Raptum Omnium Ab Omnibus

 

The late Lawrence Auster, who passed away in March of 2013, was a huge inspiration to the generation – in a rather loose sense of the word – of writers who started blogging in the years when he was active at  View From the Right and who, like himself, were theologically conservative Christians and political “conservatives” in the “traditionalist” sense of the word who espoused views on race, immigration, sex, and gender that would have been well within the mainstream sixty years ago but are now considered to be beyond the pale on the right wing of the political spectrum.    This would include, among many others, Laura Wood of The Thinking Housewife, the contributors to The Orthosphere, and this writer.

 

On April 21^st, 2009 he re-posted a comment from a post at Dennis Mangan’s blog and the thread that followed as “The Next Frontier of Non-Discrimination: Obligatory Interracial Dating”.    I’m not sure, upon re-reading the post after all this time, how much of the discussion was carried over from Mangan’s blog, which is no longer around to check, and how much was original to Mr. Auster’s, but it is not important.    The original comment linked to a Youtube video in which University of Delaware students were quizzed as to their willingness to date blacks and Muslims for the purpose of determining how “racist” they were.    The point was that liberal anti-racism was moving from condemning opposition to interracial dating as “racist” to condemning a lack of interest in participating in it oneself as “racist” and thus making interracial dating socially obligatory, hence Mr. Auster’s title.   About half way through the discussion someone who went by the handle “LL” asked Mr. Auster about whether it follows from this revised liberalism that to “eschew same-sex dating” is homophobic.    He answered in the affirmative, saying that this was precisely the direction in which liberalism was leading.    Pointing to how liberals were using previous bans on interracial marriage as part of their argument for same-sex marriage, he said “So if there’s no moral difference between a black and a white marrying each other and a man and a man – or a woman and a woman – marrying each other, there would not seem to be any moral difference between requiring a white student to date a nonwhite student (as some schools are apparently now doing) and requiring a male student to date a male student.”   The last comment in the post was by Lydia McGrew of What’s Wrong With the World and was about how pressure on heterosexuals to date members of the same-sex already existed in some women’s studies classes.

 

This whole idea that liberals’ own internal logic placed them on a trajectory that led from demanding tolerance of non-traditional relationships, to demanding acceptance of the same, to demanding participation in them, was one that Mr. Auster revisited several times.  I thought, and still think, that he was right about this and picked up the theme myself after he passed away.    A few years later, I wrote an essay that started with the hypothetical scenario of someone who politely rejected the advances of a member of the same sex being slapped with a discrimination suit, which he lost and found himself facing cripplingly punitive fines, and from this scenario reasoned towards the ethical conclusion that discrimination qua discrimination was not inherently wrong and that anti-discrimination laws, that is to say, laws that prohibit private persons from discriminating are fundamentally unjust.    Shortly after this, a judge ruled against the Christian dating site Christian Mingle in a discrimination lawsuit, and ordered them to expand their options from “men seeking women” and “women seeking men”.   While the court order did not compel individual men and women to date members of their own sex it was a large step in that direction in that it set the precedent that the realm of dating and relationships was now subject to anti-discrimination law.    In commenting on this at the time, I said that we were rapidly heading towards mandatory obligatory omnisexuality, which I described as a raptum omnium ab omnibus (“rape of all by all”) which expression, obviously, I borrowed, mutatis mutandis, from Thomas Hobbes’ famous description of human existence outside of civilized society and its laws as a bellum omnium contra omnes (“war of all against all”).

 

 

Who would have thought at the time that five years later a radically different situation would develop which could also be aptly described with this same expression?

 

I am referring, of course, to the forced vaccination that is the latest episode in the ongoing bat flu saga.

 

Let us consider the component parts of the expression, beginning with raptum, which would usually be translated abduction but which I am using here in the sense of its English derivative, rape.

 

To call forced vaccination rape is to use this word in a sense that is only slightly less than literal.  In the most literal sense of the word to rape is to force someone to have sexual intercourse with you against that person’s will.   Apart from instances of statutory rape involving an adult woman and a minor in which the minor is unable to legally consent due to age, this almost always means a male forcibly penetrating somebody else.   This is due to basic biology – even if you have a female who is sufficiently larger and stronger than a male to try and force herself upon him in this manner, to succeed would require that his body co-operate in a wayr in which it is noted to fail even when its cooperation is wanted by the male and under the set of circumstances when it is least likely to do so.    Therefore, for all intents and purposes, rape can be said to be forced penetration.    Forced vaccination is forced penetration, albeit with a needle rather than a penis.   To the wiseacres who think that talking about the bees and mosquitos who “raped” them is a witty comeback to this, note that mens rea, which can only be present in those with human moral agency, is a necessary component of any crime.   Insects do not and cannot possess mens rea, humans who compel other people to be injected with substances that they do not want to be injected with, have it in spades.

 

Should, however, anyone still object on the ground that rape is essentially sexual in nature, I shall answer neither by suggesting, however plausibly, that those who are so insistent that everyone who does not want the bat flu vaccine be compelled to take it derive some erotic thrill from this, nor by making reference to the common feminist trope that rape is about power not sex, but by offering an alternative comparison.   Imagine the government telling everybody that they need to have two injections of heroin, and possibly a booster injection of heroin at a later date, issuing heroin passports to confirm that people have had their required doses, banning people from bars, restaurants, movie theatres, concerts and sporting events unless they can prove they have had their heroin shots, and requiring all public employees and all people employed, whether publicly or privately, in certain sectors, to take their heroin shots as a condition of their continuing employment.    This would be considered by pretty much everybody to be a heinous crime against humanity.   The analogy here is exact, with the only difference being the contents of the needle.    The heinousness of forced heroin injection, however, does not lie solely in the heroin itself, but rather permeates the entire act.

 

The omnium, meaning “of all”, requires little in the way of commentary.    The fact that these vaccine passport and mandate measures have generally been introduced after a sizeable portion of the population has already been voluntarily vaccinated shows that nothing short of 100% vaccination will satisfy those insisting upon such extreme measures, which in turn demonstrates just how irrational these people are. 

 

The ab omnibus, which means “by all” is appropriate here because of the broad support these vaccine passports and mandates seem to have.   If the numbers on the matter are at all credible, vaccine passports and mandates have far more supporters than lockdowns and mandatory masks did.   The explanation for this is that the number of those who supported lockdowns and masks but feel that forced vaccination is a step too far is much lower than the number of those who opposed lockdowns and masks and who see the vaccines as a means of escaping these things.    This was inevitable, I suppose.   Once someone has accepted suspending everybody’s basic and constitutional rights and freedoms, imposing quarantine on the entire healthy population, ordering people to close their businesses based on an arbitrary classification of “essential” and “non-essential”, and the like as acceptable means of slowing the spread of a novel respiratory disease that those who are young and healthy have over a 99% chance of surviving he does not have much further to go to accepting forced injections.   Such a person is not likely to understand that holding the rights and freedoms that the government stole from us hostage is not morally different from holding a gun to our heads as a means of persuading us to get vaccinated.   Meanwhile, two years of lockdowns and masks have tired many out, wearing away at their moral resolve so that those willing to resist the vaccine mandates are fewer in number than those who opposed the earlier measures.

 

This is most unfortunate since forced vaccination is, in reality, an escalation of the tyranny of the last two years, not an escape from it.   Do we want to live in a society where we can be compelled to be injected with substances without our informed and voluntary consent?   Do we want to live in a society where we can be required to show our “papers” wherever we go?   Do we want future generations to have to live in such a society?

 

If our answer to any or all of these questions is no, then regardless of what we may think about the vaccines qua vaccines, or whether we ourselves have been vaccinated, partially or fully, or not, we must fervently oppose and reject this raptum omnium ab omnibus now.

It is Way Too Late for That Brian

Brian Pallister should have been an actor.   Judging from his performance last Thursday he would have been much better in that career than in his chosen profession of politics.   Granted, prior to this year, he did a fairly decent job as premier of the province of Manitoba.   He was certainly a major improvement over his predecessor, Greg Selinger of the NDP, although that is setting the bar of comparison extremely low.   This year however, faced with the true test of leadership, a crisis manufactured by the irresponsible news media and the even more irresponsible medical profession, he failed that test big time.   His tear-jerking, emotional-laden, speech on Thursday may very well indicate that he has missed his true calling, the stage.   His timing, however, needs some work, for the performance would have been much more convincing had it come in March.   Adjustments would have had to be made, of course, as it would have made little sense to talk about stealing Christmas in the middle of Lent.   An emotional appeal to Manitobans to follow public health guidelines would have been much better received if he had led with that, however, instead of tacking it on after nine months of arrogant posturing, threats, and bullying.

 

Pallister’s speech came a couple of days after the release of an Angus Reid Institute survey that indicated that his approval rating had dropped to the lowest of all premiers in the Dominion.   Although he had been asked to comment about this on the day the poll results were released and gave a brief answer it is generally understood that his remarks on Thursday were his real response.  

 

He claimed that he understood why do not like him.  “I understand that, I totally do” he said.   Certainly, he seemed to be aware of the reasons:

 

I’m the guy who has told you that you cannot shop…I am the person who has told you you can’t go to work.  I am the premier who has said you can’t run your business because we have the toughest restrictions in Canada, and it affects people who put their lives into their businesses.  I am the person who has come before you and said you can’t go to church, you can’t see your friends, you can’t travel. I’m that guy.

 

While some dispute this explanation for his drop in approval – Wab Kinew, the current NDP leader, and his butt-kissers in the media think it is due to his having re-opened the economy, which, except for the fact that he shouldn't have closed it in the first place, was the one thing he did right this year – these all seem to be fairly good reasons for disliking him.  It would appear that being aware of the reasons does not actually translate into understanding them, however, because from this starting point, Pallister launched into a bunch of self-justifying hocus pocus about the difference between being liked and respected, illustrated by a story from his school days about being disciplined by the principal for being late and told by the headmaster “You don’t like me right now, son, and that’s okay.  I want you to respect me in ten years.”

 

Does he seriously think that lesson applies here?

 

A teacher who disciplines a child for being late does so to prevent the bad habit of tardiness from forming.   Tardiness is a habit which hurts people both professionally, because employers don’t like to either hire or advance people who are tardy, and socially, because, formal occasions where it is fashionable to be late aside, people do not like to be kept waiting by their friends, dates, etc., all the time.   Like all bad habits, it is easier to break when it is just forming than when it is fully developed.   The principal who yells at a student for being late is, indeed, doing him a favour, and so the line from Pallister’s anecdote does indeed apply in that situation.

 

What Pallister is doing is completely different.

 

To tell people that they cannot go to work or run their business is to do the very opposite of what the teacher who tries to discipline tardiness out of his student does.   Rather than correcting behaviour that is bad and harmful it forbids behaviour that is both good and necessary.   Rather than helping people it is hurting them.   There is nothing in what Pallister is doing that deserves respect, either now or years down the road.

 

He, of course, justifies what he is doing on the grounds that it is “saving lives”.   He said:

 

I will do what I believe is right, and right now I need to save lives.

 

We have been hearing this from him for quite some time.   It is, however, utter nonsense.  

 

It is only ethically permissible to hurt Person A to save Person B under certain very limited circumstances.   If Person A pulls a knife on Person B with the intent to kill then we are justified in harming Person A to prevent Person B from being killed.   In this scenario, however, the action of Person A which threatens Person B will definitely have the effect of the death of Person B if not prevented and is done with malicious intent.   Neither of these things is true with regards to the lockdown scenario.    If Person A opens his store there is no certainty that anyone will die from the Wuhan bat flu as a result.   Indeed, when we consider the survival rate of the disease, who the people most likely to die from it are, and the circumstances pertaining to their contracting it, it is, in fact, extremely unlikely that anyone will die as a direct result of Person A opening his store.   Furthermore, there is no malicious intent, no mens rea, in Person A’s opening his store.   His intent is quite good and honourable, to earn a living for himself and his family, by selling people goods that they want or need rather than to be a burden on the public purse.   There is nothing wrong with what he is doing, unless, of course, he is selling nuclear waste to children or some such thing.   Finally, that forbidding Person A from opening his store will harm him is certain, the only uncertainty being the extent of the harm, whether it completely destroys his business and drives him into bankruptcy or not.   The lockdown scenario simply does not meet the standards of when it is ethnically permissible to hurt Person A to save Person B.

 

Immediately after that self-justifying prattle about saving lives Pallister said the following:

 

If you don’t think that Covid is real, right now you’re an idiot. 

 

What an interesting remark from someone who claims that he is doing the right thing and hopes we will eventually respect him for it.    In the same sentence he completely misrepresents the views of those who oppose him and insults them.   To say that someone does not think that Covid real is to say that he questions the existence of either the SARS-CoV-2 virus or the sickness it can produce with symptoms ranging from shortness of breath, fever, and cough to a life-threatening, organ-damaging, severely painful, pneumonia.   I think very few of those who oppose the lockdown question the existence of either of these things.   Opposition to the lockdown is based upon the fact that lockdowns do a lot of very real harm - they devastate the economy, load future generations with piles of debt, damage the fabric of society, dissolve communities, and create mental health problems that themselves result in many fatalities that would not have occurred sans lockdown - and only a small amount at best, of questionable good.   The most informed opposition to the lockdown is also based on the fact that the government imposing what amounts to a total suspension of our constitutional and prescriptive basic freedoms for the supposed sake of keeping us safe from a disease with a survival rate higher than the seasonal flu for otherwise healthy people under the age of 65 and with which the average age of those who die is higher than the average lifespan of Canadians is a giant leap away from civil freedom and towards totalitarianism.

If Mr. Pallister really wants to do the right thing and be respected for it then he had better learn to himself respect the Common Law, the constitution, and the limits these place on his powers as First Minister of the Crown in this province, for until he respects these he is a disgrace to his office.

His speech culminated in an emotional appeal to Manitobans to stay apart at Christmas, full of self-pity about having to be the Grinch that steals Christmas from us this year to keep us safe, so that we will have plenty to celebrate next year.

Well, it was a good performance, but to return to the point made at the beginning, it would have been a lot more persuasive if it had not followed ten months of ordering us around, telling us to snitch on neighbours who don't do as their told, threatening us with punishment, calling us names, setting obscenely high fines for breaking very petty rules, and wasting a million dollars that would have been put to better use hiring extra hospital staff and opening extra beds on contracting a private security organization to help enforce his draconian rules.

Following Christ in a Time of Plague

The following essay was inspired by a blog post written by a member of the leadership team in my parish.   Since this man has been a friend for about a decade and his post inspired me to write the exact opposite of what he had written, I shall do him the courtesy of leaving out his name.   

 

My parish, like all other Churches, sectarian congregations, and sacred communities of other religions for that matter, are presently forbidden to meet in person here in the province of Manitoba, in violation of three of what the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identify as “fundamental freedoms” and, indeed, in violation of the entire Common Law tradition of justice and liberty that has been the bedrock upon which the Dominion of Canada was built since Confederation.   This insane government overreach, which evokes memories of the persecution of religious communities in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and North Vietnam, is called a “Code Red” lockdown, and has been ordered by the public health mandarin, because he and the premier don’t like the fact that the dishonest media concentration on rising numbers of people who test positive for the Wuhan bat flu, regardless of the facts that the tests used are not diagnostic tools and that the majority of the “cases” are people who are not sick in any conventional sense of the term, make them look bad.   Most people are incapable of distinguishing between what the media says and reality and therefore have been duped into thinking that the tearing apart of the fabric of society, dissolving of communities, eroding of social capital, and brainwashing us all into fearing ordinary human contact and distrusting our friends, relatives, and neighbours outside of an extremely small so-called “bubble” of contacts is somehow “necessary.”   The isolation this causes, is not merely an experience we don’t enjoy, something unpleasant, but is downright harmful to our social, moral, spiritual, psychological, and yes, as everyone who knows the meaning of mens sana in corpore sano is aware, physical wellbeing.   Anybody capable of distinguishing between the bare facts and the slant imposed upon them by alarmist adjectives in the news and drawing rational conclusions from the facts will know, regardless of what “most of us” may or may not agree upon, that these measures are by no means precautions necessitated by the spread of a virus which for the portion of the population under 70 and in good health is less dangerous than the seasonal flu and for the portion of the population that is most at risk, that is to say those over 70 and with two or more serious chronic health conditions, these measures are quite evidently not effective at protecting since that portion of the population has been under lockdown since spring.   Furthermore and more importantly, not only are the lockdown measures not necessary, they are not good.   (1)

 

It is not just disappointing, then, but actually rather disgusting, to see so many people, including professing Christians and even Church leaders, so determined to load the burden of these restrictions upon their family, friends, neighbours, strangers and countrymen in general, as if they were not familiar with our Lord’s warning to His disciples about imitating the Pharisees in loading burdens upon others.  

 

For much of the last nine months, but especially since the new lockdown was gradually introduced over October and November, I have struggled to reconcile how professing Christians could so callously disregard not only the civil rights and basic freedoms of their neighbours, but their needs as social and spiritual beings as well.  Jesus told us that to love our neighbours as ourselves was the Second Greatest Commandment after that which tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.   It is one thing to say that the voluntary sacrificing of our personal rights and freedoms in the name of keeping our neighbours “safe” is a fulfilment of this Commandment, it is quite another thing to say that sacrificing the rights and freedoms of our family, friends and neighbours is such a fulfilment.   Supporting public health orders that impose maximal restrictions on everybody’s freedom of association, assembly, and religion is doing the latter.   To mistake sacrificing the rights and freedoms of others, which is what support for these public health orders amounts to, for the voluntary sacrificing of your own rights and freedoms, and patting yourself on the back about how much you love your neighbour, is to give the text of the Second Greatest Commandment merely the most superficial of readings.

 

There is a popular but very wrong and misguided notion that says that to insist upon and stand up for our rights and freedoms is to act selfishly and that to blindly support and obey every rule and restriction that is enacted in the name of public health is to put the common good ahead of our own.   While it is true that at the experiential level rights and freedoms are things that we primarily enjoy on an individual basis it is entirely wrong to say that insisting upon them and standing up for them is selfish.   Once again, voluntarily agreeing to limit the expression of our rights and freedoms for the sake of others may very well be the loving thing to do, but supporting government action that limits those rights and freedoms, not just for us as individuals but for everyone in society, is the very opposite of a loving act.   Our Lord summarized the message of His Sermon on the Mount in the Golden Rule, which states “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you; do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”   That is the rule worded positively, in terms of what we are supposed to do.   It is a coin with a reverse side, which expresses the same thing negatively, in terms of what we are not supposed to do.   Rabbi Hillel the Elder famously gave the negative form of this as “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a in the Babylonian Talmud).   If supporting government measures that restrict to the point of taking away completely the rights and freedoms of all members of our society does not constitute doing to your fellows what is despicable to you, it is difficult to conceive of what would.

 

When, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, the most famous student of the said Rabbi Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel who went on to become an Apostle of our Lord, St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth instructed them to be careful in how they exercised their Christian liberty so as not to be as stumbling block to those of weaker conscience and to put the good of others ahead of their own good, he clearly meant that they should voluntarily limit and restrict their freedom for the sake of others, not that they should write Caesar and ask him to do it for them and everybody else, nor that they should become Caesar’s cheering section if he did so of  his own accord.   When it came to limiting the freedom of others, St. Paul’s thoughts on that can be found in his epistle to the Galatians, in which the very first anathema sit (actually anathema esto since St. Paul wrote in Greek not Latin) was pronounced on those who presumed so to do.    It is worth pointing out that in I Corinthians the recommended voluntarily imposed limits on freedom involved eating meat of dubious origins and in Galatians the limitations on others that were condemned involved forcing people to cut off their foreskins and to stop eating bacon.   Locking people away in their own houses for months, even if they are healthy, without even the pretence of a criminal charge, let alone trial and conviction, forbidding them any sort of healthy social contact, ordering the businesses in which their life’s work, and possibly that of several generations of their family, is all tied up, and upon which they depend for their living to close and this sort of thing goes far beyond what St. Paul condemned in the legalists troubling the Galatians.    What would he have thought if he had foreseen that some would take his plea to the Corinthians to exercise their liberty prudently and wisely and seek the good of others as an argument for supporting imposed limitations of this nature?

 

I suspect the answer would be close to what St. Peter had to say about those who misused St. Paul’s epistles in his own day “As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”  (II Peter 3:16)

 

That Jesus demonstrated by His own life what love looks like is most certainly true.   Indeed, His life was a demonstration of what a love that goes beyond the love spoken of in the Greatest and the Second Greatest Commandments looks like.   Remember, those Commandments He said, were the summary of the Law, i.e., that which God rightly requires of us.   A self-sacrificial love, such as Jesus demonstrated by allowing Himself to be unjustly condemned, tortured, and brutally killed for the sake of us all, goes far beyond that, and it is Jesus’ example that Christians are commanded to follow.   To suggest, however, that support and obedience for the lockdown measures is what that kind of love looks like today, is to say something that could only be true in some sort of parallel world where everything is the opposite of our own.

 

Think about it.   In the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry, the disease that everybody feared, for which everybody who contracted it was excluded from the community and forced to announce themselves as “unclean” lest any unwary traveler come too close, was leprosy.   Jesus encountered several lepers at various points in His ministry, each encounter ending with the healing of the leper.   One particular encounter stands out, however, which is related in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.   In St. Matthew’s Gospel it follows immediately after the Sermon on the Mount.   After He comes down from the mountain a great multitude follows Him and a leper comes to Him, worships Him, and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”   He answered, not just in word but in deed:

 

And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

He did not warn the leper to stay a safe distance away.   He did not warn His disciples to stay a safe distance away.   He did not stay a safe distance away Himself.   He “put forth His hand, and touched him.”

 

In 1832, the plague of cholera hit the city that is now called Toronto.   It killed a twelfth of the population.    It was, in other words, a plague that makes the one that has been generating an insane amount of panic this year, look small and pathetic in comparison.   While droves fled the city, John Stachan, the Anglican archdeacon of York who seven years later would become the first Bishop of the Diocese of Toronto, remained, personally attended to the sick, volunteered on the wagons that collected dead bodies, conducted the burials, and arranged for support for those orphaned and widowed by the plague.   He did precisely the same thing when the “second wave” of cholera hit two years later.

 

What does following Jesus’ example of self-sacrificing love for others look like in a time of plague?  Is it what soon-to-be Bishop Strachan did in 1832?   Or is it lecturing other Christians on how abiding by rules that destroy the economy, bankrupt small family businesses and enlarge the market share of big box chains and online corporations like Amazon, tear the fabric of society to pieces, dissolve communities, exhaust social capital, eliminate third places (2), keep families apart, close Churches, encourage distrust of neighbours, and accustom us to accepting severe government limitations on everyone’s basic rights and freedoms, all without accomplishing the stated purpose of saving lives, for the people most at risk and who have been under lockdown much longer are dying anyway and to their number are being added the underreported but rising numbers of suicides, murders, addiction-related deaths and other deaths caused by the lockdowns themselves, somehow serves the “common good”?

 

Go thou and do likewise.

 

(1)   For Christian insights drawn from Plato’s distinction in the Timaeus between “The Good” and “The Necessary” see the Notebooks of Simone Weil.

(2)   Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, 1989.

 

Roussin’s Victims

 

The province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, one of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Commonwealth Realms, is my home.   We have seen two types of protests directed against the provincial government in recent months, both objecting to the province’s response to the spread of the Wuhan bat flu.   One type of protest, such as that which took place in Steinbach on the 14^th of November, expresses opposition to the public health orders as trampling all over our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion and our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights.   The other type of protest expressed the views of the socialist opposition party, its leader Wab Kinew and his health critic, and their far left echo chamber in the media which features such automatons as the CBC’s Bartley Kives and the Winnipeg Free Press’s Dan Lett and Ryan Thorpe.   Those involved in this type of protest take the position that the government’s public health orders have been too few, too light, and too slowly enacted, and that the government by not imposing a harsh lockdown the moment the case numbers started to rise in the fall, is responsible for all the deaths we have seen since September.

 

 

My sympathies are entirely with the first group of protesters, as anyone who has read a word I have previously written on the subject already knows.   I should say that my sympathies are with the protesters' basic position.   I don’t much care for the rhetoric of civil disobedience, rebellion, and populism in which that position is often expressed at those protests.

 

 

While the second group of protesters are certainly entitled to their opinion and the free expression of the same, a freedom that I note many if not most of them would prefer to deny to me and others who take my side of the issue, their position is easily debunked from an ethical point of view.

 

 

When a virus is spreading, government is not required to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread.   Indeed, it has a moral obligation NOT to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread of the virus.   This is because the government has the power to do tremendous evil as well as good.

 

 

Let us agree that saving lives that are at risk from the virus is in itself a good and worthy goal.   Stopping and slowing the spread of the virus may be a means to that end, but whether it is a good means to a good end or a bad means to a good end is debatable.  Slowing the spread of the virus increases the total length of the pandemic, stretching out the time we have to deal with this plague over a much longer period than would otherwise be the case.   That can hardly be regarded as desirable in itself.   Quite the contrary in fact.   Whether this is an acceptable evil, worth tolerating in order to achieve the end of lives saved, depends upon a couple of considerations.

 

 

First it depends upon the effectiveness of the method of slowing the spread of the virus in saving lives.   If the method is not effective, then the evil of artificially lengthening the period of the pandemic is much less tolerable.

 

 

Second it depends upon the means whereby the stopping or slowing of the virus, considered as an end itself, is to be accomplished.   If those means are themselves bad, this compounds the evil of stretching out the pandemic.

 

 

Neither of these considerations provides much in the way of support for concluding that a longer pandemic is an evil made tolerable by a good end, such as saving lives.

 

 

With regards to the first consideration, it is by no means clear that any lives have been saved in this way at all.  Indeed, at the beginning of the first lockdown, back when everyone was repeating the phrase “flatten the curve” ad naseum, the experts advising this strategy told us that it would not decrease the total lives lost  but merely spread them out so that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed at once.   This, in my opinion at least, was not nearly as desirable an end as saving lives and not one sufficient to make the lockdown measures acceptable.

 

 

This brings us to our second criteria.   The means by which our government health officials have tried to slow or stop the spread of the virus are neither morally neutral nor positively good.   On the contrary, they are positively evil.  They inflict all sorts of unnecessary misery upon people.  Advocates of the lockdown method sometimes maintain that the damage inflicted is merely economic and therefore “worth it” to save lives.   This would be a dubious conclusion even if the premise were valid.   The premise is not valid, however, and it is highly unlikely that those who state it seriously believe what they are saying.  

 

 

Telling people to stay home and avoid all contact with other people does not just hurt people financially, although it certainly does that if their business is forced to close or their job is deemed by some bureaucrat to be “non-essential”.  It forces people to act against their nature as social beings, deprives them of social contact which is essential to their psychological and spiritual wellbeing, which are in turn essential to their physical wellbeing.   Mens sana in corpore sano.   The longer people are deprived of social contact, the more loneliness and a sense of isolation will erode away at their mental health.   Phone, e-mail, and even video chat, are not adequate substitutes for in-person social contact.

 

All of this was true of the first lockdown in the spring but it is that much more true with regards to the second lockdowns that are now being imposed.   The first lockdown was bad enough, but the second lockdown, imposed for at least a month, coming right before Christmas in the same year as the first, will be certain to pile a sense of hopelessness and despair on top of the inevitable loneliness and isolation.  The government has kept liquor stores and marijuana vendors open, even though the combination of alcohol and pot with hopelessness, loneliness, and despair is a recipe for self-destructive behaviour, while ordering all the churches, which offer, among other things, hope, to close.    This is evil of truly monstrous proportions.    It can only lead to death – whether by suicide, addictive self-destruction, or just plain heart brokenness.   

 

 

The protesters who accuse Brian Pallister and the government he leads of murder for having re-opened our economy from the first lockdown and not having imposed a second one right away when the cases began to rise are wrong-headed about the matter as they, generally being leftists, are wrong-headed about everything.   The government does not become morally culpable for deaths because it refrains from taking actions which are extremely morally wrong in themselves in order to achieve the goal of saving lives.   Not imposing a draconian lockdown does not translate into the murder of those for whom the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus becomes one health complication too many.

 

 

Where Pallister does bear moral culpability for deaths is with regards to all the people who will kill themselves, or perhaps snap and kill others, drink themselves to death or accomplish the same with drugs, or simply give up on life in hopeless gloom and despair because he has allowed Brent Roussin, once again, to impose these totalitarian public health orders.

 

 

Roussin has been going on television as of late, showing pictures of people who have died, and lecturing Manitobans on how these are not just numbers but people.   This is a kind of sleight-of-hand, by which he hopes to distract the public from all the harm he is actively causing, and he knows full well that lockdowns are themselves destructive and lethal for he admitted as much a couple of months ago thus compounding his guilt now, by manipulating their emotions.

 

 

Does Roussin realize that this street runs both ways?

 

 

What about the young man, Roussin, who would otherwise have had decades of life ahead of him, much more than those whose deaths you have been exploiting to justify your bad decisions, but who killed himself because you cancelled his job as "non-essential", took away  his social life, and left him with the prospect of long-term isolation?   Do you not realize that he is a person as well?

 

 

In the end, those who die from the lockdown may very well turn out to outnumber by far those who succumb to the bat flu.   In which case all that Roussin will have accomplished will have been to exchange a smaller number of deaths for which he would not have been morally responsible for a larger number of deaths that leave his hands permanently stained with blood.

 

Has Captain Airhead Finally Learned to Count?

On Thursday evening, Captain Airhead, who sometimes goes by the nom de scène Justin Trudeau and whom we in the Dominion of Canada have, whether as a result of some voodoo spell by our enemies or as divine judgement for turning our backs on God, been cursed to have had as the Prime Minister of Her Majesty's government in Ottawa for the past five years, made a phone call to the provincial premiers.   Why they bothered to pick up remains a mystery.   Perhaps Caller-ID was temporarily down all over the country.

We know what Captain Airhead told the premiers because he himself broadcast it on Friday morning.   "One of the things that I did highlight is that our resources are not infinite at the federal government" he said.   We shall return to those words momentarily.  First, take note of the fact that this was in reference to the Chinese bat flu.   He gave as specific examples of the resources which he has newly discovered to be finite, support for contact tracing, PPE, military and the Red Cross.   The last mentioned seems odd in this context since, although the Red Cross has royal patronage here as in the United Kingdom and receives some government funding, it is, the last I checked, an international private charitable  organization and not a branch of government.   That is beside the point however.   Captain Airhead spoke of the Dominion government as being there to support the provinces in the pandemic but added "there is a threshold beyond which when the cases spike too much, we might have to make really difficult choices about where to deploy the limited resources we have."

That the resources available to the government are limited rather than infinite is a truth of which prior to this Captain Airhead has given no indication that he was aware.    

Does this mean that Captain Airhead has finally come to appreciate the austerity that he always denigrated and deplored in Stephen Harper's premiership?

Hardly.   It is a tactic to bully the provincial governments into imposing stricter, harsher, lockdowns.

"Controlling the virus now reduces the impossible decisions and choices we might have to make down the road" he went on to say.   The translation of this out of smooth, polished, political talk back into Airhead's native dialect is "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse.  Take away everyone's basic freedoms now or I will be cutting you off of federal support."

That Captain Airhead has not had some sort of epiphany about the limits of government resources or even taken a crash course in basic arithmetic from Count von Count is evident from the basic contradiction in his message.

The contradiction is simply this: the kind of lockdowns that Captain Airhead wants the premiers to impose will only use up the government's limited resources faster.

In the prairie provinces, including my own Manitoba, we are seeing the hospitals and intensive care units fill up with bat flu patients.   This is not typical of most places experiencing the so-called "second wave" which generally has seen numbers of positive cases going up without a significant spike in people getting seriously sick.  In Manitoba, at least, this can be attributed to this being the province's first real wave.   We did not see our hospitals and ICUs fill up when other places did back in March and April.  The desire of public health officials, both Dominion and provincial, to impose a second lockdown on us, if we charitably albeit, perhaps, naively, attribute to them the most benign possible of motivations, comes from a concern that the hospitals and ICUs will be overwhelmed and the system will crash.    This is the drain on public resources that they wish to avoid and it will be such a drain to be sure.   

One problem with their reasoning is that the addition to public expenses that will be produced by the lockdown measures themselves will exceed any possible reduction of the expenses due to the hospital overload.   Lockdowns are insanely expensive.   Far more so than crashing the health care system.   If people are not allowed to open their businesses or go to their jobs because of government orders, the government must compensate them.   The Dominion government already ran a record deficit doing this in the earlier lockdown this year, driving our national debt burden to the point where the federal debt alone will exceed a trillion dollars by the end of the year.    Whatever stress on the health care system new lockdowns might relieve, and it is doubtful that it will provide any significant relief at all, it will not sufficiently reduce the demand on our resources represented by the hospital/ICU crisis itself to offset that which will be created by the lockdowns.

The other problem with the "we need to lockdown or we won't have the resources to deal with the outbreak" reasoning is that lockdowns don't just add to the public expenses enormously themselves.   They also attack the other side of the ledger by severely reducing public revenue.   Public revenue is derived from taxes and it is the economy which generates the wealth that pays those taxes.   Lockdowns, however, are economy killers.   Businesses deemed "essential" are allowed to be open but at severely reduced capacities, currently 25% in Manitoba.   Retailers and restaurants classified as "non-essential" are allowed curbside and delivery service only.   Everybody else must close.   However, the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" is not legitimate.   People cannot survive without food although they as individuals can get along without television sets but it is the production of goods such as television sets that pays for the production of goods such as food.   The so-called "non-essential" part of the economy is what pays for the so-called "essential" part and you cannot shut down the former without endangering the latter and severely reducing the source of public revenue causing the government to go further into debt (printing more money is merely a way of disguising the debt for the new inflated currency is now backed by wealth produced in the future, i.e., debt, rather than wealth that has already been produced). (1)

So no, Captain Airhead has not learned how to count.   He is simply doing what he always does, exercising his freedom-hating, totalitarian muscle, from behind his "sunny ways" mask.

(1) Should anyone object that it is a case of "lives" versus "the economy" I have shown many times in the past that this is a false dilemma.   Lockdowns kill.  While there has not been a whole lot of excess mortality this year compared to the immediately previous years, certainly not as much as one would expect from all the grims and alarmings and shockings the lying newsmedia use to describe the Chinese bat flu, there has been a lot of excess suicides, people drinking themselves to death, deaths by drug overdoses, and every other source of death one would expect to arise as the result of increased loneliness.   Lockdowns, not the virus, are the bigger killer this year.