... and a love letter to tmservo433, who gave us this.
It seems we're going to have a month of calls for "The Good Old Days"TM, if the anti-vaxer trolls swarming the site are any clue. The good old days, when large families were the norm, because a) there was no way to prevent pregnancy, and b) it helped assure that there would be at least one child that survived to adulthood, between measles, mumps, chicken pox, smallpox, killing influenza, scarlet fever, polio, rheumatic fever, whooping cough, malaria, diphtheria, cholera, and tetanus.
The good old days, when all the people that counted were male, white, and Protestant, and preferably of Scots/English descent, women knew their proper place, and children were seen but not heard.
The diary went up 1:57pm on Friday, Jan 30.
So far it has 664 comments, 594 diary recommends, and 306,000 Facebook shares. The first comment that ended up hidden was #101 http://www.dailykos.com/... , at 5:08pm. The latest, so far, was on Monday, Feb 2, at 7:52pm.
33 antivax comments have been hidden in 4 diaries, 7 users have been banned for antivax trolling, and one is on a TimeOut. A large number of users have been delicately skirting the edges of the controversy, as usual. There have been at least two calls for anti-vax to get CT status, on the basis that it's less well documented than 9/11 trutherism, and more dangerous to our kids.
69 hidden comments overall, of 27,500 comments total for the period since 1/30, or .25%. Not bad, except that it's a jump of 38% over the "normal" incidence of Hiddens.
The story seemed so innocuous - a few measles cases from an outbreak traced to DisneyLand, and then a bit of a snowball rolling downhill as various politically hued commenters added a few cents here, a few cents there. And yes, other sites have been trolled by anti-vaxers. But, you know, it's really hard to troll Daily Kos, all things considered, and when the trolling gets to a certain point, it's time to check for significance, especially when so many of the comments are from people who've been here for a while.
The point I'm drawing from the comments I've been seeing is that people seem to have forgotten, or more likely never learned, the risks of having an unvaccinated population that's any larger than it has to be (can I say "in recent generations?"). One of the good/bad things about Daily Kos commenters is that they generally skew older than the population - even older than the QuantCast stats might show. We remember when the odds of losing a child to, or having one crippled by, a childhood disease were substantially higher than they are now. Some may not entirely trust the vaccination process, but we generally don't want to go back there, good old days or not.
Perhaps we need to tell more true horror stories to these people who've never seen the old reality, along with trying to present the science, rather than letting them bask in the seeming warmth of generational forgetfulness.
8:00 am CDT: I should check more thoroughly before posting - somebody's already doing the work. See http://www.dailykos.com/... by rexymeteorite.