A quick post about age discrimination by Dave Winer. I recommend reading the discussion below the blog post - it reveals a lot about a problem I believe will become much more serious in the years to come.
This comment by jawbaw is interesting:
In general I have noticed there is also a trend for people of the same age to stick together and reject other age brackets. Kids only hang out with kids of the same age, not older or younger.
He notes this as a particular disturbing trait of western culture. The general disrespect for people of other ages is astounding and also a lot more irrational then for example hatred of people of other cultures. The comparison is also interesting because most society (often hypocritically) scoffs at cultural racism but age based insults are taken as norm.
Amy Wallace from the Wired writes about the spread of irrational rejection of vaccination due to being the proposed (obviously without evidence) cause of autism.
The article quotes an interesting fact: this type of denial is not new. Before it happened in America it happened in England:
In 19th-century England, he explains, Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was known to be effective. But despite the Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853, many people still refused to take it, and thousands died unnecessarily… [They] were great at mass marketing. It was a print-oriented society. They were great pamphleteers…
And by the 1890s, they had driven immunization rates down to the 20 percent range.
Immediately, smallpox took off again in England and Wales, killing 1,455 in 1893. Ireland and Scotland, by contrast, “didn’t have any anti-vaccine movement and had very high immunization rates and very little incidence of smallpox disease and death,” he says, taking a breath. “You’d like to think we would learn.”
The target of this fallacy is also interesting. Vaccination stands at the very core of todays medicine. Louis Pasteur who discovered germs as the cause of disease did this also in close co-findings on vaccination. He is also the person who created the first artificial vaccination. This was in the 1870s. He was also the person who told surgeons to wash their hands before performing surgery.
It is not wild to say that this person - a rigorous scientist - had probably the biggest effect on human health in the whole history of mankind. And these half-educated scumbags just dare to defy all medicine that brought them their nice safe lives.
Let me conclude with one last quotation from the article:
I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die… Now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.
(via @daringfireball)
