Your understanding of the anti-vax movement is not helpful to you. You're right: they have beliefs that are dangerous for everyone else, and they mistrust the consensus. But you've assembled the wrong exemplar. It's fair to say that the anti-vax crowd mistrust scientists and pharmaceutical companies. But the nexus of belief is not around conspiracy, it's around what they see as a paucity of safety research. The anti-vax crowd will point to thalidomide and rofecoxib. They will argue that the vaccine schedule is greatly increased from what it was and they will argue that it's better to be safe than sorry. And they will do so thankful that you are vaccinating your kids because they do understand herd immunity and they do know that you are allowing them their (admittedly selfish) choices. It's also fair to say that the mainstream response to their skepticism has been an eruption of safety studies to go along with the outrage. For anyone who is actually using reason, it's a lot harder to be anti-vax now than it was ten years ago. This has had an effect on numbers, as has beefing up exemption procedures in California and Oregon. There are still anti-vax parents and you're right - if you're vehement at this point you're halfway to chemtrails. But the original flourishing came from ordinary citizens attempting to parse immunology studies while the media, always eager to push a controversy, gave a voice to a group of advocates who should not have had one. Skepticism gave rise to "belief" for some people but for many, once that controversy was answered they returned to the mainstream. "epistemic divide" is an inaccurate turn of phrase. They look at the same studies we do, they just look for holes instead of planks. They also don't think we're assholes. They think we're overly trusting of an industry that hasn't earned it. If you've encountered animosity, it's likely been triggered by dismissiveness and antagonism (and hey - I get it. Measles doesn't make a comeback without people imagining Wakefield as credible). Then of course there's Pakistan, where they have every reason to distrust the vaccinators. Mountain out of a molehill, I know. Sorry. It's just that my wife ran vaccine workshops in and around the southern nexus of the anti-vax movement for years and she's been beat up by both sides (the science side for daring to humor the antiscientific musings of those child murdering troglodytes; the hippie side for daring to suggest that vaccines are totally in line with homeopathic and naturopathic theory and that the only agents with any causation have been banished from vaccines long since). I guess I've been too close to the sides that are busy shouting past each other to let statements like yours slide by uncommented.
Hmmm. My counterargument would be that the "belief" in this instance is more nuanced than the example: the anti-vax crowd believes that there has been inadequate safety research in the delivery mechanism and scheduling of vaccines. That's a far cry from believing that vaccines cause autism - although the default straw man was "these idiots think vaccines cause autism" a better explanation of their position was "these idiots aren't convinced that vaccines as a cause of autism has been ruled out to their satisfaction and they'd rather be safe than sorry because measles is abstract while autism is concrete to them." So in this case, the "belief" is limited and hardly black and white. It certainly gives rise to all sorts of spurious justifications ("because Paul Offut is a greedy SOB" "because pharmaceutical companies are getting rich off of the varicella vaccine" "because when you're talking about the herd, it makes sense to let a few kids get autism but we're talking about MY CHILD"). However, that "belief" is, in my opinion, not an "epistemic divide." As far as "scientific consensus", that's easy to erase by arguing that the consensus isn't scientific. Public health wants the vaccines because one kid dead of smallpox vaccine beats the shit out of thousands of kids dead of smallpox. In this instance, "science" is thinking about humanity, not you. The medical "industry" wants vaccines because they make money off of it. In this instance, "science" is thinking about profits, not you. My greater point is that while "personal belief exemptions" are what anti-vax people use to get around vaccinating their kids, it isn't really about "belief." Not really. Not unless the "belief" is "government and wall street don't care about my baby" which is pretty easy to prove. Especially when the process involves insurance billing, heinous public health waiting lines and social workers browbeating you to stick your baby six times or else you're a horrible person worthy of scornful eyerolls. I agree that the author is anti-philosophical. I also agree that the assumption that reasonable people can disagree with each other. My greater point is that it doesn't take a great deal of unreasonability to doubt vaccines and that if you assume that unreasonability you'll never convince them. For most parents, it generally starts with a glance into the maw of modern American medicine followed by a little Googling. It sounds like we fundamentally agree on this, and we're debating a turn of phrase. At which point I will cheerfully point out that "epistemic" is not a word I'm comfortable using in a sentence so I'll be on my merry way.
That's an easy one. Ever had measles? Ever had mumps? Ever had rubella? What about whooping cough? You've certainly never had smallpox and if you're in the United States, you've definitely never been vaccinated for it. Polio? That's a thing that happened in the '50s, it's gone now. But the Grishams have that weird kid up the street. And you've certainly seen Rain Man. So "vaccines" provide an abstract benefit while exacting a concrete penalty: for one thing, your baby cries when they get one and it's a preventable injury. They look at you with deep distrust and shattered confidence. Why would you do this to them? For another thing, if you type "vaccine injury" into Google, it autocompletes with "compensation program" and leads you to vaccine court whereby you learn that apparently vaccine injury claims are so common that there's a federal process whereby Congress made vaccine manufacturers 100% free of liability while also issuing large payouts to those who a jury found harmed by vaccination. Vaccines are victims of their own success. People who will happily get vaccinated for jungle rot so they can have that vacation in Phuket are hesitant to have their kids poked. And the way we handle it in the United States is fucking retarded from every angle: you bring your kid in for a well child visit and they browbeat you about the fact that you're six days behind schedule to give your kid six shots and you are a Horrible Parent. Meanwhile the doctors themselves jet the fuck out of there because they don't want the kids associating them with pain and betrayal; some Nurse Ratched figure who doesn't smile comes in and stabs your kid like they're veal. And should you say "do we have to?" you'll get an eyeroll and an exasperated sigh, not any sort of patience, not any sort of reassurance, because fuck you, moron, they're the doctor and you're just the dumbass that doesn't believe in a "known public good" and clearly 100% the problem here. Vaccines are a problem in the United States because medicine in the United States assumes the attitude of "fuck you do what we tell you now pay a million times more than makes sense and you think your insurance covers it but fuck you twice you didn't say mother may I that'll be $215 for making your kid scream for half an hour so they won't catch a disease that hasn't been seen in the US since before little Ashley's grandparents were born." It's fair to say that asking "why should I vaccinate my kid" in the US is treated with all the patience and scientific rigor of "why shouldn't I abort my baby" was treated in Ireland in the '60s. If medicine weren't an infallible, adversarial monolith in the US, nobody would fight vaccines.
It is my considered opinion that a public good should not be a vector for profit maximization. Healthcare is inelastic; 100% of people will buy 100% of the healthcare they need, presuming they can afford 100% of it. It benefits society if 100% of its populace can get 100% of the healthcare they need. American society holds these ideas to be inviolate so we charge the free market with implementing them because capitalism. Unfortunately, capitalism does not reward loss leaders such as healthcare for the indigent. Thus, we end up with a patchwork of stopgaps to allow healthcare practitioners to make money despite nonprofitable patients. And the management thereof does not fall to government, it falls again to the market, that maximizes profitability against a fundamentally unprofitable business model. The result is an antagonistic process that rewards the tenacious and well-educated at the expense of the helpless and indigent. The people most likely to get healthcare, then, are the people less likely to chronically need it. The poor will take what they can get; it's the well-educated white women who are most likely to respond with "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" which is why you don't find Andrew Wakefield serving the poor, you'll find him on encounter cruises. And you'll find that people with rippin' healthcare don't really see it as a right because they got theirs while those with a $10k deductible sit at home wondering if they really need a tetanus booster from that rusty nail that went through their bicep on set. I've had the rippin' healthcare. And I've had the perforated bicep and $10k deductible. And unless you are actively practicing empathy you have a hard time wanting your taxes to go up so that random strangers don't sit at home wondering what tetanus feels like. And that is a tragedy of gigantic proportions that I firmly believe history will judge us for.
While doing otherwise would be socialist, and therefore like the Reds, and therefore BAD BAD BAD, because no one wants to be like the Reds.And the management thereof does not fall to government, it falls again to the market, that maximizes profitability against a fundamentally unprofitable business model.
What's the attitude towards Putin and Russia in the US currently? I hear a lot about Mueller investigating RUSSIA for the RUSSIA collusion and RUSSIAN agents, but what do people think of the two entities behind the name? EDIT: also, I'm so glad we could just have these conversations on Hubski.
I'll gladly give my two cents on this question, but bear in mind that I've been doing everything possible in the last little bit (particularly the last few months) to avoid most news. I realize this isn't good practice for a citizen, but all it does is make me angry and doesn't persuade me of anything I didn't already think. This is a brain dump, so may be a little disorganized. Anyway, for my part, it's similar the way I hear a lot of people from elsewhere talk about the U.S. There's a recognition that the government doesn't necessarily speak for or accurately represent the people as a whole. Besides which, a large, heterogenous nation like Russia (again just like the U.S.) isn't going to just have one unified feeling on much of anything. Plus both countries are guilty of much of the same stuff. I find Russia's foreign policy more than a little scary. I've seen it argued on more than one occasion that Putin's idea of success is just to fail more slowly. There's certainly a stereotype of Russians as (not undeservedly) gloomy and pessimistic, and that can certainly come through in some governmental actions, even if it's not been my experience of meeting actual Russians face-to-face. I also think there are just plain some different values there, which is to be expected (and I don't pretend to know Russian culture especially well). What little I do know makes it seem more traditional than the U.S., and that it does trend towards more group-oriented than individualistic like the U.S. This isn't a bad thing per se, just depends on how it plays out. Anyway, with foreign policy, Russia's coziness with some shady regimes only makes sense through this "failing more slowly" narrative, especially in the case of North Korea and Iran. I also see maybe a little bit of an inferiority complex in the Russian leadership. The USSR was one of the two superpowers, although there's some question about whether that was actually true. Just as no one on the outside is truly sure of what kind of shape the Chinese ecnonomy is really in, something as centralized as the USSR could cook the books pretty easily (and certainly had more than a few incentives to do so). Now, though, some of the cracks are showing: the few signs of poor maintenance in the military that have made the news (e.g. the Kursk and the need recently to send the россиский флот's only nucelar aircraft carrier back from the Mediterranean), and the tough time the Army had in Chechnya. This is what I see as leading to some of the uglier social issues too, like the crackdown on homosexuality. I have no reason to think Russians are innately more homophobic than the U.S. is, but minorities of whatever type are a good distraction from the leadership fucking up the place. (I don't know if the скинхеды are still as big of a problem as they were, but I'd put that in a similar category.) Again this parallels what we're seeing in the U.S.; Republicans would gladly do the things Putin is doing on the social front if they thought they could get away with it. I remember an interesting conversation I was part of back in 2004 or so with Юрий Шевчук (founder of ДДТ). He was definitely anti-Soviet and anti-authoritarian in general (I remember he was in Kiev when the anti-Yuroshenko protests were happening). Aside from a pretty fascinating story about playing a show in a stadium in Grozny during the ceasefire that was attended by thousands of soldiers from both sides, his perspective on the state of Russia at that time was that the time spent in such a tightly-controlled system meant that suddenly people had much more freedom but didn't know what to do with it. In other words, there may not have been the cultural support for a more democratic setup. I think this is an underappreciated aspect of what's required for a representative system, and is why Trump is so dangerous. The few Russians I actually met, mainly during college, were some of the warmest and kindest people I've ever known. I still miss terribly one Moscovite, Рамил, whom I used to hang out with during his semester at my school. I loved how much more open the Russians I've known tended to be; sometimes it could almost seem blunt to American sensibilities, but I liked their willingness to both express emotions more readily and to simply cut to the chase and not dance around. And as is common with people from parts of the world that have had a rougher time of it, they tended to have this innate sense of joy at life just in general (my theory being that if the outside world sucks, you have to find that sense of happiness somewhere inside). I also had a really cool opportunity (that I want to punch my younger self for not taking further advantage of) to meet some much older Russians at a local retirment home. There were even a couple guys there who had been in WW2, and they all enjoyed talking to us even with our pitiful Russian. There was also one grandmother I was talking to who introduced me to her frightfully attractive granddaughter...who turned out to be like 14 ><. Turning back to the broader question about the attitude towards Russia generally, I think it's less a case of outright anger or hostitlity towards Russia and more just a recognition that an outside group (in this case a country) who doesn't necessarily have our best interests at heart tried to fuck around with our election. That it's Russia doubtless still carries some baggage from the Cold War, but to an extent I think most of us recognize that it's the kind of crappy thing that countries tend to do to each other (and God knows we've fucked around in others' elections often enough over the years). Even more than this, though, it's become an internal political thing: it's more about a way to discredit (and hopefully get rid of) Trump than it is some broader existential threat. I haven't seen any particular calls for retaliation or anything like that. I actually think this means that the extent to which Russia actually influenced our election is being overblown, since again it's a line of attack on Trump. We have no shortage of those, but this is the one that might have some legs (although if anything does him in, it'll be the cover-up rather than any actual collusion IMO). So broadly speaking, I'd say we see Russia as a rival but not an enemy. We condemn some things (the gay rights issue, the invasion of the Crimea, etc.), but no one is burning Russian flags or anything. We definitely see Putin as a corrupt autocrat, but the world is hardly short on those.
Thanks a lot for the write-up - and for the stories. I really like hearing those! You gotta tell your Russian stories on Hubski sometime. How would you describe that? Is it that Putin sees Russia as ultimately a failure and tries to suck it dry (along with the other oligarchs) before it's done? Hell yeah there is. I think this is why there's so many national(ist) holidays right now: the May 9th (the V-Day, I believe it's called?), the Day of National Unity (which is November the 4th, I believe), something around the 1st of June... There's also a lot of military "cultural dances": military parade is one thing, but there are military parks for children, there's the Paratroopers Day (August the 2nd, when you're advised to stay away from the ВДВ places of celebration, like public parks, 'cause drunk paratroopers are a damn menace, apparently), there's the general atmosphere of "military service = good", which I think is just Stockholm syndrome for conscription. There's a lot of brouhaha about national strength that just makes me wonder: how unconfident do these people need to be to order social engineering of their country's cultural layer just so that people would believe in something? Haven't heard of them lately, so I guess it cooled down. And speaking of homosexuality... National culture dictates a lot of behaviors of its people, so while I don't think people are innately homophobic to any degree, there's a lot of anti-homosexual propaganda going on right now. I believe it's tied to the "national strength" point, 'cause I've seen it explained that way: men are afraid of looking unmanly, and gay men are as "unmanly" as they come, being (in the minds of the 'phobes) effectively women, so men boister and macho to be seen as brutes and jocks. Loud cars, sports, military... I believe it's all tied into that sense of hypermasculine might that opposes the non-masculine emotional sensitivity. What about Putin? What's the attitude towards the man himself and/or as the leader of Russia? I've seen it argued on more than one occasion that Putin's idea of success is just to fail more slowly.
I also see maybe a little bit of an inferiority complex in the Russian leadership.
(I don't know if the скинхеды are still as big of a problem as they were, but I'd put that in a similar category.)
Your descriptions make a lot of sense, and I'm glad to see I wasn't wildly off base. Maybe, although I think it's more a perspective that says "there are no good options, so rather than trying to find the option that helps us the most, I'm going to find the one that hurts us the least." Speaking of machoness and homosexuality, I actually wrote a brief paper in college (that I'm sure is lost to the mists of time) about how HIV/AIDS was getting really bad over there. As I recall, it was a combination of things: Russia being a transit point between East Asia and Western Europe, and IV drug use. But supposedly (and you may be able to confirm this), part of the reason it was spreading so much was that it was still seen as a "gay" disease, and so people just wouldn't deal with it. Random side question: is голубой still used as a slang (and not very nice, as I understand it) word for gay people? Fun random fact related to my random side question: I cannot confirm this is true, but when I took Mandarin in college, we were taught that the Mandarin word for comrade, 同志 (tóngzhì), is used as a derrogatory word for homosexuals in Taiwan. Not especially favorable. I would say that he's seen as callous, corrupt, and amoral.How would you describe that? Is it that Putin sees Russia as ultimately a failure and tries to suck it dry (along with the other oligarchs) before it's done?
What about Putin? What's the attitude towards the man himself and/or as the leader of Russia?
I was never aware of the size of the HIV/AIDS infection in Russia. I remember TV commercials, greyscale and quietly dramatic, warning against getting infected. There were never stats presented, nor was there ever a conversation - in school, with parents or among peers. Dirty needles was a problem when I was growing up. I've never witnessed people using, but I'd seen a lot of empty syringes around. I could find one a day just by going to school and back, which took five minutes. My mother would always caution me against picking them up. It never connected with HIV/AIDS in my head, but I reckon now they had something to do with each other. Can't confirm or deny it, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone in Russia say that. The main HIV/AIDS conversation was around heterosexual relationships. The commercials would always portray young men and women; never two men or two women. Homosexuality is not even a conversation in the mainstream, mostly because it's led by bullheaded, narrow-minded old wheezers whose views would be welcome in the Republican Party of the US. Young men still stay away from the subject because of the same macho bullshit, but it's hereditary rather than self-assumed. Young women? I'm not sure they'd mind it so much. At least gay men make for decent male friends - something young women nowadays lack dramatically. It's been a while since I've heard the term, but that's probably because I don't hang out with bigots. If you say it today, people will understand you.about how HIV/AIDS was getting really bad over there.
But supposedly (and you may be able to confirm this), part of the reason it was spreading so much was that it was still seen as a "gay" disease, and so people just wouldn't deal with it.
is голубой still used as a slang (and not very nice, as I understand it) word for gay people?
I remember at the time, the stats on infection rates were getting pretty bad. Not like sub-Saharan Africa bad, but still bad. Sadly, a quick search does not suggest things have gotten any better. This article from 2015 mostly focuses on how the government is fucking the dog on the issue: From here (autoplay video warning), we have this: Russian government statistics show that more than half of new infections are transmitted through intravenous drug use. And the rate of infection is rising. Finally, this one is local (although I know nothing about the publication). Still, if I'm reading the headline correctly, it says that Russia had more (new?) HIV infections than the rest of Europe combined. Sadly all these articles pretty much suggest the same thing: a combination of conservative policies (that gut spending, refuse to allow sex ed, and basically pretend the problem doesn't exist) and IV drug use."Look at what they are currently doing with their budget. Will we get more signs on the metro telling us HIV doesn't occur in monogamous relationships?" Malyshev said, referring to a current public information campaign on the Moscow subway. The signs read: "Love and loyalty to your partner is your protection from AIDS" and "HIV isn't transferred through friendship."
According to the United Nations' UNAIDS program, Russia had the third-highest number of new HIV infections globally in 2015, behind South Africa and Nigeria.
That's Russia's way of dealing with any serious problem. My hope is that, once the USSR generation dies off, the younger people would be more willing to have a conversation about sex, sexuality and related issues. Right now, sex ed is maybe a thing of two private schools. HIV? "Just don't do it". Those are terrifying stats, to be frank. "behind South Africa and Nigeria" - fuck! P.S. Kommersant is, to my knowledge, a respectable newspaper, but I'm no expert.and basically pretend the problem doesn't exist
We have no small amount of that here, as you've no doubt seen. I think it's simply human nature: we're hard-wired to ignore contrary evidence, especially when it's something that our egos get wrapped up in (such as group affiliation).