You can call it whatever you like but it won’t make what I’m saying any less true. Getting vaccinated is intentionally easy to do. Laws prohibit doctors and any organization with access from sharing medical records. A shitty spouse has less control over this choice than the vast majority of choices in your life.
I’m sending the message to anyone reading this that it is possible to get vaccinated even if there are people in your life who don’t want you to do that. What are you doing besides telling people it’s important to get vaccinated unless it’s a bit more difficult than it should be? Who does that help? Everyone already knows that abusive spouses are dicks. That fact doesn’t need any more attention.
It’s not a universal truth that you can just choose to get a vaccination without making an appointment or needing to involve insurance etc.
In a hypothetical extreme scenario, imagine having to weigh the risks between getting the vaccine that will potentially save your life and unexpectedly getting an appointment reminder text/email or follow-up contact that alerts the controlling partner and they potentially end your life for the “transgression.”
The vaccine being “cheap” is also not universal and if you aren’t allowed personal discretionary spending anything >$0 isn’t cheap enough.
Yes, you’ve successfully summarized the situation this woman may have faced. She chose to let the fear of her spouse make her decision for her. Did she make the right decision? I don’t think so. She’s still dead. At least if she was murdered for choosing to get vaccinated it could be said that she did everything she could to keep herself alive. Maybe that’s a meaningless distinction and maybe it isn’t. I think that comes down to the way you view personal responsibility. Still, whether coerced or not her decision lead to her death and that’s worth pointing out no matter how unfortunate you find the circumstances that lead up to it.
You are of course free to disagree with that assessment but I am firmly of the belief that getting vaccinated is always better than not getting vaccinated unless you have a valid medical reason to avoid vaccination.
This is pretty yikes man. I hope that you’re still like in high school or something and have time to grow a little because the thought of someone having as little compassion or understanding as yourself is concerning.
Making excuses for the unvaccinated is no different than promoting antivax misinformation. Dressing it up as empathy to make it more palatable to your political leanings doesn’t change anything meaningful about what you’re saying. Unless a (non-crackpot) doctor tells you not to get vaccinated you should be vaccinated. Full stop. There is no amount of social pressure that you should allow to make medical decisions for you.
That’s the kind of vague, self righteous platitude people give when they don’t have an actual response. Assuming you’re not some antivax dipshit I guarantee you’ve said something exactly like the final sentence of my last post in the previous four years. Yet here you are saying it’s fine for people to not get vaccinated as long as they have someone else to blame that choice on. Sure, you’re not framing it exactly that way but of course you wouldn’t, that would be stupid and you’re not stupid, right? You’re just making an emotional appeal and hoping it’s convincing enough to make people forget that there aren’t supposed to be exceptions to the vaccine mandate for people with sufficiently annoying relatives.
If all it takes for you to abandon your convictions is someone agreeing with you in a way that you don’t completely approve of then you don’t have a sincerely held belief, you have a socially conditioned emotional response. But I already know you don’t care about being logically consistent enough to actually think about what I’m saying. You got the bad feeling from what I said. I wasn’t being perfectly inclusive. I didn’t check the right mental boxes to get past the NiceGuy™ filter in your head. You can think of one extreme example that maybe doesn’t quite allow for an absolute statement to be made on vaccination therefore I must be wrong, even though saying so would require contradicting yourself.
Let’s shut it down there and get out of here, this guy is just an asshole, right? Right…
There’s a big difference between choosing to not get vaccinated and being coerced into it.
Defending her is not defending the unvaccinated; it’s acknowledging that she was a victim of abuse and that abuse has extreme psychological effects that you clearly don’t truly understand.
Being a victim of any sort of abuse does not remove your free will. I know it makes you feel like you’re being understanding by justifying whatever choices they make but that only sounds nice on a surface level. You’re dehumanizing these people by saying they have no control over their own lives and reducing them to side characters in someone more powerful’s story. That’s not empathy or nuance or whatever else you want to call it. It’s enabling abusive people by perpetuating the idea that victims of abuse aren’t strong enough to oppose them. I doubt these people would appreciate you remembering their lives in such a reductive and impotent way.
That is certainly a naive oversimplification of the concept of free will.
It’s funny that you think you can assume how abuse victims would feel, considering it’s quite obvious that you either 1.) haven’t bothered to educated yourself about the psychology of abuse on even a basic level, or 2.) you did, but just decided you know better than the mental health professionals who have spent years studying the topic.
Either way… it’s clear that continuing this particular discussion with you is a waste of time, at least for now.
You know there are people who can’t leave the house without their spouse going with them, right? Like literally that’s the amount of control there is. They are never alone and never have the chance to get it. You really don’t get what scary lives some people lead.
I agree with your overall arguments and your position, just not the way you have portrayed it.
It would be trivial
she could have easily
getting vaccinated is simple, cheap, and as anonymous as you would like it to be
A shitty spouse has less control over this choice than the vast majority of choices in your life.
All reads like blaming the victim or not acknowledging that there can be barriers you possibly haven’t even considered between a desire to act and an ability to. The goal absolutely should be about making personal decisions even in the face of adversity, but when you reduce it like it’s just them being lazy, and not recognizing the full extent of their reality, it doesn’t come across as empowering. Maybe decisions are also being made with consideration of their children and their needs which also affects the calculus in making otherwise personal choices.
All choices come with a multitude of external influencing factors. This is not unique to the situation we have been discussing and in my mind is not even worth pointing out because it is universally true. Of course she had to weigh how her choice would impact her family and of course she had to consider the consequences of her husband finding out. She probably did what she thought was best for her situation but then she died anyway. She was wrong. When someone dies because they made a wrong choice you’re supposed to wonder what they could have done differently. That’s how we learn from their mistakes.
At the end of the day none of us know why this lady chose not to be vaccinated. The only thing we know for certain is the choice she made. Clearly it was not a good choice. That much at least is not up for debate. I would disagree with you if you said that choice was entirely out of her hands but if that makes you feel better about what happened to her then you are free to rationalize it in that way. Personally I think that does a disservice to her by painting her solely as a victim with no agency over her own life. It’s theoretically possible that was the case but that kind of abuse is much more rare than the people assuming that was her situation are making it out to be.
Statistically it’s far more likely she was simply annoyed by her husband’s constant bitching about the deep state and didn’t think it was worth pushing the issue. Again, we’ll never know. Either way I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong by pointing out that this potentially fictional woman bears at least some responsibility for what happened to her. If we don’t do that and then try to figure out how she could have stopped it from happening then the story serves no purpose other than to revel in her husband’s misery. If enjoying his suffering is the point of this post then I guess I am the asshole for thinking it was more civilized than that.
Is it? Did she have her own transportation? Was she able to leave the house without her husband’s knowledge, or without him keeping tabs on her?
What you’re doing is victim blaming at its finest. Just stop.
You can call it whatever you like but it won’t make what I’m saying any less true. Getting vaccinated is intentionally easy to do. Laws prohibit doctors and any organization with access from sharing medical records. A shitty spouse has less control over this choice than the vast majority of choices in your life.
I’m sending the message to anyone reading this that it is possible to get vaccinated even if there are people in your life who don’t want you to do that. What are you doing besides telling people it’s important to get vaccinated unless it’s a bit more difficult than it should be? Who does that help? Everyone already knows that abusive spouses are dicks. That fact doesn’t need any more attention.
It’s not a universal truth that you can just choose to get a vaccination without making an appointment or needing to involve insurance etc.
In a hypothetical extreme scenario, imagine having to weigh the risks between getting the vaccine that will potentially save your life and unexpectedly getting an appointment reminder text/email or follow-up contact that alerts the controlling partner and they potentially end your life for the “transgression.”
The vaccine being “cheap” is also not universal and if you aren’t allowed personal discretionary spending anything >$0 isn’t cheap enough.
Yes, you’ve successfully summarized the situation this woman may have faced. She chose to let the fear of her spouse make her decision for her. Did she make the right decision? I don’t think so. She’s still dead. At least if she was murdered for choosing to get vaccinated it could be said that she did everything she could to keep herself alive. Maybe that’s a meaningless distinction and maybe it isn’t. I think that comes down to the way you view personal responsibility. Still, whether coerced or not her decision lead to her death and that’s worth pointing out no matter how unfortunate you find the circumstances that lead up to it.
You are of course free to disagree with that assessment but I am firmly of the belief that getting vaccinated is always better than not getting vaccinated unless you have a valid medical reason to avoid vaccination.
This is pretty yikes man. I hope that you’re still like in high school or something and have time to grow a little because the thought of someone having as little compassion or understanding as yourself is concerning.
Making excuses for the unvaccinated is no different than promoting antivax misinformation. Dressing it up as empathy to make it more palatable to your political leanings doesn’t change anything meaningful about what you’re saying. Unless a (non-crackpot) doctor tells you not to get vaccinated you should be vaccinated. Full stop. There is no amount of social pressure that you should allow to make medical decisions for you.
That’s great dude. Come back to the discussion when you’ve got an inkling of life experience and understand how people and operate.
That’s the kind of vague, self righteous platitude people give when they don’t have an actual response. Assuming you’re not some antivax dipshit I guarantee you’ve said something exactly like the final sentence of my last post in the previous four years. Yet here you are saying it’s fine for people to not get vaccinated as long as they have someone else to blame that choice on. Sure, you’re not framing it exactly that way but of course you wouldn’t, that would be stupid and you’re not stupid, right? You’re just making an emotional appeal and hoping it’s convincing enough to make people forget that there aren’t supposed to be exceptions to the vaccine mandate for people with sufficiently annoying relatives.
If all it takes for you to abandon your convictions is someone agreeing with you in a way that you don’t completely approve of then you don’t have a sincerely held belief, you have a socially conditioned emotional response. But I already know you don’t care about being logically consistent enough to actually think about what I’m saying. You got the bad feeling from what I said. I wasn’t being perfectly inclusive. I didn’t check the right mental boxes to get past the NiceGuy™ filter in your head. You can think of one extreme example that maybe doesn’t quite allow for an absolute statement to be made on vaccination therefore I must be wrong, even though saying so would require contradicting yourself.
Let’s shut it down there and get out of here, this guy is just an asshole, right? Right…
There’s a big difference between choosing to not get vaccinated and being coerced into it.
Defending her is not defending the unvaccinated; it’s acknowledging that she was a victim of abuse and that abuse has extreme psychological effects that you clearly don’t truly understand.
Being a victim of any sort of abuse does not remove your free will. I know it makes you feel like you’re being understanding by justifying whatever choices they make but that only sounds nice on a surface level. You’re dehumanizing these people by saying they have no control over their own lives and reducing them to side characters in someone more powerful’s story. That’s not empathy or nuance or whatever else you want to call it. It’s enabling abusive people by perpetuating the idea that victims of abuse aren’t strong enough to oppose them. I doubt these people would appreciate you remembering their lives in such a reductive and impotent way.
That is certainly a naive oversimplification of the concept of free will.
It’s funny that you think you can assume how abuse victims would feel, considering it’s quite obvious that you either 1.) haven’t bothered to educated yourself about the psychology of abuse on even a basic level, or 2.) you did, but just decided you know better than the mental health professionals who have spent years studying the topic.
Either way… it’s clear that continuing this particular discussion with you is a waste of time, at least for now.
You know there are people who can’t leave the house without their spouse going with them, right? Like literally that’s the amount of control there is. They are never alone and never have the chance to get it. You really don’t get what scary lives some people lead.
I agree with your overall arguments and your position, just not the way you have portrayed it.
All reads like blaming the victim or not acknowledging that there can be barriers you possibly haven’t even considered between a desire to act and an ability to. The goal absolutely should be about making personal decisions even in the face of adversity, but when you reduce it like it’s just them being lazy, and not recognizing the full extent of their reality, it doesn’t come across as empowering. Maybe decisions are also being made with consideration of their children and their needs which also affects the calculus in making otherwise personal choices.
All choices come with a multitude of external influencing factors. This is not unique to the situation we have been discussing and in my mind is not even worth pointing out because it is universally true. Of course she had to weigh how her choice would impact her family and of course she had to consider the consequences of her husband finding out. She probably did what she thought was best for her situation but then she died anyway. She was wrong. When someone dies because they made a wrong choice you’re supposed to wonder what they could have done differently. That’s how we learn from their mistakes.
At the end of the day none of us know why this lady chose not to be vaccinated. The only thing we know for certain is the choice she made. Clearly it was not a good choice. That much at least is not up for debate. I would disagree with you if you said that choice was entirely out of her hands but if that makes you feel better about what happened to her then you are free to rationalize it in that way. Personally I think that does a disservice to her by painting her solely as a victim with no agency over her own life. It’s theoretically possible that was the case but that kind of abuse is much more rare than the people assuming that was her situation are making it out to be.
Statistically it’s far more likely she was simply annoyed by her husband’s constant bitching about the deep state and didn’t think it was worth pushing the issue. Again, we’ll never know. Either way I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong by pointing out that this potentially fictional woman bears at least some responsibility for what happened to her. If we don’t do that and then try to figure out how she could have stopped it from happening then the story serves no purpose other than to revel in her husband’s misery. If enjoying his suffering is the point of this post then I guess I am the asshole for thinking it was more civilized than that.