If it helps, my posting history is more diverse and I agree with antondd. OP's free to post what they like about the EU but I think people should know what sort of an ideological position it's coming from.
I don't lie about my own politics. Saying that makes you feel better about yourself. I've followed politics closely and have evolved greatly in my thinking, but the average hive mind cannot comprehend nuance, resulting in people like you that believe "if only my party had power, all would be well". When your side wants to you stand for Ukraine, you do it. When they want you to talk about gender, you do it. When they want you to talk about an affordability crises, you do it. But it never comes from you. These talking points never surface in a grassroots manner because people fail to think independently and objectively.
The fact that you are not able to have real nuance in your beliefs is a huge indicator that your beliefs live in the realm of ideas and concepts and not reality.
You are a liar, it has been demonstrated. If you feel such a shame about your beliefs because you really do understand deep down that they’re wrong and that you are sinning, you should repent.
To continue to behave like you have been outs you as cowardly little worm.
It's a cope, and it follows the dynamic reactionary talk radio has been using for decades - get people riled up about the system in general, cool them off just enough to go vote Republican, and then leverage their having made that choice to rationalize why it was somehow justified. Rinse and repeat.
(I'm coming from a centrist libertarian position here, not a partisan one)
Nah, you're just as partisan as anyone else. I would be libertarian if the world was all sunshine and rainbows, but after years of seeing how the world actually works, views tend to change. Before, I would have unconditionally voted against any form of welfare. Now, I've seen that government does what it wants when it comes to pouring money into wars, the defense industrial complex, subsidies for their cronies. So now, if I had to vote on subsidizing education or healthcare, f it -- I'm doing it. Because I'm done tightening my belt so that government and big business can squeeze out every last penny for themselves.
What we've had in this country for the longest is a two-party dictatorship. No options. No real structural change, regardless of who is in office. I don't think both sides are equally bad.
Note I said centrist libertarian. I think the Libertarian party, along with much of "libertarian" thought, has been captured by rightist fundamentalism - effectively turning it into crypto-fascism. But I continue to consider myself libertarian as I believe that individual liberty is still the most appropriate yardstick and framework by which to evaluate and analyze systems.
Your "unconditionally voted against any form of welfare" is what I call rightist fundamentalism. I figured out long ago that merely saying "no" to everything makes it so that politically soft targets (ie services that benefit citizens) take damage, while politically hard targets (eg defense industrial complex) continue unimpeded. So I'm right there with you on the heuristic of voting for subsidized education or healthcare in the face of having massive deficit budgets regardless. If I were given the choice I would much prefer sound monetary policy, but as that never seems to be an option then squeezing citizens while pouring trillions into corporate welfare and war is utter foolishness.
> No real structural change, regardless of who is in office
Except there was a huge structural change in 2024, with the blessing of autocratic authoritarianism by the voters (following its creation and approval by the supreme council and congress during 2016-2020). That is what you're ignoring and supporting by continuing to both sides here.
Pre-2016 administrations (and even Trump 2016) were not "dictatorships" - rather they were bureaucratic authoritarianism. That bureaucracy had at least kept the exercise of authoritarian power constrained and predictable.
Well, what can I say: you make some valid points. This topic is very extensive and I wouldn't have the time to address every aspect, but I like the term you use, "bureaucratic authoritarianism". I think that's an accurate portrayal of what's at work.
Anyways, thank you for taking time to respond. Regardless of the nuance we could talk endlessly about, your perspective was edifying.
I don't approve of the downvoting and flagging, if there's anywhere on the internet that conspiracy ideas can be constructively pushed back on it should be here.
That being said you're not making very detailed defences of RFK's book and ideas. Can you be more specific on some ideas or claims from his book that you believe in and how they're supported?
A tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations.
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
> the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger
Except that we knew by May 2020 (possibly even earlier) that the data showed that the young and otherwise healthy were at extraordinarily low risk from Covid.
I still recall a conversation with child#2 after one of his school friends was at home quarantining after testing positive for Covid.
I asked my son if he knew if his friend was feeling better...
Kids spread the virus, whether they’re at risk of dying or not. Vaccines reduce the chance of them spreading it by reducing the symptoms and the time that they they’re infectious.
The main benefit of vaccines is that they reduce the transmission of disease. This aspect saves more lives than individual protection.
The overall VE [Vaccine Effectiveness] of the complete primary series against infection with any SARS-CoV-2 variant was 70.7%. VE was lower for Omicron, at 26.1%, than for pre-Omicron strains, at 77.0%. Over time, VE against infection by any variant decreased from 68.9% to 38.9% after 6 months.
> A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop
The advice I was given from our family doctor was that having had an utterly mild case of (actual) Covid, as I had (two separate times!), during the pandemic, was significantly better in protecting against both future infection - and subsequent transmission - than any protection I could have gained by vaccination.
YMMV. I suspect this is down to those who have had mild Covid pre-vaccination and those who have not.
Some of us didn't even know we had had Covid until afterwards, others think the vaccine saved them from an untimely death/hospitalisation.
If you’ve had Covid twice then you’ll have had the antibodies in your system, however there were several strains and getting boosters to maximise resistance was important.
Remember that you caught Covid twice, because your body’s immune system was still not strong enough to make you asymptomatic the second time. You likely caught Covid several times but several of those times you were asymptomatic.
It’s incorrect to say that catching the virus gives you “better” protection than a vaccine. The vaccine teaches your immune system how to react to the virus without the damage and long-term effects caused by actually having the virus. This makes future infections much less severe and you are less likely to spread the virus to others when you catch it.
Worth restating because of all the misinformation out there: a vaccine will not prevent you from catching a virus, it cannot do that. It trains your immune system to fight the virus so that when you catch it your immune system can fight it immediately and symptoms are much less severe (ideally asymptomatic, but that is not guaranteed), so that you have less chance of passing it on.
That’s what Dr Fauci said for seasonal flu in 2004.
Yes you will have antibodies from being exposed to one strain of flu. You won’t for the next strain.
Catching COVID carried a far greater risk because although symptoms can be mild in many cases it can kill vulnerable people and it spreads incredibly quickly. At the peak of the pandemic, hospitals were being overrun by people sick with the virus, which affected everyone’s access to care. Vaccines helped prevent the spread of new strains to vulnerable people and reduced pressure on the hospitals.
They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.
No, they did the best for their child. They had no way of knowing their child would react before they gave the vaccine. The harms and risks of illness prevented by vaccination are far greater than the harms and the risks of adverse reaction.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.
To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.
What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.
Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.
> it's a trade off but it's one that must be made.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.
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