Easy Truth

Tad, you'll have to elaborate on this. I just can't imaging a scenario where the government EVER has the right to put a gun to your head and inject something in your body without your consent. I can imagine a person being forced to stay at home but not the injection.

I doubt if anyone could argue that vaccines should never be required. The question is by whom in what venue. Privately they can be required. The argument is against a mandate that everyone should get a vaccine or be incarcerated.

Yes and no. Even with an afterlife, life could still be considered meaningless.

"Yes", "No" or "Maybe", or "I don't know" are going to be common answers. "No" in this case simply means he disagrees. The only option you have is to make your case or ignore and move on. There are no judges here and there are no rescuers either. One thing that may help would be if you said what could or should have been said for people do understand it better.

The requirements you mention are based on responsibility of ownership. Someone who does not own a car or have swimming pool etc. doesn't have those responsibilities/requirements. In a social context, we have a requirement not to harm another (I suppose physically but for now it has to remain vague). The idea of increasing risk, unnecessarily, is harming people. In principle, that does have merit. But in the case of vaccination, do I or you have the right to invade someone's body and vaccinate them for the good of the group? The fundamental right is to be unmolested, to keep people away and to be supported in that by "the system".

The key issue is threat identification. The moment it "is" a threat, a reaction begins. If there is agreement on when it began, then we know when initiation happened. But suspect there may not be agreement. Increasing risk to an intolerable level would require identifying the "intolerable level".

But by definition, the potential exists. The potential for this transformation also exist with faith based thinking. At what point should we treat a potentiality as if it were the actual expression of force? A person tells you he fantasizes about stabbing you. There is a knife on a table within his reach. Is the moment of expression when he said that to you, or when he reaches for the knife, or when he lunges at you?

Alright then that would imply that some initiation of force is to be ignored. But nevertheless it is an initiation of force. Which goes back to the issue of an objective cutoff point. At some point it becomes actionable. We are now in the real of "threat identification" which has subjective and objective elements. It seems that some threats, we decide to ignore, because we can't live if every little threatening behavior is disallowed. As in breathing. Or do we define "threat" such that, if it is not actionable, it is not a threat?

So is increasing the risk of death from .00001 percent to .00002 percent due to exhaling an initiation of force? I hope I didn't repeat myself too much.

Doug, a major problem with your argument is simply using the word "risk". If you said 50 percent risk, you would get far more agreement than now. The problem with Covid or the flu is the relatively small risk compared to ebola. I was wondering why you don't use Ebola, but I think it's because the contrast would reveal the problem with Covid or the flu. After all the flu also kills a lot of people every year. Just living in your house has a risk of an airplane crashing into it.

Doug, in a society that uses laws based on objective reality, you can't base laws on unknowable risk levels. What if someone kills another, after being arrested, his defense is "Judge, I'm innocent, you simply can't know the risk I was dealing with".

The "degree of threat" was in response to the above. It is not that you are saying it is the same degree, but a blanket (treat everyone the same) mandate does treat it that way. And if one is a proponent of such a mandate, they are supporting that position. And because of that people who increase the threat actually and "highly" are treated the same as those who do not in fact pose any threat. Keep in mind, I am not against a company creating mandates for its' employees (because they are automatically limited in their force). Worst case is you have to leave. While a threat of incarceration is a threat of death, a reaction to criminal behavior. But you have still not addressed the issue of the "few" who are not a threat at all.

Regarding an older podcast on Valliant I found the text of his criticism https://www.scribd.com/document/9421651/The-Passion-of-James-Valliant-s-Criticism Meanwhile a detailed criticism of his criticism https://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/topic/6280-the-passion-of-james-valliants-criticism-part-v/?tab=comments#comment-59958

You're implying that "a degree of threat" is the same as "beyond the cutoff point threat". You never address the issue of the person that is an infinitesimal threat or zero threat. They exist too and they are a part of society. In the case of a "quarantinable threat", it's clear cut. This is a threat that one should and can forcibly separate someone from society. Now that is beyond vaccination as in a vaccine won't fix deal with that. With a vaccine you end up with two designations: potential threat reduced potential threat We are not even talking about an actual threat!!! The "a degree of threat" does not go away even with a vaccine. So the phrase as used is sort of meaningless. Everyone is, was, will be "a degree of threat". So the threat of incarceration is to reduce threat one way or the other. You like to use the idea of "not increasing it" but I don't understand the significance. Bottom line, I am arguing that this tramples on the rights of people in that they are not free to determine their own course of action. Some even know the effectiveness of the vaccine but don't want to take it. It is tantamount to saying "we know better, do what we say or you go to jail and if you resist, we shoot you". The just way to do it is a campaign to convince people with non physical means which include boycotting them if they don't comply. But not a governmental mandate like we have with Biden's decree yesterday. A government should not have that kind of power. Even though China, Cuba, Vietnam and others have it and exercise it regularly.

Agreed. Some extent also includes infinitesimal. You would have to specify everyone is a threat beyond the cutoff point to make it actionable.

Even with DNA, it is very difficult to prove that a particular person caught the disease from a particular source. I don't think that this is an area that we have a major disagreement. I was just bringing up that there seems to be a school of thought in this forum that proposes something like: we should have a disclaimer mandate imposed on all the population like "you cannot sue for damages even if you can prove how the transmission took place". Meaning no liability ... no responsibility ... no right to self defense.

It is definitely a metaphor, something like saying that a murderer is guilty but someone who just slugs another person in the arm is innocent. The principle is that by forcing vaccination, one is a treating a person who is a threat and a person who is not ... the same. The rights of the person who is not a threat are being trampled on. "Each of us" does not pose the same threat nor is "each of us" subject to the same threat as anyone else. The statistical threat is in a sense an average. Not that it does not come in handy in a triage or emergency situation, it does not accurately describe a particular person as a threat or not. An 18 year old person who lives at home get's deliveries and pays his bills online, never interacting with anyone is treated the same as an 80 year old person one who lives among many active cases of Covid. Different levels of risk are being averaged out and being treated as the "same" level of threat to "all", everyone, or each. The idea that we all have the same level of threat is a metaphor, that government is acting on. It is a metaphor that you seem to support. It is the primary tool used by an authoritarian system to control their population. The arguments seem to make sense.

Even if we can quickly expand ICU capacity as needed, needing to do so indicates that we have exceeded the cutoff point. ICU's are not magic. Some of the people in ICU's will die. Others will have serious long-term damage to their bodies. The point being made here was only that governmental management of this disease is not necessarily the fastest way to deliver needed goods and services to deal with it. Laisses faire Capitalism does a far better job. Exceeding cutoff points or people dying in ICUs or ICU's being magical is irrelevant. The problems exist with any system. The comment "it takes time" implied that the market is too slow to respond and I made the point that our governmental response was very slow to back up the point.

I try to stay away from talking about the current government because there is a corrupt crony medical system entrenched, politicised research and implementation, and a population that is not used to be responsible for themselves which could justify anything. In that situation it could be an emergency and it's pick your poison. From what I have seen discussed throughout this forum, there are three fundamental positions: 1. Forced Vaccination by Government 2. Non forced vaccination but allow liability 3. Non forced vaccination and disallow liability I would argue for number 2 in principle. I see some merit to "increasing risk is initiation of force" but only if it is active and intentional because simply "being" increases risk. The amount of risk is going to be relevant in declaring an emergency situation. Also, I would emphasize that to treat a person who is "not a threat" the same way as a person who "is a threat" is unjust. Once injustice permeates a society there are many ways to rationally navigate it.

I would argue that this is an attempt to forbid the initiation of force by initiating force. You are not advocating self defense of the individual. The right to incarcerate someone who is in fact sick with Covid and is sneezing on supermarket food stuffs and refuses to stay home is different than arresting someone who is not vaccinated and is tested and does not have Covid. You are advocating to treat them the same because of "lack of vaccination". Again I am using the innocent and guilty metaphor, they are treated the same. As far a liability goes, the supermarket that does not do anything about it should be sued by someone who contracted it and that can be proven to be (like a dna test). Maybe it is after the fact and maybe it is rare, but the right to do so immediately causes a chain reaction in the entire society. I don't think you are arguing the supermarket should NOT have the right to do so, but some on this forum do seem to advocate that.

I'm not sure how well you understand the situation. You need to explain this more fully. It goes back to the issue of treating the guilty and the innocent the same. As in charging a mass of people for a service, even when some need the service while some do not. The right to mandate the way you speak of it is similar to the right to tax people. I'm assuming you will argue that a government has a right to fund it self by forcing everyone to pay something regardless of if they think they need it or not. Some people are paying for something they do not need or use. Isn't it a similar principle that you are using for Covid.

Invading Mexico would be a gross overreaction unless we were dealing with a zombie apocalypse and so many Mexicans had become zombies that the government had collapsed. If as a government, you have a right to force people to vaccinate to "decrease risk", shouldn't it also force populations outside our borders to do so assuming it is cheap and easy to do so?

That takes time. Far less time and money than without. If it was a "free market culture" from day one, labs in California would have done tests. CDC would NOT have prevented it. Masks prices would have gone up and production would have ramped up immediately without a Nanny state medical system. Medicine and services would be far cheaper and far more available than they are right now. For instance testing kits from South Korea could have been used without obstacles. Doctors would be plentiful moving from place to place or remotely servicing with licensing issues. Hospital Beds would have increased in response. In fact small places to keep patients separate would have sprung up because there would be no roadblocks to doing so. Old people homes would not be forced to take in infected people. People who wanted to use the vaccine before it was fully tested would have done so. All of this much sooner than a government that was actively preventing all this. (And other items I will have missed) Bureaucracy slows down all this stuff. A free market combats this type of thing far faster than central planning. Especially where everything is politicized.

Then you are arguing for the best poison amongst what we have. You would have to indicate that your arguments are based on the current corrupt system we have. Not on what ultimately should be. Because then, you may be right. I say this because in an Objectivist society, the market takes care of overflow of patients. Demand goes up, prices go up and more are built and some will become rich over it. Government should not be managing this stuff.

Yes, but your argument hinges on the "spread" of something undesired by "some" i.e. those who are actually under threat. The unknown issue is the problem. Like pollution. No one knows if they are actually under threat. But the mandate imposes protection on those who don't need it too. Similar to Obama care that make men pay for pregnancy too. That is why I press for individual liability. It is not a one size fits all. It respects property. It respects the right to self defense. And it is not unlimited power given to the government. When the risk is high, costs go up in particular regions for particular reasons. You may counter that by saying Covid does not respect geography. If so, that gives the US to invade Mexico because of that Lax Covid policy.