Talking to Normies About Vaccination

Thoughts on how to dissuade older friends and relatives from going back to the vaccinators in the Fall.

These goats don’t care about Corona.

The vaccinators are in summer hibernation, but very soon they’ll be with us again, hawking a novel set of wares. The media blitz will start anew and the medical bureaucrats will return to forcing superfluous and potentially harmful medical interventions on millions of people who don’t need them. One day, all of this will be recognised for the absurd hypochondriac panic that it is, but no few people will be hurt, and at least a few will die, before we get there. What follows are some thoughts I have about how to approach especially older acquaintances, who will be at ground zero of the coming propaganda campaign, and who probably don’t need a fifth dose of the magical miraculous mRNA elixir.

First, some notes on normie psychology:

You have to understand that they think the vaccines are the best things ever. They believe Pfizer and Moderna have almost singlehandedly turned the whole pandemic around and given them their lives back. If ever a doubt should creep into their minds about that, they will fall back to believing that being vaccinated is the right pro-social thing to do, and that not being vaccinated is evil, selfish and stupid. It is the unvaccinated who are responsible for variants, who spread Corona and who are prolonging the pandemic. Normies have The Science on their side, and they take great comfort in buying into and espousing the mythology that has been sold to them. This is how sophisticated propaganda and information management works. Contradictory information will make them extremely uncomfortable, and they’ll look for any reason at all not to believe it. If you cause them too much discomfort, they’ll get angry, tune you out, and put you in the antivaxxer bin, where you can be safely ignored.

It’s going to be very hard to win ground here, and your goal shouldn’t be total victory. You just want to get them to think for themselves, consider their own experiences as valid and real information about the world, and break out of the limited vaccinator-cult patterns of thought long enough to ponder how many boosters they really want to put up with.

The most important thing is to present a relaxed, jovial scepticism on key points. The goal is not to argue, but to challenge in an oblique, casual way, while giving as much as you take. Unless we’re talking about somebody who absolutely trusts you and is earnestly seeking your opinion, you shouldn’t be scheduling in-depth conversations or sitting down for a serious talk. You want to raise questions and plant little seeds of doubt, before they ever realise what is happening, and then you want to fade away before they notice that you’re encouraging them to have heretical thoughts.