Over the years I heard cool people saying: Be in the Now, the Time is Now, stay in the present etc. as if this phenomenological commitment entailed some kind of spiritual transcendence. There was a time when I was partial to this view, which seemed so obviously correct. Today I can say that the NOW, the Present, is precisely the point in time that does not exist. It is empty of information, and therefore of meaning, because meaning requires information and information requires duration and context, both of which extend in time, beyond the Now. The meaning of every “moment” draws on our deepest past, and could not exist without it. The Now (as an ideal) is a lie, at best a mistake, but the totality of human relations is also elusive. We exist somewhere between the now and the eternity, but whereas we existentially depend on the eternity, the now is merely a conceptual abstraction allowing us to contextualise attention and focus, experience reality in digestible pieces that can be integrated into a meaningful whole only over time. The mystics of the Present misunderstood themselves; they took the present experience of the totality of being as the present itself (a category mistake). https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3735180

I hereby declare the 26 of May as the international day against flu-phobia, germophobia and corona-bigotry; the day of the year we all take a stand against discrimination against the fever, sneeze and cough diverse community. End all flu-like-discrimination now! No more hate, no more exclusion, no more apartheid.

The same people who want to restrict personal firearm ownership in America (because ‘guns kill people’) are determined to flood Ukraine with a virtually unlimited supply and assortment of the state of the art killing machines, no questions asked, and incite them to fight their Russian-speaking brothers to the last drop of blood. I am not sure whether this differential treatment means they want to harm the Americans, or harm the Ukrainians.

Feminism is a concept developed to displace the culpability of the tyrants with factional animosity among the oppressed masses. Feminism is based on the logically false premise that because ‘females were oppressed’ they were <therefore> oppressed because of being female. In fact, females (and males) were systemically oppressed because of their class, not because of their gender. This psychological recipe is reproduced in many contexts, some examples: a) Anthropogenic Climate Change uses the technique of re-focalisation to create the impression of universal (and more or less equal) culpability of all humans for resource exploitation, while only a tiny minority disproportionally benefits from the industrial exploitation of resources; b) systemic racism displaces the culpability of a tiny minority of systemic parasites with racial divisions within the working class; c) Covid/Pandemic where everyone is a biological threat… d) debt bubble, where all borrowers are responsible for the financial collapse, etc.

Imagine if Covid vaccines were either a placebo or otherwise ineffective but harmless, and the much publicised deaths of sport stars were caused by something else. The overall excess deaths statistics do not show a significant increase in cardiovascular deaths. The experts predicting mass deaths from vaccines to occur late last year were wrong. What if the vaccine were merely a means to make you acquiesce to the removal of the right to free medical consent, possibly to be exploited in the future, or to force you to make a fundamental moral choice, reveal your moral character? Yes, this is just a far fetched fantasy, but I like to think laterally.

Those who are physically weaker but intellectually equal always are dominated on that level, and this is the most apparent in classes where physical capabilities are highly valued (ie the working class). But there are other forms of domination that are non-force based but desire/attraction/emotion/guilt based (feminism and all political movements based on victimhood are a form of guilt-based domination, victimhood as currency). The way that oppression is quantified within a class is also at best arbitrary, but often already infused with ideological antagonism. As far as I can tell the only consistent moral standard is in terms of Right vs Wrong, where every action stands on its own merits and must be criticised or defended on its own merits. When the moral judgement is systematised, ideologies, attached to an in-group identity, politicised as an -ism, it is already something wrong, because it simplifies morality to an identity-based induction formula (this is a logical error), alters the resolution of moral thinking from Right/Wrong to Us/Them (ecological fallacy, identity fallacy, and arbitrary truncation of the moral context…). In short, in becoming an -ism the moral content is perverted, in a number of ways.

A reminder that in an ethical society (which Australia is CLEARLY not!) lockdowns would fail on moral grounds (restriction of freedom, theft of property rights) even if they passed a CBA.

Mankind has a long journey to go to become a moral species.

[Extract from my book]

For those unclear about why lockdowns are so devastating, here's US data that shows how a good number of people failed to get diagnosed/ treated during the lockdowns and hysteria.

https://bit.ly/3NrjppG

Interestingly, Sweden has had NO EXCESS DEATHS in 2021 and virtually none in 2022, which means there was literally no drop-off in its normal health care, diagnosis and treatment.

This basic moral fact relates to lockdowns and mandatory vaccines. We know that lockdowns kill some people, primarily due to social isolation and the withholding of routine medical screening and care. We also know that vaccines kill some healthy people.

On Disgust

All deformed representations of the human form evoke deep-seated disgust, because we are a product of over one hundred thousand years of phenomenological conditioning in what humanity ‘is a-like’, which guides both our aesthetic sensibility and ontological sensitivity. The human form, especially the face, constitutes the phenomenological foundation of our socially reflexive consciousness, so everything that de-faces or de-forms humanity also subverts our own being; it is sensed as phenomenologically aberrant. We all sense it on some level, but we can also conceptually override it. This is why intellectuals, art critics, can act as if perfectly comfortable with grotesque representations of the human form, but on a deeper personal level there is an internalised split, a contradiction between the phenomenological conditions of our being and the conceptual object of aberrant fascination. No matter how skilfully and consistently we can contextualise and bracket-off the aberrant (as symbolic, progressive, transcendent, cultural etc) we cannot remain unaffected and undamaged on some level. One of the most pathological symptoms of our times is perhaps the intellectual circumvention and shaming of disgust. Disgust ‘protects’ us from reflexively internalising the aberrant in the act of identifying with the Other as a being of the same kind. It is a psychological defence from dis-integration and we ought not be ashamed of it, not deny it. We can be disgusted and yet conceptually engaged, seek for the common ground beneath the disgust, without lying to ourselves and without deforming ourselves to fit the aberrant.

I have just submitted my critical response to the following article in the BMJ: https://gh.bmj.com/content/7/5/e008684 (pending editors’ acceptance).

Response noscript: Fundamental values are not defeated by the argument from proportionality.

The article does not adequately take into account a crucial ethical and (by implication, legal) fact: the argument from proportionality does not justify arbitrary violations of the right to life or the removal of the right to free medical consent, for the following reasons.

Summary of the three strongest arguments against the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates and why any medical procedure imposed by coercion must be refused.

1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow their unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. (This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240).

2. Medical consent must be free – not coerced – in order to be valid. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of valid medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right can be subverted by medical coercion. Crucially, by accepting any medical treatment imposed by coercion we would be acquiescing to the taking away of the right to free medical consent not just from ourselves but from our children and from future generations, and we do not have the right to do this. Acquiescence to medical coercion is always unethical, even if the mandated intervention were a placebo.

3. Covid vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that Covid-19 also kills people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated (or a privileged treatment of the vaccinated) amounts to a violation of the right to life, because a small percentage of the targeted population are expected to die as a result of this coercive treatment.

As the Australian economist Sanjeev Sabhlok said: “Governments are not authorised by law - by analogy - to burn down additional homes and kill unaffected people in order to save those who might be at risk of being engulfed in a bushfire.”

An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT, Australia:

https://www.parliament.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/1948719/Submission-0730-Michael-Kowalik.pdf

I have emailed Ben Fordham (of the 2GB radio breakfast show) with the information/arguments listed here: https://news.1rj.ru/str/NormalParty/1064 Perhaps those listeners of Fordham whose lives were destroyed by medical coercion will find consolation in the fact that they did the right thing, that they did not betray their children and future generations by complying with unethical orders, did not go along with the government propaganda, despite systemic coercion.

The moment you would get into utilitarian (risk vs benefits) arguments about vaccine mandates, those who support the mandates can turn the argument against you, since the commitment to relative utility as the standard of ethical action implicitly denies all absolute values, absolute principles, including your fundamental rights. This is a lost cause, because if someone stronger would increase your risks for not complying with their demands (unemployment, poverty, social isolation), then a utilitarian must conclude that you Ought to comply, and if you Ought to comply, then they have the right to make you comply. For example, according to utilitarian ethics, slaves ought to obey their master if the master would kill them for disobedience. The crucial point, and an implicit contradiction, is that utilitarians are not in principle opposed to extortion, theft, murder or slavery.

“A plastic surgery addict says she feels ‘dehumanised’ after claiming she was kicked off a flight because of her 10kg breasts.” They are not breasts but prosthetics and she is not human but a porn-cyborg.

https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/i-was-kicked-off-a-flight-because-of-my-10kg-boobs-model-claims/news-story/3916aa87556bb92bbadc9f5d30c4bcf7

Nativism (Nativist Prioritarianism) is a rejection of that which unites Humanity, which makes us Human. We all share the same ancient ancestors. We are all related. We are all brothers. Reason unites us. Everything else is an attack on consciousness, reducing us to animals and ultimately to dust.

Sadly, Sanjeev does not understand that there can be no “proportional” way of violating the right to life, there can be no proportional way of removing the right to free medical consent (you either have it or you don’t), and no proportional way of discriminating against the healthy innate characteristics of the human race. Not everything can be reduced to risk vs benefits analysis, and fundamental principles and values should never be considered in this light. https://news.1rj.ru/str/sanjeevsabhlok/3970

Only the belief in anthropogenic climate change poses serious risk to mental health (but sometimes it is the other way around).

Viruses certainly do discriminate, otherwise everyone infected would get sick and suffer the same way. In any case, what viruses do to people has no bearing on how humans ought to relate to one another. We must fight discrimination against healthy, innate characteristics of the human race.