Aaron Siri’s latest argument against the OSHA ETS (the vaccine mandate for large employers) is an important read, and a good summary of the Constitutional problems with the mandate.
But it is, in part, not an argument about vaccines at all. Mark this excerpt from the reply linked above (but really, read the whole paragraph):
It is well established, for instance, that heart disease is the number one killer of Americans yearly, beating out COVID-19…Under the Government’s theory, workers during lunch breaks frequently consume fatty foods or perhaps grab a soda, which are (i) substances or agents, (ii) that workers are exposed to on the job, (iii) which are physically harmful in that they are linked to increase incidence of (iv) the grave danger of heart disease. Based on this, the Government could issue an OSH ETS that might: (i) demand caloric intake regulations for American workers, enforced through their employers; (ii) place dietary restrictions on American workers, enforced through their employers; (iii) prohibit soda intake, again enforced through their employers.
Think about the implications of such an unrestricted authority of the federal government. This isn’t even about vaccination at all anymore. This is about the food you put in your mouth.
Responds the voice in your head: “don’t be ridiculous, no one has any intention of policing your diet.” Right, and one year ago, vaccine coercion was a right-wing conspiracy theory. And, if you’d claimed two years ago that by springtime most governments would force businesses to close, put people’s livelihoods on the chopping block, and unceremoniously dispose of foundational human rights commonly recognized by free Western nations — if you claimed that at the beginning of 2020 — you’d be dismissed out of hand.
The point is that none of this has progressed in a rational way and it is foolhardy to rely on the rationality of the same people who have enabled it to go this far in the first place. And frankly, if you’re getting tired of what sounds like conspiracy theories, then stop opening all the doors and lining up all the incentives to make it look like a conspiracy is happening.
Let’s think about the conventional wisdom on the human diet for a moment. Let’s think about how shaky the Science™ actually is that backs official dietary guidelines.
Diabetic patients in the US are commonly advised to eat a diet that is directly at odds with what will help them control their blood glucose levels. Wheat bread, potatoes, starch with every meal. The demonization of saturated fat based on extremely selective and ego-driven science has colored and damaged good dietary guidelines for decades now. It was epic foreshadowing of the monomaniacal push for universal lockdowns instead of focused protection; and for mRNA vaccination of the entire population of Planet Earth at the expense of early treatment and lifestyle improvements.
Let’s also consider the convergence of two pseudo-religions: the push for plant-based diets and climate alarmism. Reduction of animal foods, especially red meat and dairy, is a favorite proposed remediation of carbon emissions (perhaps because it places the primary burden on the lower and middle classes). Even if the ghost of Ancel Keys were not haunting our dietary guidelines by themselves, the framing of climate change as public health crisis (COVID revealed an apparently ironclad marketing strategy, just appeal to “public health”) would yield similar controversy over what people ought to eat.
Maybe bugs?
As a diabetic myself, I tend to take this somewhat personally. Seven years ago now, I realized that I was on a course toward extremely poor health and worrisome complications. I stopped eating starch and sugar and subsisted on animal protein with some vegetables. I dropped weight and several medications specifically by ignoring the official, “scientific” advice on what I ought to eat. So call me biased, but I’m a little touchy when the federal government starts chasing the authority to override my own judgment on the matter.
If this mandate goes through, will my employment be put at risk in the future not only because of my vaccination status, but my noncompliance with a “cricket, soy, and rice” diet? The reasoning would be identical. I, as a burden on the healthcare system, would simply need to face consequences, according to this principle.
If you grant sweeping authority to an unelected bureaucracy based on only the broadest and most tenuous possible links to impacts on public health and workplace safety, these are the questions you need to be asking.
You need to be asking “if we allow this here and now, what must we also logically allow afterward?”
And if the thing you allow has no limiting principle, the answer to that question can only be “everything.”
> “don’t be ridiculous, no one has any intention of policing your diet.”
Eh, since 2010 school lunch program meals are not allowed to have whole milk. Only 1% or non-fat. This applies to private schools as well - if they are on the program.
As an identified auto-didact and lifelong iconoclast, I've spent the bulk of my sentient years as the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Sadly, life insists on remaining linear, so the largest lessons have had the unfortunate tendency of arriving in single file.
The most valuable of them by FAR was the moment where I lost "faith" in the medical industry in my mid-20's, followed immediately by the discovery that the best "medicine" was what you put in your mouth at "mealtime", as well as the manufactured fallacy of mealtime (and so many others).
What that grueling stretch taught me was critical, after having my immune system trashed by well-meaning, pill-pushing physicians with zero nutritional knowledge : each individual must experience (and survive) their own personal "radicalization" moment, before any awakening is possible.
Mine/ours (me and the wife) was edible. Followed by realizing -- and accepting, then acting on -- the simple, fundamental truth of personal responsibility for EVERYTHING in our lives. Reclaiming "quality control" in all things. It gave sayings like "physician heal thyself" and "do no harm" rich new meaning.
Invested years studying and (un)learning the well-funded tenets of formal "nutrition" and discovering a tawdry history of industrial and institutional meddling and marketing stretching back over a century. Already hip to similar historical arcs in other disciplines, the patterns were very familiar.
To top it all off, the wife and I are both familiar with vaccine injury, personally and peripherally. Our stance on the latest genocidal impulse emanating from the upper reaches of systemic power is rooted in these experiences. The malicious policies advancing on each and every one of us are beyond insulting when viewed in context. It's difficult NOT to interpret a genocidal impulse.
Her family actually hid two of their own from the "Einsatzgruppen" for nearly a decade. One unquestionably damaged by a polio vaccine at age six, the other most likely a developmental DDT casualty in the early "better living through chemistry" years.
Sadly, such powerful individual lessons are nothing in the apocalyptic battle for hearts and minds so long dominated by well-funded industrial propaganda and the mewling minions who worship at the triumvirate altars of "Science", "Capital" and "Progress".
Our radicalization moment was nearly three decades ago. Over that span, we've personally helped a few close friends -- those with functioning critical minds -- step off the Lazy Susan of industrial "health and nutrition". All are still thanking us to this day, some now more radical than ourselves.
Thirty years down the road and both sporting fully functional immune systems, it's clear to us that the Machine can no longer be sated consuming us one-by-one or in small handfuls. We're reaching truly ghastly levels of blood sacrifice. The blanket othering of critical thought is also tragically familiar, not to mention hugely ironic from our outpost on a rural German farm.
It's hard to cultivate hope when one possesses something akin to "prescience", based on forty years of reading ALL sides and honing one's mental blade.
It's hard to retain hope in the face of colleagues and family with FAR more formal education are utterly beholden, incapable of recognizing the basest reality when pointed out -- and unable to acknowledge accurate predictions made months or years earlier coming to pass again and again and again.
When hindsight is eliminated, all that remains is the future conflict you allude to above. Is it inevitable...? Unfortunately, if history any sort of guide, the answer appears to be yes.