Very true, but 1/5 is actually the most reassuring part of the poll. It matches up with the basic crazy answer threshold I usually see in polls with similar methodology. It seems like, no matter how absurd the question, about 1/5 people in opinion polling are willing to claim to believe it. What’s worrying to me is the additional not sure chunk. Between them they rise above what I consider the base value foe nonsense and start signaling an actual belief.
I like the response “There is no need to put the microchip in the vaccine, it’s been in your food for years” and see if their belief survives their starvation.
Perhaps we need a corollary to Poe’s law:
With all due respect to Mike Judge (Office Space was great) intellectual liberals need to stop trotting out Idiocracy as “prophetic”. That movie was classist, vaguely racist and more-than-a-little eugenicist trash. The entire premise is that “we” should stop “stupid people” from breeding too much, as though stupidity is genetic and all offspring are therefore irredeemable. Of course “we” also get to decide who the smart and stupid ones are because it’s obvious to the “good” people, no stated criteria required. This is conservatism in a nutshell and not the message fans of Idiocracy think they are backing when they chortle and trot out references to it.
Let’s all let that one go, please?
I’m sorry but, bullshit. This attitude is what will doom us all, not people that we haven’t reached yet.
The task is to figure out how to connect with people. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years and always found a way. There’s nothing unique about our current time. There have always been stupid people, ignorant people, and blindly ideologically people. We find ways to motivate them, meet them where they are, and help each other. Dividing ourselves into “us” and “them” then giving up on “them” is how wars start, not how we solve problems.
Come on, people- this poll was bullshit, like all self-selecting polls, and getting all defeatist about it does nothing except doom us faster. Science communicators and public health officials are working on the problem of how to reach these people and making progress every day. Either help them or at least stop making their job harder by poisoning the well in online echo chambers.
This is just stupid based on the fact alone the vaccine needles are way too thin to pass any kind of chips.
My father and I both had hereditary issues with having a low platelet count (his was so bad, it kept him out of Nam). So when we got the J&J shot back in early April we had to go through a special procedure (more paperwork, sitting through a medical warning from staff and waiting an extra 15 minutes in the post injection area on top of the regular 15 minutes everyone else has to sit though). So when I got my shot, the first needle bent when it hit the skin because of how thin it was. So they had to give me a second needle and after that when they inspected the area it was decided that I didn’t need a bandaid because for some reason I didn’t bleed. Later on when my dad a shown off his injection we realized that we saw that they didn’t cover his injection site with a bandaid (they missed by an inch) and he too didn’t bleed from it. So how can a needle so thin that two people with low platelet issues will not bleed from it be even remotely capable passing as something as big as a so called tracking chip through it rotflmao
And besides around 25% of the earth’s population is vaccinated so even if their conspiracy theory is true, there would be an insurmountable amount of actual evidence and stories NOT coming from the tin foil hat set.
Trust me, if you want to get microchips in people, there are much easier ways of doing it.
I love Idiocracy (and its inspiration, Kornbluth’s “Marching Morons”), but the dysgenics aspect isn’t really the point. These are stories about what happens when ignorant idiots are permitted (and encouraged) by irresponsible and greedy and cynical non-idiots to call the shots in society.
Although fundies and white supremacists are stupid enough to believe it’s a plausible path to victory (as well as being a means of control over women), the Know-Nothings really don’t have to outbreed everyone else to cause mayhem.
If a quarter of the TV audience wants to see pseudo-documentaries filled with staged and empty interpersonal dramas, media outlets are going to cater to that lowest common denominator and flood the zone with “reality” TV. If more than 20% of the population doesn’t want that thar trackin’ jab, we don’t get herd immunity. If 30% of the population votes for members of an authoritarian and racist movement or party, we get fascists in our legislatures.
Are they the same people?
“Cool, a free cyborg implant!”
The whole “Let the stupid people die” approach is not a viable solution. Covid isn’t going to wipe out the stupid people and save the smart people. It’s going to kill 5% of the authoritarian right, making the other 95% more desperate. Since their political strategy is violence rather than votes, this makes them stronger, not weaker. A year from now when New York looks normal and Alabama is a state of endemic delta variant, instead of saying “vaccines kill you” they can just say, “They gave all the good vaccines to the New Yorkers and offered us the poison ones.” That’s just off the top of my head, the story can morph any way they want it to to suit the interests of the day.
Lets just start a rumor that there’s a microchip in phones that track everywhere you go.
Taking a guess, I think this stems from the knowledge that one can implant microchips in one’s pets, for precise identification with a scanner. These aren’t transmitters, doofuses.
And to belabor the point, they have no batteries.
As I posted in the coronavirus thread, this is all we $%**& need at this point.
Shit, we’re gonna end up with homeopathic fascism, aren’t we.
Vaccine hesitancy isn’t just a GOP phenomenon:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/09/politics/vaccine-hesitant-analysis/index.html
(Vaccine resistance still seems to be GOP dominated.)
And I’m sure many of these people own a smart phone of some brand. Yet they seem fine with the fact that these little devices (smart phones) broadcast their location, personal information, and much more in real time.