Yes, the vaccinated can spread the disease, and according to an Israeli study for example, have less protection than natural immunity. Maybe there should be natural immunity passports.

The whole “burden on the healthcare system” has so far been a canard. We’ve been hearing it from the beginning, but even when field hospitals were implemented to offset this, they had to stand down, most of them without treating a single covid patient.

Imagine needing state officials to decide your health and safety. You will never leave the tit at this rate, forever unweaned.

Medical science also recommended the Tuskegee experiments, experimentation on Jews, slaves, deliberately infecting Guatemalans with syphillis, transplanting the testicles of young men into older ones, or radiated prisoners to see the effects of radiation, and on and on. I’m not sure the fact that some policy is recommended by medical science is a good enough reason to enact them, especially given that the the area of expertise for medical scientists is medical science, not ethics or political science.

It’s also practical to weld people into their homes or round up the infected and put them into concentration camps. It would be much easier and cost effective to round up the infected and gun them down where they stand. But to me, the practicality or success rate of any given policy isn’t a good enough reason to enforce it.

Anyways, if you are vaccinated, what is there to fear from the unvaccinated?

That’s right; the “interests of society” are whatever Xtrix says they are.

Society is a collection of atoms? Wow.

Who says the interests of society is health and safety?

I am fully vaccinated and I listen to the advice of my doctor. How does that square with your little caricature?

Your obedience is to government officials, not “science”. Rather than working to falsify any theory, apply the scientific method, you merely work to perpetuate government edicts. It’s so servile and obsequious as to be laughable.

Is society not composed of individuals?

I’d love to hear what you think the “interests of society” are.

Somehow I’ve always known that those who pretended to fight against dictatorship, authoritarianism, discrimination, executive power, state capitalism, and government over-reach during the last administration would help usher in all of the above during the next.

And here we are. Biden, the POTATUS, stumbling over the words on his teleprompter, just gave license to corporate America to enforce his pro-pharma agenda.

I accept that in principle the government and private individuals can restrict me from denying the freedom and rights of others. The unvaccinated do not deny others their rights and freedoms by virtue of them being unvaccinated. Restrictions against them are a step too far in that sense, and not only that, but unnecessary given that the vaccinated are protected from them.

The infected can spread the disease. Absent voluntary quarantine and isolation, I think more forceful measure would have to be taken and is justified. It’s a tough question. Typhoid Mary is a good ethical case study.

Alright. Though I’m not the topic, I do not believe in “unrestricted self-autonomy” and am not a full-on anarchist. I would prefer to end someone’s autonomy the moment he attempts to end mine, for example.

Though I do speak of fundamental rights, I do not believe in natural rights. All rights are or ought to be afforded by human beings, not nature.

Sorry, now that I read back on it it isn’t clear. What I mean by it isn’t “stated somewhere” is that it isn’t a matter of what we “must” do. It’s a choice. Plenty of countries choose not have such mandates. It’s a matter of authoritarianism.

Right, there are things we can't do and things we must do. And nowhere does it state that we have to mandate people to take a vaccine and deny them access to society if they do not. There is nothing unfeasible about it.

I don’t see how it is reasonable to discriminate against the unvaccinated, especially when natural immunity can offer better protection than some vaccines, and the vaccinated are not immune from spreading the disease. It seems more reasonable and justifiable to discriminate against those infected with the virus, the only people capable of spreading the disease.

I’m not one for the supernatural either. And nowhere does it state that we have to mandate people to take a vaccine and deny them access to society if they do not. It’s a simple moral decision.

Society’s interest is its own continuation…I must have missed the memo because there is no other way beyond sheer projection to verify such an interest. But no, I did not describe the proverbial war against all, or an eternal battle royal, only that some individuals are trying to impose their will on other individuals, which is closer to the spirit of war than any defense of fundamental rights.

That is at least a practical view. But I must reject it. Society is composed of individuals. The interests of the individual is the interest of society at large.

My concern is that no one, including the state, can know what “the interest of society” is. If we are to mean the interest of every individual involved, then there is a vast variety of sometimes common and sometimes competing interests. If we are to mean the common interest of some group, then that is not the interest of society.

That’s what we’re dealing with here: the interest of some group, in this case the interest of the state and those who seek to gain from the exercise of state power. There is no collective “we” making these decisions, willing to sacrifice our own and our neighbor’s autonomy, willing to deny medical privacy, willing to endorse mass discrimination, all to appease our subjective, consequentialist desires.

The ends do not justify the means, in this case.

It's a straw man. Not an argument.

If you want to make choices that harm no one else, fine. Do what you want. But, again, sorry to remind you, but we live in a society.

It’s not a straw man. It’s just an argument you cannot address.

“We live in a society”. And? Such a fact is meaningless when it comes to imposing your will on others. That fact of being in a majority does not justify you imposing your will on a minority.

We do know, because we know how viruses spread.

Fear and ignorance is on your side -- fear of, and ignorance of, vaccines. That's all this boils down to: sheer ignorance on your part. Like with almost everything you discuss.

Straw man. I fear vaccine mandates, hence why I am arguing against “vaccine mandates”, which is obvious by what I wrote. Not only fear, not only ignorance, but lies as well.

Straw man.

It’s my argument, not a breakdown of yours. So maybe you can dispute it.

If you live in society, you are. We do know. Which is why we mandate vaccines in schools and many workplaces.

Yours is an idiotic and inconsistent view. But I expect nothing else from you.

You don’t know. You’re ignorant. You’re scared. Fear and ignorance is the premise you use to justify denying bodily autonomy.

If you don’t own anyone’s body, what gives you the right to force vaccines upon them, make medical decisions for them, or otherwise attempt to assert your will with theirs? Nothing.

The problem is you don’t know whether I’m affecting people or not. You are just proposing to deny my bodily autonomy based on your fear-ridden and morally bankrupt precognition.

Yes, the government doesn’t own anyone’s body. The legitimacy of government authority over someone’s body has never been justified. It’s as simple as that.

We don’t need to pretend that mandating vaccination is somehow equivalent to stopping people from banging their heads against a brick wall to maintain that you should not force others to inject or ingest biological agents they do not want to. Perhaps you can argue why a government official should be given the power to make your medical decisions for you.

The fact that the policy maker doesn’t buy into my view doesn’t afford him any right to inject things into my body against my wishes, anymore than a policy maker who doesn’t buy into your view can deny you the right to inject all the vaccines you want. We can’t just surrender that power because, for the time being, it only affects people we disagree with.

Assuming that people should be able to make their own health decisions, should be able to decide what they don’t want to inject into their body, the problem with vaccine mandates is that it forces or coerces people into putting biological agents into their body that they otherwise might not want to. I think parents ought to decide how to protect their children when it comes to vaccination. I don’t think the government should.

It’s no surprise you’d bring up the fatuous “fire in a crowded theater” cliché, used as it was to justify jailing a man for speaking out against the draft. Anyone with “the ability to understand nuance and think analytically” knows the phrase is meaningless, not legally binding, and the underlying case was overturned back in ‘69.

If you don’t believe in the fundamental right to bodily autonomy just say it. Tell everyone, “I want to trade your will with my own”. Let them know that you and the government should decide what to put in their body. You’ll feel better when you let it out: “I want to exclude you from society because you refuse to do what I want you to”. Honesty would at least dissolve the cloud of pretence that follows you.

Did anyone see the piffle from the self-proclaimed “American Civil Liberties Union” on vaccine mandates?

In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated and communities of color hit hard by the disease.

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/civil-liberties-and-vaccine-mandates-heres-our-take/

What may have been a decent argument, an opportunity to further the reasoning behind taking a vaccine, quickly becomes a justification for the government to assert its power and mandate people taking them.

That may sound ominous, because we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others.

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/civil-liberties-and-vaccine-mandates-heres-our-take/

Novelist Salmon Rushdie would demote the ACLU to what he calls the “But Brigade”. Out of one side of the mouth they champion your rights while out of the other they nullify them. We either have “the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health decisions”, or we do not. To the ACLU, we do not.

In this authoritarian fantasy each of us are a risk, a latent vector of danger, a potential Typhoid Mary in some fear-ridden, hypothetical future. Whether we come into contact with the disease or not, whether we are infected or not, it is possible we will be. And because such a scenario is possible, it is further possible we will spread it to granny and [insert at-risk group here].

This is a sort of mealy-mouhed, authoritarian racket, of course. Even if you never come near to becoming infected with the disease, and thus never come near to infecting anyone, let alone the at-risk group, sophists have long since absolved themselves from the evil involved in trading the ACLU’s and the government’s will for your own. When so-called civil liberties groups bend the knee to state power, it’s basically over.

Could it be possible that some folks would rather err on the side of caution when being coerced into injecting biological agents into their body?

The state is operated by men. It was also built by men. So you are subordinate to men. But these men don’t act like men, like your neighbor might. They act like officials. So you are subordinate to a lower form of man, the official. The statist is little more than a stooge or thrall in that sense.

In a free world we’d build roads together in common enterprise. But since we live in a statist world we cannot. So your property is declared eminent domain, the state’s property, and a road goes through your property without your say in the matter.

Also, it should be noted, that Kemalism of Kemal Atatürk was for westernization as a way to defend Turkey from outside powers and the religious aspects of the Ottoman Empire was seen as a reason for the weakness of the Empire.

If Kemalism was in any way inspired by Ataturk's agnosticism, and Ba'athism inspired by Aflaq's Christianity, it could be said that these types of Arab-nationalist ideologies (inspired by Western thought) were against Islamism in state affairs.

L'état, c'est moi

Wherever the state relinquishes power, whether through privatization, deregulation, or cuts in spending and taxation, there is no shortage of critics lamenting the process. But why? If the criticism is not so servile as to be the knowing and explicit defence of state power, then it teeters on one flimsy assumption: that what the government loses so too does the governed.

This assumption brings to mind Ortega Y Gasset’s "The Revolt of the Masses". In it he distinguishes between the superior man and the “mass-man”. Man is naturally-inclined to seek a higher authority. “If he succeeds in finding it of himself, he is a superior man; if not, he is a mass-man and must receive it from his superiors.”

According to Ortega Y Gasset, one should watch with interest the attitude mass-man adopts before the state:

“He sees it, admires it, knows that there it is, safeguarding his existence; but he is not conscious of the fact that it is a human creation invented by certain men and upheld by certain virtues and fundamental qualities which the men of yesterday had and which may vanish into air to-morrow. Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own”

“The mass says to itself, “L’ État, c’est moi,” which is a complete mistake. The state is the mass only in the sense in which it can be said of two men that they are identical because neither of them is named John. The contemporary State and the mass coincide only in being anonymous. But the mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working on whatsoever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it—disturbs it in any order of things: in politics, in ideas, in industry.”

I suppose this is why, in statist terms, the “state sector” is synonymous with the “public sector”. The state thrives when the public believes it is the state, that the ruling class and its mechanisms of power represents the public en masse rather than its own interests. But when one recognizes the parasitic nature of this relationship, who is host and what is parasite, it becomes difficult to sustain it, or at any rate, to maintain the faith in symbiosis.

It’s easy to fall pray to statism. We are born in it, moulded by it, and forever governed by it. So we should always remember, like Proudhon, what it means to be governed.

“To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. And to think that there are democrats among us who pretend that there is any good in government; Socialists who support this ignominy, in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; proletarians who proclaim their candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic! Hypocrisy! …”

The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century

These are good, solid ideas, Xtrix. But, like all rules for conversation, I think they will increase time and energy rather than reduce them.

Yours and my own views are quite different and I fear pulling them apart would only lead to frustration. For instance, I’m not a believer in the canard of “neoliberalism” and see any liberalization during the past 75 years as mere attempts to pull man from the ruins of statism—fascism, socialism, communism, dirigisme, and Keynesianism. But despite these attempts, government spending, interventionism, taxes, welfare statism in general, have only increased. So I think that, despite Friedman’s successes with the abolition of the draft and maybe floating exchange rates, he has had little influence worth noting, and the crimes of “neoliberalism” are too often overstated.

Given my diverging views, I cannot see any hope for saving time and energy. That’s why I think any goal of coming to some sort of agreement in discourse should be abandoned. But it is not a complete waste of time. What was said or written should stand on their own, not for the benefit of the participants in the discourse, but for those others who might come across it.

I said, “ For the last few years many of these states have pressured social media companies to censor “fake news” and “misinformation”. I gave you an example. How is that misleading?

I am against censorship. I’ve already stated this. I’m not sure what you’re taking issue with here.

You thought, wrongly, that the HRW article pertained to the “liberal countries” I wrote about below, and not the authoritarian countries I wrote about above. That’s your misinformation, not mine.

First you accuse me of misinformation; now you accuse me of being against media literacy. Of course, you’re lying. I’m against censorship, as I’ve always said.

Most children throughout history have spent their formative years under the tutelage of their mothers. The rapid cognitive, physical, emotional, and social development of children occurs in their cauldron. All systems are, in this sense, matriarchal.

If you justify an action before committing it, doesn’t that imply free will? If you cannot justify it, you act in a different manner.

It is obvious by what I wrote that my point about more liberal countries was that “For the last few years many of these states have pressured social media companies to censor “fake news” and “misinformation”, the newest bogeyman. In compliance, they have employed an army of busybodies and algorithms to root out speech that is not first approved by the state.” Your own misinformation is betrayed by your comprehension, it seems.

Here’s a map if you’re unsure.

https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/anti-misinformation-actions/

One example would be the United States. The surgeon general called misinformation an “urgent threat” and called on tech companies to take action. European countries have long been waging battle against social media companies over “misinformation”.

I think you’re right. Social media is more anti-social media than anything. Bleating on Twitter or some other platform has become the substitute for many social activities, political action included. There are some egregious examples of censorship, like the concerted effort to ban the American president from online discourse, but for the most part social media companies want us on their apps.

Censorship is still quite severe, and has only increased since governments sieved absolute control over their citizenry. An example would be the suppression of Dr. Ai Fen and Dr. Li Wenliang in China during the start of the pandemic. In Australia you can be put in jail for organizing a protest under the guise that you’re violating restrictions. There are more examples.

At least 83 governments worldwide have used the Covid-19 pandemic to justify violating the exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly, Human Rights Watch said today. Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health. The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/11/covid-19-triggers-wave-free-speech-abuse

But it is also quite ubiquitous across more liberal governments. For the last few years many of these states have pressured social media companies to censor “fake news” and “misinformation”, the newest bogeyman. In compliance, they have employed an army of busybodies and algorithms to root out speech that is not first approved by the state.

There was a spicy Biden leak about his last phone call to Afghan president Ghani, days before the Afghan disaster.

Exclusive: Before Afghan collapse, Biden pressed Ghani to ‘change perception’

The odd thing about it is Biden's demand for a shift in "global perception", proving once and for all why America is one of the world's largest public relations firm, and why no one should trust a word this man says.

In much of the call, Biden focused on what he called the Afghan government’s “perception” problem. “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said. “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”

Biden told Ghani that if Afghanistan’s prominent political figures were to give a press conference together, backing a new military strategy, “that will change perception, and that will change an awful lot I think.”

“I’m not a military guy, so I’m not telling you what a plan should precisely look like, you’re going to get not only more help, but you’re going to get a perception that is going to change …,” Biden said.

His Joint Chiefs of Staff also focused on "narrative".

In this call, too, an area of focus was the global perception of events on the ground in Afghanistan. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Ghani “the perception in the United States, in Europe and the media sort of thing is a narrative of Taliban momentum, and a narrative of Taliban victory. And we need to collectively demonstrate and try to turn that perception, that narrative around.”

None of it worked, of course, and we get to watch as they pick up the pieces of their "narrative".

If one had to choose between denying people healthcare and procuring more beds, procuring more beds is the moral option. Absent that, give healthcare anyways, on the floor if necessary. That was my only point.

You’ve taught me nothing but to enjoy the benefits of Trump’s Operation Warpspeed, or unscrupulous actors will deny people healthcare if they don’t.

Henry Dunant wasn't a doctor and he started the Red Cross.

Why not yourself?