The major difference is that the danger of drunk driving is common sense. The benefits of vaccination don’t have the same evidence in our everyday life; you have to trust experts, and know to discount all the misinformation out there.
If i had a loved one who was drunk driving, i’d probably hope they had a scary and perhaps painful experience to set them straight. And if i’m honest, some of that would be based on anger for making me feel worried. That is a perfectly natural human feeling. It is not the same as making a decision to actually put someone through that pain, which incidentally might actually be justified in certain hypothetical situations.
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When I was a young adult, we didn’t take drunk driving nearly as seriously as today. In fact, not long before that, being drunk was seen as a mitigating factor in causing an accident, not an aggravating factor.
Changing social mores to make it socially unacceptable to drive drunk appears to have greatly reduced auto fatalities. (It’s a little hard to pick apart, because there were a lot of other major safety improvements at the same time. But most of the folks who study this believe the reduction in drunk driving has been a big improvement. Data is always messy.)
We are now seeing a growing divide in covid mortality rates between states that “take it seriously” and those that don’t, as proxied by political opinions. Again, the data are messy. The pandemic started by mostly killing in the more densely populated “blue” areas, but has now moved to be largely an unvaccinated “red” problem.
But the correlation between those who die (and those who lose loved ones) and those who, personally, take precautions, is only modest. Because that’s how pandemics work. Vaccines are imperfect. Other precautions are even less perfect. There’s a lot of luck involved for all concerned.
So I am rooting for higher vaccine uptake, and fewer untimely deaths.
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Booster Scheduled - about a week and a half
It’s not that safe. Especially if you ingest it, including from traces on your skin.
I mean, it’s better than Clorox, but bathing in it is not a good idea.
This is a logical fallacy.
The mRNA vaccines are ~95% effective.
95% <> 100%
So yes, the jabbed do indeed have something to worry about.
Similarly,
95% <> 0%
So while they are not perfect, the vaccines are pretty darn good.
That’s not even taking into account waning effectiveness if people haven’t had their boosters, immunocompromization, children too young to be vaccinated, J&J vaccine with lower effectiveness, variants…
That phrase is a real pet peeve of mine.
You do realize that not everyone can get jabbed, right?
Presymptomatic is when you’re most likely to spread the most germs, as I understand it. And since this virus is so much more lethal than pretty much any widespread virus since “Spanish” flu, it’s quite a lot more likely that he killed someone than a person with flu going to the doctor’s office.
That said, it would be nice if this normalized wearing masks when you’re sick, especially with flu-like symptoms.
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it is bad that this is normal. But it really is normal for people to make emotionally frustrated judgements.
every time some one cuts my wife off in traffic she says something like ‘i hope they get into an accident!’. To which I reply, ‘dont say that…thats just silly’.
marcie is playing a little too much devils advocate for me here, but I agree with the premise that the vaxx crowd needs to stop hating the unvaxx crowd to the point where they lose human compassion for them.
I disagree that emotions are good or bad. It’s how we use those emotions that may be good or bad.
There emotions are one way that our brains are telling us that these people are behaving recklessly.
I completely agree we should still feel compassion and empathy for people who do not vaccinate.
But that doesn’t mean we have to feel this every moment. Those feelings represent one truth- that both people who vaccinate, and who do not, are both people, and in many cases it is largely accidental which group you fall into.
But the anger is another important truth. We have to integrate both of these truths to act appropriately.
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I completely agree with this. But I can’t help but feel frustrated with the antivaxxers.
I can have human compassion for people who I don’t want to share time with, ever again.
Life’s too short.
And when someone is actively spreading vaccine misinfo, they cross a line to ‘this person is actively dangerous and should be shunned.’
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You’ve consistently downplayed the pandemic, consistently cast aspersions on the vaccine, all with a playful deniability.
You do not get any benefit of the doubt.
Really? I hadn’t noticed.
I am not so quick to judge.
Sometimes people believe the wrong thing because they have made their own ego more important than the truth. Many politicians and pundits do this when they spread misinformation, which become lies in many cases. They are acting immorally, although we all put our own ego before the truth for something or another, to some degree.
But other people are just listening to others they think share their own values. This is an effective heuristic that is unfortunately failing here. In my opinion, their is no sin in that, just ignorance.
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Experience shows me that certain beliefs are highly correlated with personalities I do not get along with. It may not be fair to one or two individuals, but life’s short, and there are billions of people out there. I can afford to miss out on spending time with the rare counterexamples.
its easy to remove people from your life that you are not close to.
but what do you do when that person is your mother… or brother… or someone you really dont want to shun from your entire life over 1 issue.
I have had to watch others insult my family members… watch family members fight at funerals over masks, and some people wrote hate mail back as their RSVP to a family event. These are the people I have loved and respected for my entire life and now the whole world is telling me they are stupid. I dont agree with what they are doing, but I dont enjoy having to watch as everyone looks down their nose at them.
I chose to get the damn vaccine, for whatever reasons I had when I did. I was able to convince some high risk family members to get the vaccine. I have had discussions with the people I care about to tell them what I saw as their risks and how their actions relate to public health.
At this point Im done with it and have adopted a ‘dont ask dont tell’ stance on the subject. Im not letting this get in the way of my relationships with loved ones. Im not losing good friends over this.
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