In a WaPo article concerning a proposed coal power plant replacement with an experimental nuclear unit in Kemmerer, Wyoming, I was struck by this political observation:
Nicole Anderson, 30, was motivated to open her own accounting firm downtown. She said most reservations about [Microsoft found Bill] Gates — long the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories stemming from his support of vaccines — are overshadowed by hope.
“I think people still think of him as a figment of your imagination,” Anderson said. But he’s put Kemmerer “on the map, which none of us ever saw happening.”
Of course, being a science groupie, I was tiredly outraged by the remark concerning vaccines. You look at the change in death antecedents following the introduction of a vaccine, and the case is generally closed. The most likely conclusion is that vaccines simply do work, and most are “safe” in the statistical sense, which is to say that, yes, I do actually know someone who suffered an attack of myocarditis following a Covid shot, so he’s probably one of the < .001% who suffered a negative, dangerous reaction to the vaccine.
That does not make the vaccine generally dangerous. The statistical definition of generally dangerous may be up for discussion, but < .001% is not generally dangerous. The vaccine in question is safe within the general definition.
But, to return to the point, every political movement is speckled with fallacies, misconceptions, and other detestable aspects that accompany being human. Politics is about acquisition of power in order to implement political philosophies; political philosophy, on the other hand, is an accretional theory about how humans, and human societies, both do work and should work.
Because political philosophies are mixtures of earnest theories of human behaviors and self-interested “theories” designed to carry their progenitors to power, evaluation of political philosophies must carefully differentiate between the two, marking as negative the latter while critically evaluating the former.
Because the former can easily be as wrong as the latter.
What am I saying? Every political philosophical aggregate will inevitably have ingredients, forcibly introduced by those of a ruthlessly ambitious nature, that are simply wrong. Keeping in mind the scientifically accepted findings of researchers of vaccines, those “suspicious” of vaccines are echoing the sentiments of those who are desperate to accrete power to their own ends, who talk through their hats in order to unite those inclined, through ignorance and suspicion, to disdain vaccines.
Meanwhile, transgender advocates, eager to be civil rights champions, bypass standard democratic values and procedures, quite potentially leading non-transgender down the irreversible path of surgery and, almost certainly, depression, in their hurried quest for, yes, say it, fame.
Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
That teaches me that, yes, the conservatives are fools for disdaining vaccines, but the Left have their revered feet of clay, too, and us Independents have our treasured ignorance of governing. None of us are anywhere near perfect, but for those who know they are ignorant.
