Bullying, by definition, requires that the oppressor is in a position of power over their victim and punching down. As these people have it in their power to prevent the spread of a painful and deadly disease but chose to ignore their responsibility to the rest of society to do so, we are challenging their mindset and defending ourselves (and others) from their selfishness. Belittling and mocking them isn’t bullying them, it’s insulting them. If we were bullies we’d browbeat and force them to take vax while delivering a swirly ‘cus they’re fucking dorks.
Belittling and mocking them isn’t bullying them, it’s insulting them.
I get where you’re coming from. The question is, do you want to help anti-vaxxers change, and stop being anti-vaxxers, or do you just want to feel superior to them?
If you want them to change, I really encourage you to think yourself about times in your own life where someone else successfully encouraged you to change their mind. Did they do so by mocking and belittling you, or did they do it with kindness and by helping you understand your mistakes in a way that didn’t make you feel rejected?
do you want to help anti-vaxxers change, and stop being anti-vaxxers, or do you just want to feel superior to them?
Depends on the person and the situation. This isn’t some hypothetical, far reaching discussion about why they should recycle to prevent future global warming. Look at the picture attached to the post. There’s a kid suffering from measles because some adult in their life wouldn’t use the reality of science and reason and put that kid in the position they’re in. If adults with all those tools and learning want to expose themselves to preventable consequences; fine. That’s your choice, and while I think you’re an idiot, by all means, ignore history, logic, and reality and suffer your consequences. Die. I’m not going to save you in the face of all that.
Did they do so by mocking and belittling you, or did they do it with kindness and by helping you understand your mistakes in a way that didn’t make you feel rejected?
Both. I’m far from perfect or ideal. I’ve done things that were selfish and had both the rejection of strangers and the support of individuals who same some kernel of personal humanity in spite of my behavior and backed the idea I could change even when it seemed like I couldn’t, had hurt others, and was otherwise not a benefit to society. But I also used that opportunity to self-reflect and try, sometimes unsuccessfully, to grow and change. I will always fight to give people who have a spark of that the opportunity and time to change. There’s people covered in swastika tattoos who’ve realized their error and try to work beyond the people they’ve been. There’s murderers and rapists who grew up in environments of victimization and passed that on once they became adults because it’s the only lesson they got about how one treats others. My beef isn’t with the victims of bad lessons who are struggling but willing to learn from the consequences of their actions. It’s with the ones that continue to use their past as an excuse to justify their current behavior, and especially those who are aware of reality but don’t care because they have the power and ability to dodge the consequences of what they’re doing but have no concern if it affects another.
Right, this is what I’m getting at. Bullying people and treating them like shit will not help them self-reflect and change. To achieve that, we need to extend that support you mentioned, we need to somehow see the kernel of personal humanity within them.
Like you said, this isn’t a problem where the consequences are confined to individuals, adults acting poorly is causing innocent children to suffer and die, so we need to focus on solutions. This isn’t like these people believe in Flat Earth, if we just sit around mocking and belittling these people, more innocents will die at faster rates.
We need to collectively swallow our (totally justified) anger and find some kind of a way to understand the root reason of why people are anti-vaxx, and help them resolve whatever broken logic or unresolved emotional issues is standing in the way of them doing the right thing.
This isn’t like these people believe in Flat Earth,
My local anti-vaxxing, Straight Pride Festival hosting, “free drinks at my bar if you can prove you turned someone in to ICE”, white nationalist just tried to primary our Republican governor, who himself is helluva bigot, and while he lost he still got 30% of the vote. He’s also a flat earther who hosts round tables for fellow believers at his bar. There’s a substantial overlap in the illogical and irrational belief community.
Now, I don’t think he personally is a flat earther. Despite being repugnant, he’s an intelligent and charismatic person, smart enough to recognize gullibility and use it to gather strength of numbers. For a person like that to change they’d have to be willing to abandon the power they hold. It’s the same problem with podcasters, celebrities, snake oil salesmen, and talking heads that push these ideas. Plenty of them aren’t true believers, it’s a means to profit and clout. There comes a point where you have to stop looking at people as victims of their own ignorance and instead intentionally harmful for their own gain at the expense of others.
There’s also the problem of religious beliefs. We allow people a lot of leeway in spirituality because humans do seem to have a need to feel connected to something “greater”. When someone does that in a manner where their belief guides them but has respect for the rights and boundaries of others, fine. When spirituality becomes religion it often ends up becoming another tool of oppression and unaccountability because people begin demanding their to practice their beliefs regardless of how it’s affecting others. Since god is made up, you can put any words you’d like in god’s mouth to justify your behavior, and worst case you disregard the people you love around because “only god can judge me”.
The US created a problematic loophole with its hands off approach to religious beliefs. If people used their liberty to pursue beliefs that nurtured their personal spirituality and self actualization it’d be great. Instead it’s become a breeding ground for hucksters to develop their own cults of “this is what the ancient book really meant”, or sometimes they just write a brand new book. And we do at times come together to quash behaviors of the religious even at the expense of an individual’s right to act on their supposed god endorsed beliefs because that practice violates the right of another. Joe Smith informed people god was chill with dudes marrying multiple teenagers, but that one’s gotten quashed (for the most part, but some sects still do it, they just have to live removed from society). We’re still fighting to quash child marriage loopholes and male genital mutilation. I don’t care if your god impregnated a teenager with your Savior, your prophet married a child, or your god commanded you to cut of the end of a kid’s penis as a sign of devotion. It’s gross. They’re gross and people are gross for abiding it.
Arguments of logic and reason don’t work on people whose core belief is based on the existence of an invisible, all powerful, universal puppet master. It results in people who do not take accountability for why they must be accountable for their actions in the here and now, judged for their behavior by fellow humans instead of some future where god decides. It also creates people who are willfully ignorant of cause and effect, prevention and accident. I’m content to let adults dance around in a church with a handful of rattlesnakes. I could tell you why that’s a bad idea, but if an adult wants to lose an arm or their life engaging in that, welp. Their life to lose. Spreading disease or denying a child access to healthcare because they’re praying over them instead; not their life to lose.
help them resolve whatever broken logic or unresolved emotional issues is standing in the way of them doing the right thing.
Like an addict, who continues to destroy themselves and the lives of those in their circle/community with their addiction, repairing broken logic and unresolved emotional issues can’t be helped by external forces until they make the decision to change for themselves and then accept the help. Otherwise they cycle repeatedly through the consequences of losing their privilege of being a part of society, turn themselves into pariahs as the community shuns them to avoid the collateral damage of their behavior, or kills themselves through their own choices. We don’t have to tolerate the fallout of selfishness while they “work on it”. At what point do we look at the pox ridden, scarred for life, maybe dead body of a child then turn to the adult that helped cause that and say “nah, fuck you, your right to chose is revoked”.
This isn’t the dark ages, people aren’t unaware of the sources of disease. We’ve had a good thousand years to figure out where they come from and our literacy rate, declining as it is, is sufficient that we can demand a baseline understanding of cause and effect out of adults. If they want to put up a fight, fine. I’ll fight them over it. If bullying them to the point their only choice is to live cut-off from society so they can’t spread their disease and die alone, unvaxxed but self-satisfied they clung to their belief to the miserable, painful end, so be it.
That’s a lot of words to come around to the conclusion that you believe we should force people to undergo unwanted medical procedures for “the greater good”. I’m sorry, but that idea is even more harmful than anti-vaxxers. This exact same sentiment was used to justify unbelievable atrocities in the past, such as sterilizing minority groups and things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
I agree with you that people need to want to change to change, but bullying and belittling them is counterproductive to encouraging people to want to change.
The fact is that you just want to feel justified in treating people badly, because you (totally justifiably) feel that those people are doing bad things. You need to recognize that you need to choose between working towards solving the problem, or just making yourself feel better by shitting on them.
Societal shame and alienation may have worked in a pre-Internet world, but it works no longer. No matter how depraved, destructive, or horrible someone’s behavior is, there will be a community on the Internet who supports and encourages it. The ONLY WAY to reach those people, to keep them from falling deeper down rabbit holes, is through compassion.
I’m not implying forced vaccinations from the government, I’m suggesting that when your neighbor is a threat to the most vulnerable members of your community, you, yes, you the person I’m talking to, unite with your likeminded neighbors and do everything in your power to isolate, ostracize, and exclude that person from society until their only choice becomes live in total isolation or complies. Our government is in the hands of the anti-vax enablers, they’re not going to do anything about it. It’s your responsibility to identify the threats to children, the elderly, and the most vulnerable in your community and neutralize them.
They don’t even need to change their minds about it, just like a bigot is free to be a bigot in the privacy of their own home. You can’t force a white supremecist to abandon their mindset because you cannot “make” someone believe what they don’t want to believe. You can only make espousing their beliefs and acting upon them in public a costly endeavor.
Look at what’s happening in Africa with the Ebola outbreak. The demand for access to dangerous corpses due to religious beliefs is fueling the destruction of the facilities trying to protect the public and will result in the disease continuing to spread. Measles and Covid are bad, Ebola is pretty much just death waiting to happen. Would you tolerate “right to deny” and demand we coddle deniers with patience and compassion if they were willfully exposing society to some of our most lethal diseases? If yes, well, there’s nothing left to discuss. If not, why do you demand we tolerate them scarring children for life with something that could have been prevented.
We do already hold people accountable for knowingly spreading disease. If someone knows they’re HIV positive and continues to spread it without informing their partner of the risk, they are penalized for it. HIV isn’t even the death sentence it was 30yrs ago, but it is a lifelong medical burden that can affect quality of life and life expectancy. Why do we allow others to spread diseases that cause suffering, scar, cause long term health issues, and sometimes kill? The responsibility for protecting your community is on you, not the government.
Okay, so your options there are either to force them to have vaccinations, which would be a violation of their human rights, or to change their minds so that they voluntarily get vaccinations.
Remember, these people are generally just acting out of fear and ignorance. Treating them poorly won’t change their behaviour, it’ll only alienate them further from the rest of society.
Bullying people is a completely ineffective means of changing behaviour. It’s actually likely to make them dig their heels in further and become even more entrenched in their views just out of pure opposition to their perceived enemies.
Bullying, by definition, requires that the oppressor is in a position of power over their victim and punching down. As these people have it in their power to prevent the spread of a painful and deadly disease but chose to ignore their responsibility to the rest of society to do so, we are challenging their mindset and defending ourselves (and others) from their selfishness. Belittling and mocking them isn’t bullying them, it’s insulting them. If we were bullies we’d browbeat and force them to take vax while delivering a swirly ‘cus they’re fucking dorks.
I get where you’re coming from. The question is, do you want to help anti-vaxxers change, and stop being anti-vaxxers, or do you just want to feel superior to them?
If you want them to change, I really encourage you to think yourself about times in your own life where someone else successfully encouraged you to change their mind. Did they do so by mocking and belittling you, or did they do it with kindness and by helping you understand your mistakes in a way that didn’t make you feel rejected?
Depends on the person and the situation. This isn’t some hypothetical, far reaching discussion about why they should recycle to prevent future global warming. Look at the picture attached to the post. There’s a kid suffering from measles because some adult in their life wouldn’t use the reality of science and reason and put that kid in the position they’re in. If adults with all those tools and learning want to expose themselves to preventable consequences; fine. That’s your choice, and while I think you’re an idiot, by all means, ignore history, logic, and reality and suffer your consequences. Die. I’m not going to save you in the face of all that.
Both. I’m far from perfect or ideal. I’ve done things that were selfish and had both the rejection of strangers and the support of individuals who same some kernel of personal humanity in spite of my behavior and backed the idea I could change even when it seemed like I couldn’t, had hurt others, and was otherwise not a benefit to society. But I also used that opportunity to self-reflect and try, sometimes unsuccessfully, to grow and change. I will always fight to give people who have a spark of that the opportunity and time to change. There’s people covered in swastika tattoos who’ve realized their error and try to work beyond the people they’ve been. There’s murderers and rapists who grew up in environments of victimization and passed that on once they became adults because it’s the only lesson they got about how one treats others. My beef isn’t with the victims of bad lessons who are struggling but willing to learn from the consequences of their actions. It’s with the ones that continue to use their past as an excuse to justify their current behavior, and especially those who are aware of reality but don’t care because they have the power and ability to dodge the consequences of what they’re doing but have no concern if it affects another.
Right, this is what I’m getting at. Bullying people and treating them like shit will not help them self-reflect and change. To achieve that, we need to extend that support you mentioned, we need to somehow see the kernel of personal humanity within them.
Like you said, this isn’t a problem where the consequences are confined to individuals, adults acting poorly is causing innocent children to suffer and die, so we need to focus on solutions. This isn’t like these people believe in Flat Earth, if we just sit around mocking and belittling these people, more innocents will die at faster rates.
We need to collectively swallow our (totally justified) anger and find some kind of a way to understand the root reason of why people are anti-vaxx, and help them resolve whatever broken logic or unresolved emotional issues is standing in the way of them doing the right thing.
My local anti-vaxxing, Straight Pride Festival hosting, “free drinks at my bar if you can prove you turned someone in to ICE”, white nationalist just tried to primary our Republican governor, who himself is helluva bigot, and while he lost he still got 30% of the vote. He’s also a flat earther who hosts round tables for fellow believers at his bar. There’s a substantial overlap in the illogical and irrational belief community.
Now, I don’t think he personally is a flat earther. Despite being repugnant, he’s an intelligent and charismatic person, smart enough to recognize gullibility and use it to gather strength of numbers. For a person like that to change they’d have to be willing to abandon the power they hold. It’s the same problem with podcasters, celebrities, snake oil salesmen, and talking heads that push these ideas. Plenty of them aren’t true believers, it’s a means to profit and clout. There comes a point where you have to stop looking at people as victims of their own ignorance and instead intentionally harmful for their own gain at the expense of others.
There’s also the problem of religious beliefs. We allow people a lot of leeway in spirituality because humans do seem to have a need to feel connected to something “greater”. When someone does that in a manner where their belief guides them but has respect for the rights and boundaries of others, fine. When spirituality becomes religion it often ends up becoming another tool of oppression and unaccountability because people begin demanding their to practice their beliefs regardless of how it’s affecting others. Since god is made up, you can put any words you’d like in god’s mouth to justify your behavior, and worst case you disregard the people you love around because “only god can judge me”.
The US created a problematic loophole with its hands off approach to religious beliefs. If people used their liberty to pursue beliefs that nurtured their personal spirituality and self actualization it’d be great. Instead it’s become a breeding ground for hucksters to develop their own cults of “this is what the ancient book really meant”, or sometimes they just write a brand new book. And we do at times come together to quash behaviors of the religious even at the expense of an individual’s right to act on their supposed god endorsed beliefs because that practice violates the right of another. Joe Smith informed people god was chill with dudes marrying multiple teenagers, but that one’s gotten quashed (for the most part, but some sects still do it, they just have to live removed from society). We’re still fighting to quash child marriage loopholes and male genital mutilation. I don’t care if your god impregnated a teenager with your Savior, your prophet married a child, or your god commanded you to cut of the end of a kid’s penis as a sign of devotion. It’s gross. They’re gross and people are gross for abiding it.
Arguments of logic and reason don’t work on people whose core belief is based on the existence of an invisible, all powerful, universal puppet master. It results in people who do not take accountability for why they must be accountable for their actions in the here and now, judged for their behavior by fellow humans instead of some future where god decides. It also creates people who are willfully ignorant of cause and effect, prevention and accident. I’m content to let adults dance around in a church with a handful of rattlesnakes. I could tell you why that’s a bad idea, but if an adult wants to lose an arm or their life engaging in that, welp. Their life to lose. Spreading disease or denying a child access to healthcare because they’re praying over them instead; not their life to lose.
Like an addict, who continues to destroy themselves and the lives of those in their circle/community with their addiction, repairing broken logic and unresolved emotional issues can’t be helped by external forces until they make the decision to change for themselves and then accept the help. Otherwise they cycle repeatedly through the consequences of losing their privilege of being a part of society, turn themselves into pariahs as the community shuns them to avoid the collateral damage of their behavior, or kills themselves through their own choices. We don’t have to tolerate the fallout of selfishness while they “work on it”. At what point do we look at the pox ridden, scarred for life, maybe dead body of a child then turn to the adult that helped cause that and say “nah, fuck you, your right to chose is revoked”.
This isn’t the dark ages, people aren’t unaware of the sources of disease. We’ve had a good thousand years to figure out where they come from and our literacy rate, declining as it is, is sufficient that we can demand a baseline understanding of cause and effect out of adults. If they want to put up a fight, fine. I’ll fight them over it. If bullying them to the point their only choice is to live cut-off from society so they can’t spread their disease and die alone, unvaxxed but self-satisfied they clung to their belief to the miserable, painful end, so be it.
That’s a lot of words to come around to the conclusion that you believe we should force people to undergo unwanted medical procedures for “the greater good”. I’m sorry, but that idea is even more harmful than anti-vaxxers. This exact same sentiment was used to justify unbelievable atrocities in the past, such as sterilizing minority groups and things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
I agree with you that people need to want to change to change, but bullying and belittling them is counterproductive to encouraging people to want to change.
The fact is that you just want to feel justified in treating people badly, because you (totally justifiably) feel that those people are doing bad things. You need to recognize that you need to choose between working towards solving the problem, or just making yourself feel better by shitting on them.
Societal shame and alienation may have worked in a pre-Internet world, but it works no longer. No matter how depraved, destructive, or horrible someone’s behavior is, there will be a community on the Internet who supports and encourages it. The ONLY WAY to reach those people, to keep them from falling deeper down rabbit holes, is through compassion.
I’m not implying forced vaccinations from the government, I’m suggesting that when your neighbor is a threat to the most vulnerable members of your community, you, yes, you the person I’m talking to, unite with your likeminded neighbors and do everything in your power to isolate, ostracize, and exclude that person from society until their only choice becomes live in total isolation or complies. Our government is in the hands of the anti-vax enablers, they’re not going to do anything about it. It’s your responsibility to identify the threats to children, the elderly, and the most vulnerable in your community and neutralize them.
They don’t even need to change their minds about it, just like a bigot is free to be a bigot in the privacy of their own home. You can’t force a white supremecist to abandon their mindset because you cannot “make” someone believe what they don’t want to believe. You can only make espousing their beliefs and acting upon them in public a costly endeavor.
Look at what’s happening in Africa with the Ebola outbreak. The demand for access to dangerous corpses due to religious beliefs is fueling the destruction of the facilities trying to protect the public and will result in the disease continuing to spread. Measles and Covid are bad, Ebola is pretty much just death waiting to happen. Would you tolerate “right to deny” and demand we coddle deniers with patience and compassion if they were willfully exposing society to some of our most lethal diseases? If yes, well, there’s nothing left to discuss. If not, why do you demand we tolerate them scarring children for life with something that could have been prevented.
We do already hold people accountable for knowingly spreading disease. If someone knows they’re HIV positive and continues to spread it without informing their partner of the risk, they are penalized for it. HIV isn’t even the death sentence it was 30yrs ago, but it is a lifelong medical burden that can affect quality of life and life expectancy. Why do we allow others to spread diseases that cause suffering, scar, cause long term health issues, and sometimes kill? The responsibility for protecting your community is on you, not the government.
I don’t give a fuck about changing their minds, only their behaviour
They can take a vaccine and then whine, or put half a potato on it, or claim to be magnetic now
Just so long as the stupid cunts get vaccinated to protect the most vulnerable people in our society
Okay, so your options there are either to force them to have vaccinations, which would be a violation of their human rights, or to change their minds so that they voluntarily get vaccinations.
Remember, these people are generally just acting out of fear and ignorance. Treating them poorly won’t change their behaviour, it’ll only alienate them further from the rest of society.
Bullying people is a completely ineffective means of changing behaviour. It’s actually likely to make them dig their heels in further and become even more entrenched in their views just out of pure opposition to their perceived enemies.
Exactly. bulling is unacceptable but not bullying is ok.