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.

Using victimhood to gain sympathy is not generative but parasitic. Since victimhood is a currency that rapidly devaluates and eventually turns to disgust, politics and mass media require a constant supply of fresh victims to keep your mind on a leash.

I just had an epiphany! The Great Reset was designed to enlighten humanity to a new level of parody, transcendental parody. You will own nothing, you will eat bugs, and you will find it funny!

Even the rulers have delusions. The stronger the delusion of control the harder it is to accept that nobody is in control beyond the capacity for moral choice, and that every choice we make changes our being, makes us either more or less real. Every meaningful choice is either black or white.

The world is individually external but collectively internal.

It would be impossible for two autonomous beings to come to a common understanding about anything without already having something in common, and the resulting understanding (the same meaning/idea) is an extension of this commonality. It follows that when we both ‘perceive a tree’ as something external, we are only referring to something internal to our being that is held in common. The world ‘out there’ is meaningful to us individually as a partial externality only because it is something internal to our kind, generated and maintained by reciprocal interaction with other members of the kind rather than individually discovered and then communicated. In this sense, all existence is constructed, generated and set in motion by a network of individually distributed instances of the same kind of consciousness. The subsequent states of the totality of existence are a consequence of its inherent motion and progressive augmentation by conciousness.

Logic of the Mirror

Logic is not ’just an idea’ but also a necessary condition of ideas, a necessary condition of meaning or sense. Without logic there is only non-sense, but logic is minimal, consisting of only three articulations of one law. If you violate it then you are literally saying nothing, just noise, so it is crucial, fundamental to awareness of being and to understanding of one another. We are using it now: I, to express meaning and you to understand it; without it we would not even exist for one another. But beneath logic there is something else, something deeper that probably cannot be well defined, a surplus that occurs when you put two mirrors face to face. In the objective sense, nothing extra is added to this situation and yet infinite depth is somehow created, an infinite potential for content. Perhaps consciousness is something raw, the ground of everything, the capacity to be a mirror, to reflect.

The freedom movement is just another part of the totalitarian deception, groupthink, also in lockstep, evangelising (with superficial religiosity and theatrical histrionics) the anxiety of those who accidentally escaped the primary delusion but are not yet willing to think for themselves, and are begging for an alternative mythology of salvation, or escape from reality. It works only because victimhood and dependency on the dynamism of a leader who is willing to reduce the complexity of being to a simplistic caricature is easier than assuming full moral responsibility for the conditions of our individual existence. You are alone and you will always be alone. Nobody is coming to save you and nobody can save you, and only in this realisation of moral solitude you can find your own dignity and discover the link that genuinely binds you to all of humanity.

Nativist prioritarianism is the essence of Nazi ideology. Tribalism is the narrowest, the most exclusionary form of racism. All humans share the same ancient ancestors, we are all related, we are all the original owners of the Earth. Reason unites us.

The question is disingenuous, implying (falsely) that Aboriginal people are now systemically denied the same voice as every other Australian. By VOICE they of course mean something else: the ‘priority of voice’ based on racial or tribal identity, nativist prioritarianism. In short, if you are not a descendant of those who lived here prior to 1788, then you can never fully belong, and will never be equal under law, always a second-class citizen, or if you happen to be a more recent migrant than the diggers, then a third-class citizen, a worthless untouchable. What I find the most disturbing about this situation is the mindset of people who would actually want the nativist priority for themselves, the kind of people who would go to public meetings and state ceremonies just to play the part of a pagan idol.

The sentiment underpinning social justice, racial justice, climate justice, decolonicsation, critical race theory, gender theory is arguably that of secularised, religious guilt hysteria, chiefly of Protestant, pro-social origin. People who forgot how to laught at themselves can only maintain their moral high ground by projecting their sense of guilt on society or by making a public spectacle out of self-mutilation, or both.

In matters of human spirit there is no going back, only a way through and beyond.

Ethical Realism

The value of human life consists in our self-reflexive capacity for intentional action. By discriminating between more of less valuable actions and choosing to act in a particular way we unconditionally affirm the value of being a rational agent. The commitment to the value of being a rational agent is a necessary condition of all other value-commitments, including the belief in God. It follows uncontroversially that without the capacity for rational discernment and intentional action there can be no awareness of value, therefore any life-form that does not possess this capacity can have no meaning or value to itself. This is a crucial insight for ethics, as it presents us with an objective reference point with respect to which we can assess the value of any human action. If ethics stems from the awareness of the value of rational consciousness, and the value of all actions derives from this common source, then any action can be assessed as either Right or Wrong on the basis of enhancement vs. diminishing of rational consciousness. Moreover, if rational consciousness is not individually self-sufficient but requires (reflexive) social relations to construct meaning and therefore rationality, then our relationship to other beings of the same kind is subject to objective ethical criteria that can be discovered.

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3737433