I have received a response from AMPS to my letter https://news.1rj.ru/str/NormalParty/1790, saying they “strongly advocate for true informed consent” as outlined in this document: https://amps.redunion.com.au/healthreformdeclaration My reply to this will be posted below.
Telegram
Normal
Letter to AMPS (14.08.2022)
Dear Jeyanthi and AMPS,
I just came across the letter from AMPS to “The Australian Colleges and Associations of Medicine, Health, and Science, and All Australian Federal, State, and Territory Senators and Members of Parliament”.…
Dear Jeyanthi and AMPS,
I just came across the letter from AMPS to “The Australian Colleges and Associations of Medicine, Health, and Science, and All Australian Federal, State, and Territory Senators and Members of Parliament”.…
My response to AMPS (16.08.2022)
I am glad you are addressing the issue of patient consent. There is nevertheless a crucial distinction between “informed consent” and “free consent” (without coercion). On my reading of your document, the issue of coercion (economic or social-opportunity discrimination) applied to patient consent is not emphasised.
The strongest statement on this question in your document reads as follows:
“The restoration of Informed Consent to the Australian Community.
The restoration of a Health Practitioner’s duty to afford the Australian Community Informed Consent free from interference.”
This implies that availability of information and patient-doctor communication should not be impeded by regulators and the government, but says nothing about the importance of non-coercion for patient consent. This I believe is the central ethical issue, which arguably becomes a criminal matter when medical coercion is likely to cause deaths of some non-freely consenting patients. Also, when a medical practitioner is aware that a patient is subject to state coercion to accept a medical procedure (therefore not able to give consent freely), even if the freedom of medical communication is unimpeded, the medical practitioner could also be liable for administering the (known to be coerced) procedure.
My suggestion is therefore to be explicit in emphasising ‘free (uncoerced) medical consent’.
I am happy to help with this, if you like.
I am glad you are addressing the issue of patient consent. There is nevertheless a crucial distinction between “informed consent” and “free consent” (without coercion). On my reading of your document, the issue of coercion (economic or social-opportunity discrimination) applied to patient consent is not emphasised.
The strongest statement on this question in your document reads as follows:
“The restoration of Informed Consent to the Australian Community.
The restoration of a Health Practitioner’s duty to afford the Australian Community Informed Consent free from interference.”
This implies that availability of information and patient-doctor communication should not be impeded by regulators and the government, but says nothing about the importance of non-coercion for patient consent. This I believe is the central ethical issue, which arguably becomes a criminal matter when medical coercion is likely to cause deaths of some non-freely consenting patients. Also, when a medical practitioner is aware that a patient is subject to state coercion to accept a medical procedure (therefore not able to give consent freely), even if the freedom of medical communication is unimpeded, the medical practitioner could also be liable for administering the (known to be coerced) procedure.
My suggestion is therefore to be explicit in emphasising ‘free (uncoerced) medical consent’.
I am happy to help with this, if you like.
Informed Consent, no matter how well informed the patient might be, amounts to nothing if the patient is economically or socially coerced to accept the procedure irrespective of the relevant information. Consent must be FREE, not coerced, before the information about the medical risks vs benefits would be a sufficient condition of consent.
Email to Human Rights Commissioner AHRC (16.08.2022)
Subject: Vaccine mandates infringe on the right to life
infoservice @ humanrights . gov . au
Ms Lorraine Finlay
Human Rights Commissioner
Australian Human Rights Commission
Dear Commissioner,
I am a philosopher of ethics and the leading voice in the academic debate questioning the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics (cited below). I submit that vaccine mandates, or any systemic discrimination against the unvaccinated, infringes on human rights, including the right to life. This conclusion is based on the following grounds:
1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow our unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. This devaluation of the innate human constitution is not only universally dehumanising, but it perverts the very concept of human rights; discrimination against the unvaccinated implies that our innate human constitution is no longer a guarantee of full human rights. This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240.
2. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of free 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 (including the right to life) can be subverted by medical coercion. Free medical consent is the most fundamental protection from crimes against humanity being committed under the guise of healthcare (several instances of such abuses have occurred in this century).
3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive 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 infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine 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 amounts to a violation of the right to life by coercing people to undergo a medical procedure where a small percentage of otherwise healthy people are expected to die as a direct result of that procedure.
An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT and subsequently published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229.responses#fundamental-values-are-not-defeated-by-utilitarian-calculus
I suggest that we are facing a human rights emergency and the outlined issues call for immediate administrative action.
I am available for collaboration.
Sincerely,
Michael Kowalik
https://philpeople.org/profiles/michael-kowalik
Subject: Vaccine mandates infringe on the right to life
infoservice @ humanrights . gov . au
Ms Lorraine Finlay
Human Rights Commissioner
Australian Human Rights Commission
Dear Commissioner,
I am a philosopher of ethics and the leading voice in the academic debate questioning the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics (cited below). I submit that vaccine mandates, or any systemic discrimination against the unvaccinated, infringes on human rights, including the right to life. This conclusion is based on the following grounds:
1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow our unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. This devaluation of the innate human constitution is not only universally dehumanising, but it perverts the very concept of human rights; discrimination against the unvaccinated implies that our innate human constitution is no longer a guarantee of full human rights. This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240.
2. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of free 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 (including the right to life) can be subverted by medical coercion. Free medical consent is the most fundamental protection from crimes against humanity being committed under the guise of healthcare (several instances of such abuses have occurred in this century).
3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive 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 infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine 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 amounts to a violation of the right to life by coercing people to undergo a medical procedure where a small percentage of otherwise healthy people are expected to die as a direct result of that procedure.
An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT and subsequently published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229.responses#fundamental-values-are-not-defeated-by-utilitarian-calculus
I suggest that we are facing a human rights emergency and the outlined issues call for immediate administrative action.
I am available for collaboration.
Sincerely,
Michael Kowalik
https://philpeople.org/profiles/michael-kowalik
👍1
If we disallow the innate human constitution as the objective basis of human rights, then we are giving up human rights completely. We may have other rights, privileges granted to us by an authority, but these are no longer secured by any fixed, universal point of reference but are a matter of judgment by powerful people, which can be then freely abused according to their desires, and this is precisely why we conceived of objectively grounded human rights in the first place.
Gender reassignment surgery is ethically equivalent to body thinning surgery on anorexics. It amounts to surgical mutilation of psychologically vulnerable people.
Normal people believe, correctly, that consent is necessarily Free consent, without any coercion. The authorities believe that when you are not pinned down and forcibly injected but only partially/economically coerced, this still leaves room for valid consent, so this ambiguity in the meaning of “consent” needs to be addressed, made explicit and resolved. Partial consent is practically meaningless, because only free, non-coerced consent can protect you from crimes against humanity, from abuse. Any crack in the scope of consent can be exploited against you.
Forwarded from Beach
If any person were to apply the concept of consent as preached by health 'authorities' and practiced by the injectors in the covid farce, but in the context of sexual relations, they would be charged with rape.
If a doctor knows that a person has to accept a medical procedure to keep their job, keep their house, or they will lose their profession and become homeless, is it perhaps ethically equivalent to two thugs bringing a distressed, battered woman to a doctor, asking for an abortion, because the two guys will harm her if she does not do that. What would be the liability for the doctor to comply with her request being clearly made under duress? Would it be just an ethical liability to agree to perform an abortion under these circumstances or also a criminal liability?
“Gender theory” is conceptually weaker than Flat Earth theory. Flat earthers are at least committed to resolving their conceptual inconsistencies by means of more complex theoretical constructs, whereas gender theorists and trans advocates are not responsive to the rules of rational discourse. Gender theory is therefore not a scientific or philosophical ‘theory’ but rather an ideology.
Some legal perspectives on the meaning of “coercion”: A) https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Coercion On this definition coercion occurs when a person is forced to do something that they would not do by their “free choice”, because of psychological pressure or a treat by another. “A defense asserted in a criminal prosecution that a person who committed a crime did not do so of his or her own free will, but only because the individual was compelled by another through the use of physical force or threat of immediate serious bodily injury or death.“; B) https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/what-is-coercion-law.html “The broad definition of coercion is "the use of express or implied threats of violence or reprisal (as discharge from employment) or other intimidating behavior that puts a person in immediate fear of the consequences in order to compel that person to act against his or her will." Actual violence, threats of violence, or other acts of pressure may constitute coercion if they're used to subvert an individual's free will or consent.”
People who get offended for wrong reasons are liable for causing the offence.
If the right to equality before the law is conditional on being vaccinated then humans are born without some human rights, which is absurd.
What is Transgenderism
Reasearch in psychiatric science and neuro-anatomy has established that transgederism is a result of anomalous brain development, causing a compulsive, irresistible conviction or feeling that the individual in question is of the opposite sex to their actual sex. The evidence suggests that the condition is consistently related to abnormal sex self-identification and does not involve or require explanation in terms of gender. The idea of gender, as something distinct and not determined by biological sex, may nevertheless be useful as a therapeutic token, a narrative tailored to help transgender patients to rationalise and conceptually integrate their fractured sense of sexual self. Another way, gender theory appears to be a fictitious construct developed not as a scientific model but a discomfort-mitigation tool tailored to assist transgeder people in managing their condition. This therapeutic model may have been recently hijacked for both propaganda/disinformation purposes, misrepresented as a scientific theory rather than a therapeutic approach, and to facilitate medical experimentation and profits from harmful, unscientific and generally hopeless “gender conversion surgery”.
“GD in adults is associated with an elevated prevalence of comorbid psychopathology, especially mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and suicidality. Causal mechanisms in GD are incompletely understood, but genetic, neurodevelopmental, and psychosocial factors probably all contribute.”
https://www.klinefelter.se/wp-content/uploads/Gender_Dysphoria_In_Adults.pdf
This may explain why transgender people are so abnormally impulsive, angry and vindictive when the therapeutic model that alleviates the discomfort of their sexual dis-integrity is questioned. Based on this understanding I have decided not to criticise inconsistencies in this therapeutic model when discussing these issues with transgender people, if this narrative gives them some relief, provided they are not activists trying to promote these tailored therapeutic fictions as objective facts to minors or other psychologically vulnerable people.
“Both post-mortem anatomical analyzes as well as in vivo neuroimaging studies revealed structural differences in different brain areas, comparing transgender individuals and control groups.”
“In MtF transgenders, the size and number of neurons in both brain areas resemble those of the female control group. This sexual reversal also appears to occur in FtM transgenders, but so far, there are too few data available. By these results, the altered number of neurons and the size of these areas could serve as markers for the atypical sexual differentiation of the brain in transsexuals.”
https://www.peertechzpublications.com/articles/IJSRHC-3-113.php
“Results suggest disconnectivity within networks involved in own body perception in the context of self in GD.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11682-016-9578-6
Reasearch in psychiatric science and neuro-anatomy has established that transgederism is a result of anomalous brain development, causing a compulsive, irresistible conviction or feeling that the individual in question is of the opposite sex to their actual sex. The evidence suggests that the condition is consistently related to abnormal sex self-identification and does not involve or require explanation in terms of gender. The idea of gender, as something distinct and not determined by biological sex, may nevertheless be useful as a therapeutic token, a narrative tailored to help transgender patients to rationalise and conceptually integrate their fractured sense of sexual self. Another way, gender theory appears to be a fictitious construct developed not as a scientific model but a discomfort-mitigation tool tailored to assist transgeder people in managing their condition. This therapeutic model may have been recently hijacked for both propaganda/disinformation purposes, misrepresented as a scientific theory rather than a therapeutic approach, and to facilitate medical experimentation and profits from harmful, unscientific and generally hopeless “gender conversion surgery”.
“GD in adults is associated with an elevated prevalence of comorbid psychopathology, especially mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and suicidality. Causal mechanisms in GD are incompletely understood, but genetic, neurodevelopmental, and psychosocial factors probably all contribute.”
https://www.klinefelter.se/wp-content/uploads/Gender_Dysphoria_In_Adults.pdf
This may explain why transgender people are so abnormally impulsive, angry and vindictive when the therapeutic model that alleviates the discomfort of their sexual dis-integrity is questioned. Based on this understanding I have decided not to criticise inconsistencies in this therapeutic model when discussing these issues with transgender people, if this narrative gives them some relief, provided they are not activists trying to promote these tailored therapeutic fictions as objective facts to minors or other psychologically vulnerable people.
“Both post-mortem anatomical analyzes as well as in vivo neuroimaging studies revealed structural differences in different brain areas, comparing transgender individuals and control groups.”
“In MtF transgenders, the size and number of neurons in both brain areas resemble those of the female control group. This sexual reversal also appears to occur in FtM transgenders, but so far, there are too few data available. By these results, the altered number of neurons and the size of these areas could serve as markers for the atypical sexual differentiation of the brain in transsexuals.”
https://www.peertechzpublications.com/articles/IJSRHC-3-113.php
“Results suggest disconnectivity within networks involved in own body perception in the context of self in GD.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11682-016-9578-6
Our innate biological constitution is the only objective proof of human identity, the core feature of human identity and a guarantee of human rights. Our human identity is the primary object protected by human rights. Any discrimination against our innate biological constitution is an attack on human identity and a violation of human rights.
Our innate biological constitution must be protected not because it is natural (disease is also natural) but because it is the only independent means for consciousness to realise itself in the world as a causative agency, as a morally autonomous Self. Any interference with these independent means of self-realisation by other agents would disrupt the integrity of the targeted Self and thus negate her moral agency and moral status. Our moral status as Humans hinges on the recognition of our innate biological constitution as an absolute right. To deny it in even one instance would be to deny it as a property of the human kind, and thus damage all of humanity. (# Human rights)
I agree with almost every point that Harari makes in this interview. His analysis of the Trolley Problem is spot on (pretty much exactly what I said to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, who responded to my critique of mandatory vaccination by describing healthcare as a trolley problem). I now understand that my moral disagreement with Harari can be traced to his lack of engagement with social ontology, or how conscious agency necessitates objective moral norms as a condition of existence. Nevertheless, Harari suprised me by stating he is afraid that in trying to improve human constitution by means of technology we could end up degrading it, that the technology can be abused by corporations and governments. This is precisely why, now more than ever, we need to guard our human right not to be discriminated against or coerced on the basis of our innate biological constitution, in favour of biotechnologically augmented subspecies. Zizek is a little low on form here but I generally find him entertaining and likeable, a treasure-chest of autistic insights, despite his ideological inconsistencies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jjRq-CW1dc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jjRq-CW1dc
YouTube
Slavoj Žižek & Yuval Noah Harari | Should We Trust Nature More than Ourselves?
Are we above nature? How can we combat extremism? How do extreme ideologies often become their opposite?
In a lively discussion between Slavoj Žižek and Yuval Noah Harari, the two thinkers debate extremist ideology, our role in nature, the notions of good…
In a lively discussion between Slavoj Žižek and Yuval Noah Harari, the two thinkers debate extremist ideology, our role in nature, the notions of good…
My email to Yuval Noah Harari about the significance of our innate biological constitution for human rights. Discrimination against the unvaccinated implies that our innate human constitution (being born human) is no longer a guarantee of full human rights, which is absurd. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/email-to-yuval-noah-harari-18082022