“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C. S. Lewis

The quote is intuitively compelling, but misses one crucial fact: moral conscience can be objectively right or wrong, and this has objective consequences for the host. When it is right, no harm is done; when it is wrong, it will destroy the host. CS Lewis implies that tyranny is objectively wrong, but asserts that this can still be ok by the subjective moral conscience of the tyrant, without giving rise to any self-destructive consequences. Objectivity implies objective consequences. Lewis’s omission leads to unwarranted pessimism.

There is only one way to refute an argument; by engaging with it and demonstrating that it is either logically incomplete or leads to contradiction and is therefore non-sense. Stating your opinion is not an argument; it is changing the subject to just talking about yourself. That’s ok, you can talk about yourself, but this is a different conversation and I need you to understand this difference so that feelings about yourself are not misinterpreted as facts about me.

So no, I am not afraid of “the vaccine”, I just don’t trust psychopaths.

This should be a mandatory disclosure notice on every vaccine dose.

When minors are intentionally exposed to information about sexual preferences or practices without explicit consent of the parents, the school is engaging is sexual harassment of children. This is qualitatively no different to an intimidating male manager insisting on discussing sex with female subordinates.

Artemisinin, a widely available extract from Sweet Wormwood plant species (Artemisia annua, contains approx 0.5% by dry weight) and a WHO recommended anti-malaria medication, is also a promising antiviral with an exceptionally broad range of action. The first clinical trial (small) found it to be effective against Covid. Review of research: https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/57/3/217/htm

The ‘current thing’ therapy for the totalitarian personality disorder. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/23/style/cannibalism-tv-shows-movies-books.html

Climate Denier: noun, a person who denies the existence of naturally occurring climatic changes and believes instead that changes in weather-patterns are caused by human activity.

Socialism is mandatory, an enforced state doctrine; charity is by definition (necessarily) voluntary. Before charity is even possible we must have private property rights, something we own that we can give, and socialism does not respect private property rights. Socialism precludes charity.

Misinformation and the State

If the government were genuinely concerned about misinformation they would be here, on uncensored Telegram, rationally arguing against false beliefs and responding to objections. Their refusal to engage in public deliberation based on evidence and consistent reasoning is of itself the evidence that they are not interested in correcting misinformation but only using it as an excuse for political vilification and censorship. They are therefore in breach of Discourse Ethics (see the extensive work of Juergen Habermas and Karl Otto Apel on this point) and a sign of bad faith. Moreover, a government that pursues censorship as an end instead of public deliberation may have a strategic motive to covertly propagate disinformation and promote extremism. Our shared moral duty is not just to label a particular viewpoint as ‘extremist’ or ‘wrong’ but explain why it is objectively wrong. If I can engage in broad social discourse on a voluntary basis, as my unpaid social contribution, then there is no excuse for any politicians, the government and statutory agencies, who are well paid to engage with the community, not to do it on a full time basis. Dogmatism about values and norms is wrong, a commitment to violence as the ultimate arbiter of values and fact. https://culturalanalysisnet.wordpress.com/2017/12/24/on-what-is-right/

By coercing others to wear masks to protect you implies that your mask does not protect you, so you agree that the effectiveness of masks is very low if any. At the same time, the requirement to wear a mask exposes people to psychological and bacterial harm, apart from the fact that it violates the the principle of free medical consent and is utterly dehumanising.

Tribalism is the foundation of Nazism, which emerges when tribal norms are challenged by other cultures. The tribal mindset is primitive insofar as it is not aware (or refuses to accept) that there is a higher level of social connection and affinity than familial relations, race, tradition or culture. At that higher level, which is the meta-structure of meaning itself, reducible to the laws of sense, the universal conditions on the basis of which meaning can be generated by reflexive, social relations independent of culture or genetics, there is humanity as such, and humanism (understood in the exclusively Kantian sense) as the antithesis of tribalism. Modern history can be reduced to the conflict between these two forces, one dying a natural death but still unleashing its inherent commitment to violence as the ultimate arbiter of values and facts, and the other learning how to mitigate this primordial irrationalism without negating its own commitment to humanity by becoming violent itself.

On Eco-Fascism

The idea that native species have a higher (moral?) status and deserve special protection by the state, whereas non-native species do not, is arguably a modern, normalised feature of Nazi ideology. It goes hand in hand with the idea that “nature” should be returned to some mythologically defined “original state” of “health”. This ideology is one of the mandatory, cross-curriculum priorities in Australian schools. The associated value commitments also underpin the special rights and the superior moral status of the indigenous tribes, those who are connected to the land/environment by “blood” or “heritage”; Germanic “blood” became the basis for nativist prioritarianism and tribal supremacism, and led to some of the greatest crimes against humanity. The tribalist/nativist aspect of this ideology is also prioritised in the Australian curriculum, albeit it has been transposed from Germanic tribes onto native tribes of the Australian continent. Nazism had a makeover, it was rebranded as a symbiosis of Extinction Rebelion, Climate Emergency and the political endorsement of First Nations prioritarianism. In short, Nazism was not defeated at the end of WWII, but progressively normalised. Here is a fascinating analysis of the Nazi roots of contemporary environmentalism: https://infrakshun.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/dark-green-ii-eco-fascism/

The use of emergency powers - governance by decree - is always contrary to the rule of law, an attack on authority. https://news.1rj.ru/str/NormalParty/415

What is Ethics?

Ethics in the most rudimentary sense is concerned with the distinction between Right and Wrong actions with respect to other beings of the same kind, or what we call the social dimension. We can only speculate about the origins of ethics but the most plausible hypothesis is that social experience has taught early hominids what actions result in better social outcomes, which were probably geared to group survival. These practical insights were progressively formalised as customs, laws and religion. Our modern institutions were build on the prevailing ethical principles, not only because these were socially internalised as the shared moral conscience, but because we became aware that the integrity of the social dimension, which is sustained by ethics, is inseparable from the conditions of social constructs such as meaning and culture. A meaningful existence is necessarily an ethical existence, and the degree of meaning is commensurate with the degree of ethical consistency of the individual and the society. Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to demonstrate analytically that ethics is necessarily grounded in what all rational agents value about themselves: the uniquely human capacity to bestow worth on things, actions and ideas. According to Kant, in order for this capacity to be consistently expressed at the social level we must respect it not only in ourselves but in everyone else: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end." To do otherwise would be self-defeating and universally harmful. Kant’s argument was still open to the technical objection that even if we can achieve better societal outcomes by acting ethically as a collective, an individual is not obliged to value this collective good if he can benefit personally at the expense of society. I have formally refuted this objection, by showing that ethical conduct is indispensable to maintaining a psychologically integrated Self: https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO

In essence, we must act ethically, in the minimalist Kantian sense, to preserve not only the integrity of the social dimension but also a meaningful existence as individuals.

My approach to medical ethics has two levels: a) at the lower level I consider the most fundamental moral/ethical norms that our society already accepts (for example, the right to life) and analyse whether a specific policy is consistent with those norms; b) at the higher level I attempt to demonstrate a priori that certain moral principles are objective in the sense that the associated moral wrongs have negative existential consequences for society and for the person who commits them. As an additional feature, I stress the importance of being able to substantiate a) in terms of b), which is presupposed by my commitment to ethical realism.

I have written more on Kantian ethics and its relationship to religious ethics here: https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWTGR

One cannot rationally believe that nature is good, claim a commitment to sustainability, and still live in fear of viral infections. The fear of viruses unmasks environmentalism as a lie.

Humans are not liable for acts of nature just because they are living normal lives.