Coronavirus

It never occurred to me that the vaccination argument would have anything to do with race, but it seems that for some people it does.

A few days ago, the acting mayor of Boston, who happens to be black, compared vaccine passports to slavery freedom papers. My guess is that I'd disagree with her if I knew enough to form an opinion. After heavy criticism, she said that she regretted her words. I can say I'm not a big fan of retractions.

Today I heard a debate on sports radio when a local writer called in. The host of the show is a white male, the co-host a black ex-pro-football player. Both have had the virus and neither one is vaccinated. They were talking about athletes who have not been vaccinated, specifically a prominent New England player who happens to be black. The writer was very critical of the player, openly questioning his character. The black co-host started to take offense, not because he's not vaccinated, but because the white writer was criticizing a black player's morality. It got me wondering about some things.

These sports teams are trying to get their players vaccinated with mixed results so far. Obviously they do not wear masks while practicing or playing. The vaccination rates on teams are of course going up, but what if a guy who's not vaccinated now, gets vaccinated next week? I don't think they inject liquid goodness into the arm along with the medicine, so I would assume if they are bad people now, that's not just something that would go away. Let's picture a player who changes his mind and decides to get vaccinated in 2 weeks. I would imagine his character stays the same. A month goes by and that player is out in the club celebrating a big win and he meets a girl, a real nice girl with class who doesn't put out until the 3rd date. Even after the 3rd date, the player treats the girl like a queen, and in a couple of months he asks for her hand in marriage. Fast forward a few months; he's at practice, and she's at home with a bun in the oven searching for that recipe she clipped because she wants to give him a surprise dinner after his long hard day. While searching for that magical recipe, she comes across his vaccination card. She checks the calendar and puts 2 and 2 together. She screams, the dog starts barking, and she thinks my entire life is a lie! Pretty soon the player is living off endorsements because his entire salary is going towards child support, which in essence pays for his ex-wife's new boyfriend's BMW. The new BF might drink too much and slap her around a little, but just a couple of years earlier he was one of the 1st people to get the vaccine after he doctored his deceased grandfather's birth certificate. With the way of thinking that's going around, this is a realistic scenario so keep your eyes on the divorce rates in the next couple of years.

I also heard that less than 25% of the black population in America has been fully vaccinated. We know that our politicians, health officials, and media have done nothing to inspire trust, just the opposite. I think these sources are where most of us get our information from, including statistics and science. Going further back, it seems like there's real reason for black America to mistrust the government and the healthcare system. Despite that, it seems that 75% of them may hear the criticism from the supposedly good, mostly white people, and take it to heart. Hopefully they understand that questioning their morality is for the greater good, and that it's important not to discriminate when passing judgment. I would say that most people aren't considering race when they give criticism to the unvaccinated, but the results of that criticism is something to think about when weighing the pros and cons of labeling and judging.

The Terminator slams those who refuse the vaccine shot.

As COVID rates in my state continue to rise, my workplace has made the logical decision . . . .that we'll all return to work this coming Monday with no masking or distancing requirements.

Which means I get to spend 7 hours in a room with 25 unmasked, unvaccinated children, and also will be expected to attend staff meeting with unmasked, unvaccinated adults.

And if I get COVID, well, they've taken away the COVID leave provision, so I will have to use my sick days.

AWESOME! I feel so respected as a human being!

My sister teaches in a middle school two counties over from me. They have a mask mandate in her school and, because of the slightly older population, many of the students are vaccinated.

I took the second dose of Moderna 26 hours ago. Still no symptoms, just the arm hurting a little bit; ice fifteen minutes three times a day, and Ibuprofen. I hope I get the symptoms today and not tomorrow, my relatives are coming from France and tomorrow we're going to have a lunch, I don't want to be in bed or very down.

Wowser, you done wrote yourself a movie screenplay here.

So sorry for what you’re going to be going through. I wish you all the best & good luck.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Thank you. It's frustrating to have no recourse. Our county's vaccination rate is 46%. Currently our positivity rate is 7%. The CDC classifies our county as having high levels of community spread.

And yet my co-workers are planning an INDOOR potluck for next Friday. I was the only person in the building today wearing a mask.

It's making me feel very isolated, unsafe, and honestly a bit like I'm the crazy one.

You’re not. Our Archbishop asked us to return to mask-wearing during Sunday mass. Surprised on Sunday to see some maskless. Not many, but some.

I would like our church to get the cantor off the altar & back into the organ loft. We weren’t allowed to sing for a long time, but now we have a cantor again. Annoying. I don’t need to sing or hear singing when I’m in church.

Anyway, you’re not crazy & don’t think it for a second.

This honestly means a lot to me, thank you.

This has been me since March 2020. My coworkers are not belligerently anti-mask, just...cluelessly non-mask. Meanwhile I've been diligently wearing mine, even after being vaccinated, in a vain attempt to set some sort of example. So I get the isolation part. My only consolation is the knowledge that if my building has an outbreak, everyone there will know who DIDN'T spread it. I refuse to be "on the wrong side of history" when we're telling COVID stories in the future. If everyone in my building drops dead tomorrow my conscience will be clear.

So just try to remember WHY you're wearing it. If I were a parent I'd be extremely grateful to know that my kid's teacher was wearing a mask.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

Back when I got vaccinated in March and was feeling optimistic about the future, I agreed to a weekend getaway with some high school buddies. A 'cabin in the woods' type of thing in late August. Why not? The virus will be gone by then! Little did I know that August would be a veritable COVID orgy, so I officially dropped out today. (The other guys are carrying on without me.)

Meanwhile, my unvaccinated coworker just returned from a weekend in Gulf Shores, AL. So... I'm not in a great mood.

I certainly feel good about the decisions I'm making. I feel as if I'm being very conservative in terms of keeping others safe.

But now I'm beginning to feel some resentment at the fact that I am being endangered. Because our vaccination numbers are so low, vaccinated people make up a not-insignificant portion of the new COVID cases (around 18%). It's just because of being surrounded by so many unvaccinated people.

One little piece of good news is that I have a relatively smaller class size (21 students as opposed to the 28 I had last year), so it will make spacing students out a bit easier.

Bah. Thank you for the solidarity.

Yes, see my above post about my cancelled vacation.

My friend works at an elementary school, but she works in the school's library which means she will come in contact with literally every student in the school at some point during a given week. She was already infected back in January, so the amount of courage it takes just to show up for work every day is mind-boggling to me.

If you're the crazy one, then you're not alone. Hubby and I still wear masks when we go out, and we still social distance. We keep hand sanitizer with us when we go shopping, and we use Lysol to clean the shopping carts.

Our friends want us to go to a buffet restaurant with them this weekend, but we already told them that we don't feel comfortable eating in a restaurant yet, especially not in a buffet restaurant.

It seems like the numbers are getting worse, but many people are still acting like the pandemic is over. If this keeps up, we might never go back to normal living.

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If I answer a game thread correctly, just skip my turn and continue with the game.
OPEN FLOOR.

Neither: we should talk about the ideas.

No worries, I figured it wasn't intentional.

Hey, the first analogy I came up with I was Batman.

Anyway, the analogy is only meant to demonstrate one thing: that my involvement is not coincidental because I'm making a point to get involved in these situations (and to see them through). Obviously it'd be totally different if I were pretending I wasn't being argumentative and yet somehow kept finding myself in arguments. That would be implausible.

Probably wrong, but maybe not unreasonable (a good distinction that I'm very glad you made). But it depends: a reasonable position can be formed for unreasonable reasons. In fact, I'd say that's actually very common.

I think your decision not to explicitly advocate for the vaccine is a mistake, and my suspicion is that if we teased out your principles about freedom and your beliefs about vaccine efficacy and all that stuff, it would probably be hard to reconcile them with this choice. That's one of the reasons I've been trying to strip away the hyperbole and examine the principles underneath.

If you won't even start to defend something because it might go on for awhile, why say anything to begin with? And why not just say that immediately when questioned, instead of much later? Also, if that's the fear, isn't it pointless to spend thousands of words talking about not doing it, anyway?

I think you actually do have a bit of an obligation to explain why I'm wrong. You're posting opinions on a public discussion forum. I can certainly come up with circumstances under which someone is not obligated to explain themselves, but those mostly involve people who are being absurd or arguing in bad faith, which obviously isn't the case here. And frankly I usually explain myself to those people, too, at least initially.

Yeah, this happens a lot: if I break things down sometimes people feel like I'm trying to trick them. Sometimes (not saying this applies to you right now), it's simply because they can't find a fault in the logic but also don't like the conclusion. Sometimes I think they just say to themselves "well that's not what I meant, so something must be wrong with it." Even though, in those cases, the explanation is usually that they simply didn't say what they meant.

There's no trick, though: it's simply my thought process, and it's specifically designed so you can point out any disconnect between mine and yours. By laying out the steps (rather than just giving you a conclusion or position), I make it easy for you to point to a specific step you don't agree with. Or you can explain why one step does not logically follow from the next. This is the fastest way to figure out where we differ.

This is a great example of how I tried to make things easy: I specifically asked about this earlier!

Do you think a choice can be "unreasonable" but not "bad"? Unreasonableness isn't always bad?

If this was the sticking point, these questions were the perfect opportunity to say what you just said now. Instead you rejected them as patronizing and suggested they were not only wrong, but so wrong you wouldn't even explain why. But now you're saying you could've just said "I don't grant the premise," which would've been exactly the kind of response I was soliciting and would've been way easier than whatever this has been.

Not at all: you can question the definitions. But questioning them means explaining why they're wrong/what the definition should be.

Because lack of simplicity was not my objection: lack of explanation was. You must realize that "I don't care for that, I'm going to pass" could be used to dismiss any argument, even if it's totally valid, yeah?

Yeah, I don't think I did that. Again, think of the raise taxes example: that wasn't interpretation, it was deduction. So is this. If you say it's not just logical deduction, you should explain what part of the deduction fails. Asking you to do that is an eminently reasonable request. It'd be a reasonable request even from a total stranger, let alone someone you obviously know by now is genuinely attempting to have a useful conversation.

It's clear to me that we have a disconnect on the function of analogies, and more broadly how arguments work.

There's something called reductio ad absurdum ("reduction to absurdity"). It demonstrates that a principle does not hold by formulating an absurd example of it. Like someone who says they'd "never harm another human" being asked if they would "go back in time and kill baby Hitler." That example is absurd, but it establishes whether the person literally meant what they said, or was engaging in hyperbole. It determines quickly and efficiently what the person's actual principles are. And the person can't say "I don't have to answer that because time travel isn't real."

Same thing here: you said many things in defense of your position about not telling people what to do with their bodies, or not being comfortable with this or that, but in each case it seemed clear that none of that was literally true (which is at odds with the "face value" thing you keep insisting on; you've actually been objecting I'm taking them at face value too much). So I used simple analogies to demonstrate that they were not literally true, and that you're obviously willing, as a fundamentally reasonable person, to make exceptions to those principles.

What this should do is result in a "okay, sure, not literally, but here's why I won't do it here." That would have advanced the discussion. It would lead to you articulating your actual principle, and the way you decide which exceptions to make, and why this scenario does or does not qualify. And then we're having a real discussion and really understanding each other better. Instead, you just told me it was "wrong" and absurd and rejected the analogy for being in the exact form it's supposed to be in for the point it was making.

I don't see this as a meaningful distinction, and it's been my experience that if I just ask people to explain without challenging a specific thing, they just give a general speech full of more claims and statements. The conversation never progresses if people can just give a new opening statement whenever.


I can sorta dig that. By that same token, I see dissecting what someone says as a form of respect, since it shows I'm taking them seriously. I'm putting time and thought into what they say and genuinely giving them a chance to clarify and sharpen their beliefs.

Well, usually. I won't pretend I don't subject outright trolls to it sometimes to put them in their place, but it usually sounds pretty different than this. It's usually sassier.

I've noticed that people who live in cities tend to be more likely to still wear masks, whereas out in the country people don't do it. I got vaccinated and i don't wear masks anymore unless asked to because it's very annoying.

I got "sassy yoda" from all that.

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

Maybe my sassiness has increased on net so that normal Yoda is now sassy and sassy Yoda is now very very sassy.

This might not be a bad thing.

We just got a message that we're getting a mask mandate put in place for the start of the school year. (For the record, our county metrics have exceeded the levels that the state previously said meant you shouldn't even be at school in person). This is obviously a huge relief, and big commiserations to those of you who want mask mandates in your workplace but don't have them.

I'm really happy.

But also, one response to the announcement reads, "Why are you scaring the children? No one dies of COVID."

Can we have a mandate to smack that person upside the head?

Tell me about it.