I don’t find you terribly respectable I’m afraid. Your self improvement narrative in regards to vaccines with the “I go to the gym and wash my vegetables” is enacting something ultimately dark that goes beyond simply trying to be understood. I wish you would stop but at this point I am very certain you won’t. Good luck.
Why are you trying to conflate Canadian Liberals and the Democrats? They aren’t remotely the same party, the systems of government don’t look anything alike and they aren’t in cahoots.
And the Canadian Conservatives are fronting a guy who has stated his support of American style “Right to Work” legislation and other Americanizing government initiatives who went into politics immediately from going to school for international affairs against a guy who has spent years as Governor of two National Central Banks and created a number of international contacts across the Commonwealth in the international financial sector that can be leveraged and yet Conservatives are trying to paint themselves as “better for the economy”. Pollievre has been utilizing anti gay anti queer dogwhistles in his rhetoric for the past ever as well. Fuck Right to Work bullshit and fuck anybody who wants to roll back civil protections. There’s not a lot of places in the world as safe as Canada for queer people to exist so it’s not like there’s much better places to escape once the fortress falls.
Because I don’t think one hops around a topic replying to a multitude of strangers with fairly combative short little posts that convey a sense of being personally attacked if they have a solid understanding of this principle?
Because there’s only three ways people respond to an argument based out of ‘everyman for themselves’ logic. The most common is to respond with a “well fuck you too” attitude and the second is to double down on their belief that that’s not a good principle. I wonder why one would open themselves up to that and behave like it’s compelling if you’re already aware? The juice doesn’t seem worth the squeeze.
The point I am making is that you are doing two things here. The first shows a fear for your personal safety and represents a very understandable reluctance. People usually get that part. It represents a non-ideal outcome but people are generally fairly willing to write it off.
However when people come on here and posting the way you are trying to advocate for your position to be one of unchallenged normalcy it is trying to achieve a totally separate second task. You are trying to reinforce an oppossing social pressure in direct opposition to the goals of others with the intention of group safety. You are either not being honest with yourself or not being honest with us about your intentions are but that doesn’t really matter because regardless you’re going from being a smaller problem for people to one that is standing directly in their path.
A lot of the time this second task isn’t elucidated properly because you framed this as an argument about how best to achieve your personal safety which is a fundamentally different arguement… But people arguing against you often are approaching you from this second task because you are not arguing effectively for personal safety when your actions and stated desiref outcome don’t align.
You are effectively arguing for lower general safety by fighting against the social pressures that are in service of raising the bar of protections. That is in direct opposition to your goals and theirs. Why would the misconception about a fear of needles matter when it doesn’t change your modis operandi and you statedly do not care? Why is lying the lesser evil then being selfish?
Would it clear some things up if people just said “We don’t particularly care about your fear of vaccine injury. Our pushback is actively trying to engineer society to protect a wider swath of the human population and your fears aren’t relevant to that aim but the repetition and specific means of open expression of those fears as being something worthy of respect is in direct conflict”?
Not sure I buy it. This honesty comes across as wanting to have your cake and eat it too. If it were pure selfishness at play your ace move would be to encourage others to utilize vaccines so that your personal risk is minimized by upping the social pressure to get vaccines… and then just quietly not take them yourself. As someone who thinks it’s moral to protect people who are immunocompromised and cannot protect themselves except through joint Immunity projects it benefits my aims and the people I know who live their lives under increased risks they can’t personally mitigate to increase the social pressures to take vaccines.
Our goals should align here because as long as the social pressure remains hightened both aims benefit. Your statistical best chance of achieving your stated aim is to just lie or stay mum.
But that’s not what you’re doing and if you were really inoculated against social pressures than the increased social pressure of just quietly not conforming wouldn’t effect you negatively. You are effectively platforming your veiw that there should be less social pressure because you ultimately are effected by that social pressure and you want people’s tacit endorsement that what you are doing is okay. This isn’t ultimately about vaccines for you. It’s about how you’re personally made to feel about it and that isn’t terribly compelling in the face of altruistic endeavours.
The anecdote about the loud apartment music is something of an unnecessary red herring and a somewhat confusing one. I get that your premise is that people are horrible so you should be horrible too but is that really the answer? Those people were acting selfishly but if they were corrected by increasing the social pressure to stop by the residents around them making a fuss or by a culture that reinforces that considering the needs of people in your vicinity more highly is a common good you wouldn’t have suffered for their selfishness. Your way doesn’t see an actual reduction in the occurrence of the problem. It endorses more problems that are left to fester.
I understand where you come from even if I think we do have a responsibility to create Immunity through lowering transmission rates. It isn’t exactly noble but you have the self awareness to note that. Still the vehemence displayed towards vaccines doesn’t support your outcome.
Everyone who gets a vaccine effectively supports your health for you as it makes it less likely that it will spread to you who is unprotected. Many things vaccines are made to protect against have fairly bad long term effects on health. It doesn’t matter how well you personally take care of yourself polio permanently robs you of your stamina, measles robs you of the ability to fight off other diseases, flu can develop into long term pulmonary conditions and some viruses cause lifelong neurological problems. Getting any of those is entirely possible and just a matter of random chance.
I understand wanting to go through life essentially cheating the process by not having to experience any negative effects from disease or vaccine but it is essentially a lottery. Long term vaccine injury is a thing but the odds are very small. Those injury rates and the type of injury however are usually still less than the effects of getting hit by the diseases themselves and the rates associated with suffering the long term effects of one. However here’s where I become a little confused at why you’re advocating for normalizing your attitude : the more people who take the reasonable risk of vaccine injury the less diseases are able to transmit the less likely you personally are to encountering a debilitating and life threatening illness. If more people stop taking the vaccines your statistical outcome of getting through life unscathed goes dramatically down… So if selfish motives are at the core of your vaccine hesitancy why are you so vocal about your choice? Wouldn’t it personally benefit you to encourage other people to take that risk on your behalf?
While I don’t doubt your stance comes from a history of trauma, policing any kind of identity in this way causes real trauma to others. It causes a pervasive sense of isolation that is antithetical to feeling supported and secure and puts a check on a person’s ability to participate in their culture. Your lack of comfort does not mend leveling the playing field of stripping away the comfort of others if it is being expressed peacefully.
Bans also very become a very fuzzy line. Most holidays are based off of religious festivals that are widely participated in by the secular and non-secular alike. Once someone starts making exceptions because a wide number of people like a specific one you start creating an artificial canon where minority cultures are oppressed while a narrative of “dominant culture” is allowed giving certain religious traditions cultural supremacy. For example people inside the Church have been trying to get rid of the multitude of pagan festivals that were rebranded as Christmas for eons. They ended up just rubber stamping it because taking away something beloved doesn’t go well. In a modern context you could try and rebrand Christmas to a non-religious holiday… But good luck. It’s layers of Christian over Pagan imagery and traditions fused into a gastalt religious melange. Any governing body that has tried to get rid of it before has spectacularly failed and leaving it be would quickly become a symbol to people who come from places with different dominant partially seclarized religious traditions that they remain cultural outsiders who don’t have the nessisary concensus to participate in public. It would translate directly into supremacy narratives.
It’s healthier for a society by far not to police the range of peaceful human expression and connection. People deserve to see themselves represented and connect with each other without needing to act like undercover spies in hostile territory.
Nobody. Canadians are worried about a good old fascist… I mean fashioned war war.
I am less shocked and more resigned. Been tracking the progress of the Republican party over a decade now and watching them throw out euphemism after euphemism as they just aren’t needed anymore. What the reaction of shock got us back then was “alarmist” since the Conservative playbook was so layered up in dogwhistles the average person thought it was tinfoil hat fodder.
The base was being groomed to accept this as an outcome and so they were slow boiled. It was that way for the Nazis too. Each terrible move wasn’t quick it was the next horrible logical conclusion of their worldview of removing the “useless” aspects of humanity. They started first in government services and then with eugenics in mental health care while dismantling queer infrastructure in cities under the same eugenics line citing them as non-reproductive genetic dead ends. Then it turned to homelessness. Then as their policies created more “useless” classes of people in the form of minorities who could not legally work because of the laws they passed they turned to liquidation of those groups. Each step was followed by a pause to make the rhetoric more callus to build off the basic premise that as an able-bodied, regularly employed, sane, cishet, white, Christian / atheist that your resources were personally being stolen from you to feed the “undeserving”.
How far back can you remember Republicans on their soap box about people being undeserving of assistance or support? About people being a waste of resources or campaigning to make those people easier to stigmatize? It shouldn’t be surprising after over a decade that they’ve been dropping the mask.
Admittedly the Liberals are not my party of choice but there still is validity for voting for the lesser of two bad options. Until we can address the first past the post system we are beholden to voting more against than for a given regime by reaching a sort of mutual concensus with our neighbours before we hit the polls. That representive voting system needs to happen elsewise we’re stuck playing this dumb game.
But it’s hard to compare even this party I am not terribly enthusiastic to to the Democrats when there’s at least mediocre commitments to a number of decent causes toward reconciliation, reasonable commitment to the Kyoto climate accord targets, stated support of LGBTQIA+ causes and at least a lukewarm support of Palistine mostly expressed through refugee programs and a spineless condemnation of the atrocities and a recognition of two state authorities in the region. There’s also a much more robust court culture and a wider swath of people in the party who at least demonstrate a desire for a properly pluralistic, secular society.
It’s more useful to veiw the parties based on how they talk within their own parties because it’s not a presidential situation. There’s less unilateral moves to be made as a PM without party support is a lame horse. While I wish we would see wider endorsement of the NDP it’s not traditionally a popular party in the field and there’s way more swing between Libs and Conservatives.
The Liberals are trying their best to find a tasty middle ground for the “fiscal Conservative voter” to bite because strategy reasons. They put forward a candidate who is Albertan, Catholic, an outsider to politics with a lot of financial sector ties who pulls quotes from the era of the Quiet revolution and balancing government budgets for the discerning blue voter while the more leftist ones can chew on his ringing of alarm bells of wealth inequality, climate change and the lack of application of morals in the markets. He’s been largely silent on 2SLGBTQIA+ issues which while always a little unsettling the previous admin left on a very openly queer friendly stance so while again, not ideal, all that currently is needed at present is just not undoing what’s been done and supporting the stuff already in progress.
Is he everything we’ve dreamed? Not really. But it shows they are trying to build out a solid concensus candidate that a broad range of people can stomach.