Well, the argument goes something like: I'd euthanize my kids and spend the rest of my waking life in one of your jails, dying childless, rather than let them live in your world, raised by you, and not me.
If I'm in your jail, I'd rather dispell all illusions about it, and not live a life pretending my children are more than your playthings. Furthermore I wouldn't even want kids, if they'll be raised by you. They're better of dead or aborted.
Let's be clear, I'm playing devil's advocate, and I don't really think or believe this myself, but this is the root of the argument.
My reason for surfacing the foundation of the premise for such behavior, is because I think different strategies are needed to confront emerging biological hazards of the future.
It's not going to be enough to just ask people to jump on a band wagon, and it's barking up the wrong tree, to remove an individual's choice from the equation. People have to want to live, and biological epidemics have to be attacked with a variety of strategies.
Vaccinations are good, and so are antibiotics, but they won't save us in all cases, and they won't save all of us even when they do work.
Other brute force methods like area denial take over, when the sophisticated medical tactics fail. It's important to look ahead, and recognize that in scenarios where vaccines and antibiotics don't work, to consider the situations that emerge even when other plans fail.
Basically, the oldest option on the table is quarantine. It's low tech and appeals to biblical sensibilities. Some people are willing to try it instead. The argument is going to go that way. Strategies for dealing with people who think like that are going to have to chart a different course.
My actual position is that life sciences are going to radically change in the next decade or so, anyway. Why bother haranguing people about vaccinations, when five years from now, biological agents might very well be a solved problem, rendering vaccinations as obsolete as brute force quarantines?
You're using a lot of internet argument buzz words, but none of them invalidate my position.
More to the point: people get to make choices. That's what being a person means.
Either you let people choose, or you put them on a feedlot, admit that this is a factory farm, and openly ply them with antibiotics and horomones, so you can milk them longer, before putting the bolt gun to their head and serving their remains at McDonald's.
If my quality of life is low, even while otherwise healthy, what do I care about the well-being of the herd?
If I'm held down, and made to work two or more low-paying jobs, and still can't escape poverty, you're going to have to hold me down even harder, and force me to take care of myself.
If I'm unhappy in life, I'm not going to see a doctor to keep that life going. Does this make sense yet?
It's great to say "but what about the children" and all, but immunized individuals really don't need to involve themselves in the lives of those choosing to avoid medical treatment.
By definition, the immune won't be harmed by my choice to not immunize myself. If I get sick, and you are immune, my choice to take risks won't harm you.
If you're worried about those other than yourself, who might be harmed by my hypothetical decision to risk illness and injury, your advice should be phrased to them as an audience.
Meanwhile, the waters are still muddier. There are a wide array of other terrible personal choices that are defended maximally, despite conceptual harm being part of the package. The choice to consult a doctor, or not, the choice to not be resuscitated, to not seek treatment for terminal diseases, to not suffer treatment when quality of life is not rewarding.
All of these choices matter as much as choosing to have a child at all. Ultimately, I think some children would be better off as orphans in foster care, but I'm not about to try and make that happen. I think it's more about letting nature take its course.
The immune live. The others die. Darwin's theory prevails.
I'm not against medical intervention. I think vaccinations are a good thing.
I'm against government mandated familial interventions.
I think there are 1,000 other more important things the government could be doing to improve people's lives. Alarmist, breathless hand-wringing about personal medical choices or parental responsibilities isn't the only way to approach pandemics or public health issues.
The last thing we should be doing is using government resources to apply retaliation or punishment. There are plenty of reasons to inflict harm, take money away from people, and generally stifle the hell out of people with laws, and all of them get over used, and just simply spread misery. This gives people more reasons to rationalize and passive-aggressively resist anything with a government's fingerprints on it.
Meanwhile, you said it yourself: those who do get vaccinated have nothing to fear. They'll live lives untouched by disease, so it's none of their business what happens to the rest. For the vaccinated, this is already a non-problem by default.
Well, today I learned. I feel like the use of specialized jargon doesn't help communicate the experience or idea the artist would probably like to convey, by including those kinds of details in the captions. The definition for the term needs to be provided as a footnote, each time it gets used under that context, since non-experts are among the audience.
You have to figure that chimpanzees are psychologically advanced enough that it's really the totality of an experience in a lab cage that ruins them. Getting shot with tranquilizer darts is more or less the icing on the cake, adding insult to injury.
I'd suspect that after, on or around knockdown #20, the maximum amount of trust has been eroded, and a chimpanzee is pretty much done with being around people, but especially the ones that dart them.
Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011, before the 2014 Ballmer/Nadella change-over. Also, Minecraft isn't exactly a start-up, but more of a celebrity among gaming projects, ranking closer to an endorsement/sponsorship deal.
Some of them look a little cagey or intimidating, but a few of them give off a really friendly, reliable persona like they'd be your best friend in a heartbeat.
Toddy, for example, looks like a really easy-going, reasonable lady:
...kind of a horrible life story, though, by human standards.
It'd be really interesting to interact with them, and see how far away the personality is from the portrait's impression, when interacting with them in real life.
It's hard not to feel guided by an instinct to judge a book by it's cover, when looking at those faces.
Meanwhile, based on the descriptions with each picture, most of them are horribly depressed and traumatized by experiments or isolation. I can't really conceptualize what a couple of hundred "knockdown" experiments [0] with "punch liver biopsies" might be like.
I dunno, can we do something so that they just "grow up normal"? Let's make them all the same. How might we go about stamping out differences among humans?
Ways that don't involve a government registry, ways that don't involve police demanding papers, ways that don't involve mandatory behavior modification with negative reinforcement.
My instinct is to not resort to a knee-jerk presumptive desire to punish, because I feel I don't have enough dominion over my peers. I'm not interested in throwing more people in jail. I'm not interested in more traffic tickets. I'm not interested in putting my kids in another database.
Sorry, track your mandatory compulsory military draft in some other place. Raise your own kids far away from mine, thanks.
If I'm in your jail, I'd rather dispell all illusions about it, and not live a life pretending my children are more than your playthings. Furthermore I wouldn't even want kids, if they'll be raised by you. They're better of dead or aborted.
Let's be clear, I'm playing devil's advocate, and I don't really think or believe this myself, but this is the root of the argument.
My reason for surfacing the foundation of the premise for such behavior, is because I think different strategies are needed to confront emerging biological hazards of the future.
It's not going to be enough to just ask people to jump on a band wagon, and it's barking up the wrong tree, to remove an individual's choice from the equation. People have to want to live, and biological epidemics have to be attacked with a variety of strategies.
Vaccinations are good, and so are antibiotics, but they won't save us in all cases, and they won't save all of us even when they do work.
Other brute force methods like area denial take over, when the sophisticated medical tactics fail. It's important to look ahead, and recognize that in scenarios where vaccines and antibiotics don't work, to consider the situations that emerge even when other plans fail.
Basically, the oldest option on the table is quarantine. It's low tech and appeals to biblical sensibilities. Some people are willing to try it instead. The argument is going to go that way. Strategies for dealing with people who think like that are going to have to chart a different course.
My actual position is that life sciences are going to radically change in the next decade or so, anyway. Why bother haranguing people about vaccinations, when five years from now, biological agents might very well be a solved problem, rendering vaccinations as obsolete as brute force quarantines?