An Epidemic of Fear (Anti-Vaccination Bullshit)

[SpaceMarine93]

Did I hear that th death rate for vaccination of children is 1 in 30 million?

Well, if that's the case, i think it is a good bargain.

And to those parents who claims their children is autistic due to vaccines; frankly, i do not give a damn about your kids. I really don't, to heck with them. There are millions or more patients who are vulnerable to diseases and don't get autism from medication who needed vaccines. I really wouldn't mind even if my children gets autism from vaccines, assuming there is such a connection, because I know in the long run, vaccines benefit civilization more than the picketing concerns of a minority of these brainless, ignorant, paranoid, good for nothing panic parasites.

And I wonder if they had any humanity in them, using their own already sick-stricken children as nothing more then a political / media tool to reach their goals. Have they no sense of decency? Have they, at long last, no sense of decency?

[PeZook]

Or maybe they really don't know how vaccines work, are deathly concerned about their children and can't come to grips with the fact their child will require professional care and major changes in lifestyle that they can't understand, either? I'm sure you know all about what it means to be a parent, so you can obviously relate. Obviously.

Telling these people "We don't give a crap about your children!" is NOT the way to sell vaccination to them. Sure, you can force people to have the shots, but I don't think we want a situation where the Vaccination Police drags people out of their homes, do we?

[someone_else]

The flaw with that reasoning is that willingness to vaccinate is not genetically passed on. As I pointed out, the vast majority of today's anti-vaxxers are actually the descendants of pro-vax parents.

That reasoning is based on the fact that the descendants of anti-vaxers will have a higher mortality rate (although with the better medical science we have now, that's going to be somewhat lessened from the Old Days), and may see a friend, or a loved one die due to lack of vaccination. Such traumatic events should be the ones that justified the widespread acceptation of vaccines some generations before, so I was speculating that it could behave like a cycle.
Anti-vaxers ---> higher mortality, descendants become pro-vaxers ---->lesser mortality, descendants become anti-vaxxers-->higher mortality and so on and so forth.

The annoying thing is that in this speculation, to have them change their minds, they have to look at people suffering and dieing (and probably suffer themselves for such loss).
How I hate when human beings (taken as a whole) seem to behave like dumb cattle.

And I wonder if they had any humanity in them, using their own already sick-stricken children as nothing more then a political / media tool to reach their goals. Have they no sense of decency? Have they, at long last, no sense of decency?

It's just plain ignorance. They aren't evil, they just don't have a clue and try to choose what they think is better. Some do cross the line and become full-blown religious or insane but still, the amount of actually evil parents is extremely slim.

[PainRack]

Oh, then you get people going on about how vaccines "fool" the immune system and how that's deceptive and not as good as "the real thing"... actual things I have heard from people. Goes right along with people blaming vaccines for increasing allergies and cancer, because meddling with the immune system has to be bad, right?

Meh. Can't be as bad as that gingko ad or homeopathy crap I see out there.

Something like gardasil has its own problems - it involves an STD and, at least here, there is still a strong current of stay-virgin-until-married so a teen getting it is essentially saying she's a slut. Or her parents think her to be a slut. Or can't control her enough to keep her from being a slut. It becomes a twisted badge of honor - "I'm such a good girl I don't need the vaccine!". Or, more likely, the parents are in denial that their daughters are having sex and could use the vaccine. On top of that, for the follow up doses - you can't trust young people that age to take birth control pills or use a condom or even not to text while driving a car, you're expecting them to 1) remember and 2) go to the trouble of getting jabbed in the arm at intervals? And while I appreciate some of the points in the arguments from the people who promote pap smears over vaccinations, they're missing the point that I see that, sad to say, not every woman is going to get every single pap smear she should even if cost is not a factor, and this makes it less likely that missing one or two will have tragic consequences. It shouldn't be a matter of EITHER pap OR gardasil, it should be both being promoted and access being provided. Of course, we don't live in an ideal world, I know that.

As time goes by I think public health is about 75% battling cultural issues (which would include both lack of education and persistent rumors) and 20% making sure access is reasonably easy and only about 5% actual medicine.

So, how would you approach this?

[Broomstick]

Approach what? Cultural issues in general or gardasil in specific? Or both? Let me think about that for a bit.

[Purple]

What I don't understand is why not just make it compulsory to vaccinate people? But this seems to be the thing with the western world now a days. For some reason people seem to resent being forced into things even if they are 100% good for them.

[Broomstick]

You know, that was done with smallpox. And the resistance wasn't just in the West. At one point a family patriarch in, if I recall correctly, India refused to have himself and his extended family vaccinated so the army was sent in to get it done at gunpoint. Literally, they held a gun on the guy until he and his family were vaccinated.

That's what it will take for some people - holding a gun to their skull. Do we really want to make that level of coercion a common practice? What are the downsides to that?

[Purple]

Common practice, no of course not. But it's not like we are talking about trivial things here. Vaccinations are a special case.

After all while some people might feel resentful to being forced to vaccinate what you described will only ever happen to very few people (and for very few things) and the alternative (dying a horrible death from smallpox in that particular case case) is often much worse. In any other case, I would not propose such a thing but in this case the alternative literally is often horrible death and at times spreading a plague to kill more people horribly.

There just has to be a line where society steps in and tells people that they are a danger to them self and others and that for the sake of the society this simply can not be allowed to continue.

[Akhlut]

Are you incapable of suppressing your totalitarian urges? Dude, just make it an enormous hassle to get an exemption that isn't medically based and you'll weed out a bunch of wishy-washy people right then and there. Telling parents that in order for a child to not get vaccinated to get into school, you have to get a form signed by the district superattendant, the local county health department, a doctor, and a few other people and you have to pay a small filing fee of $15. Most people don't want to spend a day driving around getting forms signed and paying fees, however small, so you'll easily get fence-sitters to go ahead and get their kids vaccinated anyway because it is a lot easier the trying to spend 4 or 5 hours going around town getting all the relevant signatures and filling out all the paperwork.

The more hardcore people are going to do that anyway, but the US legal system already allows for parents to let their children die from easily cured diseases due to religious objections (how many kids of Jehovah's Witnesses have died because they couldn't get a blood transfusion?), so the vaccine issue can't really be forced at this point.

[Purple]

Are you incapable of suppressing your totalitarian urges?

Why should I? What is wrong with a little force if the end result is beneficial? You make it sound that anything forced on people was a bad thing because it is forced. By that logic if I was to hand out free money and force people at gun point to take it than I would still be evil for forcing them. Because this is the same thing, just better. Vaccinations save lives, period. How is forcing someone to have his life saved from suffering and death a bad thing?

And besides, 99% of all vaccinations are not the kind that justify the extreme measure described in the above post by Broomstick. But if you ask me about that particular case and if the Indian government was right I will say YES 100%.

The more hardcore people are going to do that anyway, but the US legal system already allows for parents to let their children die from easily cured diseases due to religious objections (how many kids of Jehovah's Witnesses have died because they couldn't get a blood transfusion?), so the vaccine issue can't really be forced at this point.

I think you can guess my opinion on that particular issue. But let's not derail the thread that much.

[Akhlut]

Are you incapable of suppressing your totalitarian urges?

Why should I? What is wrong with a little force if the end result is beneficial? You make it sound that anything forced on people was a bad thing because it is forced. By that logic if I was to hand out free money and force people at gun point to take it than I would still be evil for forcing them. Because this is the same thing, just better. Vaccinations save lives, period. How is forcing someone to have his life saved from suffering and death a bad thing?

One must look at the ends before adminstering the means. Part of the ends of gunpoint coercion is that it infuriates a lot of people. For smallpox, that's legitimate because it is a scourge that has a mortality rate of 30+% (and, frankly, if we had a disease that we could vaccinate against that was killing a third of anyone it infected, people would be lining up for the vaccine even if that one was proven to produce autism in 1% of the people taking it); measles and most other diseases in the west have much smaller mortality rates, usually a great deal under 5%. However, due to their (formerly) widespread nature, they still usually result in a modest number of deaths. Now, with modern vaccination programs, this can usually be reduced and we're only fighting against a relatively small number of people on the issue. The best to solve this, especially in the US, isn't through gunpoint coercion because that will have a violent backlash and you'll end up with MORE people not going through with vaccinations, not LESS. So, you'll end up worse off than when you started, whereas if you go through with a plan on educating people about the function of vaccines and why they're necessary and why nearly everyone needs them, in combination with putting speedbumps in the way to get non-medical exemptions, you'll find yourself getting much better results.

And besides, 99% of all vaccinations are not the kind that justify the extreme measure described in the above post by Broomstick. But if you ask me about that particular case and if the Indian government was right I will say YES 100%.

You were a bit ambiguous, seeing as you said "vaccines are a special case," seemingly indicating that ALL vaccines might require gunpoint coercion to administer if necessary. While for smallpox it certainly was, I don't think using such means is productive for the less lethal problems of measles, rubella, or the like, as detailed above. While I think MMR vaccines should be totally mandatory except for those medically exempt because of the problems associated with rubella, that is neither here nor there.

[Simon_Jester]

Are you incapable of suppressing your totalitarian urges?

Why should I? What is wrong with a little force if the end result is beneficial? You make it sound that anything forced on people was a bad thing because it is forced. By that logic if I was to hand out free money and force people at gun point to take it than I would still be evil for forcing them. Because this is the same thing, just better. Vaccinations save lives, period. How is forcing someone to have his life saved from suffering and death a bad thing?

We've had conversations like this before, but I'll assume you aren't trolling because my response is fairly short. There are good reasons to be cautious about the use of force to compel people to accept things "for their own good."

The main problem is that once you accept that the state will routinely use force to override citizens' objections on things like this, you lose the ability to tell which things the state should be doing.

One of the most powerful forms of insurance against bad policies which hurt the public is the knowledge that the public will protest or resist being abused. If you try to rearrange everyone's farm properties according to some bizarre land redistribution scheme a few guys cooked up in a basement three weeks before The Revolution, this is probably a bad idea. The farmers will protest, and you should be listening to the protest. Even in nondemocratic governments, there is a huge amount of expertise and perspectives which exist outside the state bureaucracy, and which must be factored into state planning.

This is related to the concept of the right to petition.

When you start stepping on anyone who complains or resists what they see as abusive treatment, without bothering to consult them, you are going to start creating problems for yourself very quickly. It's all very well to give people their smallpox vaccinations whether they like it or not, but if you're justifying this to yourself by saying the state has a right to force people to do things "for their own good," what happens when the state decides it's "for the people's good" to do something stupid or destructive?

What happens when your government starts screwing up the watershed in a misguided effort to turn desert into farmland, and winds up making farmland into desert? What happens when your government decides to impose intolerable working conditions on people in particular industries because the latest Five Year Plan includes a few misplaced decimal points and the only way to get production back on track is to have people working 16-hour shifts? What happens when your government starts inflicting forced sterilization on citizens as part of an ill-conceived population control campaign, as happened in India under Indira Ghandi?

To avoid abuse and stupidity in high office, there has to be a balance of power between the government and the people. And that balance of power cannot be maintained if the government is free to use its monopoly on armed force to overrule the people whenever the people disagree with it.

[Samuel]

There is also the problem where you get the wrong people. You start using guns and stop listening and you might end up vaccinating people who have already been vaccinated (waste of resources) or people who have medical problems with it (and you cripple/kill them).

I would have suffered under such a program. I'm allergic to the whooping cough vaccine so I didn't get it. Instead I got smaller doses. They were completely useless as I found out at the age of 14 when I learnt that it was more of a vomiting disease. If however, I was forced to have the full vaccine, there might have been extremely unpleasent side effects.

And to those parents who claims their children is autistic due to vaccines; frankly, i do not give a damn about your kids. I really don't, to heck with them. There are millions or more patients who are vulnerable to diseases and don't get autism from medication who needed vaccines. I really wouldn't mind even if my children gets autism from vaccines, assuming there is such a connection, because I know in the long run, vaccines benefit civilization more than the picketing concerns of a minority of these brainless, ignorant, paranoid, good for nothing panic parasites.

If it was true, the best answer would be not vaccinating individuals who are vulnerable to such an effect, not ignoring the results.

[PeZook]

Purple's unsurprising lack of understanding of the follies of totalitarian solutions to complex social problems aside, welcome to the first quarter of 2011: the WHO published an announcement a few weeks ago showing a staggering growth of measles cases in Europe, especially in France.

In the first three months of 2011, France reported 4937 cases. In the entirety of 2010, they had 5090 cases.

WHO summary with sources

[Purple]

@Akhlut

Well I certainly am not advocating using gun point coercion for freaking fly shots. But Anything that has a mortality rate of say 1% or greater and is infectious is another story. And yes, there will be backlash but why care? After all, let people riot all they want as long as they do what is right. It's better than what we do now where we let people say what ever they want and allow them to ruin their lives and the lives of inocents around them by making stupid suicide choices. This at least gets rid of the second part.

And what do you mean by LESS? Seriously, 100% people would get vactinated. After all, they would have no freaking choice. What can they do? Have a standoff with the government? I can totally see a civil war, complete with pipe bombs and home made dirty bombs breaking out over measles shots.


@Simon_Jester (from here downward)

We've had conversations like this before, but I'll assume you aren't trolling because my response is fairly short. There are good reasons to be cautious about the use of force to compel people to accept things "for their own good."

I can't see how that is a bad thing in this case. I mean this is not some sort of arbitrary land reform or wacky law. It is the state stepping in to tell people they are not allowed to cause them self horrible pain and suffering fallowed by death.

It's the same thing the government does when they massively penalize cigarettes and work to stamp out drug abuse. The government taking steps to make sure stupid people don't ruin their own and the lives of others.

One of the most powerful forms of insurance against bad policies which hurt the public is the knowledge that the public will protest or resist being abused. If you try to rearrange everyone's farm properties according to some bizarre land redistribution scheme a few guys cooked up in a basement three weeks before The Revolution, this is probably a bad idea. The farmers will protest, and you should be listening to the protest. Even in nondemocratic governments, there is a huge amount of expertise and perspectives which exist outside the state bureaucracy, and which must be factored into state planning.

The problem here is how you define abuse. Used to be that people knew how to differentiate stupid decisions like the mentioned land reforms from good ones like say anti drug laws and compulsory vaccination. Now a day, people just think anything forced on them is abuse even if it is a good thing forced upon them with the best of intentions just because of the force factor.

And that is a bad way of thinking that makes no sense. I mean, why should the government not be allowed to force things that are good for everyone?

When you start stepping on anyone who complains or resists what they see as abusive treatment, without bothering to consult them, you are going to start creating problems for yourself very quickly. It's all very well to give people their smallpox vaccinations whether they like it or not, but if you're justifying this to yourself by saying the state has a right to force people to do things "for their own good," what happens when the state decides it's "for the people's good" to do something stupid or destructive?

And what happens when you do consult them and it turns out their arguments are nonsense based off things like internet crackpots and religion? The problem here is not that the government should force it's vision on people no mater what. I am not advocating that. What I am saying is that when the evidence is stacked against the people than the government bloody well should do it's job.

I mean, here we have a clear cut case. Medical experts, studies and years of experience all show vaccination to be a good thing. And the counter argument are internet crackpots. It's not an ambiguous thing here.

What happens when your government starts screwing up the watershed in a misguided effort to turn desert into farmland, and winds up making farmland into desert? What happens when your government decides to impose intolerable working conditions on people in particular industries because the latest Five Year Plan includes a few misplaced decimal points and the only way to get production back on track is to have people working 16-hour shifts? What happens when your government starts inflicting forced sterilization on citizens as part of an ill-conceived population control campaign, as happened in India under Indira Ghandi?

Those things are vastly diffrent than forcing people to take a shot or two to save them from horrible suffering and death don't you think? I mean seriously, the best examples you can come up with are failed political experiments undertaken by crackpots with no scientific backing let alone sanity. Why not go all out and cite the final solution of the jewish question as an example to support your side?

To avoid abuse and stupidity in high office, there has to be a balance of power between the government and the people. And that balance of power cannot be maintained if the government is free to use its monopoly on armed force to overrule the people whenever the people disagree with it.

Now whenever, just when the government is absolutely, unmistakably proven to be right by a myriad of sources like here. That is why this is that one special case. Because it is so freaking clear cut that a blind monkey could tell you the answer.


I mean, I don't quite understand how anyone can be against this. This is not some arbitrary thing like religion or sexual orientation we are talking about here. The whole argument boils down to: Should the government force people to make the choice that does NOT cause them and others horrible suffering and death.

So like, if I walk into a room with a torture murdered and tell you:
"This man is a horrible person. He might one day decide to torture and murder you. And now, he is going to ask your permission to do that one day in the future if he ever feels like it. He might not ever do it, but he might if you allow him now."

Now, under that situation. Do you think it would be good or evil for me to make the call for you and just say no?


But either way, I rest my case. If you answer good to my last question than you agree with me. And I dare you to answer evil.

[Broomstick]

Well I certainly am not advocating using gun point coercion for freaking fly shots. But Anything that has a mortality rate of say 1% or greater and is infectious is another story.

Actually.... at times influenza has had signficantly greater than 1% mortality. Even though flu normaly has around a 0.25% mortality rate, that still represents tens of thousands of deaths world wide per year. In some cases where a disease is highly contagious even a low mortality rate can result in large numbers of dead people.

And yes, there will be backlash but why care? After all, let people riot all they want as long as they do what is right.

Ask Gaddafi about the problem of widespread riots spawned by disastifaction with the government. Why care? Because “everybody else” outnumbers you.

And what do you mean by LESS? Seriously, 100% people would get vactinated. After all, they would have no freaking choice.

So, you're really going to vaccinate 100% of all people? Even those who, for genuine medical reasons, can not be vaccinated without great risk of a horrible, painful death and/or permanent disability? Vaccinations do have some real risks, it's not all fluff and mirrors. The worst, of course, are the live vaccines though one of them we hopefully will never need to use again (for smallpox) and in some cases safer versions have been made (polio) that no longer need live virus. Even something as common and seemingly innocuous as a flu vaccine has caused fatalities in certain indivdiuals.

100% compliance is not actually needed. Percentages in the 90's are typically enough.

What can they do? Have a standoff with the government?

Yep.

I can totally see a civil war, complete with pipe bombs and home made dirty bombs breaking out over measles shots.

Check out the connection between Islamic extremists and resistance to vaccinating against polio in, say, Nigeria some time.

We've had conversations like this before, but I'll assume you aren't trolling because my response is fairly short. There are good reasons to be cautious about the use of force to compel people to accept things "for their own good."

I can't see how that is a bad thing in this case. I mean this is not some sort of arbitrary land reform or wacky law. It is the state stepping in to tell people they are not allowed to cause them self horrible pain and suffering fallowed by death.

Most communicable diseases do not, in fact, result in “horrible pain and suffering followed by death” in most cases. They typically result in annoyance, some suffering, and recovery. It's a drain on resources, it is not necessary for children (or adults) to experience them, and of course there are some tragedies that are entirely preventable.

That's why a trade off can be discussed. The diseases routinely vaccinated against aren't like rabies, you know, where failure to vaccinate is 100% fatal.

In fact, the only argument for coercion here is because such diseases are contagious, that is, a person's refusal can affect others. Western nations allow adults to refuse medical treatment of any sort, even when such refusal is fatal. You can't argue “it's for their own good” because adults are allowed to make medical decisions contrary to continued life. You have to make the argument that the public good of preventing people from spreading disease to others outweighs the social harm that may arise from coercion.

And that is a bad way of thinking that makes no sense. I mean, why should the government not be allowed to force things that are good for everyone?

Because if you aren't free to make wrong decisions as well as correct ones you aren't free at all. And freedom means a lot to people, enough some are willing to kill and die for it.

I mean, here we have a clear cut case. Medical experts, studies and years of experience all show vaccination to be a good thing. And the counter argument are internet crackpots. It's not an ambiguous thing here.

Actually, medical experts, studies, and years of experience show that there are some real risks to vacinations. They have certainly become MUCH safer over time, but those risks much be assessed and weighed against the benefits of vaccines. I think failure to communicate risk factors in a way understandable to people has allowed some of the quacks to mislead people.

[madd0ct0r]

Reading back over my email correspondence with the lady who was unsure whether to vaccinate her child a couple of points stand out:

1. She did not think vaccines cause autism
2. She was against unnecessary use of medicines.
3. she had had bad experiences with doctors prescribing corticoids to her 2 yr old. for a cold.
4. She said she'd been checking online, and found a very strong binary split, with the information either being anti-all conventional medicine or anti-all hippy stuff. She specifically name checked homeopathy. grrr.

2. is a very common viewpoint. I know many people who dislike taking paracetamol for anything less then a migraine. And since vaccines have been so successful, people misjudge the risk of childhood diseases.

3. Reinforces the point 2. It also undermines the doctor's authority, so when they state 'you need to do this' people are less likely to believe them. Especially if they have to pay for it (unknown in this case).

I don't think making it compulsory would necessarily help here, as suspicion of a doctor's authority tends to go hand-in-hand with suspicion of all authority. And parents will NOT risk their childs health under coercion.

I think education would be more helpful. You will never convince 100% of people, but laying out the facts in an approachable manner, with links to the stat's for those who want to burrow deeper might be the way to go.
That's assuming most people are inherently reasonable, an assumption that has bitten me in the past.

[Simon_Jester]

I can't see how that is a bad thing in this case. I mean this is not some sort of arbitrary land reform or wacky law. It is the state stepping in to tell people they are not allowed to cause them self horrible pain and suffering fallowed by death.

It's the same thing the government does when they massively penalize cigarettes and work to stamp out drug abuse. The government taking steps to make sure stupid people don't ruin their own and the lives of others.

You will notice that you do not see people being told not to smoke at gunpoint. Other drugs are criminalized and the targets of armed police... and in case you hadn't noticed, this results in prisons choked full of nonviolent drug offenders, and the drugs stay on the streets. Look at the US. How many millions of lives have we ruined with drug charges? How much good has it actually done us?

You cannot outlaw human nature, Purple.

One of the most powerful forms of insurance against bad policies which hurt the public is the knowledge that the public will protest or resist being abused. If you try to rearrange everyone's farm properties according to some bizarre land redistribution scheme a few guys cooked up in a basement three weeks before The Revolution, this is probably a bad idea. The farmers will protest, and you should be listening to the protest. Even in nondemocratic governments, there is a huge amount of expertise and perspectives which exist outside the state bureaucracy, and which must be factored into state planning.

The problem here is how you define abuse. Used to be that people knew how to differentiate stupid decisions like the mentioned land reforms from good ones like say anti drug laws and compulsory vaccination. Now a day, people just think anything forced on them is abuse even if it is a good thing forced upon them with the best of intentions just because of the force factor.

And that is a bad way of thinking that makes no sense. I mean, why should the government not be allowed to force things that are good for everyone?

How does the government know what is good for everyone?

Indira Ghandi thought it was a great idea to enact population control by sterilizing people. So she decided to do it- to thousands of people. Under coercion- people were forced to go under the knife, in unsafe conditions. Objections like "Um, you shouldn't be sterilizing people with dirty surgical instruments" and "your people are forcibly sterilizing people who haven't had kids, even though the policy is supposed to be to only sterilize people who have had kids" simply did not reach her for some time... because she was ignoring such things.

After all, birth control was for India's own good, and the people who disagreed with her were all stupid ingrates, right?

Wrong.

That's how tyranny works, Purple. There is literally no such thing as a reliably benevolent and wise dictatorship. All it takes is one really bad idea, and that bad idea will be rammed down everyone's throats.

We've had this argument before, and I have yet to see you say anything in response to it but "but THIS time, it'd be done right and I wouldn't make any mistakes!" Do you understand why I think that's a bad argument?

...

Come to think of it, are you actually being serious here, about what you believe about politics? Or are you just arguing totalitarianism for your own amusement again?

And what happens when you do consult them and it turns out their arguments are nonsense based off things like internet crackpots and religion? The problem here is not that the government should force it's vision on people no mater what. I am not advocating that. What I am saying is that when the evidence is stacked against the people than the government bloody well should do it's job.

Who decides when the evidence is against the people? Presumably the government. Which works great as long as the government is always right, which it won't be for long.

You see, Purple, sometimes it is a good idea to never do a certain thing, because it is not safe. Never stick a fork in an electrical socket- sure, you'd only get electrocuted sometimes if you did it, not always, but the risk is too great. Likewise, never make a policy of forcing people to undergo medical procedures at gunpoint, save under the most horrible, desperate of conditions (and a measles outbreak ain't that desperate)... because the risk of it being habit-forming is too great.

Those things are vastly diffrent than forcing people to take a shot or two to save them from horrible suffering and death don't you think? I mean seriously, the best examples you can come up with are failed political experiments undertaken by crackpots with no scientific backing let alone sanity. Why not go all out and cite the final solution of the jewish question as an example to support your side?

Because the "failed political experiments undertaken by crackpots with no scientific backing" were all undertaken by people with dictatorial powers who sincerely believed that what they were doing was right- and who could find experts to tell them it was right.

For example, India genuinely did need population control- but mass sterilization campaigns in the slums weren't the right way to do it. Russia genuinely did need farmland- but draining the Aral Sea wasn't the way to get it. And so on. In these cases, the people in charge were told by qualified engineers and physicians that what they were doing was necessary... but the experts, and the dictators, screwed up. The projects weren't implemented with proper caution and carefulness, because there is no need to be careful about hurting people when you can threaten to shoot them if they argue with you- you can just bulldoze over their objections while blindly assuming that it must be primitive idiots who have no good reason for disagreeing with you.

You see, Purple, there is no reliable 100% certain difference between a good idea and a bad idea. Sometimes a really really bad idea looks like a good idea. The only way to avoid implementing bad ideas is to have feedback, and preserving those feedback mechanisms is too important for a wise ruler to start smashing them on a whim.

Now, under that situation. Do you think it would be good or evil for me to make the call for you and just say no?

But either way, I rest my case. If you answer good to my last question than you agree with me. And I dare you to answer evil.

Your question has a huge flaw in it- you assume that you know, with certainty. That you always know, and that it's OK to get into the habit of doing as you please to people because you know what you're doing. You can kill, or threaten to kill, anyone who opposes you on this issue, because you are just that much smarter than them.

That is a dangerous habit, because it never stops with the issues where you really are right and they really are wrong.

[Samuel]

It is worth noting that some groups in the US would use force to resist a mandatory vaccination program, not because they are against vaccines, but because they don't trust the government. The Tuskegee experimentation and other government activities means that there are people who will asume the government is just running a massive experiment.

This sounds insane and paranoid except in the Tuskegee case did run a massive experiment for essentially no reason. Start using force and it will end up only against people who think this way, reinforcing their beliefs.

So yeah, you can't use benevolent totalitarianism in a country where the previous usage of totalitarianism was to see how long it took for your skin to fall off.

Look at the US. How many millions of lives have we ruined with drug charges? How much good has it actually done us?

You cannot outlaw human nature, Purple.

In fairness, it worked for Prohibition. The drop in alcohol related deaths exceded the new deaths from organized crime and bad booze. Additionally, China managed to destroy its opium habit through such methods. If you are willing to be ruthless you can eliminate the drug problem.

The only way to avoid implementing bad ideas is to have feedback, and preserving those feedback mechanisms is too important for a wise ruler to start smashing them on a whim.

And even that doesn't work- look at eugenics. In the US it had a wide backing. You had political figures, scientists, intellectuals, everyone backing it and from most of the civilized world. It started as a progressive issue, but once the more foward thinking places signed on, more people joined in. This wasn't one off crazy dicators, but popular proposals that met little opposition.

My state, California is noted for its excessive democracy and liberalism. Out of the 32 states that had such laws California managed to be responsible responsible for a third of the sterilizations in the US. They were very foward thinking. Fortunately, world war 2 showed the world the horrors of eugenics and the program was discontinued...

in 1964.

If it makes you feel better, Sweden didn't stop until 1975.

When people complain about how interfering with other peoples lives because you know better is wrong, this is one of the reasons they hold such a belief.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. The track record of people who boast and strut about how they are so much more enlightened and rational, and therefore they're going to impose their will on minorities and conservative groups by force, is very bad. Most of the modern political philosophies that one might call the "dark side of the Enlightenment," the characteristically Western notions of government that turned out badly instead of turning out well, did that at one point or another. Even the better types of government weren't immune, as Samuel points out.

[K. A. Pital]

I could play Purple's devil advocate (I am deeply suspicious of the "human nature" argument, for example, as well as the argument that the US war on drugs is not yielding results simply because it is a War on Drugs, rather than the precise methods of this campaign boastfull called "war"). Alas, I am tired. Maybe when this disagreement comes up some other day or if there'll be enough of a tangent.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, it can be done properly- there is such a thing as benevolent dictatorship, it is possible for the state to employ the threat of force to make the citizenry do only those things that are necessary.

But the historical record of dictators attempting to do such is strewn with failures, and with things worse than failures: tyrants who took it into their head to change their people and succeeded in changing them for the worse.

The precedents are not encouraging, and given the level of sophistication and grasp of human subtleties Purple's shown, I damn sure wouldn't trust him anywhere near that kind of power. There are very few power-seeking people I can think of that I would trust with such.

At a bare minimum, no one should talk about using force to compel people to do things for their own good until they are capable of understanding why this is so often a bad idea. And of recognizing that their own opinion about what is important enough to justify using force to compel people to do things for their own good is usually not a good guide.

[K. A. Pital]

I thought of arguing it specifically vis the vaccination angle. After all, smallpox vaccination with live specimen was stopped long before proper vaccination was done. The WTO annihilated smallpox via mass vaccination, after all.

[PeZook]

Yeah, but the whole problem with that is that smallpox was freakin' deadly, so there was naturally less opposition to any measures taken to prevent it.

If you tried to force people to have flue shots or rubella vaccination, you run into the problem of people perceiving those as mild diseases (mostly because modern medical science can prevent people from dying due to those), and thus there'd be naturally higher opposition to forced mass vaccinations which would be seen as unnecessary.

P.S.

By the way, that's not to say there was no resistance to compulsory smallpox vaccination. In a way, the modern anti-vaccine movement is different only because it uses a different argument (the autism connection), but anti-vaccination movements in general are as old as the practice itself.

Heck out the Vaccine Revolt for what can happen if your force something on people who do not understand what you are trying to do. Not pretty. It's generally much better to get people to cooperate, but that requires long-term planning and commitment...

[Broomstick]

I thought of arguing it specifically vis the vaccination angle. After all, smallpox vaccination with live specimen was stopped long before proper vaccination was done.

Incorrect. Even today the smallpox vaccination is a live virus vaccination - it's just that they switched from actual smallpox (variola vera) to cowpox (vaccinia) which is closely related enough that immunity to cowpox also gives immunity to smallpox. That's one of the reasons why the smallpox vaccination has always had a high rate of side effects and even deaths compared to other vaccines, because you actually are deliberately giving someone an illness. Someone immunized with vaccinia will also become contagious and can potentially spread the virus to others, or if the person touches the immunization site then fails to wash his or her hands before touching another part of their bodies they can cause the infection to spread. This can have tragic results if the spread is to the eye, for example, as the vaccination or infection always leaves a scar. Wouldn't want that on your eye!