Illuminati-R-Us

Alright. Fine. Maybe calling vax-hesitant people stupid won't work. But this is frustrating.

New York Times wrote:...there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

Reaching 'Herd Immunity' is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe

An acquaintance of my folks, an ornery man in his early 70s, refused to get a vaccine. He had all sorts of reasons: COVID was like a bad cold, the numbers were highly exaggerated, the vaccine wasn't tested properly, etc. He ended up in the ICU of the regional hospital on a ventilator. Despite that and the fact that he was a heavy smoker for decades, he survived. And guess what? He's as insufferable as ever.

Whelp, here's to many, many years of COVID booster shots.

I think the short answer to your question is "We don't".

Otherwise, I've seen people like him. The kind who start complaining the minute they come off the ventilator and start to squeak again. I've said to more than one of them, it's so nice to hear you complaining again. I thought you'd never make it back to normal that way. That shuts some of them up. For five minutes.

Private companies who insist on vaccine passports will fix stupid. Needing to prove you are vaccinated to go to Disney or to see sportsball will enforce it apart from the hard core idiot holdouts.

Heid the Ba wrote:Private companies who insist on vaccine passports will fix stupid. Needing to prove you are vaccinated to go to Disney or to see sportsball will enforce it apart from the hard core idiot holdouts.

They’ll make their own Disney or sportsball. With blackjack! And hookers!

Some things can easily be duplicated/replaced.

But if the more capital-intensive or otherwise hard-to-duplicate things require it, that might do the trick.

And if employers require it . . . although I don't know whether any will.

Мастер wrote:Some things can easily be duplicated/replaced.

This is where the chip comes in.

Requiring a vaccine certificate might work for some of the Disney parks. But not the one in Florida, given who Ron De Santis's voter base is. Musing. Vaccine certificate required for Disneyland, California and Disneyland Paris, but not for Walt Disney World. Ah, the Facebook posts!

At least the UK Government is moving towards approving a vaccine certificate for international travel, pointing out that many countries require a yellow fever certificate. You want your 2 weeks on a Turkish beach? (And Turkey has been working hard to restart its tourist industry.) Well, you can either get vaccinated for free, courtesy of the NHS, or you can stay in quarantine hotel for 10 days at a cost of £1750 when you get back - the decision is yours!

Working in trucking and a grocery store are a bizarre polar opposite on opinions from coworkers. The heavily conservative truckers are all against it and basically refuse to get it unless they have to. At the grocery store, nearly everyone is excited to get it and be protected against the some of the disgusting customers that walk through the doors and refuse to wear a mask. It's weird to see both sides of the argument on a daily basis.

Interesting. One of the people I know most determined not to have any vaccine is a trucker.

I wonder how much of that trucker sentiment has to do with talk radio. I'd guess being starved for human contact you would tend to reach for the closest thing, a voice on the radio. And those voices are pretty much only coming from one end of the spectrum.

g-one wrote:I wonder how much of that trucker sentiment has to do with talk radio. I'd guess being starved for human contact you would tend to reach for the closest thing, a voice on the radio. And those voices are pretty much only coming from one end of the spectrum.

I've gone on long drives between small towns in the western US.

There's not much on.

But I think the question is, does the audience follow the talk radio, or does the talk radio follow the audience?

To be fair, truckers are a decent cross section of the general public, with the exception of gender. And, even if they are regular listeners of NPR, they are as likely to be listening out of boredom or for the sake of continuity as an alternative to conservative talk radio. However, XM (satellite) radio is becoming ever more popular among truckers, and one of the main reasons is that it offers continuity for their entire trip. I suspect that truckers will start listening more to the stations that offer programs with which they align. I will say this, though: I can recall several instances during support calls where truckers espouse to me their unsolicited support for Trump/Republicans and/or their disdain for Democrats/Pelosi/Biden, but I cannot recall the reverse ever happening.

This article from 2017 pretty well sums up my own experiences with truckers - https://current.org/2017/08/love-it-or- ... lic-radio/

Edited to add: I should also point out that many drivers will end up getting vaccinated as a matter of company policy, their opinions of science and politics notwithstanding.

Мастер wrote:But I think the question is, does the audience follow the talk radio, or does the talk radio follow the audience?

I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere, but over here the news media tries to shape and direct opinion rather than cater for the existing base. Unfortunately, they do this quite successfully among those of the population who lack critical thinking skills.

Lianachan wrote:

Мастер wrote:

g-one wrote:But I think the question is, does the audience follow the talk radio, or does the talk radio follow the audience?

I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere, but over here the news media tries to shape and direct opinion rather than cater for the existing base. Unfortunately, they do this quite successfully among those of the population who lack critical thinking skills.

The quote is from me, not g-one.

In any event, I don't doubt they try, but do they succeed?

So if you have newspapers or television news channels espousing certain political orientations, do people with different orientations eventually come around through exposure to these alternate views? Or do they just switch the channel or buy a different newspaper, finding something more to their liking?