On the concept of a mandate, and protests against them

 With the Canadian trucker protest and continued pushback against any vaccine mandates in the US, I have a simple, or perhaps not so simple observation.  Rejection of a vaccine mandate can come in one of two forms.  There is straight-forward antivaxxer-ism, wherein those who object to the mandates do so because they have an active desire to not take the vaccine.  Perhaps they believe, falsely, that the risks of the vaccine are higher than the risks of COVID.  Perhaps they believe, insanely, that the vaccines have microchips in them, or some such nonsense.  Perhaps they believe, non-falsifiably, that there will be some consequence 20 years down the road, which is unlikely given what we know, is not a standard that they apply elsewhere, the math doesn't add up compared to COVID, and is basically just a rationalization of fears handed to them by other antivaxxers.  Antivaxxerism is not data-based, but it is, at least, a belief.

This morning, though, I have an observation about another category of argument against mandates.  Stop me if you've heard this one before.  (Or actually don't.  Not that you could.)  "I just don't want to be forced to take the vaccine."

OK.  How about this:  don't shoot yourself in the head.

That's kind of actually what we are saying anyway!

As a general rule, I don't like being told what to do.  I like my independence, obstreperous contrarian that I am.  Yet, I try to approach decisions in a fundamentally utilitarian way.  I do not, and have never used illicit substances.  I have never responded to the laws, the mandates that I not use these substances by saying, fuck you, I'm injecting the Keith Richards special!

And funny, but I don't think that the anti-mandate crowd is going all Keef on the drug thing either.  Statistically, your average COVID mandate opponent has taken more illicit drugs than I have, because I'm over here at the zero lower bound, total square that I am, and I honestly don't give a shit if they've smoked weed, or even gone for something harder than that.  My point is that they aren't injecting the craziest shit they can find to protest drug laws.

Which are mandates.  Thou shalt not.

Fuck you, don't tell me what to do!

I may be a contrarian, but I don't need the gub'mint to tell me to not inject heroin.  I can read the data, and that's just a stupid, fucking thing to do.  Also, needles are scary, and what the fuck is wrong with you people?!  And the flip side is that I didn't need anyone to tell me to get the vaccine.  Yeah, needles are scary, but not getting it would have been fucking stupid.

And this brings me to my basic point about mandates.

If you tell me not to say, "fuck," I'm going to say, "fuck," at least in part because you told me not to say, "fuck."  Four letters, one syllable, three phonemes, meaning which exists only through social construction.  No, I'm not becoming a post-modernist, but language is a social construction.  Some things are socially constructed, and some are not.  Language is.  I reject the concepts of profanity and obscenity, and I reject the moral standard of "I'm offended," which is the only moral standard by which "fuck" can be deemed an offense.  Why?  Infinite regress.  You're offended?  I am offended by your demand.  You are offended by my insistence that my offense matters, and on we go, through infinite regress.  No standard exists by the Rawlsian principle for determining whose umbrage matters, or which umbrage matters, so umbrage cannot be a guiding principle.

Umbrage can fuck its prissy, little self.  (Right about now, you're trying to figure out if that was offensive, aren't you?  Aren't you?)

The proscription on the use of a word like, "fuck," is precisely why the word should be used.  And frankly, its diminished power to offend shows that this has been working.  Good.

Yet it costs me nothing to say, nor type, "fuck."  In... most circumstances.  The first amendment protects it by any correct reading of the text, my contract protects my use of such words, particularly since I am making political observations through such commentary (academic freedom!  in tenure veritas!), and all of that means that when I respond to a proscription with confrontation, I am being pointedly contrarian, and if nothing else, then not irrational.  [Counts negatives...]

When does a refusal to comply for the sake of noncompliance become costly?

In all sorts of ways.  And people do pay costs to not comply.  Remember the individual mandate in Obamacare, before that got repealed?  Quick refresher:  when the Dems passed the ACA, part of it required individuals with sufficient income to buy health insurance, or pay a higher tax rate, based on the premise that if you don't buy into the health insurance system, once you show up in the emergency room like a fucking dumbass, and can't pay that bill, you put that emergency room bill on someone else, rather than helping to keep charges down for everyone.  This was actually the key to the Heritage Foundation's counterproposal to HillaryCare, back in the '93-'94 healthcare debates, and a Republican governor put it into law before becoming the GOP presidential nominee (before groveling uselessly before Trump for a job, like a moron).  But, some black dude became a Democratic president, and thought it was a reasonable idea, so it became nazi-ism, and the whole Republican Party turned on it, having the memories of racist goldfish.  In 2017, after a few years of promising "repeal and replace," the GOP finally got a chance, but funny story.  "Repeal and replace" was never anything more than a slogan, and they never put any thought into an actual replacement.  When they actually had to, the technical term is "legislate," they couldn't fucking manage because the GOP actually turned stupid long before Trump came along, or they wouldn't have elected him.  So, when their big moment came, they... couldn't perform.  The only thing on which they could agree was what they called, "skinny repeal," which meant just repealing the individual mandate.  At the last minute, on the Senate floor, Sen. John Phony McCain gave a thumbs-down and voted against skinny repeal, and nobody says a fuckin' word about Collins or Murkowski voting with him.  Then, right after that, the GOP put together their tax cut bill, and they throw in skinny repeal as an add-on.  You know who voted for it?  All three of those fuckin' phonies!  The only difference?  Murkowski got somethin' for it.  McCain and Collins were just useless frauds, as always, and John McCain should never be remembered as anything else, particularly not for killing the GOP's Obamacare repeal attempt.  He voted for the exact proposal that he voted down, a few months later, when it was included in the tax bill.

John McCain was always a fraud.  Yeah, I know, Trump reset the scale on political fraudulence, but nothing for which John McCain was ever praised was justified.  That guy sucked.

Anyway, digression aside, remember the mandate?  People paid higher tax bills to not get health insurance.  Even when it was fuckin' stupid to not get health insurance.  Why?  'Cuz you can't make me!

Dumbasses.

Yes, people are stupid, and they will do stupid, irrational things to refuse to comply with mandates when they have been told that noncompliance signals something.

Yet... the vaccine.

I come back to my snarky line.  On a college campus, we have to be kind of careful about suicide, but I'm making a point here.

OK, anti-mandaters.  You say it's the mandate you don't like?  Well, don't shoot yourself in the head.  This actually is a legal mandate, in many states.  If you succeed, it is hard to prosecute you, but if you try, and fail, you can be prosecuted for a suicide attempt.  Attempted suicide is a crime in many states, and in many countries.  I'm not just talking about doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.  I mean, like, someone who makes an attempt, fails (as many attempts fail), is found, taken to the hospital, treated, and instead of just sent to the psych ward, that person gets prosecuted for having committed the crime of attempted suicide.  It is not the most common prosecution, but it is a law on the books in a lot of states, and the prosecution can happen, more frequently in other countries than in the US.

I don't see any of these people shooting themselves in the head to protest the criminalization of suicide attempts.

Why not?  Because there is something more than the proscription.

I don't see these people injecting heroin to protest the criminalization of heroin.

Why not?  Because there is something more than the proscription.

If I tell you that you are legally prohibited from doing X, and that makes you so angry that you protest and such?  It means you aren't protesting for the principle of libertarianism.  It means that specific prohibition bothers you, and you want to do X, or at least, to be able to do X.  I explained why I want to say "fuck."

I have no desire to say the n-word.  Tell me I can't, and... so what?  Chris Rock?  I'll defend his right to say it, but I'm neither a comedian, nor Chris Rock.  I'll defend a novelist's right to use it when a story requires it, but I'm not a novelist.  Me?  It's not a prohibition that bothers me.  "Fuck?"  Tell me I can't say, "fuck," and we got a fuckin' problem, as I have explained.  Many times.

When a person recoils from a mandate, it is never just the concept of a mandate.

Otherwise, those who claim that they just don't like being told what to do?  They'd have shot themselves in the head, long ago.  Literally, to protest the prohibition on suicide.  Or at the very least, tried to inject more drugs than Keith Richards, just to protest the laws that tell them they can't.

I'm pretty contrarian, but the fact that I've never even taken a puff of marijuana tells you something.  It's never just the prohibition.  Never.

So what is it?  I'm sorry that my answer at this point is going to sound so trite, but simple tribal identity.  My side is the unvaccinated side.  It's just easier to defend that if you wrap it up in a bunch of pseudo-libertarian bullshit.

Remember, conservatives are not libertarians.  They have just been trained to spout libertarian rhetoric because it makes their bullshit easier to defend, but push 'em on legalizin' it.  I've never taken a puff, but from my economics perspective, the war on drugs makes zero sense.  Ban something, and all you do is create a black market.  (Anything.  Even certain... objects... that you, liberals, don't like, but that, well... I don't talk about anymore.  Kinda weird, right?)  The war on drugs is conceptually stupid, and an empirical disaster in every way.  But go ahead and ask those making pseudo-libertarian arguments against vaccine mandates, who are claiming to refuse vaccines, just because they don't like being told what to do, how much crack they smoke in the typical week?  What?  Don't you want to show the government that they can't tell you what to do?

Or, is there something more to it?

And at the end of the day, a vaccine mandate is a probabilistic prohibition on suicide anyway.  We don't call it that, few are ever prosecuted for attempted suicide, and despite the hyperbolic rhetoric, your freedom is not really being impinged.

What a bunch of bullshit.

I missed jazz again yesterday.  Hank Garland, "Tell Me, What Am I To Do," from The Unforgettable Guitar of Hank Garland.