I guess I do! They must be actually gassing Jews and invading Poland during that education! Because that is literally the only possible way for it to be in “living memory” by definition!

You idiot really believe that the people who voted the nazis in, and celebrated them were like “Oh nooo we did a big bad~~” after they lost? People wanted hitler back after the war. Antifascist consciousness arose only in the late 70’s. The whole living memory thesis remains to be horseshit.

Those material relations have shaped the thoughts and cultures of those countries, to make them less prone to conspiracy theories.

This is not what I am saying and I do not agree with that. This is complete horseshit still as it hinges on the idea of living memory o algo.

I’ve been saying this whole time is that it was the material relations that shaped people’s thoughts and ideas!

You did not.

Are you claiming that Japan was a stateless society? Or did you just provide me with more evidence that states can improve people’s quality of life?

this doesn’t follow and is bullshit. I said the state apparati did not lengthen life expectancy out of the goodness of their hearts. I said they did it so they have a workforce with which they can “win” in state-state competition. Your thought about the benevolent state is a fiction.

What have I said that’s “atrocious?” Wanting to remove misinformation? Acknowledging that material relations are a thing that exist?

Your pro-state top down approach and speech policing is quite horrible, yes. A genuinely unsympathetic and cynical approach to politics that can aptly be described as nannying. Cynical because of the distrust of the organic action of the subjects – workers. You are a real counterpoint to staffordshire beer, in the worst way. I will quit talking to you. No surprise that your moderation history is full of bans.

claiming that it’s in the “living memory” for half of Germans is just factually wrong and shows that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

You have no clue about Germany and you underestimate holocaust education.

What does “concrete interactions” mean, and how is it different from “material relations?”

It’s not any different and I did not debate the thought of material relations.

then calling me a “fool” for valuing vaccines so highly is stupid and meaningless.

I called you a fool because you said they are mankind’s greatest achievement. That is objectively foolish

“Materialism is when you believe in mysticism”

I did not say that, nor do I believe in mysticism. I believe in investigating that which appears mystical, that was my point. You idiot. Quit putting words in my mouth, you are proving more and more with every message how disingenuous your approach is.

moralist

Is it wrong for me to be?

Yes, science does not operate on morals. You claim to be interested in a social science of sorts.

The PRC literally doubled life expectancy within a generation.

So did other countries in (a similar way at least) that developed extremely quickly, like Japan and so on. China is not special and it was in the interest of China to maximise their population potential to get ahead in state-state competition.

What on earth are you talking about? Please stop “guessing” about my views,

I don’t have to guess your views, they’re atrocious enough.

Lmao, what?? WWII ended 81 years ago. The only Germans who have living memory of it would be like 90. That’s nowhere remotely close to “half of Germans.”

So living memory is now a property of people who have direct experience of something? Living with the aftershocks of WWII doesn’t count? What in the direct realism is this?

“Irrationality?” So you think these ideas just magically sprung out of nothing? How on earth is this a “materialist” explanation?

No I am saying irrationality is a type of noise, noise can about from material processes. For you everything has to have an explanation that makes sense. You work from phenomena to the relevant objects instead of considering the concrete objects for themselves and then see how the concrete interactions turn into something bigger.

No. Based on what you’ve said, there’s exactly one explanation you can use here, which is that there’s some property of some particular object that turns people fascist or communist. Some kind of orb, perhaps, that all the Germans touched and it suddenly turned them into fascists.

Yes, the particular material objects here are brains, the tools humans use, the environment, etc. You don’t understand my argument on a fundamental level and you think of objects as being cars or spoons, which is ridiculous. Idealism, and much of language, ideas, are downstream phenomena that don’t mean that much outside of being shorthands for organisation and strategy. For example: try becoming a structured writer without the tools of notetaking, paper, pens, etc., it"s close to impossible. Or a good orator without ever facing a crowd.

You don’t comprehend anything I’m saying, nor do you make an effort to.

I’m allowed to have an opinion on which accomplishment

I don’t care + same is true for me then, I can have an opinion about your opinion. I can say it’s shit. What are you going to do? I give feedback and you can’t even be assed to consider what I’m saying. I attack you because you wrong and annoying.

No, I equate mysticism with being wrong. Because I’m a materialist.

Foolish and eliminativist, and not what Marx or any relevant thinker meant with mysticism.

When I talk about the first responsibity of the state, I am talking about what it ought to do, not how it acts in practice. So all of this is irrelevant.

Moralist. So what have states done in history? Has there ever been a state which wasn’t atop major antagonisms? Your oughts don’t mean anything, when historically no state ever did jack squat in regards to fulfilling needs of commoners. None. And most would send their citizens into !!!death!!!, i.e. going against the interest of the worker/commoner/what have you, if it meant securing the continued existence of the state apparatus. Let me guess, you are also part of the “real democracy has never been tried”-crowd.

Ok, so do it then. What’s stopping you? Seems like under the current conditions, we still have antivaxxers and they’re growing instead of shrinking.

I don’t need to do much except for keep doing what I’ve always did. What a disingenuous way to appeal to constructive criticism.

Um. Because it’s true?

This whole living memory thesis is complete horseshit. Half of Germans have the living memory of WW2, maybe not directly, but close enough. Many boomers remember the social unrest of the late 60’s to mid 1970’s. Yet they vote AfD! Germany is a country that prided itself with being open minded not even 12 years ago, where almost every country bumpkin held onto an antifascist belief of one kind or another. Yet despite having a (like all other memories flimsy) memory, they do a 180.

This is a pattern, or rather lack thereof, can be observed in revolutionary times as well. The Bolsheviks had to deal with an ultraconservative populace before there were big insurrectionary movements. This changed entirely within a few years.

You know why that is? Because humans are immediate beings more often than not that have a gigantic capacity of irrationality.

Material conditions shape thought

This is in direct contradiction with your OBJECTIONS to my materialism.

Nothing I have said in any way implies that thoughts simple materialize from nothing or that ideas have some special power or that you arrive at ideas through pure logic or any of that

No, you talk about intelligence ops by Americans as if they have special power.

??? I’m not even gonna take a stab at detangling that. “I’m a materialist, but I don’t reject things just because they’re mystical.” Uhh, ok, sure.

*untangling

Yes and this makes perfect sense. You equate mysticism to evil and therefore don’t understand when people try to engage with mystical ideas. You are not considering the content of the engagement in any way. All you are doing is attempt at nullifying a fundamentally opposed reading of sociology as this one self contained field.

If there is ever a case where removing misinformation is justified, this is it. Vaccines are the single greatest accomplishment of human civilization.

The greatest accomplishment? Are you serious? Do you even know your history of science? Haber process ring a bell? Semiconductors? Agriculture? Refrigeration? Mechanical calculators? Freaking writing? Steel? Concrete? Nuclear reactors? Printing? Cooking? Spacefaring? The internet? Anaesthesia? There is no such thing as a greatest accomplishment you fool!

Actually, you’d want to get to a point misinformation does not even need to be removed. Where it is seen like the statement 1*1 = 2. That doesn’t happen through simple removal of the false content but engagement with it.

The first responsibility of the state is to protect the people

The state doesn’t give a shit about you unless it can make a buck off of you. The state will exacerbate your poverty very intentionally so that you take even the shittiest of jobs. The state, as led by a class of bureaucrats, has an interest in exploiting its populace. This is immanently baked into the state. The concept of a people is also complete horseshit which ultimately serves to ideologically iron over the extreme differences people have internally. I have much more in common with a Brazilian who’s renting their flat than with my landlord. The state owes you nothing and knows hardly any responsibilities except for its survival in state-state competition!

You view the state as a neutral object, that can either function to this or that interest’s end. But this is simply not true. Antivax rhetoric doesn’t harm people, it’s the inherent impossibility of state led education to ensure that people don’t fall for it in the first place, also the nature of work is one where people don’t learn to a sufficient extend if work became more diverse and interconnected, also less demanding, people would be much more adept in their general cognitive approach. Professor Dave for example has done the job of thousands of teachers and then some in combating vaccine misinfo – the state could never. You wish to be led by a benevolent ruler, a Zohran, but you don’t comprehend how choosing your rulers only affirms rulership over subjects instead of becoming self empowered. Yours is a completely faulty way of thinking if your interests are that of the working class. You are ignoring how people, at the mid to lower rungs, can empower themselves cognitively.

but if you claim to understand social relationships and see them as worth studying, then you’re saying that you’re doing sociology right there

Nope, That is very abstract conception of sociology I am sure most sociologists wouldn’t share. And Marx wasn’t all about social relationships, he was just as much a philosopher of science, and that includes biology and physics and so on, a determinist even! Due to his materialism. As he grew older and more refined he also became more materialist and determinist in his thinking.

“As if?” Nothing I said could even remotely be construed as implying they couldn’t!

Why the hell do you then say this?!

“that cultures that have the memory of first getting vaccines in living memory tend to be more favorable towards vaccines and less prone to conspiracy theories about them,”

By what in my previous message?

“You are treating ideas that exist only in particular times and cultures as inherent things that will naturally arise out of the existence of particular physical objects. That’s nonsense. Those ideas come from culture and social relations”

The last part, “That’s nonsense. Those ideas come from culture and social relations” treats it as a closed loop and that is bullshit. In fact the mind and ideas are constantly regenerated by physical inputs, that is why false memories are so easy to condition. So yes, everything “naturally” (I hate that word) arises out of physical objects and these words here are ephemera if they’re not being tested against concrete physical reality constantly. I can’t purely logic myself into the right thoughts to come to correct views about the world, it has to be connected to the tangible and if anything ideas that exist primarily through the exchange between people are a weak shadows of that tangible reality.

It’s mystical, but you don’t reject it?

Just because things are mystical, doesn’t mean I have to reject them completely, just because something almost leaves a bad taste in my mouth doesn’t mean I shouldn’t engage with it. Economics is very crucial, I hate it! It is mystified and stupid! But I engage with it and take it seriously non the less because I am an antimoralist.

Also your approach to vaccine denialism just being regulating speech is in fact pure paternalism with a little education thrown in. Thought I might add that before nodding off.

First nowhere did I perform a complete rejection of sociology, in fact I even incorporated the idea of culture into one of my responses to your OBJECTIONS https://lemmy.ml/post/54374193/28498142

And nowhere do I flat out ignore social relations, which you vaguely throw into the discussion. I understand and respect those probably better than you do as evidenced by my not citing them willy nilly. And sociology is absolutely mystical, biologists laugh at most sociology, so do physicists and mathematicians. Durkheim’s book on suicide is absurd shit! The protestant work ethic thesis is an utterly crazed idea, and some people still hold on to it! To appropriate a Marxist term, and in the eyes of a sociologist a sociological term, sociology is mostly a petty bourgeois jerk between professors with very little practical applicability.

The cultural memory stuff is mostly BS and contradicted by your appeals to the temporally changing rate of vaccine denialism in western countries. As if these societies couldn’t be swayed by future social dynamics. This priming idea, that somehow having the right vaccine **first **is deeply meaningful, is charitably put a very rigid conception of the dynamics at hand.

What you’re doing is some bizarre, vulgarized form of materialism that disregards entirely material relations and the long term effects of material events on people’s thought processes

It’s not vulgar, it is very sophisticated in fact. You believe ideas have a special power, as evidenced in your previous message, I am saying they don’t really. That is materialism. Matter over mind.

Also the false equivalence of chemical relations with social ones is nagging me.

There are plenty of people (for example, with schizophrenia) who form conspiracy theories about their friends

I knew you were going to make this point. That doesn’t count! Paranoid delusions stemming from organic factors, like SCZ, are not of interest.

Conspiracy theories can only be of interest when they affect people of sound mind, further it’s clear that one can’t talk of conspiracy theories when they only concern a minority of mentally ill individuals, who are ill in an o r g a n i c, hence materialistically comprehensible way that doesn’t even begin to touch social phenomena in an interesting way.

You are treating ideas that exist only in particular times and cultures as inherent things that will naturally arise out of the existence of particular physical objects. That’s nonsense

It’s called materialism/enactivism, look it up. It’s not nonsense, it is hard science.

Those ideas come from culture and social relations

And where do those come from?!? Not out of thin air! I might as well believe in the power of God almighty! Preposterous.

Let me just put it this way: Is there any conceivable evidence that could exist that would falsify this idea that conspiracy theories come from the properties of particular physical objects rather than sociological factors?

Yes, fucking yes, and time and time again this is proven 100%. The mental world needs to, absolutely needs to, come out of material existence and it absolutely replenishes itself through material stimuli time and time again. Scientific inquiry can only come to this conclusion. Assuming systems are just disconnected, you might as well go back to the church and PRAY. Learn how to notice when you are thinking in abstract categories! Because you are not noticing it and cluelessly jumping up and down the ladder of abstraction.

I think you don’t understand what I mean by immanent property, at no point did I say that the immanent properties link back perfectly to the phenomena. The word to watch out for was “abet”. My argument hinges on the idea, or rather lived fact, that things are seldom monocausal. It is an interplay of immanent properties that find themselves fulfilled with regard to certain ends and methods, that have to come first, and then fuel as well as sparks. Nothing of this can be eliminated or shrunk down to misinfo. The really important idea here is that not everything can become the subject of conspiracy theories, chairs, friends, or plain money f.e., even when there is an effort.

It would also help to study the difference between immanent and imminent, as I was no way referring to the latter.

And no, my example didn’t concern just Somalia, I exposed the general case for “freedoms” being perceived as being infracted through public health measures, I showed that all of these things have immanent properties similar to those of vaccines. Not every one of those is merely a sociological factor, that would be oversimplifying things dramatically. From the perspective of sociology everything looks like a nail with enough pondering.

Also I think you’re taking my rather lighthearted and obvious thought experiment with the relationship between antivax and phobias too seriously.

and as the only way to support antivax arguments is through lies, misinformation, substacks from people called “Dr. Wojak, M.D."

So is it your idea to limit the spread of misinformation after the fact, and then everything is fine? To say that vaccine denial is reproduced top to bottom, instead of being reproduced by the system of consumers and consumers of such content, abetted by the circumstance of vaccines themselves lending themselves well to paranoid narratives, is a bit shortsighed.

I get that this is a charged topic, but let’s not let the subject or “victim” of misinfo off the hook, as well as all the other relevant factors that can be understood to make it easier to combat antivax.

If it wasn’t, if it’s just an immanent property of the object, then how do you explain the difference between perspectives on vaccines between different areas, like Somalia and France?

For one, people in Somalia have much much bigger fish to fry and don’t feel the need to appeal to a nationalistically tainted right to bodily sovereignty. Secondly, there are other health measured the masses of people are subjected to. For instance lock downs, masking, fluoridation of drinking water, the GMO scare, the roundup scare, the gene editing scare, even sodium intake recommendations are twisted into pro salt conspiracy theories (I fucking wish I was joking but I had a gigantic fight with someone over this and it seems to be an issue on JP social media.) I could come up with many more. Public health is the perfect incubator for conspiracy theories, and it just so happens that vaccines are the queen here. For reasons that are quite obvious I would add. The sting, liquid going into one, (to an uneducated public) murky mechanisms of action, compulsion, etc.

Also people in Somalia aren’t as used to the internet and social media yet.

I think the better question to ask is why it lends itself to misinformation. Misinforming cabals are one thing, but why antivax specifically and not flatearth musings? I generally find it questionable to seek primary causes outside of objects that have immanent properties that could explain so much more.

I said your logic blasts past reality before you reread what I said in detail. I was asking you to reconsider what I said, as it was said, and not to read anything into it inductively. I don’t mean to insult you, maybe it would have helped if I said “your logic blasts past what I am saying a bit”

It’s not the main driving factor

Sure, that is trivially true.

I do think there is still merit to understanding those who are “not ordinary”, who don’t know they have a fear of needles and will just rationalise and rationalise until the world ends. While I’m sympathetic to your evocation of state sponsored misinfo, I don’t think that’s it either, at least not in a deep way since vaccine hesitancy has existed since the dawn of inoculations. In fact vaccine hesitancy might also be understood as a historical remnant from a time when vaccinations had much more common side effects. Variolation for example had a significant death rate. Seventy years ago, when the science of drug delivery wasn’t really a thing, side effects were much more pronounced. Basically: medical procedures that everyone has to go through are an easy target to activate the “lizard brain” with, be it intentional or not.

The title of your post sounds like a pretty sweeping statement about antivaxxers

It sounds that way to you.

but you sure didn’t include anything to indicate that there could be more.

I don’t have to. This is showerthoughts.

Not everyone afraid of needles is your sister

But it the case for a lot of people. I can apply your argument to you. Your personal experience, or your fear, doesn’t mean all that much as an argument. I couldn’t also cite two other people I know who both have tattoos and fear injections. I am sorry if I offended you in any way, I do not mean to suggest that people with a fear of needles are antivax, that that is the general case at least.

There’s even an Oxford study that confirms what I was thinking, albeit weakly: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8220023/ https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-16-treating-needle-fears-may-reduce-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-rates-10

Small number, though still significant.

Sure, I don’t exclude this. This is not at odds with what I’m saying. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I’m trying to explain a part of the appeal not the entire thing.

Also fear of needles is in part culturally conditioned and varies country to country, region to region.

I can absolutely make this distinction. There is a gigantic qualitative difference between continuous small picks where you don’t feel the injection and a jab. With a syringe you get upwards of 0.5 mL injected into your body. The syringe has a real size to it. It takes half a minute to get a vaccine and needle is in your arm for more than 3 seconds easily. The entire content of the syringe is injected at one.

My sister has a fear of needles but has tattoos; She does not fear the tattoo gun. This is the case for a lot of people. Your logic blasts past reality.

I also didn’t say it was the case for every antivaxxer that they’re rationalising a fear of needles. I am explaining one cause of something that knows an innumerable amount of causes.

How is it nonsense when you have self awareness? I wrote about people don’t understand their fear.

I mean these are the exception and even then you just gotta bite the bullet, the pain is 100% worth it.

vaccines don’t hurt at all lol

It absolutely didn’t start with good intentions. Antivaxxers are like kids who believe in Santa. Immaturity after a specific age is not tolerable and it didn’t spiral into insanity with Russian help. You’re placing undue emphasis here. The American brain, as well as whatever the fuck the Euros are doing is homemade. Any manipulation by Russians is abuse of the fact that people are extremely miseducated and frankly antagonised by their governments to begin with.