Doug Morris

I am not asking for a blanket elimination of risk. I am saying that unnecessarily increasing physical risk can rise to physical force. My comment about risk and death was a response to the bizarre statement that life increases risk.

Does this mean we should not have laws against reckless driving, reckless firing of a gun, reckless burning when fire danger is high, or any other form of reckless endangerment? I am not saying that possible future infections are fully actual. I am saying that already existing germs are fully actual and that physical endangerment can rise to the level of physical force. We would need such information to justify suing or prosecuting someone for actually causing harm. We do not need it to prove endangerment. An immigrant does not endanger anyone by simply entering the country; there is no justification for restricting entry. Anti-immigration is driven largely by xenophobia, racism, protectionism, and blaming immigrants for violating laws that violate their rights. Exactly what sort of gun control? Exactly what sort of environmentalism?

It is not for open-ended collectivist nonsense like "the good of the group". It is on the grounds that failure to vaccinate increases the risk of spreading disease, and that this is physical force. Germs molest people.

Someone who does not have a respiratory system should not be required to mask or to vaccinate. To put it another way, if we ever build rational computer systems, they should not be required to mask or to vaccinate.

To say that an action is initiation of physical force is not to say that liberty is not for people performing that action. We can have laws against such actions as speeding, letting one's dogs run unleashed, or disturbing one's neighbors' sleep and still recognize that people who do such things are entitled to liberty. If you want to attack my views, you should address the arguments I have made on this website to support my claim that failure to mask or to vaccinate can rise to the level of physical force. You should explain where you think those arguments go wrong. You should not smear me by putting words into my mouth.

If fruit is hanging low, that does not mean we should ignore it.

This can be true, and there can still be a risk that that person will spread the disease.

I have never spoken of " 'murder' by Covid" or anything like that. You must have badly misunderstood one of my posts, perhaps the one in which I said that Hitler and Stalin probably had laws against certain actions that should be viewed as very serious initiations of physical force and are widely recognized as very serious crimes. If I have belabored over and over a single point, it is because, over and over, someone seems to be ignoring or misunderstanding it.

Do you think if you say why, whYNOT might feel less need to make his posts? If you succeed in convincing me, I will say so, and whYNOT will almost certainly feel less need to make his posts.

Ayn Rand assumes that the unvaccinated pose no threat to anyone else. This is not true. That's probably true of some people, but this does not mean we should swing to the opposite extreme. There's still enough harm and death that it is natural and reasonable for people to react strongly to it.

Requiring people to mask and/or vaccinate does NOT require them to stop acting and living.

There are preventive actions people should be required to take. It is easy to come up with examples involving guns, cars, swimming pools, and animals. This includes requiring rabies vaccination. It also includes limiting one's animals' freedom of movement, even if one is not sure to what extent the animals are capable of aggression against people, animals, or property.

If Malone makes a specious comparison of vaccines to antibiotics, this will throw his risk-benefit calculations off.

Unnecessarily increasing the risk of spread of disease is an initiation of physical force. This remains true even if some people are more endangered than others.

We need to rationally distinguish between violations of rights, which are part of the bad process, and proper defenses of rights

We've been over this before. That statement is misleading at best.

Recently the number of COVID-19 deaths in the USA topped 1/500 of the population, or .2 per cent. This is a pretty large risk of death from a single cause in less than two years, certainly a lot larger than the hypothetical percentages in some of Easy Truth's posts. It is possible that this is an undercount, since the total deaths from all causes have increased by more than this. Also, this does not count people who survive, but with serious long-term harm.

I should make clear that a variety of physical actions are possible. One possibility is to pick up the knife, drop it to the floor, and put my foot on it.

What about them?

We need more details to know exactly where to draw the line. If I find myself in such a situation, I must judge as well as I can what to do, using all the information available. I should at least remain wary, may decide to call 911, and may decide to take direct physical action.

The primary point I am trying to make is that there may be situations in which mandates to mask and/or vaccinate are right. Although I have responded to some comments about the specifics of COVID-19, that is not my primary concern here.

If you're talking about hospitals having to ration care because they don't have the capacity to treat it all, and governments saying the rationing is permissible, your comments are inappropriate. If you're talking about something else, please give examples.

If bad thinking and bad actions are involved in passing a law, it does not necessarily follow that the law is bad. Hitler and Stalin probably had laws against murder, rape, arson, and robbery. They could easily have misused such laws. It does not necessarily follow that those societies would have been better off without such laws. It certainly does not follow that better societies would be better off without them.

Eiuol has already addressed the specious comparison of vaccines to antibiotics. To get a little more specific, there are two problems that apply to antibiotics that have no analog for vaccines. Patients sometimes demand antibiotics for viral infections, against which they are useless; they may go so far as to shop around for a doctor that will wrongly prescribe the antibiotic. Patients sometimes fail to take the full course of antibiotics, stopping as soon as they feel better; this lets some bacteria survive and selects for resistance, contributing to the rise of resistance. If Malone's argument depends mainly on the specious comparison of vaccines to antibiotics, it would be a waste of my time to listen to the video. Does he have anything else to offer? Does he address my key point that unnecessarily increasing the risk of spread of disease is initiation of physical force?

Only when insanity expresses itself as the initiation of physical force should force be used against it.