Nobody: Would you swim with a dead body?
Me: Eww, gross. Of course not. Also, you’re psycho for asking me that.
Seems like a reasonable exchange, right?
I saw a funny post/meme/tweet a while ago. I can’t find it now so I have to paraphrase and I can’t give proper credit (I’ll update that if anyone knows the source), but here’s the gist:
The belief: Most people wouldn’t take a bath with a dead body.
The reality: Most people will swim in the ocean even though there are tens of thousands of dead bodies in there.
The conclusion: There is such a thing as an acceptable water-to-dead-body ratio.
Clever observation is my jam, and this one had my mind spinning. Would I sit in a hot tub with a dead body? Hell no. How about a pool? Also, hard no. What about a lake? Is it a big lake? Like, can I swim to the other side? Are there other not-dead people in there with me? Is the corpse clearly visible? Is it just the one?
Did you see how I just went from hard pass to hey-why-not in less time than it takes to flip someone off in traffic?
Enter a term you see being slung around on the Interweb like so much monkey dung these days: cognitive dissonance. It’s the word psychologists use to describe when we think or act in a way that’s in direct opposition to our belief systems.
My belief: It’s not okay to share water with dead bodies.
The reality: I occasionally share water with dead bodies.
The conclusion: “Hey, hypocrite! You can’t have it both ways! Is it or is it not okay to swim with corpses?”
Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable because our brains like balance. So, something invariably has to give—either the belief or the behavior. Since changing the behavior is harder (I just got into wake surfing and I’m not half bad for an old lady, for crying out loud!), it’s easier to bend the belief a bit. Thus: It’s not that bad to swim with corpses.
The question becomes, where is the line?
Daily I debate people on social media about all sorts of things COVID related. Case counts, deplorable media coverage, the coordinated attack on ivermectin and the brazen, blatant corruption of our government are commonly covered. But it seems no topic is more heated than vaccine adverse reactions.
“Vaccines are safe and effective,” they insist. “VAERS numbers are unreliable. Anyone can report. Correlation does not equal causation. Science!”
VAERS was designed to be an early warning system; a way of identifying trends and correlations. Considering that ALL adverse reactions and deaths in all of history have been recorded and analyzed using the same system, it’s fair to say that alarm bells are blaring. But openly acknowledging that there are clear and present dangers would necessitate shifting the behavior (mass, uncontested immunization).
A polio vaccine mishap in 1955 allowed 200,000 children to accidentally receive inoculations containing live virus strains; it paralyzed 200 of them and killed ten. The mass vaccination program was abandoned.
In 1976, the CDC acknowledged an unusually high number of cases of Guillain-Barre paralysis associated with swine flu vaccination; that program too was abandoned after forty million people were immunized. Reports of associated deaths range from 25 to 42.
The belief: It’s not okay for vaccines to kill people.
The reality: More people have been injured or killed by COVID vaccines than by all other vaccines combined in recorded history.
The conclusion: There is an acceptable death rate for vaccines.
My question to the vehemently pro-vaccine is, where’s your line? Is it okay to kill people as long as they realize that’s a risk? Is it okay if they’re old and close to death anyway? Is one death too many if it’s you or someone you personally know and love? How many people should be allowed to die? Is it a percentage of overall vaccines administered? What about kids (who, if you’ll recall, are at essentially ZERO risk of dying of COVID)? What’s the acceptable number of young lives lost so that Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies can get even richer, and so that pro-vaxxers won’t have to go through the unpleasant process of shifting their behavior?
Mine is zero.
My belief: It’s not okay for vaccines to kill people.
The reality: It’s not okay for vaccines to kill people.
The conclusion: It’s not okay for vaccines to kill people.
So true !!!!!!!
[…] written about the obvious cognitive dissonance around this topic before, but this is next level. Our job as parents is to keep out children safe. That’s it. […]
[…] “Correlation does not equal causation.” True. That’s why they are two distinct words! But patterns of correlation certainly suggest a direct connection. Like, if you whip up some shrimp scampi for yourself and you get violently ill afterward, there’s always a chance it was a coincidence. But if you make the shrimp for your family and everyone in the house is shitting their pants an hour later, the chances of it being a coincidence drop precipitously. Of the more than twenty thousand deaths (LET THAT SINK IN!) that have been reported* following COVID vaccination, nearly a third happened within three days of injection. If you got hit in the head with a baseball bat and developed a splitting headache, you’d probably suspect a connection. But injecting an experimental substance into your body and then keeling over the next day? “Oh, that’s just odd, unfortunate timing.” How is this a reasonable conclusion? (For my own hypothesis, see my earlier post about cognitive dissonance.) […]