A Few Words on the Anti-Vaccination Movement

At least since people figured out that PLAGUE!!! is contagious, public health issues have been special cases where community safety overrides what are usually individual rights. So long as herd immunity is enough to ensure the health of the group, we should defer to people's: 

• (highly justified) suspicions of Big Pharma, 

• somewhat less justified dedication to the unsapped power and purity of their precious bodily fluids,

• desires to keep out of their bodies the artificial, "unnatural," and/or toxic or related to the toxic or pathological,

• beliefs in belief and the healing power of faith and/or Nature,

• usually true and useful ideology that their bodies are their own to do with as they will,

• usually true and useful ideology that "Freedom isn't free" and requires taking risks and the occasional literal or figurative blood of patriots and/or the innocent to figuratively water and fertilize the tree of Liberty. 

When herd immunity is insufficient, however — uh, no. Then we-all usually understanding and peaceful folk should use social pressure to encourage and if necessary State power to coerce getting the goddamn shots already.

Conservatives Needed

And, you know, there is no such thing as society. 

There are individual men and women, and there are families.  

           —  The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher

Tory Prime Minister, United Kingdom, 
31 October 1987

            I've been mulling over the headline in my local newspaper, The Ventura County Star, for 13 April 2017, "Local group kicks off in bid to empower conservatives" and recalled Aldous Huxley's comment in his preface to the 1946 re-issue of Brave New World, "For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives […]."

            Huxley overstates, but he had a point about much of the 20^th century, one still relevant today.

            Conservatives reject the general statements "Change is good"/"Thrive on Change" and insist that change is inevitable and often necessary but "Continuity is good" as well, and "If it's not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."

            Conservatives insist on people as both individuals and members of societies and on "the continuity of the generations," where each generation is obligated to past generations and to posterity.

            So, what are the great generators of change? Three are revolution, war, and capitalism. A real conservative is suspicious of all three. Others may praise "creative destruction"; real conservatives count the costs of revolutions, wars, and capitalism.

            What are individuals' duties to society? They include contributing our fair share. And society's duties to posterity? Those including bequeathing our descendants a sound economic system, a livable world, and natural resources for them to use.

            American conservatives face complexities since American tradition includes strong individualism, capitalism, revolution, and a religious mix with a lot of radical ideals on social justice that would make necessary many changes.

            Some things though, are easy: conservatives should be for socially responsible environmental conservation and socially responsible public expenditures and budgets.

            And since even the easy things are difficult for so many, it's understandable that there are few genuine conservatives. 

* * *

ADDENDUM:

            Conservatives serve another useful purpose in balancing liberals and radicals on how they "image" society and government. Since the Enlightenment, what became the Left (for a while) saw the world in mechanistic terms whereas conservatives favored organic. If you talk of "checks and balances," you're picturing a mechanism — and mechanisms can be tinkered with. If you talk of "the body politic" and "head of state" and "members of society," you're thinking more biologically — and however careful you need to be tinkering with mechanisms, you need to be a whole lot more careful trying to tinker with living things.

            So conservatives traditionally have held a kind of ecological view, where "Everything is connected to everything else" and (therefore) "You can't change just one thing." Even with machines but more so with organisms, it's hard to tell the final results of any change. With a drug, "There aren't 'side effects'; there are a range of possible effects, some of which you may not want." Even so, thinking in images of organisms keeps one cautious about change. With machines, indeed, "If it ain't broke, don't 'fix' it"; but less is at stake than with an organism, where messing up may result in death.

            

PERSONAL STATEMENT:

            I see myself as a variety of conservative; many of my readers will see me on the Left. And we're correct: (1) See below. (2) In a nice irony, 19th-c.-style Radicals are part of the recent Right; as often as not, for a variety of reasons, American old-style conservatives are on the Left. And America needs more of us old-fashioned fogies. 

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," 1848, chapter 1

Bleeding-Heart Conservatives & Macho Wimps (20 Nov. 2009 / 29 March 2015)

                 They're hardly the worst people in the world, but among the more annoying breeds of Americans are bleeding-heart conservatives and macho wimps.

         I'm not bad-mouthing "compassionate conservatives" here. People should be compassionate; conservatives are people; so conservatives should be compassionate. The bleeding-hearts I refer to, mostly, are religious or social conservatives who can't bear the thought of (figuratively) God's straying sheep destroying their lives and, more important, damning themselves to hell. Bleeding-heart conservatives want to intervene and save these lost sheep; they differ from bleeding-heart liberals because their interventions often involve serious jail time, and some of the lost sheep wind up as mutton.

         The debate over gay marriage ultimately has to do with full-citizenship, sodomy and sin, and ancient and modern attempts to preserve the boundaries around categories — male and female, here — and semi-conscious programs to increase our tribe's population by limiting sex to the reproductive. This is an important debate, and rapidly getting resolved: a growing proportion of Americans, when pushed, accept "Different strokes / For different folks" with gays, or will allow that American adults have the right to go to hell as they, and we, choose.

        An armistice in The War on Drugs is also approaching, if more slowly.

         States approaching bankruptcy can't afford "the New Prohibition" of recreational drugs other than booze. We can't afford the investment in policing; we can't afford the gang wars over sales territories; and we can't afford incarceration of people who hurt mostly themselves. Abroad, the United States can't afford the figurative "War on Drugs" when it interferes with a far more literal war against the Taliban, ISIS, and other zealots.

         The 12-step people — Alcoholics Anonymous and its offspring — say this much that is true and important: that you really can't help addicts until they want help, and they often don't want help until they hit bottom. You want to be a compassionate conservative? Make sure every addict that wants help gets help. No waiting time to get into rehabilitation programs — and good programs. Until then, let these lost sheep, too, go to hell in their own ways: limit "intervention" to matters of public health.

         The currently most troublesome macho wimps, in my unhumble opinion, are the people pushing the excellent slogan, "Freedom isn't free" while militantly unwilling to take risks themselves.

         There are arguments to be made against closing the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. Those arguments do not, however, include, "Keep 'em locked up forever without trial in an iron cage 'cause I'm afraid to have a possible terrorist in my area code!"

         Freedom is not free; neither is decency nor effective foreign policy. They all require risks. Indeed, to modify a bit a teaching of Thomas Jefferson, freedom, decency, and even crass policy all require, from time to time, that nice people will die.

         Most Americans would be safer in a police state than a free one, but we haven't gone to a police state. To establish unlimited police powers would be macho in a way: tough; to do it to protect our own precious butts, however — the reason it gets done — is the act of dangerous wimps.


         So, bleeding-heart conservatives and macho wimps: toughen up! Throwing people in jail for doing some drug is not compassion; wetting your pants in fear that a suspected terrorist might get acquitted and walk among us isn't manly, or womanly: it's wimp.