Anti-vaxxers are "knuckleheads!" Get Vaccinated!

Stop begging the COVID bullies. We can’t "nice" people into doing the right thing - echo opinion by Helen Ubiñas* published in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

If people who are eligible and able to get the vaccine haven’t been moved by the more than 3 million people worldwide who have been killed by the virus, no amount of pleases and "thank yous" will do it.

I'm not an especially nice person (more on that later), so this admittedly comes much more natural to me. But, listen up (!), I'm not about to talk nice to anti-COVID vaxxers and maskers- and, what's more, I'd suggest we all stop begging and pleading with these folks to walk toward the light.

Bullies cannot be "niced" into doing the right thing. That's like Grade School 101.

And, by this point, that is exactly what many of these COVID deniers are. Bullies! Plain and simple!

Just look at how anti-vaxx parents recently threatened doctors and nurses at a Tennessee school board meeting all while the the numbers of COVID cases rise in the district and the state.

"We will find you!", one of the especially deranged dads yelled, while he and others screamed at the medical professionals, blocking their cars and berating them as they tried to drive away.

Yo, tough guy, that would sound a lot more ominous if we didn't already know where to find most doctors and nurses these days- that is, at a hospital, probably near you, trying to save the lives of the unvaccinated.

"If you don't trust the medical field to prevent you from getting COVID, then why do you trust them to cure you from it?"

That "drop all the mic" question came from a viral Tik Tok video posted a couple of weeks ago by Jason Arena after his wife with stage 4 breast cancer was discharged from a North Carolina hospital early because it was overwhelmed with COVID19 patients.

"Stick to your (bleeping) guns collections, and keep your (bleeping bleeps) - Maine Writer, I suppose the bleeps ID the ani-vaxxer as an "ass"), at home", he said. "Stop running to the hospital putting everybody else at (bleeping) risk. People like my wife who actually needs medical (bleeping) help but get kicked out of the hospital because your (bleeping bleep- aka "ass") is too stupid to go get a (bleeping) vaccine shot."

Even for an expletive enthusiast like myself, that's using a lot of "bleeps". But then, who can blame anyone for loosing their faith and their tempers, these days.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy righteously, if a little too politely, lost his cool with a bunch of anti-vaxx demonstrators, calling them “ultimate knuckleheads.”

Moreover, while announcing Philadelphia's latest mask mandates, Mayor Jim Kenney grew frustrated when asked if even more restrictive policies could be put into place in the future.

“Not if everyone acts like a mature adult,” he sniffed.

But he also did that thing that too many people do when trying to soft-walk folks to the right side. “Please,” he said, “just get the vaccine!”

Stop. Just stop. This isn’t 2020. It’s damn near 2022. We’re nearing two years of living in this hellscape, and if people who are eligible and able to get the (free!) vaccine haven’t been moved by the more than 3 million people worldwide (636,369 and counting in the U.S. alone) killed by the virus — no amount of pleases and "thank yous" are going to convince them to side with science, common sense and decency.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the virus and the variants. But we do know how to keep ourselves relatively safe: Keep our distance, wear a mask, get a [bleeping] vaccine!

And I’ll add one more: Stop coddling and catering to the anti-vaxxers and maskers.

You don’t want to believe? Wearing a "wittle mask" makes you cry? Convinced the vaccine is the mark of the beast or something? Cool, you have an inalienable right to do you — God Bless ‘Murica and all that.

But the rest of us also have a right and a responsibility to do whatever we need to protect ourselves, mostly from you "knuckleheads!"

That means you shouldn’t get to inconvenience or endanger our lives any more. You shouldn’t get to misplace other patients because of your selfish idiocy. You shouldn’t get to go to school or work or your favorite restaurant or gym if you don’t do the literal least to save lives. Take those squats outdoors, Joey. No, Aunt Fran, you don’t get to come to come to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Kevin, you’ve been uninvited to the company conference.

But hey, just feel free to join that COVID Deniers Clubhouse (COVIDiots); I hear they always have room.

And this, my fellow vaccinated, is where we come in. If an institution, organization or establishment has the guts to do the right thing, at the risk of threats, harassment and their bottom lines, it’s on us to support them.

If given the choice, support the school, the grocery store, the restaurant, the hotel, the hair dresser, the corner bodega, the public officials who require masks and vaccinations. As much as you can, boycott those who don’t.

Bullies thrive on fear, and acquiescence, and when we talk nice and act nice in the face of dangerous disinformation and defiance, that niceness is read as weakness. Fear.

Which brings me back to my admittedly lack of niceness, of which I have no regrets or apologies.

Niceness is more about appearances, about keeping things civil, polite — superficially comfortable. And there’s nothing wrong with that, until it endangers truth, and accountability and, these days, our lives.

What this very uncomfortable time in history calls for is less niceness and more kindness, which means we care enough about one another to do, and say, and, yes, mandate, what needs to be done.

And right now, the kindest thing we can do is stand against the bullies and say no more.

Helen Ubiñas a metro columnist, focusing on issues of equity, equality, and justice, in Philadelphia, PA.

Essay echo: Living beyond truth - bullies in conflict

This is a high level philosophical point of view, but if I understand it, what the author described is how deconstruction of the concept of "truth" is leading to an inability to establish share human values whereby people have something in common and will learn to get along with each other.  Instead, in this postmodern relativism* where truth becomes subjective, the meaning of "truth" becomes a power position, used bullies to gain control over others.

So, to me (MaineWriter), this sounds exactly like Trumpism and the evil "fake news" label.  In deed, Donald Trump uses that horrible label (and others like "enemy of the people") to demonstrate his power over the media.  Isn't it exactly the mythical exchange recorded in the Biblical account of what happened when Lucifer challenged God?  Lucifer:"He said to the woman, 'Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'?" Genesis 3: 1-24

An echo opinion essay authored by Nicholas Phillips. It was published in The National Review and republished in the Texas newspaper,  The Dallas Morning News:

When Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, he described an American academy awash in postmodern relativism.

Universities, rather than pushing students to find the truth, were inculcating the moral virtue of "openness," such that the only belief that united anyone was that truth is relative. "What right," Bloom described students perpetually asking, "do I or anyone else have to say one opinion is better than the others?"

What fruits did the relativist approach bear? Certainly not what most commentators anticipated. Those who embraced relativism in the academy expected it to work like the Coexist bumper sticker: It would be a simple move to ward off absolutism and facilitate democratic tolerance and equality. 

Critics, outnumbered though they were, expected a moral vacuum that would lead to hedonism and nihilism. Both sides were wrong.

Today's students, the products of generations of postmodern relativism at every level of American education, are not the amoral hedonists that conservatives feared (a new study published in Child Development showed that teens are having sex, dating and drinking less than they used to). But neither are students the peaceful coexistors that progressives hoped for: according to reporting by The Washington Post, one in five students now says it's acceptable to use violence to disrupt a controversial speaker. 

Campuses today are typified by the opposite of relativism: a new moral positivism. Young people are now comfortable asserting proscriptive norms and calling out rule-breakers, creating a taboo-laden culture that few anticipated.

We know from the much-discussed events last year at Evergreen State College — where students angered at perceived racial slights succeeded in taking over the campus and holding its administration hostage — that this culture can sometimes take on an authoritarian character. Students' moral positivism increasingly tips over into attempts to restrict the freedoms of disfavored groups. But how did places like Evergreen, perhaps the most welcoming territory in the world for postmodern relativism, end up playing host to its authoritarian opposite?

To begin thinking about why, it would be helpful to have a direct window into the application of relativism in a classroom environment. And luckily, we have one.

Journalist Benjamin Boyce conducted an interview with an Evergreen student named Thomas Hadley. The interview is a remarkable video that should be watched in full.

Hadley describes his experience in a film class called Media Matters: "The first thing that [the professors] were pushing was the idea that documentaries are not 'true.' Which is in part correct. . . . You can't take away human involvement from the process in terms of how people are choosing to put forward any kind of narrative. But . . . it seemed clear to me that there was a major problem with just telling all these students that everything that they see is kind of fake, or kind of untrue."

One might expect students raised on this message to become passive critics, adept at deconstruction but too timid and skeptical to advance any real narrative of their own. That's what Bloom was seeing in 1987. But it's emphatically not what happened here. Hadley describes a scene on one of the first days of class: The professors had organized an exercise in which students were given two antonyms and told to pick where on the spectrum between the two they stood. When students objected to the antonyms "dirty" and "clean" because of perceived racial connotations, this is what occurred, he says:

"Some students got very upset to the point of shouting down the teacher who'd orchestrated the thing, and just verbally berated her to the point of her crying and apologizing and saying 'Oh my God I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to, please forgive me.' She's saying all of this while crying and starting to break down... A small percentage of very vocal, hostile students [were] very clearly at the top of the hierarchy of the class, who people would just cede to immediately. The response from those students was 'Of course we don't forgive you.' So they continued doing that and berating her."

Why did students with authoritarian instincts find fertile ground for their absolutism in an Evergreen film class? Hadley speculated that, unlike science professors, arts and humanities instructors are "more likely to tell students, 'Hey, you already have the knowledge you need to have ... we're here today to have you express as clearly and loudly as possible what your truth is.'" Whereas traditional education inspired humility by measuring students' knowledge against an external standard, postmodern pedagogy implies that any attempt to stifle a student's personal truth is illegitimate.

Hadley's insight is simple: When external sources of truth are knocked down, only one is left: the self. And the self, despite the hopes of well-intentioned postmoderns, is remarkably unwilling to acknowledge evidence of its own errors and bias.

The self's confidence in its rightness is too deeply rooted in our evolutionary psychology to really be threatened by the teachings of an abstract theory.

This relativism-for-thee-but-not-for-me contradiction has not gone unnoticed by the observers of academic postmodernism. Asked why he abandoned his studies with the great deconstructionists Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently explained in a Chronicle of Higher Education interview that these eminences "were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth ... yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda."

Postmodern tools of critique wind up being used to more effectively prosecute others and dismantle hierarchies that stand in the way of one's own personal truth, which itself is never questioned — whether it's Marxism or intersectionality or 4chan troll-anarchy. The underlying aim is the pursuit of the ancient pleasure of exercising power over others. That's what happened when the Evergreen students in Hadley's class humiliated their professor.

Bloom had a prediction for what would result from the reign of relativism, and its prescience marks him as the wisest of postmodernism's critics. Bloom held that it was unlikely that democracy and equality would emerge unscathed out of "value relativism." Relativism creates a Weimar-esque free-for-all of value creation, and the values that win in a free-for-all tend to be illiberal. "The conditions of value creation," Bloom wrote, "particularly its authoritative and religious or charismatic character, would seem to militate against democratic rationalism."

Knocking down external truths doesn't breed peace. It turns society into a field of conflict between personal truths that compete against one another with less and less restraint. It creates social conditions that reward extremism. Peace, it turns out, comes from hegemonic values — on agreement between us about what is true.

Postmodernism was supposed to liberate us from myths masquerading as facts. The problem is that a society can achieve nothing — including liberty, including social justice — without collective trust. And trust depends on fellow citizens feeling bound together by shared truths, values, and, yes, myths. Without them, society atomizes and degenerates into a war of all against all, an agglomeration of selves seeking to project power — the only truth that postmodernism knows.

If we'd prefer to have a society instead of scorched earth, we must agree to be bound by truths and values and myths that lie outside ourselves. These truths and values and myths will be imperfect, they will be contingent, and they will be ripe for critique. But if we decide they don't exist at all, soon enough, neither will we.

Nicholas Phillips is a research associate at Heterodox Academy. This column was first published in The National Review

But for the same reason, a person will gleefully question the rightness of others. Postmodernists perhaps hoped that by deconstructing truth, people would aim the critique inward, humbly asking "Why is my truth any better than yours?" Instead, they phrase the same idea differently, defiantly asking "Why is your truth any better than mine?" It's a recipe for perpetual conflict.

*postmodern relativism - postmodernism: A late-20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism (applied in this Phillips essay to the concept of "truth") that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematical relationship with any notion of “art.” (or to extend this definition, to include "truth").