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.

Collegiate Age of Anxiety: "Stranger Danger!!"

Apparently, Letters to the Editor of The Ventura County Star published on line do not appear in Google searches. I will therefore immodestly post them on this blog. Under the shorter title "Age of Anxiety," this letter appeared in The Star for 9 October 2015.

Collegiate age of anxiety

REFERENCE: "A call to action after devastating campus events" by Luis Sanchez, President of Moorpark College, Star, 27 September 2015.

            In a column in the Star for September 27, Luis Sanchez, President of Moorpark College notes that "Many of America's college students today live with acute anxiety" partly because they grew up post-9/11, with its shattering of the "illusion of […] security" and how "The horrors of global terrorism, international discord, and even domestic strife have assaulted our children relentlessly through the Internet and […] smart phones […]."

            President Sanchez tweaks the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15.3-7) and ends with "the shepherd who delivers 99 sheep safely but loses one to the wolf" and how "our joy for the 99 is overwhelmed by our grief at the loss of the one."

            Today's students and more important the parents of today's students grew up in an America of "Stranger Danger!" in which usually well-meaning people have worked effectively to assault parents relentlessly with images and stories not of the figurative one lost sheep in a hundred but far smaller percentages of kids abducted and murdered by strangers, lured into drug addiction or slavery, attacked by sharks, molested by sexual predators, killed in home invasions, or gunned down in their classrooms.

            Americans generally, and journalists particularly, do poorly at risk assessment. Advertisers, marketers, and propagandists for an array of causes — many quite worthy — competently manipulate psychological weakness that can render us "overwhelmed by our grief at the loss of the one" child in a hundred thousand or more, underrating both the safety of most middle-class kids and everyday insecurity for poor kids.

            Many American college students should be anxious and non-clinically depressed because their elders are putting them into debt and not providing decent jobs when they graduate; but too many "live with acute anxiety" because they grew up with parents kept near-constantly anxious and afraid.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend ... (3 Nov. 2012)

"Preserve, Protect, and Defend" America, Not Necessarily Americans  

   
               A fair number of Americans, including American Presidents, assert that the first duty of the President of the United States is to protect the American people, to protect Americans.

                  And then a smaller group of us pedantic sorts, especially small-r republicans, assert that no, the key duties of the President are to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, and, as s/he swears or affirms — no American may be required to swear an oath — to "preserve, protect[,] and defend the Constitution of the United States."

                  Now does "Constitution" here mean every clause, phrase, and mark of punctuation in the document? The Constitution in its original form — e.g., with the assumption that slavery legally exists and that new slaves could be imported until 1808? Of course not. "Constitution" in the oath means the written document, as amended, plus something like "Constitution" in the British sense of the term.

                  I'd put it that the primary duty of the President is to defend the Republic, the American Republic as constituted in its essentials by the document, The Constitution of the United States. Let's put it, the primary duty of the President is to protect not Americans, but America.

                  This idea is in useful tension with the commonplace truth from Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan to John Stuart Mill in On Liberty to our own Declaration of Independence that the primary duty of any government is to protect its people.

                  Most Americans are either loud about their patriotism or keep their mouths shut; relatively few Americans get arrested any given year — so most Americans, most respectable, voting Americans, would be safer in a police state. Insofar as we have avoided a police state, we put at risk a fair number of decent, innocent Americans.

                  If the tree of liberty is fertilized from time to time with the blood of patriots, it is also fertilized with the blood of men, women, and children who die, or are wounded or maimed, because we make the State prove people guilty and grant bail and allow free speech to those who will insult God and the Prophet Mohammed. Well, and so forth through the Bill of Rights and traditional ideals of liberty.

                  At various times, however, and the years following 11 September 2001 have made up one of those times, there has been consistent over-emphasis on the part of US Presidents and the Congress and other leaders to protect Americans and consistent reluctance to tell the American people to toughen up and be willing to take casualties — civilian casualties — to preserve traditional rights.

                  There has been a failure to explain that even furthering US interests can have its costs, and a balancing favor to continue whether perceived interests are US interests and just what we mean be the interests of America.

                  We cannot have US ambassadors walled up in fortress embassies; we cannot have US Special Forces holed up in secure areas: to do their jobs they must get out among the people, including among people who want to kill them and sometimes succeed.

                  Ambassador Chris Stevens died doing his job, as did two of the CIA security officers who died responding to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in Libya, along with at least one other American.
                  To protect America, in some cases even to just achieve US policy goals, some Americans have to risk death or horrible injury, and sometimes they suffer.

                  The first duty of the President is to protect America and further its interests, and to do so s/he may have to get some Americans killed. Each President need to explain this nasty fact to each generation of the American public, and each generation has to debate where to strike a balance.

                  On 22 April 1971, speaking for Vietnam Veterans Against the War — against what we Americans call the Vietnam War — John Kerry asked rhetorically, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Or, arguably, worse than a mistake: we continue to debate the morality of the Vietnam War. What isn't debatable is that the President and government of the United States can err, horribly, and order Americans to kill and die in conflicts that are not necessary to preserve America, wars that hurt America.
                  This idea, too, needs to enter the debate.

                  A bumper sticker is not a philosophy, Charlie Brown, and one-liners on "the first duty of the President" aren't serious consideration of difficult issues.

                  We Americans need to toughen up and be willing to take risks necessary to preserve our freedoms (and our dignity). For example, making US airports less secure but freer puts lives at risk. So be it, I say: I sometimes take planes, and I'm for loosening up security. Let's debate that.

                  We Americans need to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and much of the rest of the world and shift money from "kinetic" military operations into the civilian economy. Such pulling back will save military lives and may put at risk civilians. So be that as well — and let us debate that also. 

Existential Threats (19 Sept. 2014)

            An existential threat to the human species is a large-ish asteroid or middling-size comet hitting the Earth, or a mega-super-volcanic event — a Yellowstone eruption, say, as the start of a series of super eruptions — or a full-out thermonuclear war bringing on nuclear winter.
            There are things we can do about cosmic and geologic threats, but they're mostly long-haul strategies and desperate stabs at survival. We need better inventories of asteroids and planetoids and planetesimals and all, and much better understanding of geophysics generally and volcanoes in particular. So governments should be doing more of what they should be doing anyway in financing scientific research. We also need to expand programs with the "Noah's Arc" approach, preserving plant seeds and other preservable genomes, plus some human beings: shelters on Earth for the very long term, plus, as soon as affordable, colonies and the Moon and nearby planets so we do not have all the human eggs in one basket, all our genes and cultures on one vulnerable planet.
            A whole lot simpler and cheaper is a crash program for what we should be doing anyway: immediately cutting back Russian, US, and Chinese nuclear weapons to where we have enough to destroy one another only a couple times over, but (probably) too few to trigger climate disaster. And after that exercise has concentrated our figurative minds, all the countries with nukes — I'm look at you Israel, Pakistan, and India — all those with nukes can move rapidly to reduce nuclear arsenals to the handful of atomic bombs (not hydrogen) quite sufficient to deter attack.
            And then, with the human-controlled existential threat removed, we can consider working on the merely horrendous, horrific, and horrible threat of small-scale nuclear warfare or large-scale conventional wars.
            Before another politician, pundit, or other propagandizer uses the phrase "existential threat," I'd like them to consider the factoid that from 1900 C.E. to 1950, despite two world wars, the human population rose from about 1.65 billion to about 2.52 billion. They should consider the fact that the USSR suffered some 20 million deaths in World War II, and numerous other casualties, and survived as a state and society. Germany and Japan lost entire cities and had regimes toppled but still survived as societies and were again thriving countries again — West Germany, anyway — within two generations.
            So please get this straight: ISIS and terrorists and terrorism as such are not existential threats to the United States, not directly. The United States as a state, society, and people can absorb even the atomic destruction of a city or two, to say nothing of casualties in numbers well below those killed each years in gun deaths or highway accidents or from cigarettes.
            ISIS and terrorists and terrorism as such are not a direct threat to America at all — not as a state and society — but to Americans, which is different, and lesser threats to us individual Americans than tobacco, alcohol, fire-arms, reckless drivers, and the other sources of "mortality and morbidity" that are part of everyday life.
            To repeat the point, what terrorists threaten isn't America and not even many Americans but the American Republic.
            As a candidate for the US presidency, John Kerry learned that politicians commit a serious gaffe when they are (gasp!) insensitive enough to slip and allow the fact that terrorism, in geo-political terms, is a "nuisance" — a fact that can lead to the nastily pragmatic thought that one does what one can against terrorists and then, as a society, suck up the occasional losses. Terrorism has been a documented tactic since at least the time Judah Maccabee's freedom fighters were killing off Seleucids and Jewish collaborators in the victorious guerilla war commemorated each year at Hanukkah. Terrorism is a tactic; it is a tactic that can work: from time to time, it will be used.
            The Republic is at risk because we Americans can get rather extreme in our reluctance to die and overly hypocritical in talking about "bearing any cost" and using clichés like "freedom isn't free" without adding that we usually want somebody else paying for it. The threat of ISIS and terrorism and all is that the third or fourth time some Mall of America is bombed or machine-gunned by (non-White/Christian) terrorists, most Americans will be sufficiently terrorized to demand moving beyond "The National Security State" to a downright police state, where they will feel, and probably be, safer.
            We Americans don't do risk assessment very well, and for all our glorification of heroes and entrepreneurs and all, most of us are really risk-averse for ourselves and those we love — as we understand risks, which is often poorly.
            You want to reduce an existential threat? Work for rapid and radical reduction in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, starting with a risk-free, and money-saving, unilateral reduction in US nuclear weaponry. Beyond that, join the fight against language inflation and manipulation through fear. Threats can be serious without being "existential" or sensational. Global warming is not an existential threat to the human species or to the United States, but it does threaten an ironic combination of flooding and desiccation to where I live, and serious harm to millions (eventually billions?) of others who live on a coast and/or where it's hot and dry — or where it used to be cold. A group like ISIS causes great local misery and may spark a Sunni v. Shi'a (etc.!) civil war and another round of global terrorism.
            Such risks are bad enough without hyperbole.