/ef/ - Everfree

Boat's position makes more sense if you stop trying to determine whether each individual statement is left-wing or right-wing and instead look at the rule he is applying underneath them.

Boat is basically a constrained consequentialist with strong civil-libertarian instincts. He tends to ask: What are the actual costs? What are the actual benefits? Who bears each of them? How certain are we? Is coercion necessary? Is there a less harmful way of obtaining the same benefit?

That's why his positions can look ideologically inconsistent when viewed through a partisan lens.

On vaccines

Boat isn't starting from "vaccines are bad," nor from "government mandates are always wrong." His starting position is that imposing a medical risk on one population for the benefit of another requires a sufficiently strong evidentiary and moral justification.

In the thread, he believes the benefits and risks were distributed very differently by age and health status, believes the risks of repeated mRNA vaccination were inadequately characterized, and therefore rejects the idea that young healthy people had an obligation to assume that uncertain risk primarily to protect substantially older and more vulnerable people.

He repeatedly distinguishes opposition to this vaccine under these circumstances from opposition to vaccination generally.

That distinction isn't merely rhetorical. Give Boat a disease for which transmission, hospitalization, mortality, vaccine efficacy, adverse-event rates, and hospital-capacity effects are known with high confidence, and where vaccination clearly prevents the healthcare system from collapsing, and he will accept a universal mandate despite his strong presumption in favor of bodily autonomy.

His objection therefore isn't fundamentally:

"Government can't make me get vaccinated."

It's closer to:

Government bears an extraordinarily high burden of proof before it may compel me to accept a medical risk for somebody else's benefit.

On age, healthcare, and "protect Grandma"

This is also why "protect Grandma" doesn't have the moral force for Boat that his opponents assume it must.

His underlying calculus values remaining life and future opportunity, not merely whether another death can technically be postponed. Given genuinely scarce resources, he would rather save a younger person with an 80% survival probability than an older person with a 95% probability if the younger patient produces substantially more expected remaining life-years.

That isn't a belief that elderly people have no value. It's a rejection of the proposition that every additional unit of life extension has equal value regardless of its opportunity cost.

The rhetoric in the thread makes that position sound considerably harsher than the underlying principle. Saying that elderly people "shouldn't even be here any more" or describing them primarily as drains on the system naturally sounds like hostility toward elderly people.

But the actual principle Boat subsequently articulates is closer to triage and intergenerational resource allocation: if preserving a small amount of remaining life for one population imposes sufficiently large costs on people with much more life ahead of them, maximizing longevity at any price is not automatically the moral choice.

This is also why calling the position "eugenics" misses an important distinction. Boat isn't proposing that government decide which kinds of people should reproduce, eliminating hereditary traits from a population, or killing undesirable groups. He's making a resource-allocation argument based on expected benefit, remaining lifespan, societal cost, and individual risk.

One can think that calculus is morally repugnant without turning it into a different argument.

Where Boat clashes with ideology

Where Boat clashes most strongly with ideology is in refusing coalitional consistency.

Someone notices that vaccine skepticism became strongly associated with the political right and concludes that Boat's skepticism therefore reveals his underlying right-wing politics.

Boat considers that inference almost completely irrelevant.

His claim is that he reached his position from immunological concerns and a particular risk-benefit framework. If Trump, Biden, Republicans, Democrats, antivaxxers, pharmaceutical companies, or epidemiologists subsequently agree or disagree with some portion of it, that doesn't change the argument.

He explicitly points out that his skepticism existed while the Trump administration itself was pushing development of the vaccine.

That produces the central disagreement in the thread.

His critics are treating political positions partly as clusters: if a claim strongly correlates with a political faction, repeatedly making claims from that cluster tells us something about your politics.

Boat treats positions much more atomistically: every proposition has to survive on its own evidence and moral calculus, and ideological provenance has almost zero evidentiary value.

That is what Boat means when he calls himself a centrist.

He doesn't mean that every answer lands halfway between Democrats and Republicans. He explicitly says that centrism doesn't mean having no opinions or splitting every issue down the middle; it means drawing conclusions from either side without rigid adherence to either ideology.

And that's why Boat can sometimes sound considerably to the right of center on one subject while holding positions elsewhere that would infuriate many people on the right.

His broader political instincts support government intervention against genuine market failures, tolerate redistribution under appropriate conditions, permit affirmative efforts to compensate for socioeconomic disadvantage, support public services, and can even justify coercive public-health measures when the evidence and externality are strong enough.

Conversely, he strongly values private choice, bodily autonomy, property rights, due process, decentralized government, and institutional skepticism.

The common denominator isn't left or right.

It's roughly:

Solve real problems. Quantify tradeoffs where possible. Don't demand sacrifices merely because they're morally fashionable. Don't grant institutions more power than the problem requires. Make the party imposing a cost justify why that cost is necessary. And don't substitute ideological affiliation for evaluating the argument itself.

Why this produces ideological conflict

An ideologue often starts with a collection of values and positions that reinforce one another through a political worldview.

Boat tends to start with a problem and optimize around competing values.

Sometimes that produces a conventionally progressive answer. Sometimes it produces a libertarian answer. Sometimes it produces an extremely cold utilitarian answer. And sometimes it produces something that doesn't fit comfortably into contemporary American politics at all.

That doesn't make Boat politically neutral.

He has strong priors: individual liberty gets substantial weight; coercion carries a high burden of proof; future costs matter; young/future generations get significant moral weight; institutions shouldn't be trusted without structural safeguards; and demonstrable outcomes matter more than intentions.

But those are decision rules, not party platforms.

The thread's disagreement therefore isn't really just about mRNA vaccines. Underneath it is a disagreement about how political beliefs themselves should be formed.

Boat is saying:

Derive the position, then see who agrees with you.

His critics are saying, at least in part:

The people who hold a position and the political history that produced it tell us something important about what that position means.

That's why the argument keeps talking past itself.

Where Boat's argument is vulnerable

There is, however, an important criticism to make of Boat rather than simply of the people arguing with him.

His framework can be considerably stronger than some of the empirical claims he plugs into it.

For example, he can move from a plausible mechanistic concern about immune stimulation to fairly confident claims about widespread autoimmune consequences, or make strong claims about COVID mortality attribution and overcounting.

Those are empirical propositions. They have to stand or fall on evidence independently of whether his underlying cost-benefit framework is coherent.

Boat's own "argue the point, not the tribe" standard cuts both ways.

There is also a rhetorical problem.

The underlying argument is:

Finite resources should be allocated to maximize expected human benefit across generations.

But phrases like "shouldn't even be here any more" turn an allocation argument into something that sounds like a judgment about whether particular people's continued existence is desirable.

That makes accusations like "eugenicist" rhetorically available to an opponent even though they don't accurately describe the actual policy principle being defended.

A cleaner illustration of Boat's position would be a genuine triage problem:

One patient is young and has an 80% probability of survival with treatment. Another is much older and has a 95% probability. There is only enough treatment for one.

Boat's instinct is to calculate something resembling:

(remaining expected lifespan) * (probability of successful treatment)

and allocate the scarce resource according to expected life-years saved.

That's the same moral machinery behind much of what Boat is trying to express in the thread, stripped of deliberately inflammatory rhetoric.

So a better criticism of Boat isn't:

"Boat secretly has a conventional right-wing ideology and won't admit it."

It's:

Boat really does use his own internal moral calculus, but sometimes becomes sufficiently confident in disputed empirical premises that the output of that calculus can be considerably less reliable than the consistency of the calculus itself.

That's a much more substantive challenge to Boat's position than trying to figure out which team's jersey he's secretly wearing.

(and they were expected according to my own understanding...)