The right wing dogma on the Covid vaccines and the mysteries of the internet

Yesterday I was looking for a post I wrote several years ago, referencing Erving Goffman’s idea of “cooling the mark out.” The post turned out to be from 2021, and it linked to this really interesting set of speculations from sociologist Brooke Harrington about how what we would now call right wing influencers could be employed as “coolers” to lessen Covid vaccine hesitancy.

In the course of doing this I discovered that two comments had been added to the thread, in 2023 and 2024 respectively:

2023:

Wow. Two years later I’m thinking this didn’t age to [sic] well…

But I’d also suspect that the purveyors of this blog are willfully blind to all the ‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome’, Cancer rates skyrocketing, extremely fit young sports players [ETA: Commenter Alby points out that English speakers would normally refer to “sports players” as “athletes;” chalk one up for the Slavic bot thesis] dropping dead on the playing field….

They’ll just tighten their multiple masks on their way for booster #6.

2024:

Its [sic] 2024 now. You guys still think questioning vax was wrong?

A couple of things about this:

(1) It’s now apparently received dogma in MAGAland, in the face of literally all scientific evidence, that the Covid vaccine “didn’t work,” and also killed lots of healthy young people. Again both these beliefs are utterly irrational, and in addition they treat basically the only positive accomplishment of the first Trump administration as a total disaster.

(2) Who is going around bothering to publish right wing propaganda on deader than Marley blog threads, years after anyone else has looked at them? Obviously somebody thinks this is worthwhile, and I’m wondering if “somebody” is more likely to be your basic angry loner doing so while watching infomercials for doomsday prepping at 3 AM, or some Russian bot farm doing this via the omniscient algorithms.

I don’t understand the world today.

Don’t think about it, you can go crazy.