Richard’s analysis of conservatives and collective action problems gets to the heart of why some true conservatives reject vaccination. But let’s not forget that Christie and the child that is the lesser Paul are both money grubbing politicians, so it isn’t just ideology motivating them, it’s cash. Who are the right-wing deep pockets who win when vaccination loses? In other words, who wants to embrace the nuts to make some money?
The first and most obvious interest that profits from anti-vaxxing is the gun lobby. Anytime a public health authority is discredited, or has to concentrate on defending something as obviously right as vaccination, that’s less time and energy devoted to another public health menace, guns. What do you think our new Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, is working on right now? I’m guessing it doesn’t have anything to do with AK-47s.
Discrediting public health authorities also fits in to the anti-abortion crowd, who have been denying science for decades. I’m not sure that they have very deep pockets or rich nutty buddies. They certainly won’t appreciate the irony of stopping an abortion so an unvaccinated child can die of measles pneumonia or encephalitis. Still, it can’t hurt for a Republican who wants to be President to make some sweet love to the pro-coathanger lobby.
So, who am I missing? How can flirting with anti-vaxxing get Christie and Paul some sweet donations?
aimai
I think the case of the political grifter behind Ben Carson demonstrates that there are lots of small dollar donations to be picked up by tweaking the paranoid sensibilities of the know nothing crowd. And I also think that both Rand Paul and, to a greater extent, Christie, are puppets in the hands of their handlers who are looking for money and for attention anywhere they can get it–trying to market themselves to different slivers of the repbublican lizard brain (to mix my metaphors).
Look at Christie’s stupid trip to England. That was designed to impress one hypothetical crowd but designed so poorly that it won’t have its intended effect. My guess is that the vaccination thing is as poorly thought out. Please the folks in Iowa while pissing off everyone else especially in Jersey where its not a hot button issue? Christie tried to have it both ways and fucked it up.
In other words: I don’t think that just because these guys cater to a fringe sensibility that this will actually work for them. They and their advisors only know a few tricks.
chopper
i dunno about deep pockets, but it kind of smacks of pandering to the homeschool crowd.
Gene108
Do not forget the anti-evolution / young Earth crowd, which has spent over 100 years fighting science.
Or the anti- global warming folks.
Or the “if Obama is for it, I better be against it” crowd.
At this point, Republican policy is about creating enough frustration that their base gets more angry and fired up, while demoralizing the rest of ghe voters to not bother to vote.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I think Big Pharma wins as well. These diseases are awful. Most people alive nowadays have never seen them, much less had them. If you get them they require a lot of expensive treatment and drugs to try and insure that you don’t die, aren’t left sterile, aren’t left deaf or paralyzed or a drooling imbecile.
And Pharma doesn’t make any money from making vaccines. No upside there.
Lots of reasons to get the populace to forswear immunization, if you’re a dick. That being said, I’m firmly of the mindset that anyone who doesn’t get immunized deserves to die. And I’d totally be in favor of having immunizations be 100% voluntary, save that what ends up happening is that a non-insignificant number of people who DID get immunized end up dying in the ensuing epidemic as well.
So let’s get rid of the stupid exemptions and get every single American vaccinated. Period, no arguments allowed, get the shot or go to jail…and get the shot.
SatanicPanic
I don’t know if I believe that everything they do has a basis in self-interest. They could just believe in something really dumb because they’re really dumb. sometimes hard to pick out the motivations of aggressively stupid people.
Hawes
Big Coal. Or as it says on their business cards: “Science? What science?”
cahuenga
It’s simply all about evil government compelling an action. It’s a form of regulation.
Marc
As per TPM, young people are much more strongly opposed to mandatory vaccinations than older people are. By wide margins.
It’s their play for the youth vote – or, in this case, the vote of people who weren’t alive when we saw what happened without mass vaccinations.
MazeDancer
Science is a pack of evil lies and the foe of Freedom.
Very long list of Big Beneficiaries from that.
KG
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
the problem with that sentiment is that it’s usually kids that don’t get vaccinated, not because they don’t want to but because they have no agency in the issue. there’s also the issue of some people having legitimate reasons that they can’t be vaccinated (either another complicating health condition – weakened immune system or allergies). seriously, the irony of the anti-vaxxers is that almost all of them were vaccinated as kids.
dedc79
Sometimes lunacy is just lunacy. They’ve sold a whole host of people on the claims that science is bunk, that our government is totalitarian and incompetent and wants its own citizens to die, and that an individual’s freedom cannot/would not impinge at all on anyone else’s freedom. In short, they’ve boxed themselves into a corner.
I don’t think money is factoring into this much at all. But note that a common refrain of the anti-vaxxers is that vaccination is a big money grab by big pharma, the doctors, etc….
Elizabelle
I thought Richard’s critique of the anti-government sentiment underlying anti-vaxx was elegant and accurate.
Someone needs to tell them: you can be an individual within a community/society too. It’s not either/or.
Frankensteinbeck
It’s only about money to the extent that it maintains their base of voter support. We do have a democracy, as much as it’s not voting for what we want, and the 1% are only 1%. Statements like this are insults to the Kenyan-In-Chief, stoke the fires of conspiracy theorists, and feel good to the I Got Mine, Fuck You crowd. Any Republican candidate, grifter or not, has to stay the idol of the snarling rage-addict base to seem viable to donors.
Elizabelle
OT: AP reporting new novel being published by Harper Lee.
Written in the 1950s and set aside then, but wow.
Good to see Ms. Lee in the news for something other than an obituary.
Hope this turns out not to be a fraud …
dedc79
Human health and environmental crises present particularly difficult challenges to the libertarian ideal – because they most often and most obviously require collective action. Because the libertarian generally refuses to acknowledge any instance or area where collective action is necessary, their only remaining option is to deny the problem in the first place. Hence the penchant for claiming climate change is a hoax, or that vaccines do more harm then good. If climate change is real, if vaccination works, they know they’ve got no face-saving libertarian response.
aimai
@CONGRATULATIONS!: If you think that big pharma doesn’t manke money from vaccines that are regularly taken by millions of people you are off your rocker.
TR
@aimai:
“If you think that big pharma doesn’t manke money from vaccines that are regularly taken by millions of people you are off your rocker.”
My mother’s oncologist made money off treating her, too. Should we have just let the cancer rage on, so Big Doctor didn’t make a profit?
The pharmaceutical companies make a little money off vaccines. They make much, much more off pills that aren’t taken once, but have to be taken many times over to regulate a disease rather than eradicate it.
Bobby Thomson
@aimai: they do, but there’s more money in treatment. And as you probably know, Salk never patented the polio vaccine.
This is also a play for the anti-sex crowd because of the HPV vaccine.
rikyrah
Krispy Kreme locked up that Ebola Nurse…
and has the nerve to try and attempt to be anti-vaccine
cahuenga
@TR:
So the free market incentive is to “treat, not cure”.
gene108
@Marc:
Young folks have a much higher level of distrust of authority – science, government, etc. – than earlier generations,, from my anecdotal experience.
I’m not surprised.
Person, who is turning 25 in 2015, was 8 years old when Clinton got impeached, was 11 years old when 9/11/01 happened and was 12-13 years old, when Bush & Co. lied to get us into a war with Iraq and was 18 years old when the 2008 Great Recession hit.
Republicans, through crass political tactics, have successfully managed to create a generation of folks, who despite being less racist, more supportive of gays, etc. than earlier generations, have enough trust issues with authority that many will not embrace a liberal form of governance that requires government do anything above the bare minimum for society to function.
Lee Rudolph
There’s a headline running at this moment saying “Boehner says all children should be vaccinated”.
I haven’t read the story for fear of some severe disappointment, but if it’s true as written, good for him.
boatboy_srq
@chopper: There are some deep pockets there, mostly in the supply chain (textbooks, teaching aids, supplies). Hobby Lobby springs immediately to mind, and while I don’t keep up with the publishing side I know there are a couple of wingnutty bookbinders in the hoamskool trade.
MattF
@SatanicPanic: I think I agree with this. There’s a RWNJ synapse that fires under certain circumstances, and I can see how vaccination (like fluoridation) fits in. Now, I don’t think anyone is alleging (yet!) that vaccination is a commie conspiracy, but maybe I should just wait for it.
FlipYrWhig
I’m with cahuenga upstream. It’s mostly that they have an intense knee-jerk to the whole concept that the government can require anything. This time it happens to be about vaccines, but it’s not arising from specifically anti-vaccine flapdoodle. They’re the same way about not only health insurance but also light bulbs and dishwashing detergent. CANT MAKE ME might as well be the official Republican motto.
beltane
@Elizabelle: The problem is that we now have several generations of Americans who raised to think that narcissism is a virtue. This, combined with a steady erosion of critical thinking skills and an inadequate science education creates a perfect environment for all manner of woo and conspiracy theories to thrive. If I were on another planet looking down at us I would be saying “Wow, those humans that call themselves Americans consume an awful lot of resources and produce an awful lot of waste. And they sure do whine a lot. Maybe the rest of their species would be better off if there were fewer of them.”
Mandalay
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Good luck with that worthy idea. The number of medical exemptions is fairly low, and the real problem lies with the religious and philosophical exemptions. So getting rid of exemptions mostly boils down to getting rid of dozens of state laws permitting religious and philosophical objections.
For example, in 2013 Vermont had only 11 children with medical exemptions, but 412 with religious and philosophical exemptions.
Surprisingly, the best states were Mississippi and West Virginia. Each only had a handful of medical exemptions, and religious and philosophical exemptions were not allowed.
Frankensteinbeck
I just read Richard’s article in more detail. He leaves out the crucially important point that, as Rand Paul explicitly stated, conservative parents think they ‘own’ their children. They’re already pissed that their kids are forced to circulate with blacks and unbelievers. They’ll embrace any opportunity to give government involvement with their children the middle finger.
beltane
@FlipYrWhig: And yet they all demand that “those people” be perpetually subjected to governmental intrusions on freedom of the most invasive kind.
TR
@cahuenga:
Absolutely. Sort of a planned obsolescence for people.
boatboy_srq
@aimai: Vaccines normally aren’t big moneymakers for pharma: single, or single-digit, doses of preventative aren’t especially lucrative compared with long-term regular dosages of treatments. Also, most vaccines are time-tested: there aren’t that many patents to be had, and not much incentive to continue research improvements on a known workable solution. LOTS more money in the ongoing-prescription side of the business.
Or, what TR said.
TR
@Marc:
Because it’s purely theoretical for them. Once they start having kids of their own, they’ll become hypervigilant about this issue.
I know I didn’t give it one thought before my kids went to day care.
FlyingToaster
@Mandalay: Wow, that’s cool! Go WV and MS!
Alas, the Commonwealth (God Save It!) allows religious/philosophical exemptions, since the Mother Church is headquartered here. However, interestingly, private schools get to choose whether to honor those exemptions. Ours doesn’t — every kid gets every vaccine they’re medically able to tolerate.
Public schools have to honor the exemptions. Some towns’ schools have regulations that make you get an “informed consent” sheet from your child’s pediatrician if you don’t have them vaccinated. Which seems to be helping some, but we still are getting outbreaks, just like Vermont.
Back to digging out…
Mandalay
@FlipYrWhig:
Be careful about making this a solely Republican issue.
Mississippi does not allow religious and philosophical exemptions for vaccination. However, California does, and in 2013 there were 17,253 kids claiming religious/philosophical exemptions. We can’t lay the blame for that situation with the Republicans.
Mandalay
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
The exact opposite is true. Big pharma really does want everyone to be vaccinated:
Follow the money.
gene108
@beltane:
High school graduation rates are at record highs. The youngins’ of today are the most educated generation of Americans ever.
The problem is not a lack of education, it is the erosion of trust in authority created by 20+ years of Republican attacks on government ranging from government shutdowns, to impeaching a President over an extra-marital affair, to lying to invade Iraq.
Democrats are not perfect, but the current crop of Republican state governments no longer care – and do not need to care, looking at the 2014 election results – about basic thing like economic opportunity, unemployment, education etc. They can adhere to a destructive, cynical, doctrine and be re-elected.
So why should the youngin’s trust government? Government’s gutting their education funding, getting their teachers fired, raising their college tuition, all in order to cut taxes for the rich.
beltane
@Mandalay: When I was an administrator at a child care facility the only cases of religious/philosophical exemptions I dealt with were from neo-hippies, not the Republican types (this was in VT). Younger, hippie-ish types are almost always libertarians with entitlement issues. The older, authentic hippies still have memories of polio outbreaks and are nowhere near as ignorant as their successors.
beltane
@gene108: Spending many years in school does not mean one has received an education. I am the parent of high-schoolers and a recent HS graduate. Their high school curriculum was almost homeopathic, diluted to the point of nothingness. Teachers and administrators have become so cowed by pushy parents that all semblance of academic rigor has gone out the window.
ET
Many rank and file Republicans who think any and every government mandate is bad because it was mandated by the/a government. They might not initially believe vaccinations are bad but they suck up what anti-vaxxers of all stripes say and mix that with their anti-government feels and Ta-Dah! They may not give money but they do vote and they vote in midterms.
TR
@Mandalay:
I’m sorry, but did you really just drop a statement from the leading anti-vaccination lobbying group about how Big Pharma was lobbying for vaccines? A statement with no outside sourcing, no verifiable citations, no nothing to back it up? And then cross your arms and harrumph “Follow the money” like you’d just schooled us all?!
Drop me some unbiased sourcing on that and I’ll follow the citations.
TR
@Mandalay:
On this, we agree. Most of the anti-vax parents are idiots on the left, not the right.
lol
@Mandalay:
And the vast vast majority of those exemptions are happening in private schools.
It’s upper-class white people of all political persuasions who are the problem frankly.
gene108
@TR:
Who do you think is not vaccinating their kids?
The 45 year old parent with teenagers or the 25 year old parent with a toddler?
Just saying the younger generation are the ones, who are not vaccinating. They are the only ones young enough to have kids, who are young enough to be up for vaccinations.
dedc79
@TR: Is it that most of the anti-vax parents are on the left or that most of the anti-vax parents that WE tend to encounter (in conversation, in articles, on facebook) are on the left? I ask because recent polling shows considerably more antipathy toward vaccinations on the right than on the left. It makes me wonder whether a vocal, but very small, minority on the left is creating the appearance that this is more of a left-wing problem than a right-wing problem.
raven
@Elizabelle:
NYT
TR
@dedc79:
Hmm, that’s an excellent point. You’re right, all my assumptions here come from the vocal celebrities (McCarthy, Jay Cutler’s wife) and California communities where there have been outbreaks. The numbers are probably big on the right, especially with the home schooled.
Ben Cisco
@Lee Rudolph: The word has gone out; Cruz (?) is supposedly issuing a statement later.
Which makes the beatdown Tapper is absorbing on Twitter (for going all in with some seriously anti-vaxxer woo-pitchers) all the more hilarious.
TR
@gene108:
The polling broke down according to age on the topic of “should vaccinations be mandatory?” not “Are you vaccinating your own kids this year?”
My point was that more 45-year-olds have lived through the toddler stage than 25-year-olds have, and once you cross that experience, the less likely you are to treat this as some sort of abstraction.
Keith G
Blah.
Dog. Wrong tree. Barking.
I cannot see how it helps at all. And it actually would hurt more than help. Paul was raised by an anti government paranoid. So he comes by such lunacy honestly.
Christy’s fuck up may in part be an over reaction to the shit stirred up when he jailed a nurse during the great Ebola scare of ’14. But, it is also the kind of thoughtless err that a mouthy dufus is likely to make. I would be surprised if the mistermix thesis above held any water.
beltane
@dedc79: That’s a good question. Polling aside, however, I have seen data indicating that the lowest vaccination rates are found in affluent, left-leaning communities. Waldorf schools, in particular, are hotbeds of anti-vaxxing. This is with kids who actually attend school. I wonder how RW survivalists/ religious nuts who home school are counted in the statistics. These people may be truly off the grid.
Bobby Thomson
@dedc79: the polling I’ve seen shoes anti-vaccine idiocy across the political spectrum.
JPL
Deep question… The anti-regulation Senator from North Carolina Thom Tillis, thinks that employers should be able to opt out the requiring of hand washing for employees. He would make them post a sign though. Isn’t this ridding businesses of a pesky regulation, only to replace it with another one?
Ben Cisco
@JPL: You’re surmising that the concept has to make sense. Trust me, it doesn’t.
Tillis is the latest in a long string of dimmer bulbs (don’t think low-wattage, think tulip!) making their way to DC from NC, and he is as much an embarrassment as any of them. The Fear of A Black President may yet kill us all.
MattF
Hillary Clinton has announced that the earth is round and the sky is blue:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/03/hillary-clinton-likens-anti-vaxxers-to-science-deniers-the-earth-is-round-the-sky-is-blue-and-vaccineswork/?hpid=z2
The fact that this moves the Overton Window is just amazing.
Mandalay
@TR:
Well….
Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22420796
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/business/21merck.html?_r=0
There are a gazillion others, but BJ has limits on how may links I can post. Use Google to educate yourself.
If you believe that drug companies don’t lobby to push their vaccines you are incredibly naive. You might want to get a clue about the situation before posting abusive nonsense.
beltane
John Boehner says “all children should be vaccinated” http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/boehner-all-children-should-receive-vaccines-n299266 Obviously a RINO.
gratuitous
There’s also two other, minor angles: work the refs and punch the hippies. Being against vaccinations plays to a certain mindset that public anything is anathema, even public health. So it’s a signal to the privatizers that the politician is one of them.
Punching the hippies is a little more subtle in that it’s not punching actual hippies (and it almost never is) who might also object to childhood vaccinations for little Moondance or Riverotter, but it’s calculate to piss off some mythical liberal nanny-staters: “Nyah, nyah, you can’t tell US what to do! We’ll even put our own kids at risk if we think it will aggravate you.” Think of Sarah Palin making s’mores on a camping trip with her family. She did it not as a treat for the littles, but because it would make Michelle Obama sad. Sure, her kids might get juvenile diabetes, but that’s a risk Mrs. Palin was willing to take if she could poke her finger in the First Lady’s eye about childhood health and the fight against obesity.
different-church-lady
@beltane:
Years and years and years of reflexive distrust of “Big (blank)” in those social circles. They don’t want Monsanto’s nasty nuclear junk in their kids, because tobacco companies lie. Yes, that’s phrasing it as parody, but I do think it all just munges up like that in their heads. They are perfectly willing to believe a vaccine can cause autism, because that’s the kind of behavior they’ve been conditioned to expect from any and all companies due to the paranoia that’s the result of years of indulging in despair porn.
Or so I might suggest.
catclub
@different-church-lady:
as an article on right-wing mailing lists noted, paranoids make the best marks for scams.
different-church-lady
@catclub: Sure, but who is scamming the affluent left? Other than NPR and Charlie Rose, I mean.
catclub
@gratuitous:
relabeling public schools as ‘government schools’ is part of that long game.
rejection of ‘we are all in this together’ goes right along with forgetting about ‘love thy neighbor’.
Origuy
A commenter named StephenMeansMe over at LGF found a libertarian nut named Murray Rothbard who doesn’t believe that parents have an obligation toward their children.
catclub
@different-church-lady: Lululemon, pumpkin seed oil ‘makers’, and the scented candle bosses.
Actually they are much more insidious, we don’t even notice it.
different-church-lady
@catclub: And Volvo. Don’t know how I missed that one…
The way to get them on board is to label the vaccine “Guten free” and allow them to order it through a smartphone app
catclub
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/us/politics/measles-proves-delicate-issue-to-gop-field.html
relevant!
I think the GOP is almost happy to have an issue where they can disagree without being too concerned what is the correct stance. Unlike, say, immigration.
This is the only part of ‘vaccines taking attention away from other things’ that makes sense to me.
Matt McIrvin
Several years ago it came out that Big Tobacco was surprisingly active in funding anti-environmentalist propaganda, and specifically the smearing of Rachel Carson. The aim seemed to be to discredit international research and regulatory bodies in general, and by extension the World Health Organization, which was very down on smoking. A lot of the people involved went on to be big names in climate-change denialism.
So sometimes that kind of collusion does happen. But in this case, I’d expect the incentives to actually swing toward being anti-vax, since WHO is big on vaccines too.
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady: NPR and Charlie Rose. LOL. Tell it.
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady:
Good term. I think it applies to a lot of Democratic messaging, too.
Villago Delenda Est
@dedc79: My sister the borderline wingnut is big on the GMO labeling issue. No problem there, I think that GMO labeling is a good ideal. More information out there about products helps the market do its job.
The problem is, she thinks that Monsanto is into GMOs because they want to kill people.
Now, I tried telling her that it’s even worse than that…that Monsanto does not care if GMOs kill people, they only care about profit, and if some people have to die for Monsanto to profit, well, that’s just a cost of Monsanto doing business.
Depraved indifference vs. malice.
She doesn’t comprehend the entire rent seeking aspect of Monsanto’s GMO pushing. That GMO might not be as bad as she thinks, but Monsanto’s desire to patent seeds and then suing farmers who were unfortunate enough to be downwind of the patented GMO crop and have their crops cross pollinated with Monsanto’s are being sued for patent infringement is pretty bad…well, too many syllables there, or something.
She’s been railing about vaccinations recently, too, and apparently she has the whole of human experience behind her assertions.
Uh-huh.
Matt McIrvin
@Origuy: Rothbard isn’t just any libertarian nut, he’s one of the primary thinkers of libertarian nuttery, an ideological lodestar for the movement maybe to a greater extent than Rand. I think the fearless willingness to say completely crack-brained things if the axioms require it is a positive trait for this personality type.
Calouste
@cahuenga: Libertarianism is the political philosophy for people whose emotional development stopped the first time their mother told them to tidy up their room.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
As others have probably mentioned, there doesn’t have to be a direct grifting angle for this to be seen as a “winner”. Lots of Republican politics is tribalism. “I’m one of you! They’re not!!!1” If Christie and Paul think that this meme can get out there that they’re the “True Conservative!” that supports individual choice and opposes oppressive mandates, etc., and the other can’t, especially if it gets out there under the MSM radar, then they think they’re golden.
Once they’re the “True Conservative!”, then the money will automatically roll in.
They’re playing a long game.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
catclub
OT: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/02/03/oscar_romero_sainthood_pope_declares_salvadoran_archbishop_a_martyr.html
Wow, I wonder why JPII and Ratzinger never got around to it.
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle: Got it from my days when I used to think it was worthwhile swimming upstream at the GOS. Someone wrote a diary there that completely nailed the zeitgeist that had taken hold. Which, of course, was roundly ignored, and things have only gotten a thousand times worse since.
The Dems, I think, picked up on that blogosphere zeitgeist and started to actively traffic in it when they realized they would get a response out of “the base”. But in my mind they’re just creating their own version of the Tea Party monster, and it will be just as uncontrollable as the original.
catclub
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I think that pointing out that the philosophical objection laws are just a convenience for liberal hippies could unite the GOP against that part of the anti-vax movement.
Of course, it was put in to avoid religious bias. Hey, why don’t we tell them that the Taliban is against polio vaccination?
catclub
@different-church-lady: Andrew Tobias is a nice anti-dote.
MattF
@Matt McIrvin: I suppose that TobaccoWorld has experienced a sort of natural selection– anyone who thinks that maybe regulatory bodies can do some good has left the room and the company, long ago.
dedc79
@Villago Delenda Est: There was some recent polling (from Pew maybe?) that showed the divide between scientists and the general public on a number of issues. The results showed that the scientific community is considerably less concerned about GMO/pesticides than the average person.
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady: Thank you. Bookmarked it.
I don’t think the Democratic base responds the same as the GOP does. One local candidate was sending out these piteous emails: we’re losing! They have more money! I’m going home! and all I could think was “Why do I want to support some whining surrender monkey?”
Whereas the GOP base might have sent some $$ to keep Satan or Stalin (incarnate as the Democratic candidate) out of the statehouse.
Mostly, you don’t want people deciding “these issues are too complex for anyone to do anything about it” or “why should I even vote?”
And there is the triumph of the Republican/plutocrat/oligarch messaging end game.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@dedc79:
Not to go into Cervantes-mode, but one needs to be careful about that Pew poll. That question was about eating GMO/pesticide-treated foods. Not about whether monocultures were bad, or whether artificial pesticides are wrecking the environment, or lots of other things that people and scientists might think are bad about modern agriculture even if eating the final product isn’t any more dangerous than “normal/natural” crops.
Cheers,
Scott.
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle: At this point in our political history, there’s basically only one difference between liberals and conservatives.
Conservatives think the world is going to hell and the only thing that can prevent it is stopping liberals.
Liberals, on the other hand, think the world is going to hell and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.
trollhattan
@Matt McIrvin:
We forget this at our peril. And the seeds sewn have sprouted and taken root, perhaps more deeply than even the perpetrators anticipated or even desired. All hail the next quarter’s P&L.
Merchants of Doubt
dedc79
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: That’s a great and important clarification – the divide was with respect to the safety of eating GMO.
And if we expand our look beyond the core question of whether it’s safe or not to eat GMO or pesticide-covered crops, we shouldn’t just look at the environmental costs of monoculture or the application of pesticides (which are by the way, generally much safer than the previous generations of pesticides), but also the need to feed a fast growing global population without destroying what remains of the natural environment. How many of the people who rail against big ag, Monsanto, etc… are ready to part with their almonds (and their almond milk!!)?
trollhattan
@Villago Delenda Est:
Maybe it would help to tell her “No, Monsanto wants to kill the competition. And farmers’ ability to harvest their own seed for next year’s planting.”
I’m very much for labeling GMO-containing products and suspect most of the pushback is due to the food industry’s realization they can’t presently account for where their raw materials come from. Pesky, that.
Matt McIrvin
@MattF: Aside from defending smoking, there’s also the simple fact that they’re an agricultural lobby, and so are directly interested in things like deregulating pesticides.
I think the rise of vaping might have actually given them a new lease on life: there’s a market for nicotine that isn’t obviously associated with lung cancer. That might change the political equations a little bit.
Mike in NC
@Calouste: I have an older brother who is more contrarian than libertarian. For example, he has never in his life worn a seatbelt because he doesn’t like “being told what to do”. The same goes with No Parking and No Smoking signs.
Matt McIrvin
@dedc79: Of the relatives in my extended family who spam Facebook with political memes, one of the few who is a liberal is really more obsessed with the horror of GMOs than with anything else, and she’s fully bought into the idea that these are terrible Frankenstein poisons in our food.
There’s something about the idea of adulterated food that I think mentally hits people very hard: it reminds me of the reaction to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and the way that, to his dismay, his intended primary message about the plight of factory workers and the need for a socialist utopia got completely drowned out by his side message that there was terrible stuff getting into our food.
NonyNony
@trollhattan:
Eh – I think the pushback from the food industry is because they know that labeling their product as genetically modified is killer anti-advertising. People are avoiding foods that are too heavily processed because of their negative health impact. The average consumer doesn’t sit there and think “this Wonder Bread is heavily processed garbage, so I’ll buy the ingredients and make my own bread” they think “doctor said to avoid processed food like Wonder Bread and eat Whole Grain – so I’ll buy this Whole Grain bread. Look it says on the package ‘all natural’ – that has to be good for me right?”. Sticking a “genetically modified” label on your foodstuff is tantamount to saying “don’t buy me” in the current food climate.
(Now if it were 1949 and we were still optimistic about technology in this country, you could put “Genetically Modified By Applied Nuclear Radiation” on your package and have it sell gangbusters. Of course, it was also an era when people bought Wonder Bread by the truckload.)
cosima
In a thread way down the way I posted this link about Christie being on my side of the pond, looking for international bonafides & money, I guess, and I love the title (which would never fly on the US HuffPo site): http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/02/chris-christie-gets-taken-up-the-arsenal_n_6595010.html
The UK HuffPo site also has a story about a pensioner who was mugged, and the money that’s been raised for him via strangers on the internet. He is fairly profoundly disabled, due to his mother being infected with German Measles whilst pregnant with him.
Do anti-vaxxers not get the damage they do the precious unborn, given that they’ve already (on more or less every issue) expressed their disdain for the living?
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady: I think there’s actually quite a lot we could do to improve our situation. There are problems worth solving out there.
One enormous obstacle, though, is the nexus of professional Republicans, glibertarians, the Fox cable network “news”, corporate-owned “mainstream” media, and the oligarchs they serve and defend.
It is so hard. The crazy did not used to be so mainstream, and that did not happen by accident, or overnight.
Elizabelle
@Mike in NC: Does he think his life would improve with a serious head injury?
trollhattan
@NonyNony:
Put another way, the two are intertwined. They already know “contains no GMOs” is a positive to a set of consumers and at least not a turn-off to others–so they’re happy to so-label when they can. Likewise, “Contains GMOs” will turn off some percentage of consumers (the don’t-cares will continue to not care). If the law is written such that unless they can prove a product does not contain GMOs it has to be labeled “May contain GMOs” then there will be a huge percentage of items made today that would carry the label.
Imagine knowing 25% of your stuff contains GMOs, 25% you know does not and 50% you have no idea. Big problem, and Big Ag doesn’t want to go there.
hoodie
What it might buy Christie and Paul is tribal affinity, which is in doubt for both of those guys. Collective action per se is not the problem for conservatives, its the nature of the collective that causes them to latch on to things like this. Conservatives don’t like government because it is titularly controlled by the Other (again, “Well played, Black Hitler”). Other than national security, public health is the epitome of government, which just illustrates the ridiculous extremes to which GOP tribalism extends. It’s mass hysteria on the order of biting nuns.
Riley's Enabler
I’m a mom of a 10 year old boy, and when it was time for his first round of shots the words “Autism” and “Vaccinations” were just starting a heavy push together into my little world. I, having reading far too much about my SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE and THE SPECTRE OF AUTISM approached his pediatrician with a sheaf of articles and a doubting mind.
I’ll never forget the withering look he gave me as he flatly stated “That’s all incorrect. They don’t use Thimerosal in the single-dose vaccines. The vaccines don’t cause Autism.” And so then I said, great, jab away. I felt stupid but completely relieved at the same time.
Hurray for no-nonsense pediatricians, smacking the silly down. I wish we had more of them.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@trollhattan: Unless I’m misinterpreting the data here (has links to an .xls), 90+% of the acreage of US corn, cotton, and soybeans are GMO. It’s likely your percentages are on the low-side.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who doesn’t fear GMO, himself.)
jl
Maybe also frightened people who believe the nonsense people like Paul dish out about the history of coercive government action to control dangerous diseases. Paul peddles the false history that this is some nanny state thing, and somehow not rally in the American tradition.
But, as a doctor pointed out in a Fox News discussion, and is easily checked by looking at control efforts for typhoid, TB and smallpox, coercive collective action solutions to dangerous infectious disease epidemics are as old as infectious disease and the US government. He said that if dangerous epidemics make a comeback, there will be popular pressure for coercive government action, and I think he is right. Look at the extreme over reaction to the Ebloa threat just this summer.
The first laws mandating compulsory smallpox vaccination (which was for more dangerous than modern vaccines) were in the early 1800s.
NCSteve
Not everything is about money. “Follow the money and all is explained” is hipster douchnozzle lazy callow cynicism is cool thinking.
The politicization of all fact is essential to the conservative elite thought control project. Permitting people to have an opinion about a fact that is not dictated by their ideology and fed to them by a right wing propaganda organ is a threat to that project, particularly to the extent that it could lead conservatives to find common ground with liberals based on a shared conception of objective reality and common good. A shared consensus on something like vaccines or whether it’s okay to coldcock your wife, things they simply don’t care about, could lead to a shared belief that CO2 is transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared or that income inequality is dangerous to democracy.
eyelessgame
Schools. I think it’s a drive to make public schools unsafe. Look at the rhetoric. It’s all about “choice” and “freedom” from “government tyranny”.
Where’s the one place the government actually requires vaccination? Public schools.
What happens to public schools if vaccination becomes completely optional?
How does that compare to what happens to private schools when suddenly there’s a huge market of sensible people wanting their children to go to a school where their schoolmates are all immunized?
This is a drive to kill off the public schools.
someguy
Let’s make sure we make it clear that the Anti-Vaxx movement is a Republican thing.
Sure, we’ll sort of ignore the center mass of that problem which is upscale liberal enclaves. But oh, think of the gain we can get from pinning a resurgence of polio or the black death on these anti-science maggots.
Ned Ludd
@Mandalay: “The exact opposite is true. Big pharma really does want everyone to be vaccinated”
You mean to tell me that an industry lobbying group is…lobbying for its industry?!? I’m shocked.
“Follow the money”
Yeah, and notice how much of it is making its way into the bank accounts of SCAM grifters like Joseph Mercola and Mark Hyman.
Mandalay
@Ned Ludd:
Whooooooosh!
You might try following a thread before making a fool of yourself.
jl
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
” And Pharma doesn’t make any money from making vaccines. No upside there. ”
I believe that is true, from what I read. Finding enough companies willing to manufacture vaccines is a problem. Part of it is due to liability issues due to the anti-vaxxers themselves, but also things like evidence that there were rare but serious side effects to the 1076 swine flue vaccine, and companies fear a repeat.
So, I don’t see big $ profits directly from making vaccine as a motivator. I can see other PR motives for pharma, though.
By the way, for people who think the government will always cover up any problems with a vaccine, you can get information on the relationship between the 1976 swine flue vaccine and side effects (Guillain-Barré syndrome) at the CDC website.
Swine Flu
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Activities/emergency/swine_flu.html
jefft452
Don’t discount ideology so fast
“The government doesn’t own your children, you do”
This is libertarian theology in a nut shell
Normal people do not view a parent-child relationship as a property owner-property relationship
I do not “own” any children because children are people, not property
But to a libertarian ALL people are property; it’s just a matter of determining who their rightful owner is