‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates
theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml Posts 12Comments 348Joined 2 yr. ago
theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml
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I don't really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don't think it's useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn't really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.
Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we've reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.
All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They've already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there's a whole political context that is probably worth considering.
I think that with these new kinds of stories, this sort of thing is super obvious because we haven't gotten used to it and because they haven't developed the more subtle vocabulary like officer involved shooting or how israelis are killed but Palestinians just die or how it's always the strikers threatening the economy and never the bosses or unfair working conditions.
I don't think anyone does this on purpose, mind you, but it's the system evolving to suit it's needs, as Chomsky pointed out.
My favorites, though it's really hard to choose:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-farming-in-the-1600s/
If you don't already know about it, I think you'll like low tech magazine. It's basically an entire website saying what you just said for over ten years now.
From Graeber's The Dawn of Everything:
For instance, if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the ‘tribal’ stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety. But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker’s conclusions.
Over the last several centuries, there have been numerous occasions when individuals found themselves in a position to make precisely this choice – and they almost never go the way Pinker would have predicted. Some have left us clear, rational explanations for why they made the choices they did.
Graeber goes on to give a couple of these accounts. They tend to mention a loneliness associated with "western civilization," as well as a feeling that I think lines up very well with what Marx described as alienation.
Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.
Later in the book, and I apologize that I can't find the reference right now, he comes back to this topic for a little bit, and talks about the depths of relationships that these people describe, and how their relationships in the "civilized" world are more shallow and less satisfying. Deep human relationships are the opposite of fake, so I think here we have a point in favor of "yes."
Add to that that the concept of "privacy" as we know it is relatively new. It's been 10+ years since I read a book about this, the title of which I can't even remember, but it argued that the expectation of domestic privacy, even from one's own family, is a phenomenon from the last few hundred years, especially outside the elite. People lived far, far more communally, with the expectation that they just were in each other's business more. I'd argue that it's a lot harder to be fake if you can't hide who you really are.
Between those two things, I think it's reasonable to argue that yes, society has gotten more fake.
Yay democratic planning!
Me:
Markets are somehow still seen as fundamentally sound, while every planning idea is asked to answer for every previous planning idea, no matter how new it is or how much technology has changed.
You:
Or do you really want to collectivize farms like Stalin and Mao did?
That's the thing I said!
But to answer your question: No, I do not. I'm interested in learning from the past while embracing new technologies. I'm also interested in democratic planning, not bureaucratic central planning, as Stafford Beer called Soviet style planning. I'm particularly interested in the approach of Allende's government, and project Cybersyn, which looked very promising until an American supported military coup ousted him.
edit to add:
Your criticism is aimed at insufficient market regulation.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it's an unfalsifiable claim. Markets are believed to "work," but only if they're regulated right, which apparently they aren't now and rarely have been in all of history. This idea of markets is something Milton Friedman popularized (this entire fee.org write-up is very Friedman). If you believe markets work with the right kind of regulation as axiomatically true, then it's impossible to disprove that, because you can always blame the wrong kind of regulations. It's very unscientific, something Friedman himself was famously sensitive about.
I'd argue that it's markets that have proven unworkable. Markets have failed as catastrophically as possible. They are destroying the earth, and every day that they continue doing so is another day that they show how untenable they are.
Just because previous attempts to plan have failed doesn't mean that the concept of planning itself is impossible. Virtually every rich country right now is actively "trying" to make markets work in the face of a climate crisis, and it has proven impossible, yet markets are somehow still seen as fundamentally sound, while every planning idea is asked to answer for every previous planning idea, no matter how new it is or how much technology has changed.
We have a lot to learn about planning, especially now that we have computers, but in order to have that conversation, it's important for us to understand what a catastrophic failure the market really is.
edit to add: Markets are also inherently undemocratic. So long as we continue to vote with our dollars on what our economy does, the rich and their corporations will always outvote us. The rich will always have corporate lawyers but normal people can't have child care, for example.
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If you're a US citizen, consider joining the DSA. I'm a long-time member. I think it's safe to say the DSA has, historically, been a disorganized parody of a leftist organization (as much as I love and respect many of the people in it that I've worked with), but things are changing. There's an effort with momentum to turn it into a functioning political party, and not a bullshit green party style party which runs a candidate every four years while being functionally indistinguishable from a grift, but to put in the real work from the ground up to make a party that cares about winning elections and materially making our lives better.
The time to do this was 20 years ago, but we can't keep delaying it. It's now fully unconscionable to throw up our hands after some halfhearted discussions about FPTP and game theory every four years while actively watching our world deteriorate. There are other ways, but they don't start at the ballot box, and they all involve organizing. This is true even if your politics and mine are different. If you care about our death machine funding a genocide, get involved with something, even if it's the democratic party. It's fucking boring. It feels like a larp. It's a tedious ways to spend your Thursday nights after work. I get all that, but we need people who care about human life involved, even if our politics aren't perfectly aligned, because that's how you make broad, functioning, powerful coalitions that get shit done.
Not if you're too busy between your two jobs manually training the LLM models and supervising the supposedly autonomous cars to make rent.
Oh huh TIL. I also looked it up, and it seems like a real doozy of a word. I had no idea. Looks some some dictionaries say that the two words are interchangeable, whereas others distinguish between them, and in the latter case, I used the wrong one. Language is fun!
Yeah I agree. That's why I said it was their ostensive goal. Their actual goal has only ever been profit.
At some point in the last decade, the ostensive ostensible goal of automation evolved from savings us from unwanted labor to keeping us from ever doing anything.
The goal of every company is to do shenanigans at the top while profiting off an underclass of laborers at the bottom. The more shenanigans they can do to squeeze the underclass harder, the better. Uber et al are genuine innovators in automating labor law violations to maximize that squeeze. Looks like they're expanding from chauffeurs to every other kind of household servant. Awesome. This will be very cool and fine.
Our entire news ecosystem is putrid trash. Even our most prestigious and respected outlets are pumping out a constant stream of genocide apologia right now. Manufacturing Consent is decades old and should've ended the New York Times, and that was before they cheerlead our war into Iraq.
Allowing advertising to decide which content is allowed and which isn't won't do anything but punish sites that deviate from mainstream orthodoxy and reward bland corporate friendly bullshit. Here's what that Internet looks like.
Yup. It's a technological antisolution.
When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? [...] Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated?
This line of questioning is really important, and it's why I think there's no addressing our devastation of the environment without digging deep into the assumptions of our society.
Society, as we understand it today, requires all of us going to work and school every day, no matter the weather, otherwise it doesn't work. We can't live like that. It just doesn't work. We exist in the world, and our attempts to pretend like we are somehow apart or above it, that our daily lives shouldn't be impacted by it, are destructive. We just can't be in such a hurry all the time.
So yes, when the weather is bad, we need to slow down, focusing our efforts on our highest priority infrastructure, like ambulances, with everyone else taking a beat, or even pitching in. To do that, we need to rethink our society, because as things stand now, I agree with you, that's not really possible.
This is why I think degrowth and socialism are the only human way through the climate crisis. Capitalism is a death cult of infinite growth that forces each of us to contribute to our own destruction every day because we have to get to work to live every single day.
I seriously don't understand how everyone is so confused about this. It's actually not cool at all to continuously drop bombs on densely inhabited areas while also denying them water, food, medicine, fuel and so on. Any further analysis or complexity has to build on top of that fucking obvious reality, not ignore it.
Parahprasing greatly here, but in her recent book, Naomi Klein pointed out that most Americans are pilled as fuck on neoliberalism, and because the pandemic is a naturally occurring and obvious contradiction to its fundamental tenets (individualism, meritocracy, competiton, etc.), the only way to square that circle was to go insane.
I find that framework very useful. These so called activists are pilled as hell on this fundamentally individualist concept of freedom that inundates us Americans from birth. It's an almost entirely empty conception of freedom. Basically, we can say whatever we want while owning guns and generally being selfish. No one is entitled to be free of childhood disease though. That's not freedom because it encroaches on others being selfish. If you genuinely believe in individual liberty above all, as Americans are taught from birth, then childhood vaccinations are wrong.
Unfortunately it's a really fucking stupid way to run a society.