Camestros Felapton

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LTUE and the self-enforcing conspiracy

The Utah-based Life, The Universe & Everything (LTUE) is an annual quasi-academic conference on science-fiction writing. It’s not explicitly a pro-Sad Puppies conference but the Utah location and the connections between the original SPs and the Utah writing scene means there has been a lot of overlap over the years. In 2020 Mary Robinette Kowal (a regular guest) turned down a Guest of Honour invitation from LTUE to encourage them to invite a black woman as GoH, instead, they went with Brad Torgersen as a replacement. [https://twitter.com/maryrobinette/status/1216790389073567751 ]

Despite the current Omicron wave [sorry – that sounds like yet another new genre], LTUE is going ahead in February as an in-person conference. They have announced a set of rules for attendees though.

“- We will require proof of vaccination OR a negative Covid test within the last 72 hours at check-in for all participants and panelists.
– Mask-wearing will be strictly enforced, fully covering nose and mouth at all times (with brief exceptions for eating or drinking, but not in programming rooms). Panelists will remove masks for speaking, as per accessibility best practices.
– We will create more space between seats. In most instances this will not be the ideal 6 feet, but we will do our best to create as many options for spreading out as possible while accommodating as many people as we can in the programming rooms.”

https://www.facebook.com/LTUESymposium/posts/3106388302967718

Note that this isn’t a mandatory vaccination requirement as they will accept a negative covid test as an alternative. Even so, their measures are receiving some pushback, including from their former Guest of Honour, Brad R. Torgersen. It is worth stressing that Torgersen has not indulged in the same level of covid-crankery and disinformation as his former allies and certainly nothing at the level of Sarah Hoyt or Vox Day. He’s vaccinated and doesn’t oppose mask-wearing as such. I’ll let him explain himself:

“I was slated for several panels, but won’t be attending now. Not because I doubt vaccines (I got Pfizer jabs) and not because I am anti-mask (I do think people who want to wear masks should absolutely be able to wear masks if they believe it’s in their best interest, or the best interest of others) but because I believe our events are being held hostage by people who are achieving all the wrong results for the right reasons. Ergo, safety.Well, you cannot make life safe enough for some folks, and you literally *can* be “too safe” if it means sacrificing liberties and freedoms on the altar of precaution. America should not desire to be a “Show me your papers!” place. That’s not who we are, or at least it’s not who we should want to be.I’ve promoted LTUE for many years. I was the 2019 literary Guest of Honor. I am very, very proud of that.But I am going to decline participation in 2022.I suspect there will be some who cheer this. Perhaps, even, this is their desired result? But that’s a hunch on my part.”

https://www.facebook.com/brad.torgersen/posts/7571490146210486

In the comments, to Brad’s post, it is suggested that the move is “political” and Brad is asked whether this move is “revenge” for him being a GoH previously. Brad answers:

“It could be, or at least I suspect several people were in part motivated to ensure the “wrong people” drop out of LTUE. And they don’t even have to be open about their disdain and displeasure, as always, they can achieve their ill ends by putting a patina of “safety” on it.”

Brad Torgersen, Facebook comment

If you haven’t met this almost circular idea yet, it is a common one among the right. It’s not a conspiracy theory as such because there is an empirical truth here. Many on the right are protesting, boycotting or just avoiding, venues, workplaces or institutions because of public health measures. Not everybody who hates wearing masks is on the right nor is every anti-vaxxer on the right but these have become important group markers for much of the right in the US (and other countries). Consequently, requiring masks (or other measures) at an event genuinely does work as a kind of filter that reduces the chance of somebody on the right attending.

So the net effect is Brad isn’t going to go to LTUE because he sees this as a political measure and the political aspect of it is that these measures are the kind of things that mean he won’t go. Public health measures have taken on this extra semiotic layer connected with group identity, ideology and culture wars.

As we’ve discussed a lot over the past 200+ years since the pandemic started, that extra layer adds an extra-stifling of public debate on covid strategy. I’ve been quite open about my preference for strong pre-emptive measures in the face of a pandemic but there are genuine civil liberty questions around that (in particular the role of the police in enforcing such measures and the inequity of how enforcement has been directed at poorer communities). The additional co-option of the culture-wars into covid has added a whole other layer of problems to the pandemic — especially given right-wing culture-warriors long-standing use of social media disinformation as an organising tactic — that badly undermines public debate on a huge issue.

Anyway, public health measures do help exclude people with radical right-wing culture war views from real-life spaces — but mainly because people with radical right-wing culture war views think public health measures are there to exclude them. Surgical masks may or may not protect you from covid but apparently, they have some prophylactic use against wing-nuttery.

camestrosfelapton

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49 responses to “LTUE and the self-enforcing conspiracy”

  1. I find it very alarming how many events are just… going forward… in the face of this current massive wave of the pandemic. Here in PEI we are restricted from any interpersonal gatherings outside of family groups and work (and you can imagine I have some critiques about the magical thinking behind assuming COVID won’t spread in an office but it will in a skating rink) and school is shut down to home-learning at least until Jan 31 then I hear the USA they’re holding conventions and conferences? It’s kind of crazy-making. And this sort of haphazard pandemic response is why we’re starting discussions of what we can do next winter when we inevitably go through COVID winter 2023 because our governments won’t implement appropriate preventative measures if it means impacting quarterly revenues of local businesses.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Yeah, I ended up having to defend an anti-vax aquaitaince who is likely to resign from their job because of a vaccine requirement. I’m not against vaccine requirements as such, but the workplace/job combo in question could more than reasonably be done remotely (as the person had proven. Employers should make reasonable accommodations even for people with nutty views.

      Not doing stuff in person if you reasonably can do the things remotely is a better choice at the moment and way more equitable for people with chronic respiratory conditions or compromised immune systems or major risk factors.

      [Sorry – but what’s PEI in this context?]

      Liked by 2 people

    • When implementing non-pharmaceutical interventions against the spread of pandemic illness one takes into account the societal cost of the intervention as well as the effectiveness of the intervention. The objective is to reduce the R of the pathogen below 1 (I would aim for well below one, so cases tail off faster, but policy makers seem to think barely below 1 is adequate). This means that a combination of a number of less effective interventions (such as closing icerinks) may be preferred to an individually more effective intervention (such as closing offices). You chose a combination of measures whose collective effectiveness is sufficient to reduce transmission to the desired level while minimising the societal cost. That doesn’t mean that PEI has made the right choices, but does mean the government is not necessarily engaging in magical thinking.

      (People dispute how effectiveness masking is, but, regardless, it has a minimal societal cost, which puts it at the forefront of measures.)

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  4. I really, really hate how pandemic measures and vaccination have become a political rather than a public health issue, because it’s counter-productive and downright dangerous.

    Personally, I think that cons in the next two or three months should not go ahead in person at all, but go virtual to be on the safe side. And I’m not attending any large gatherings now, e.g. I just cancelled a renewable energy meet-up next week, even though they already hired a larger room than the usual small one.

    But not everybody who privately decides not to attend a con or other event because of its anti-covid measures is far right and “the sort of person we want to exclude”. I have a lot of allergy issues and wearing a mask for longer than an hour or so is torture for me. At first, when cloth masks were still acceptable, it was tolerable, because I had one that worked for me. But then they started mandating first surgical masks and than FFP2 masks, which massively triggered my allergies. So now I only go somewhere where I have to wear a mask (and note that I’m vaccinated and not against mask wearing per se).if it’s vitally important (grocery shopping, doctor’s visits, where I would wear a mask even if not mandated) or if I get paid for it, e.g. when I have an in-person interpretation job..And I always take anti-histamine before wearing a mask for longer than a few minutes to dampen down the allergies.

    Even without the current omicron wave (where in-person cons are a bad idea period), I wouldn’t attend a con where I have to wear a mask all the time, because cons are supposed to be fun and not deeply unpleasant. And if mask mandates at cons stay in place after the need for them has passed, you’re not just excluding the Brad Torgersens of this world, you’re also excluding people like me.

    Liked by 3 people

    • Yes, at some point mask requirements need to be relaxed but also, I hope mask-wearing becomes socially normalised in the way many south-east asian cities normalised mask-wearing post-SARS (as in, it’s not weird to see somebody wearing a mask)

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      • I’m fully in favour of people wearing masks, when they have cold/flu symptoms or simply feel safer doing so, and not getting harrassed for it, but I also want people to be free not to wear a mask, once covid has become endemic.

        Liked by 4 people

  5. We don’t really wear masks in Sweden. Maybe 10%? Last fall, it might have been 30-50% on public transport, but come summer and vaccinations, they disappeared and never really came back.

    Having said that, there are some places that they are required. Such as at vaccinations and some other healthcare institutions. Or according to company rules (at my work, we have mask requirement around help desk as they meet more people).

    When they are required, we put them om without complaining. Maybe it’s easier for us to follow these requirements, because there are fewer places you need to.

    I’m kind of skeptical towards their effectiveness when looking at the rest of Europe that has had a quicker spread than us. But I think the problem is that they are used where they don’t help that much (public transport, sending leaking air out at people beside you) and not where they would help more (in face-to-face conversations at home or between close colleagues).

    Anyhow, there are a lot of discussions in both Swedish, Norwegian and Danish newpapers, often from government scientists at the highest level, about going over more to a “let it rip” phase, where at least one head of the Public Health Agencies (I think it was in Norway) was speculating that it actually might be good to get ill with the omicron version close to having gotten the third boost instead of being infected four months later.

    Today, our government got some of their rights to close establishments to hinder spread of covid revoked. This after a vote from the opposition that until now had complained that too little was being done. I think all countries are fumbling a bit now when cases are growing, but fewer fall ill in a way that needs hospital care. Myself, I think most restrictions and recommendations will be gone in a month or two here and not come back unless there is a new mutation.

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    • let it rip has been bad here but lots of people haven’t had a third shot yet. Even with boosters, people still get a short illness it seems with omicron. Past couple of weeks at work have been very disrupted because of lots of people getting not-very-seriously-but-significantly sick in a very short period.

      It might work better for you guys if it is planned properly

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      • We are not in “let it rip” here, and yet around 10% of the whole of Stockholm are estimated to get ill just this week(!). That is with restrictions and recommendations and cases are still going up even while testing has hit the roof. Around 10% of police are sick or in family quarantine.

        So I don’t really think it is a matter of choice any more. It is ripping now and we can only slow it a bit.

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        • Right now we have a 58.5% positivity rate in Stockholm with 20 000 tests per day. We estimate that at least three times that are infected as it is impossible for many to get PCR-tests, the only ones that goes into statistics.

          Yet the percentage of cases leading to intensive care has gone from 0.4% for Delta to 0.08% for Omicron and is expected to fall even lower, so problem is mostly mild illnesses taking away essential personnel.

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        • It may be more dramatic here because of low numbers of cases here previously. I note the UK had a big omicron rise in numbers but it wasn’t the near vertical shift we had here.

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          • The number now cases has seen a dramatic rise here, but we haven’t had any excess death since January last year, so people are kind of relaxed – apart from the poor people in the healthcare. Or the patients. I just had a friend working in intensive care telling me of how they two weeks ago had time to give a seriously ill covid patient a shower – for the first time in six weeks. That’s how bad it is.

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      • I don’t think anyone’s thinking that let it rip will be easy, but there seems to be an increasing feeling that it’s the best way forward. Or at least that it will be the best way forward in a little while – meaning we’ll flatten the curve a little bit longer and then let go.

        The trends so far in 2022 is that the number of infected goes up, while the number of hospitalized goes down. So everything points at omicron being both too contagious to control, and not so dangerous that people fear getting it. Lawyers are getting more and more vocal in complaining about lack of legal basis for the infection regulation efforts. There’s more news stories about people getting mental health problems from having no social life, then there is about people dying from covid. Etc.

        Intensive care units, or hospitals in general, are supposedly not very stretched at the moment in terms of bed used. The biggest problem is to fill duty rosters with intensive care nurses who are not in quarantine. But numbers there are hard to pin down – not how many who are hospitalized, there are good numbers for that, but there’s wildly different numbers for what the capacity is and in particular how many can be treated in a pinch. (With the general trend being that officials and administrators toss out numbers that intensive care doctors call wild imagination. And with staffing being the main problem it’s clear that there’s a difference between what can work for a week and what can work for two months.)

        Liked by 1 person

  6. Someone remind me. Does Brad think that women who don’t want to go to a convention that has a guest of honor or staffmember who harassed and or assaulted them in the past are “over-sensitive”? Asking for a friend

    Liked by 2 people

    • To be scrupulously fair I don’t know if Brad pushed that line when many of his comrades did but I can’t say for sure that he didn’t either. He’s said some appalling things but he doesn’t always join in with some of the other appalling things.

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  7. The first thing here is to note that this is what Brad is whining about just because it is something to whine about. Brad is never happy unless he is complaining about how he and all the other right-wingers out there are being oppressed. If it wasn’t vaccination/testing and mask requirements, Brad would be pouting about something else. Being a whiny, pouting piece of shit is basically Brad’s entire personality.

    The second thing to note here is that what Brad is complaining about is the actions of a private entity, not a government mandate. Right-wing guys like Brad love to talk about how much they love the free market right up to the point where it does something they don’t like, then they commence the wailing and gnashing of teeth. In reality, what Brad is complaining about is not that his freedom is being curtailed, but rather he is put out that LTUE is exercising its freedom of association to decide who they want to gather together with. This is, really, just another example of “libertarian” dudes getting upset when others exercise their freedoms in a way the dude-bros don’t like.

    Liked by 5 people

    • I laughed so hard when BT implied that LTUE is now being run by the “wokerati”… nah, it’s still being run by Puppies and people who are heavily Puppy-adjacent. 😆

      Liked by 4 people

    • For guys like him, private entities’ freedom of association is only good when it keeps out PoC, LGBT, women, religious minorities, and the poors.

      If it impinges on the delicate fee-fees of straight white “Christian” men, then it’s bad and the entity is undoubtedly a bunch of eee-vil SJWs who need to be crusaded against, or at least whined about online.

      Equality feels like oppression to dude-bros.

      Liked by 3 people

      • I guess if your status quo is sufficiently unequal, then having equality imposed on you might feel a bit oppressive. Not to worry, dude-bro, you’ll get used to others having the same rights and access as you pretty soon.

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  8. Is it possible that the Puppies FINALLY got as tired of Brad’s whining about everything as we were several years ago? Maybe he was a whiny bitch of an asshole when he was GoH. Probably super-demanding.

    Or, y’know, Utahns are generally fine about medicine and they genuinely don’t want people who are coming to their con to get sick. It’s, dare I say it, a good Christian duty to look out for the well-being of your friends and community.

    I’m unsure about the wisdom of in-person conferences, but if you’re going to have them, the quoted ideas are simply basic common sense. They allow masks off for the benefit of the Deaf and hard of hearing members, yay! So good for lip-reading and hearing that isn’t as acute.

    Brad’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. 10 years from a Campbell nomination from the Wokeist SJW’s and a good career to not even hanging out with his people because he’s a petulant child, plus no sales. But, like most RWNJ, nothing bad is ever his fault, it’s always Them*.

    They’ve got plenty of shrinks in Utah**; one of them could maybe help him with his delusions, paranoia, and whining. Not sure how much of a personality he’d have left, but it would be a better one.

    *Not the giant ants. Probably.
    ** At one point, it had the highest rates of Prozac prescriptions in the US.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. I mean, “con crud” is a well-known phenomenon even in the decades before Covid. Your chances of picking up some respiratory bug at cons have always been elevated.

    It’s just that a cold or other URI won’t kill you or put you in the hospital.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Very true.

      Granted, the worst case of ‘con crud’ I ever had left me laid up for a couple of days over Christmas 2019, which was a little under two weeks after I’d been to a reasonably large (>10K attendees) U.S. convention that had a lot of international attendees… so I’ve wondered for a while if that had been an actual early entry of CoViD into North America, since by that point it was already spreading in China and just hadn’t been noticed elsewhere yet.

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      • There was a bad URI going around North America at the end of 2019/beginning of 2020. I forget what it was. But it was the seasonal “that bug that’s going around” of the winter that wouldn’t have been remembered if it weren’t for Covid.

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      • It’s always tempting to imagine “COVID actually started at some earlier time” scenarios, but the problem with that is that it’s contagious enough that there’s no reason it wouldn’t have gotten un-ignorable much sooner in that case.

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      • I was only mildly down for a week after that one, and I always get a crud when on airplanes, so it’s hard to separate those out. Didn’t have to fly to San Jose and no crud.

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  10. Lurker –

    For a second I thought I’d read “UTI” in your post and was trying to figure out how common that really was post-con.

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        • It’s so proverbial that many cities’ worth of hookers have learned not to bother hanging around con hotels, and the doormen clue in the ones who do. Conventions full of businessmen are great for prostitutes, but fen do it with each other. I myself have had to wander the dealers’ room or sit in the fanzine lounge for a time instead of be in my hotel room at Worldcon.

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  11. This has been the typical stance among right-wingers who want to be seen as the “reasonable” folk. They get the vaccine and follow mask wearing and testing requirements in their workplaces (Fox for instance requires all the protocols from its anti-vaccine anchors,) but they encourage the right-wingers they want to manipulate to resist safety and public health measures and regulations as a “choice”, claiming any of it, government instituted or no, is a “papers please” march into controlling them — i.e. taking away their righteous power and supposed status over others. This do you know who I am swagger becomes a political propaganda point where more and more of them reject these measures to show they are powerful. And then the “reasonable” right-wingers claim that the lack of exceptions for their powerful specialness is a power grab by all the people they target for political leverage — Dems, libs, BIPOC, fellow right-wingers who don’t do what they want, etc.

    Someone can make the choice to not get vaccinated and not follow safety measures like masks that currently have to be in place. And then others can chose to keep them out of enclosed spaces where that’s going to be a problem. Doing that slows down the rate and severity of transmission and the opportunities for mutations, which ideally means that we can eventually get to a time period where people like Cora with medical conditions can go maskless and people who can’t medically get vaccinated or whose immune systems still are compromised even with vaccines can still go out in the world with less fear of death.

    Right-wingers like Brad declare that the choice to not get vaccinated is valid — because people with his politics are being encouraged by him and others not to get vaccinated unlike himself. But they declare that the choice to then keep people out who are deliberately choosing to endanger others and keep the pandemic going is not valid, that they don’t have equal power to do that. The right-wingers are the special righteous who get to do what they want, no matter who it harms, without consequences such as not being able to go to an event. They have power and all must bow before it. The convention, the government, etc., and the people in them who aren’t right-wingers should not have any say or follow any public health measures and be forced to be threatened by the unvaccinated. The right-wing cannot be excluded from wherever they want to be, no matter how they behave and endanger others, and if they are, it’s tyranny. Whereas excluding those who oppose them, including with physical force, is perfectly their right at any time. They are always the aggrieved special righteous and those who do not allow them to run roughshod over everyone else’s rights are always tyrants.

    Going through this pandemic with about 60 million Americans who keep asserting “I have the right to kill you and you have no rights of self-defense because I am the special good person” — not even just with covid and vaccines, but with guns, pollution, pesticides, water use, climate change, refusal of aid during natural disasters, armed militias, vandalism, death threats, anti-choice, plane safety measures, etc., has been something. Name any instance where people are trying to help others in their community and there will be right-wingers right there screaming that this is a dastardly plot of tyrannical control over them. Constant, relentless temper tantrums asserting their dominance to control others and that it is somehow “freedom.” We’ve had, what, dozens of front-line workers killed by right-wingers over masks or vaccine status requirements, thousands physically attacked? And I’d love to say that it’s recent, but they’ve always been this way, from seat belts to poisoned water to black voting rights being a justification for lynching.

    And they don’t care how many of their own political persuasion die either — two thousand mostly unvaccinated folk are dying per day here again. They are happy to throw anyone under a bus as long as they “feel” righteously in power. Brad literally goes out and tries to destroy his kids future every day. So it’s no surprise that he’s stumping for the willingly unvaccinated to be allowed to harm everybody else against their will and making it a temper tantrum, even if it’s a right-wing run convention. It’s required performance art, which is why they think all civil rights activism is performance art.

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    • “Right-wingers like Brad declare that the choice to not get vaccinated is valid — because people with his politics are being encouraged by him and others not to get vaccinated unlike himself.”
      As others have pointed out, that’s the big difference between this and the classic anti-vax propagandists. They genuinely believe vaccines are eeevil and avoid them; the current crop is perfectly fine getting vaccinated and steering others away from doing the same.

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      • Unsurprising, considering the modern anti-vaccine movement is primarily about the grift anyway, once it attached itself to the ‘health freedom’ movement. It’s less about what you’ve actually done and more about professing the right allegiance.

        And I seem to recall that Utah has the highest per-capita level of affinity scams of anywhere in North America… grift is one of the state’s major industries.

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        • It’s revealing how many right-wingers have jumped on the anti-vax train. Anti-gay lawyer Matt Staver, for example, has been asking for donation to Fight the Vax recycling piles of bullshit (5G internet connection in your brain! People have committed suicide rather than submit to the mandate!).

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          • 50% of it is the grifter-ideologues who have to find a way of making themselves part of whatever the major news story is.

            If we were invaded by aliens tomorrow, that whole pipeline would have to find away to make that news story somehow about them and their ideology

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            • The far right is exploiting covid to recruit people frustrated by what they view as overreaching and nonsensical measures. And the worst thing is, it’s working, because at least here in Germany, none of the non-far-right parties nor the media are taking complaints by people who are not far right (yet) seriously. For a while, it seemed as if the liberal party FDP might be a party that people who are opposed to some but not all measures and who are not anti-vaxxers could get behind, but they have voted for ever stricter measures since part of the government.

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          • Only a very thin percentage of American anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers were originally anti-vaxxers and actually believe there’s a real problem. The majority became against the vaccines right after the Dem president rolled them out, cleaning up the mess Trump’s people left in their endless grifts, and after it became clear that the election was not going to be overturned. You can mark exactly when it started to happen — in the summer when vaccination rates slowed, Republican governors started screaming their heads off against the vaccines they’d happily taken federal money for just weeks before, and Fox, having lost viewership and more importantly influence to NewsMax and the O after 1/6 and the Georgia Senate races that went to Dems, ramped up the anti-vaccine and mask rhetoric to gain it back while demanding both measures of their staff.

            We were doing brilliantly — vaccine rates at max, case rates and hospitalizations dropping, healthcare workers in many places able to take a breath, and then boom, we suddenly had very organized anti-mask and vaccine protesters right when Delta hit our shores. They were screaming on airplanes, at Trader Joe’s, hospitals, anyplace to disrupt getting the pandemic under control and call those measures a terrible threat. And when they didn’t get a lot of sympathy for it, they started comparing themselves, as they often do, to the Jews in the Holocaust, etc.

            It’s not that they are not willing to kill themselves over it — they make up most of the dying now, plus a lot of the long covid disabled and there’s a huge black market in snake oil cures. But they see it as political activism, a great battle of the righteous, rather than actual objections to masks or vaccines. (Witness that a lot of them tried the talking point that the vaccines were not approved for non-emergency pandemic use by the FDA. Then when the vaccines were approved after the usual process of data gathering on that in September, they just kept on claiming the vaccine was “dangerous” or pretending FDA status no longer mattered.) They are mostly white, mostly men, right wingers, who’ve mostly had all the vaccines required for public safety to go to school and/or for their work, including the military where you don’t get to ask what they jab you with. And they’re “anti-establishment,” i.e. they don’t like it to be seen as if they are following the orders of those people and institutions they don’t think benefit their status and/or are inferior to them, which with a Dem in the White House and a slim Congressional majority, means the vaccines. They are obsessed with dominance, control and cultural reputation.

            A lot of them have given up trying to claim that the vaccine is poison because clearly it isn’t true, (though folks on Fox will still outright lie and claim thousands are dying from the vaccine they themselves have had.) Those ones have switched to the position that the vaccine is okay, but public health requirements for it, like other vaccines for deadly pandemics in the past, are tyranny. Even asking for a test for the unvaccinated is tyranny. Or just a mask to cut down transmission in enclosed spaces. Anything to keep the pandemic going under a Dem president and to assert in society that they and only they get to set the conditions for rights and American life, private or public, no matter how many people that helps kill or disable. Of the developed countries, only Russia has a worse vaccine rate than the U.S., the richest country in the world and the main country that is keeping a world-wide plague going and on its home turf this time.

            And that’s Brad’s position. Sure the pandemic is still going on. Sure these are common sense public health procedures that help this convention be able to operate and are probably required by the venue (though really there should not be any conventions going on.) Sure he got vaccinated as required for work, etc. But the people who want to do what they want and endanger all the other people should not have to cooperate at all because they are the superior righteous with the right sort of political views and only they get to do what they want, forcing everyone else to bow to their demands whatever the danger. Because the right-wing are the only ones who count and the ones who should never have to accommodate someone else’s equal civil rights. That’s the whole point. To have a society that continues to prioritize them and have only people with their political views (and often demographics) count and have civil rights.

            But that requires constant maintenance and demands, no matter how nonsensical and imperious. And any resistance to any of it is regarded as a domination attempt from those who are unworthy, which undermines their status. The willingly unvaxxed are the disposable footsoldiers of their political army and they don’t even have real conviction over vaccines. They just know that they can’t let the “libs” win with mitigating policies, at a convention or anywhere else.

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