Anonymous asked: They're trying to bias natural selection pressures to kill more anti-government people, I think. Might totally backfire, though, since the whole point of natural selection is that it makes the population hit with it smarter.
Anon, I don’t think you’re getting this - reducing herd immunity doesn’t just affect the people who don’t get vaccinated. They are typically going to be the ones who get stuff like whooping cough and survive. The people who they’ll spread it to who will die are the ones who are too young for the vaccines or have compromised immune systems - so like, random babies and people with autoimmune diseases. Nobody benefits from that and it doesn’t systematically influence natural selection. It is too late in history for that sort of eugenic measure to be attempted anyway and if that’s what they were trying to do there are much better ways. Anti-vax isn’t a conspiracy, it started basically in one man’s scientific fraud and continues thanks to simple stupidity. You need to dial back your paranoia a notch - not everything is planned by ‘them.’ ‘They’ are not even all that competent or clever. Most of the bad stuff that happens in the world isn’t planned at all, it’s just people following incentives or making mistakes.
Slightly elaborating on this: If “they” made selfish-but-skilled decisions, I’d still hate not having my freedom but I would understand the purpose. It is the very fact that I don’t believe “they” are competent enough to run things that make me want to arrange my own affairs rather than leave it in “their” hands. This all regardless of whether “they” are a shadowy conspiracy or just regular government.
The competence of elite manipulators is a more complicated subject than I was implying, I guess - people tend to decide that they’re evil masterminds that can control everything perfectly, or they’re complete fools that can’t tie their own shoelaces, but they’re human beings too, and the truth is somewhere in between.
On the side of them being clever, well, they tend to actually be high-IQ, highly educated people who engage in extensive research and planning and have access to a lot of non-public information and they presumably don’t fall for their own propaganda. Like, if anyone was capable of manipulating society for good through a shadowy conspiracy, these would be the people considered most likely to be able to do it. So if someone’s conspiracy theory relies on these people being exceptionally unintelligent or not being able to foresee the direct consequences of their actions, well, I tend to reject it. If they’re going to make a mistake it’s going to be a smart-person kind of mistake - trying to outwit their opponents and being too clever by half, trying to organize an overly complicated and ambitious project and only narrowly failing, underestimating their enemies’ intelligence because they’re arrogant or overestimating their enemies’ intelligence because they project their own abilities onto them.
On the side of them being systematically bad decision-makers, though, they operate with a high degree of secrecy and compartmentalization, so they have cases where the left hand and the right hand don’t know what the other is doing and they work at cross-purposes, and anyone who is doing something that’s simply corrupt and self-interested can easily cover it up, and they’re less careful about making mistakes in the first place because they can usually cover them up. These are people coming out of elite universities as well, so they’re infected with a lot of ideology that makes them know a lot that ain’t so. They are not smarter than scientists at science, and scientists do things like p-hack and publish studies no one can replicate - their analyses done in secret are likely to be of even lower quality, if you look at stuff like MKULTRA you can see what a mess their methods probably still are.
Ultimately, these are the same sort of mid-tier Ivy League grads who run most of the rest of the government - so, maybe they’re the living embodiment of the hubris of man, but they’re not complete morons. They’re the kind of people who think they never make mistakes, and only do make huge ones.