Actually, the arguments against vaccines are very similar to the ones used against seat belts. They're also similar to the arguments against bike helmets, climate change, and gun control and arguments for cigarettes and asbestos.
They all have one factor in common: innumeracy. The odds are much higher of being injured by disease outbreak than the vaccine for the disease. However, few people count the number of people who didn't die from a disease they didn't catch because of a vaccination, who weren't permanently damaged by a head injury they didn't receive because of a helmet, and the number of people who weren't shot by a gun that wasn't there. The real problem with preventative measures is that when they work well, people think they are unnecessary and when they fail, people think they are ineffective.
The vaccine isn't 100% effective, there are very few things which are. According to the National Network for Immunization Information one vaccination is 95% and two is 99.7% effective. The U.S. started giving 2 shots in 1989. That probably means there are between 10 and 15 million people in the U.S. who received the vaccine who are still vulnerable to Measles.
Now, I do have a degree in Mathematics so you can take my word on the fact that a 0.3% is much less than 100%. There is a 0.01% of a child having a reaction, and a 0.00001% of a child having a severe reaction, and 0.000001% of a child having an anaphylactic reaction. No children have died as a result of the vaccine in the United States since 1990. Before vaccination started (in the 1960s), 450 people died annually from measles and another 4000 got encephaltis. Again, I give you my assurance that 0 is much less than 9000.
The risks of just one disease the MMR vaccine protects against far greater and more severe than the risks of the vaccine.
Isn't it more plausible that the natural activity (powered by the Sun) is more responsible for changes in weather patterns than the human activity.
No. The sun's activity has decreased over the past 30 years while the global average temperature has increased. It is significantly less plausible that the world is warming because the sun is cooling.
How does any of the above change the fact that *some* things in the bible [were] rational and well informed?
The problem is that once these "rational and well informed" rules become part of the religion they become dogma. They become holy words which must not be changed. It doesn't matter if it turns out they were wrong if the first place or if the situation changes. The reason dies and the prohibition lives.
Regarding the proposition that some non-religious people believe epidemics are punishment, yes that is true. A lunatic fringe of that population will say it is mother earth / nature punishing mankind for despoiling the earth.
I'm pretty sure anyone who believes that Mother Nature can punish mankind is religious. They may not be part of your religion, but if they really believe in Mother Nature then they are definitely religious.
"The central idea of all statists is that the State knows enough about everything to be able to make smart, rational decisions about everything, including proactively dealing with problems, whatevet that means."
That statement is, of course, false. The central idea of all statists would be that the State can make smart, rational decisions about some things. Of course, it's much harder to torch something that's not made of straw.
It's interesting to notice that, in the more extreme of the type of incident you mention, not one of the states (US, Soviet Union or Japan) was able to "proactively deal with problems.
There's an interesting problem of confirmation bias here. Since problems that don't occur or aren't severe wouldn't make the news, you would be highly unlikely to know anything about the incidents that were dealt with in any of those three countries. Of course, to understand the differences it can help to do comparative analysis. For example, why don't we compare two countries hit by extreme earthquakes recently? For example, Haiti and Japan. While Japan was hit by a much larger earthquake (9.0) than Haiti (7.0), many more people died in Haiti (300,000) than in Japan (20,000). Why did Japan suffered much less damage? Because the Japanese government implemented strict building codes and the Haitian government implemented none. Most of the Haitian dead were people who were killed when buildings collapsed on them, most of the Japanese dead were killed by the Tsunami, very few, if any people were killed as a direct result of the earthquake. That's the trouble with preventive measures, often you don't know how effective they are until they aren't there.
A libertarian society that didn't have building codes would end up like Haiti, while a libertarian society that did have building codes would cease being libertarian.
Not really. As I understand before unions it was fairly common to have 60-72 hour work weeks. That's 6x10 or 6x12. You got Sunday off for Church, of course, but that was it. It wasn't the "weekend" it was "Sunday". Unions reduced the work week to 8x5.
They're required to treat you, sure, but they also bill you, and they bill a lot. An American friend of my wife's was hit by a car that jumped the curb, he was put in a coma by accidentally that was completely not his fault. He woke up to over $200,000 in medical bills. The only way out from that kind of debt is bankruptcy. Of course, because most of those bills won't get paid, the cost of the procedure plus the cost of the failed attempts to collect the debt is then passed on to people like you.
I'm not exaggerating much (if at all) on the quality of care for poor Americans. Last time I checked the life expectancy for young black American men was 50-something*, and was actually lower than that of many undeveloped nations. The medical system in the United States works well only for the rich, it is passable for most of the country and utterly failing for most of the poor. It work best for the people who aren't sick or injured.
Frankly, health care costs are bleeding the United States dry. The U.S. is paying a 50% premium for health care that is below average (WHO. The giant deficit that is part of the reason for the downgrade of the U.S. debt rating? There are three main parts: Social Security, Military Spending and Medicare.
There are charitable medical organizations that only operate in undeveloped nations and the United States. The free market approach is working so poorly that poor Americans are getting health care that's the equivalent to what you'd get in Ethiopia or Somalia.
According to this article 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007 were caused by medical problems (link to study).
I still don't think you get it. Since, in a libertarian society a man has a right to defend himself and his property, the man with a bomb is technically a fine upstanding citizen up to the point the bomb goes off. You don't know that he's a suicide bomber for sure until after he's blown himself up. You may suspect that he intends to blow himself up, but your only recourse is to leave because his right to explode ends when the explosion hits you. This is the Achilles heel of libertarianism: a lack of security. As soon as you start prohibiting some things because they represent "too much danger" you're no longer a libertarian, and as long as you don't you allow any irregular force to terrorize your society with relative impunity.
Yes, but the point you missed is that you can't charge someone with murder if they only attempted it. And the punishment for attempted murder should, in any reasonable society, be equal to or less than the punishment for murder. From the article it appears that these guys got drunk, posted idiocy to Facebook, and will now spend 4 years in prison for being drunken idiots who didn't actually cause any real harm.
The point one of the parent posters made was that people have actually received lesser sentences for actual rioting and actual murder.
They pled guilty and they are still being made examples of. Mostly likely they pled guilty because they don't have lawyers and were assured that they would get lenient sentences. A telling point, the prosecutor asked for a more lenient sentence than the one they received. This is the legal system running amok.
Of course it's rotten to the core, Rupert Murdoch has been selecting winning candidates for decades. When Rupert Murdoch decides who win elections, government policy will be designed to benefit Rupert Murdoch.
This is not society's fault, nor the fault of the police, or the government, but the fault of a generation of bottom feeding scum sucking opportunists that need a harsh lesson in reality dealt to them.
And what produced "a generation of bottom feeding scum sucking opportunists"? Your society. A serial killer isn't society's fault, 20,000 thugs rioting in the streets? It's hard to see a way that it could be anything other than society at fault.
This is the expected result of creating an underclass with no hope and no future.
You need to think a little more about the problem then resorting to the "you don't understand libertarianism knee-jerk".
He said it wouldn't be illegal for an outsider to bribe an insider to blow up the libertarian city-state. Blowing up the city-state would be illegal, but would any of the libertarians be able to do anything about the guy who the suicide-bomber money? Would it even be illegal for him to use his free speech rights to tell someone else that they should blow up the city? Would it be illegal for him to give money to the bomber? After all, if the guy who paid for the bomb didn't initiate force against the bomber, then according to standard libertarian policies, I'm not sure he's even committed a crime. If he has committed a crime, you've already started down the slippery slope towards modern liberal statism.
And this is just one area where libertarianism would conflict with having a stable and secure society.
You don't seem to understand, as long as the explosive isn't used, it's legal. If you prefer, replace explosive with fully automatic machine gun.
It's only after the detonation that force has been used. Suicide-bombers are a perfect example of a problem libertarian society would be completely ill-equipped to deal with. How are they going to collect compensation from a pennyless dead man?
Your liberty to move your fist ends where my face starts.
Replace fist with "thermonuclear device", and then sit back and really think about how much liberty your ashes will have. One of the problems with Libertarianism is that it can't deal pro-actively with problems. You can't do anything about the sloppily run reactor until after it has melted down and destroyed your property (if you're one of the "lucky" survivors).
The central idea of most libertarians is that they know enough about everything to be able to make smart, rational decisions about everything. Personally, I think most libertarians suffer from a generalized case of the Dunning-Kruger effect where the effectively have no idea about exactly how much they don't know. I strongly suspect a truly libertarian society would bounce from once crisis to the next, never learning from their previous mistakes, until it collapsed under the cumulative damage from liberties abused.
Apparently, they lost 600k last quarter, and 300k this quarter. That makes almost 1 million in the last six months.
However, the loss may just be "returning players" exhausting the new content and letting their subscriptions expire again, if the decline continues, it'll be a different story.
I think Blizzard's quality decline began shortly after Vivendi purchased it, that's when most of the Blizzard talent left to pursue other opportunities. As I understand it, at that time many of the original Warcraft and World of Warcraft developers left to work on Guild Wars. In this case, Activision is "only" raping the corpse and stealing it's gold fillings.
I know graphics cards can be a bit pricey, however, a new graphics card rarely requires that you change jobs and move to a part of the country with better Internet access.
I wouldn't be affected by the problem of an Inadequate Internet connection, mine was good enough to play WoW (and go on 40 man raids), but I won't be buying Diablo 3 (I own a copy of both Diablo and Diablo 2). Frankly, I probably wouldn't have bought it anyway, but this always on restriction validates my decision. Frankly, as far as I'm concerned the Blizzard that produced the games that I used to love is dead. It died shortly after it sold out to Vivendi.
No, they are forcefully making someone else responsible for their well being via theft.
I don't see how "theft" makes "someone else responsible for their well being". If taking something isn't being responsible, how can the capitalist who takes the product of his employee's work be responsible? Stealing isn't legal, moral, or ethical, but I can't see how it's not self-interested. I can see how it may end up being self-destructive (for example when a person gets caught and sent to prison) but they are definitely taking actions to improve their own situation. Not smart actions, not moral actions, but actions none-the-less.
Actual capitalists rely on voluntary cooperation for their gains. Once they resort to violence, they've given up on the free market.
That's the "No True Scotsman" fallacy right there. Capitalists are human, they resort to violence when stressed. Only Ayn Rand's caricatures of businessmen are free of anger, hate, and violence. The more competitive the businessman the more likely he is to cheat, lie, and steal to win. Hiring goons to injure, kill, or destroy your competitors has fallen out of favor because it's so easy for the police to follow the trail right back to the businessman's door.
Capitalists rely on a societal agreement concerning the use of violence, and the coercive nature of the scarcity of resources to compel their employees to work. They pay their employee a fraction of the value of the goods and/or services that they produce, use a fraction to pay the business costs and then pocket the rest. Increasingly these capitalists have forgotten about the societal agreement on the use of violence and it's critical importance to the entire machine. They have steadily diminished the fraction that the employees get paid while greatly increasing the fraction they take for themselves. Most do not understand that if the majority does not prosper, the compact against the use of violence (which is what allows capitalism to work in the first place) can and, most likely will, be revoked. Corruption and greed are eroding the foundations of capitalism.
But that's just my interpretation of recent history.
There is a real problem with assigning the term "free market capitalists" to be people who do thing you like and then removing anyone from the group who does something you don't like. It can create a fairy tale of the mind where your beliefs are sheltered from disappointment by willful disregard for reality. In my experience, disregarding reality is a surefire recipe for disaster.
Of course, by "Destroy Facebook" they might mean "Officially Launch AnonPlus" which, of course, will be immediately followed by everyone deleting their Facebook accounts and switching to AnonPlus, of their own free will.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the arguments against vaccines are very similar to the ones used against seat belts. They're also similar to the arguments against bike helmets, climate change, and gun control and arguments for cigarettes and asbestos.
They all have one factor in common: innumeracy. The odds are much higher of being injured by disease outbreak than the vaccine for the disease. However, few people count the number of people who didn't die from a disease they didn't catch because of a vaccination, who weren't permanently damaged by a head injury they didn't receive because of a helmet, and the number of people who weren't shot by a gun that wasn't there. The real problem with preventative measures is that when they work well, people think they are unnecessary and when they fail, people think they are ineffective.
It is shocking how stupid some people can be.
The vaccine isn't 100% effective, there are very few things which are. According to the National Network for Immunization Information one vaccination is 95% and two is 99.7% effective. The U.S. started giving 2 shots in 1989. That probably means there are between 10 and 15 million people in the U.S. who received the vaccine who are still vulnerable to Measles.
Now, I do have a degree in Mathematics so you can take my word on the fact that a 0.3% is much less than 100%. There is a 0.01% of a child having a reaction, and a 0.00001% of a child having a severe reaction, and 0.000001% of a child having an anaphylactic reaction. No children have died as a result of the vaccine in the United States since 1990. Before vaccination started (in the 1960s), 450 people died annually from measles and another 4000 got encephaltis. Again, I give you my assurance that 0 is much less than 9000.
The risks of just one disease the MMR vaccine protects against far greater and more severe than the risks of the vaccine.
Isn't it more plausible that the natural activity (powered by the Sun) is more responsible for changes in weather patterns than the human activity.
No. The sun's activity has decreased over the past 30 years while the global average temperature has increased. It is significantly less plausible that the world is warming because the sun is cooling.
When they started being informative, insightful and underrated?
How does any of the above change the fact that *some* things in the bible [were] rational and well informed?
The problem is that once these "rational and well informed" rules become part of the religion they become dogma. They become holy words which must not be changed. It doesn't matter if it turns out they were wrong if the first place or if the situation changes. The reason dies and the prohibition lives.
Regarding the proposition that some non-religious people believe epidemics are punishment, yes that is true. A lunatic fringe of that population will say it is mother earth / nature punishing mankind for despoiling the earth.
I'm pretty sure anyone who believes that Mother Nature can punish mankind is religious. They may not be part of your religion, but if they really believe in Mother Nature then they are definitely religious.
"The central idea of all statists is that the State knows enough about everything to be able to make smart, rational decisions about everything, including proactively dealing with problems, whatevet that means."
That statement is, of course, false. The central idea of all statists would be that the State can make smart, rational decisions about some things. Of course, it's much harder to torch something that's not made of straw.
It's interesting to notice that, in the more extreme of the type of incident you mention, not one of the states (US, Soviet Union or Japan) was able to "proactively deal with problems.
There's an interesting problem of confirmation bias here. Since problems that don't occur or aren't severe wouldn't make the news, you would be highly unlikely to know anything about the incidents that were dealt with in any of those three countries. Of course, to understand the differences it can help to do comparative analysis. For example, why don't we compare two countries hit by extreme earthquakes recently? For example, Haiti and Japan. While Japan was hit by a much larger earthquake (9.0) than Haiti (7.0), many more people died in Haiti (300,000) than in Japan (20,000). Why did Japan suffered much less damage? Because the Japanese government implemented strict building codes and the Haitian government implemented none. Most of the Haitian dead were people who were killed when buildings collapsed on them, most of the Japanese dead were killed by the Tsunami, very few, if any people were killed as a direct result of the earthquake. That's the trouble with preventive measures, often you don't know how effective they are until they aren't there.
A libertarian society that didn't have building codes would end up like Haiti, while a libertarian society that did have building codes would cease being libertarian.
Not really. As I understand before unions it was fairly common to have 60-72 hour work weeks. That's 6x10 or 6x12. You got Sunday off for Church, of course, but that was it. It wasn't the "weekend" it was "Sunday". Unions reduced the work week to 8x5.
They're required to treat you, sure, but they also bill you, and they bill a lot. An American friend of my wife's was hit by a car that jumped the curb, he was put in a coma by accidentally that was completely not his fault. He woke up to over $200,000 in medical bills. The only way out from that kind of debt is bankruptcy. Of course, because most of those bills won't get paid, the cost of the procedure plus the cost of the failed attempts to collect the debt is then passed on to people like you.
I'm not exaggerating much (if at all) on the quality of care for poor Americans. Last time I checked the life expectancy for young black American men was 50-something*, and was actually lower than that of many undeveloped nations. The medical system in the United States works well only for the rich, it is passable for most of the country and utterly failing for most of the poor. It work best for the people who aren't sick or injured.
* Not including violent deaths.
Frankly, health care costs are bleeding the United States dry. The U.S. is paying a 50% premium for health care that is below average (WHO. The giant deficit that is part of the reason for the downgrade of the U.S. debt rating? There are three main parts: Social Security, Military Spending and Medicare.
There are charitable medical organizations that only operate in undeveloped nations and the United States. The free market approach is working so poorly that poor Americans are getting health care that's the equivalent to what you'd get in Ethiopia or Somalia.
According to this article 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007 were caused by medical problems (link to study).
I still don't think you get it. Since, in a libertarian society a man has a right to defend himself and his property, the man with a bomb is technically a fine upstanding citizen up to the point the bomb goes off. You don't know that he's a suicide bomber for sure until after he's blown himself up. You may suspect that he intends to blow himself up, but your only recourse is to leave because his right to explode ends when the explosion hits you. This is the Achilles heel of libertarianism: a lack of security. As soon as you start prohibiting some things because they represent "too much danger" you're no longer a libertarian, and as long as you don't you allow any irregular force to terrorize your society with relative impunity.
I'm sure you heard exactly what you expected to hear and nothing else.
Yes, and the fire has nothing to do with the gasoline.
The cuts were the gasoline, the police shooting was the match, and the riots were the resulting inferno.
You can keep telling yourself that the fire resulted from "bad wood", but all that does is make you easy to manipulated.
Yes, but the point you missed is that you can't charge someone with murder if they only attempted it. And the punishment for attempted murder should, in any reasonable society, be equal to or less than the punishment for murder. From the article it appears that these guys got drunk, posted idiocy to Facebook, and will now spend 4 years in prison for being drunken idiots who didn't actually cause any real harm.
The point one of the parent posters made was that people have actually received lesser sentences for actual rioting and actual murder.
They pled guilty and they are still being made examples of. Mostly likely they pled guilty because they don't have lawyers and were assured that they would get lenient sentences. A telling point, the prosecutor asked for a more lenient sentence than the one they received. This is the legal system running amok.
Of course it's rotten to the core, Rupert Murdoch has been selecting winning candidates for decades. When Rupert Murdoch decides who win elections, government policy will be designed to benefit Rupert Murdoch.
This is not society's fault, nor the fault of the police, or the government, but the fault of a generation of bottom feeding scum sucking opportunists that need a harsh lesson in reality dealt to them.
And what produced "a generation of bottom feeding scum sucking opportunists"? Your society. A serial killer isn't society's fault, 20,000 thugs rioting in the streets? It's hard to see a way that it could be anything other than society at fault.
This is the expected result of creating an underclass with no hope and no future.
You need to think a little more about the problem then resorting to the "you don't understand libertarianism knee-jerk".
He said it wouldn't be illegal for an outsider to bribe an insider to blow up the libertarian city-state. Blowing up the city-state would be illegal, but would any of the libertarians be able to do anything about the guy who the suicide-bomber money? Would it even be illegal for him to use his free speech rights to tell someone else that they should blow up the city? Would it be illegal for him to give money to the bomber? After all, if the guy who paid for the bomb didn't initiate force against the bomber, then according to standard libertarian policies, I'm not sure he's even committed a crime. If he has committed a crime, you've already started down the slippery slope towards modern liberal statism.
And this is just one area where libertarianism would conflict with having a stable and secure society.
You don't seem to understand, as long as the explosive isn't used, it's legal. If you prefer, replace explosive with fully automatic machine gun.
It's only after the detonation that force has been used. Suicide-bombers are a perfect example of a problem libertarian society would be completely ill-equipped to deal with. How are they going to collect compensation from a pennyless dead man?
Your liberty to move your fist ends where my face starts.
Replace fist with "thermonuclear device", and then sit back and really think about how much liberty your ashes will have. One of the problems with Libertarianism is that it can't deal pro-actively with problems. You can't do anything about the sloppily run reactor until after it has melted down and destroyed your property (if you're one of the "lucky" survivors).
The central idea of most libertarians is that they know enough about everything to be able to make smart, rational decisions about everything. Personally, I think most libertarians suffer from a generalized case of the Dunning-Kruger effect where the effectively have no idea about exactly how much they don't know. I strongly suspect a truly libertarian society would bounce from once crisis to the next, never learning from their previous mistakes, until it collapsed under the cumulative damage from liberties abused.
No, no, no!
anarchy = no rules
libertarian = money rules
Apparently, they lost 600k last quarter, and 300k this quarter. That makes almost 1 million in the last six months.
However, the loss may just be "returning players" exhausting the new content and letting their subscriptions expire again, if the decline continues, it'll be a different story.
Because they get better search results?
A little effort is often rewarded by better results. If you're not willing to put any effort in, you probably shouldn't complain about the results.
I think Blizzard's quality decline began shortly after Vivendi purchased it, that's when most of the Blizzard talent left to pursue other opportunities. As I understand it, at that time many of the original Warcraft and World of Warcraft developers left to work on Guild Wars. In this case, Activision is "only" raping the corpse and stealing it's gold fillings.
I know graphics cards can be a bit pricey, however, a new graphics card rarely requires that you change jobs and move to a part of the country with better Internet access.
I wouldn't be affected by the problem of an Inadequate Internet connection, mine was good enough to play WoW (and go on 40 man raids), but I won't be buying Diablo 3 (I own a copy of both Diablo and Diablo 2). Frankly, I probably wouldn't have bought it anyway, but this always on restriction validates my decision. Frankly, as far as I'm concerned the Blizzard that produced the games that I used to love is dead. It died shortly after it sold out to Vivendi.
No, they are forcefully making someone else responsible for their well being via theft.
I don't see how "theft" makes "someone else responsible for their well being". If taking something isn't being responsible, how can the capitalist who takes the product of his employee's work be responsible? Stealing isn't legal, moral, or ethical, but I can't see how it's not self-interested. I can see how it may end up being self-destructive (for example when a person gets caught and sent to prison) but they are definitely taking actions to improve their own situation. Not smart actions, not moral actions, but actions none-the-less.
Actual capitalists rely on voluntary cooperation for their gains. Once they resort to violence, they've given up on the free market.
That's the "No True Scotsman" fallacy right there. Capitalists are human, they resort to violence when stressed. Only Ayn Rand's caricatures of businessmen are free of anger, hate, and violence. The more competitive the businessman the more likely he is to cheat, lie, and steal to win. Hiring goons to injure, kill, or destroy your competitors has fallen out of favor because it's so easy for the police to follow the trail right back to the businessman's door.
Capitalists rely on a societal agreement concerning the use of violence, and the coercive nature of the scarcity of resources to compel their employees to work. They pay their employee a fraction of the value of the goods and/or services that they produce, use a fraction to pay the business costs and then pocket the rest. Increasingly these capitalists have forgotten about the societal agreement on the use of violence and it's critical importance to the entire machine. They have steadily diminished the fraction that the employees get paid while greatly increasing the fraction they take for themselves. Most do not understand that if the majority does not prosper, the compact against the use of violence (which is what allows capitalism to work in the first place) can and, most likely will, be revoked. Corruption and greed are eroding the foundations of capitalism.
But that's just my interpretation of recent history.
There is a real problem with assigning the term "free market capitalists" to be people who do thing you like and then removing anyone from the group who does something you don't like. It can create a fairy tale of the mind where your beliefs are sheltered from disappointment by willful disregard for reality. In my experience, disregarding reality is a surefire recipe for disaster.
Of course, by "Destroy Facebook" they might mean "Officially Launch AnonPlus" which, of course, will be immediately followed by everyone deleting their Facebook accounts and switching to AnonPlus, of their own free will.