Leaderboard

Certainly not "horrible" to say. It was not said enough. By anyone, not enough by those who know that the standard of value is man's life, a life with quality, lived "as man", lacking which lives are hardly worth living. Nothing - not a thing- should have stopped man's life from continuing for a moment. The pandemic would have an end, but people by the billions, have suffered and lost without end. It's the meek acquiescence to sacrifice I can't stand and find tragic: "Ah but you know it's Covid, what can one do?" - says the person who's permanently closed the doors to his long-established business. Or those who have run out of savings while unemployed, or mental health and medical damages - and so on and on. (I believe we won't catch up on the cost to individual lives for another generation, at least). No, the cause was not Covid, it was the lockdown, social distancing - and masking - the bureaucrat and social edicts that raised panic levels and embedded this sacrificial responsibility to others over one's own life. Reality check, if it's SO risky for you (anyone) to catch Covid, go into hiding. Don't emerge until it's over, or you get vaccinated. And if you need and choose to go out ~you~ mask up and avoid contact with the majority, the active folk. What gives one the greater moral right to presume on being specially protected by outsiders intent on fully living their lives? Altruism, the default universal code. And right, I'm sure most would take care around the elderly, etc., but don't push it! I'm glad someone is also infuriated at the utter human wastage over this pandemic year, HD. Everyone I know, almost, has taken the human losses as a given. Some intellectual I read, raved - Is it not incredibly wonderful that we would give up our global economies to save lives? Horrible man.

Bloomberg gives Amy Peikoff, Parler, Ayn Rand a plug. (A limited # of free articles/month site.) In July, Peikoff became chief policy officer at Parler, and these days she finds herself working to salvage the controversial social media platform, which in January was driven off the internet in part by the very company she once defended on Fox. Parler, which came back online a few weeks later, continues to promote a hands-off approach to content moderation that is largely being driven by Peikoff, who wrote the rules that dictate what’s allowed on the site, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Since it went online in 2018, Parler has promoted itself as the antithesis of Big Tech, a free speech champion that keeps policing of its users to a minimum. “Our goal is to provide all community members with a welcoming, nonpartisan Public Square,” according to Parler’s latest, two-page community guidelines, which were written by Peikoff, according to the people. “We prefer that removing users or user-provided content be kept to an absolute minimum. We prefer to leave decisions about what is seen and who is heard to each individual.” This is the crux relating to Parler. The questioning must have gone south from there. Peikoff, 52, initially agreed to be interviewed but stopped responding to requests. The rest of the article appears to have been constructed from references extracted from Ms. Peikoff's blog.

Returning to that specific question, let us remember that there actually is no such law, there is a set of dictatorial emergency decrees. At present, mask-mandates are marginally authorized by open-ended emergency statutes giving governors authority to boss people around in an emergency. Rand has written about emergencies, and how dangerous a concept it is. There is no emergency: there is a new fact of existence. Emergencies last at most a week. Let’s see what it would take to justify such a law. First we have to say what such a law would demand: “A tight-fitting N95 mask must be worn at any time that a person is outside their own home. Violation will be punished with a month in prison”. To justify the law, there has to be a compelling government interest. The existing justification is “to prevent the spread of disease”. Now subtract covid from the scenario – would it have been justified to force the wearing of masks without covid (to prevent the spread of flu, colds, measles etc)? I have seen nobody anywhere claim that it would have been. It must first be establish that there is something massively different in the case of covid. A covid-specific mask law needs extraordinary justification, to override ordinary constitutional protections of your rights. Secondly, the restriction needs to be demonstrably effective. It is insufficient to say “There is this big problem”, you also have to prove “This actions sufficient eliminates the problem”. Mandatory vaccination is clearly much better justified than the mask mandate, because vaccination is based on infinitely better science and is much less conjectural. Finally, the restriction must be the least-restrictive means of reaching that end. The hypothesized mask law allows only one choice, but there are other alternatives (physical distance from others; being certified disease-free are two obvious ones, and bright, free minds may find others). The fatal weakness in the covid mask proposal is (a) necessity and (b) effectiveness.

@DonAthos, my head is spinning from playing argumentative whack-a-mole in this thread. I really wanted someone to set forth a simple sentence, articulating their principle that guides discussion of a complicated problem. It’s a really big problem, in my opinion, when we can’t set forth general but simple philosophical principles that guide our choices using a few simple unloaded words (avoiding “fear” and vague terms like “threat” which refers to “possibility of negative outcome” – not initiation of force). In particular when we get proposals that being unknowingly diseased in public is the same kind of choice as committing murder, that’s when we need some clarification of fundamental principles. I will assert my position. First, the government has the right and obligation to establish and enforce laws which punish certain acts: those which constitute initiation of force, as characterized by Schwartz. If the government knows in advance that you are going to do such an act, they may rightfully stop you. That covers “crimes”. In addition, there are acts which, once committed, are wrongs which can be addressed by the law – compensation can be compelled. These are the “torts” and “breaches of contract”. Government involvement is always post-hoc, and the government’s only role is to serve as neutral arbitrator and enforcer of the final judgment (and author of the default rules, in case there is no prior agreement i.e. relevant contract term). Only a small set of torts involve initiation of force. “Intent” refers to a fact about the suspect’s mind, and inference of intent is about the officer’s mind, so yes, there is a difference, and not just a shade. Under the law, inference (by the actor) of the intent of another is crucial to defenses for otherwise-wrongful acts. A person may shoot another if he reasonably infers an intent (to harm) – based on certain facts. The law does not demand that a person be in possession of all of the facts, it only judges based on the facts that he (probably) knows. In your original scenario, I can’t even begin to imagine what the suspect intended, other than death by cop. Has anyone ever innocently pulled a toy gun and pointed it at a police officer? The vast majority of instances of toy gun shootings without criminal intent, the “mistaken encounters”, involve people lacking basic mental capacity (children and mentally-incapable adults). I assume that in your example, the person has the mental capacity of a child and doesn’t know that you may get shot if you point a toy gun at a police officer. Do you know of a real case like the one you described? Taking the shooter’s perspective, the probability that this is really a water pistol is so low and the alternatives are so much more likely and the consequences so much more severe that there is no reasonable alternative to shooting him. A person should infer that the gun is real and that the intent is to kill you, even when the facts turn out to be different. What follows is variations that make decent intents more likely, and decrease the reasonableness of the inference “he intends to kill me”. At the cell phone and wallet stage, that is the point where the shooter bears responsibility for the killing. (We can always add facts to change the conclusion, e.g. “after robbing the bank”. It’s all about the context, and your context was very simple). The law objectively states emergency guidelines where use of force is excused – in self defense. There is a relationship between those guidelines (the law) and the principle that one may not initiate force, but they are not the same thing. Initiation of force is exactly what I’ve said it is above, and “reaching for your wallet” is not initiation of force. But in a certain context, use of force may be excused because of the conceptual possibility that there is in fact initiation of force. When we are looking for moral responsibility, I would lay the blame not on the officer or the victim, but on the low-lives that make it reasonable to conclude that reaching for a wallet is actually an attempt to kill you. For the rather large and politically-prominent set of officer killings of unarmed people, there is a long list of things that one is not to do, which nevertheless people ignore, often to their extreme detriment. For the most part, this is not initiation of force, it is inferred initiation of force. Sometimes, the inference is unreasonable; but often the media reports “The victim’s gun wasn’t even loaded” as though that is a self-evident fact available to the arresting officer, ignoring the centrality of reasonable conclusions. What remains constant throughout contexts is, what is IOF? But the law can only deal in reasonable inferences about IOF.

I am responsible for my own reasonable safety, @Easy Truth