Tag Archives: coronavirus

Coronavirus Conundrum: The futility of ethics by means of mathematics

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In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there is a scene where Spock tells Kirk, who is struggling with an ethical dilemma, that “Logic dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”.

For many years this never sat well with me, for reasons that I could not quite articulate. I was unsettled. I had a suspicion that the claim was not logical at all. I mean, I suppose it was logical mathematically, but still something seemed off.

Years later I realized the specific problem. Spock is confusing ethical consistency with mathematical logic. Ethics are not mathematics, and the logic which governs the premises and conclusions of the two isn’t necessarily interchangeable. Philosophical logic, or what is better termed “rational consistency”, or “reason”, does not assert mathematical logic as axiomatic. This is because mathematics is wholly abstract, where philosophy is meta, incorporating both the abstract and the concrete. Philosophy, of which ethics is a major category, concerns the nature of existence, itself, not merely the abstract measurement and categorization of it.

Since the dilemma facing Kirk is an ethical one, and ethics are not mathematics, Spock’s claim that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one” is entirely meaningless with respect to the problem at hand. It was a pointless and decidedly ILLOGICAL waste of time and breath. Ethically, the needs of the many DO NOT outweigh the needs of the few or the one. This is because there is no rational ethical comparison between “many” and “one” when considering individual human beings. Each person is an utterly singular observer. There is no such thing as deriving an objective “us” or “we” or “many” from an absolutely singular conscious agent. There is SELF, and there is OTHER, where both are singular agents, fundamentally, but the combination of SElf and OTHER into “we” or “us” or “many” is an entirely abstract notion. “We” does not exist, fundamentally, at all. “We” is an abstract concept which combines individuals for purely practical, mutable purposes, never for root ETHICAL ones. Therefore, it is a failure of reason to claim that it is somehow better for, say, one to die than one million. The individual, at the level of SELF, is absolute…he or she IS THE OBSERVER, and he or she is CONSTANT. This is why the individual is so ineluctably necessary to existence and reality. Axiomatically, absent the frame of reference of one’s singular and constant absolute SELF, no claim can be made about anything…nothing known, nothing claimed, nothing verified, and thus nothing can exist, because an existence which cannot be known and thus cannot be valued and thus serve no purpose is a categorically IRRELEVANT existence. And irrelevant existence cannot actually exist, because it can never meaningfully DO anything, including EXIST.

So, that in mind, Spock is really attempting to assert that the needs of the many ABSOLUTES outweigh the needs of a few or one ABSOLUTE. Do you see the paucity of logic here? Spock implies that the death of one person is better than the death of a million, but there is no such thing as a comparison between a single Absolute, and a million Absolutes. “A million absolutes” is no more a quantity of absolutes than a single absolute. There is no AMOUNT of absolute SELF. There is ONLY SELF. Any quantification of individuals then is purely abstract. It is of practical use, but NOT of ethical use. When God says “thou shalt not kill” he doesn’t qualify that command by quantifying it. One death is as equally tragic as a million.

Moving on to the cornonvirus. Today I saw a Vox headline from April 1 which read “The Coronavirus is NOT the FLu. It’s Worse.” I didn’t read the article, because I didn’t have to. The title alone told me that reading the article would be a waste of time, because as far as I was concerned, this isn’t and never has been the issue. Comparisons between the coronavirus and the flu are not the fundamental point anyone should be making.

First of all, the title itself is massively subjective, as “worse” can be defined in multiple ways, and easily manipulated to bolster one’s own personal opinion, no matter what that opinion is. And even if we go with the ostensible meaning of the word—that by “worse” we mean “more dangerous, and with a higher mortality rate”—a month later from when the article was written, incidence testing around the world has proved that the coronavirus is NOT worse than the flu, and may in fact be LESS dangerous.

But who cares about this…this is incidental to anything involving the coronavirus insofar as society and public health is concerned. It’s not about how dangerous the coronavirus is or is not relative to the flu, or any other virus. We live in a context where, under the auspices of State Authority, we exist first and foremost as members of a collective. This makes any crisis, even a pandemic, not an ethical problem, but an examination of probability, and this implies the enumeration of the people. The people become numbers, and these numbers are then plugged into a much larger and more fundamental equation, which is this: What course of action best promotes and preserves the position and power of the State? And this is why government can react so differently to similar crises (eg swine flu vs coronavirus), and why its methods and actions are often so incongruent with emprical data (eg the ongoing lockdown despite evidence that the coronavirus is not a significant threat to the nation). The crises are similar, but the policies which best promote State power can widely vary from situation to situation.

And it is here were we get to the root of it all.

The biggest mistake we who are suspicious and critical of government interference make with respect to interpreting government response to crisis is that we confuse government, which is an institution of object violence, with an ethical entity…and more precisely, a MORALLY ethical entity. It is not. Its only purpose is to compel the collective masses into a particular abstract ideological standard that it alone legitimizes, no matter what appeals are made to individual rights or freedom, etc. Government, itself, not you or me or our neighbors, our businesses, our money, our health, our jobs…nothing matters besides that which affirms the State, and promotes the collective Ideal which legitimizes it (in the case of the US, where I am, this Ideal is the very nebulous “the People”). The government IS the nation…to save the government IS to save YOU and ME, so the “logic” goes. We are the State, the State is us. There is no individual to consider in the equation, and THIS is why the coronavirus is not a true ethical dilemma.

Those who are decrying the government’s draconian measures to control the virus are citing the numbers in an attempt to win the ethical debate. They are claiming that many, many more people will die in the long run from the severe economic catastrophe that the unconstitutional lockdown orders are inflicting. I, myself, have asserted this, and will continue to do so. After all the truth is the truth—if you look at the data gathered by highly competent and established epidemiologists and virologists there is simply no way a rational person can conclude that this virus is paticularly dangerous for the VAST majority of human beings, And if you look at the economic data, there is no way a rational person can deny that the measures taken to control the pandemic will kill many more people than the virus ever will. However, as this is not a specifically ethical argument, it will fail thus when employed as one. ETHICALLY, those who would rather doom a billion people via the government’s orders to lockdown society in order to save a few thousand people who might otherwise die from the virus are NOT wrong. It is NOT ETHICALLY (specifically, it is not not morally) wrong to suggest that the smaller number of lives saved by government are EQUALLY and possibly MORE important than the billions who will be destroyed by the ongoing lockdown. Why? Because, as I said, this is NOT an ethical dillema. You cannot make an ethical comparison of the importance of one life over another, so to persist in the fallacious idea that you can possess moral and rational superiority by simply appealing to the math is ludicrous. IF the government wants to kill a billion in order to save a few thousand, an ethical argument about the value of this many lives versus that many is NOT an effective argument because the situational context has nothing to do with the value of individual life.

But, you might say, why not then simply appeal to the mathematical logic? You might say that it doesn’t make sense, numerically, for the governemnt to doom a billion to save a few thousand. Surely it is in the best interest of the State to rule over many than a few, right?

The answer, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, is: not necessarily. It might, but it might not. The bottom line is that IF the State feels that it is in its best interest to destroy the many in order to save the few then this is the course of action it WILL pursue. If you think that the power and position of those in goverment are not the supreme consideration in dealing with any and all issues related to a nation, be it a pandemic or any other thing, then you simply do not understand the true and root nature of the State and the nature of your position under its authority. And there is no ethical argument you can bring to bear which will alter the course of government action. You can quote numbers all day long, and conflate mathematics with ethics all day long, but it will do you no good. It is an exercise in futility and will only serve to exasperate, frustrate, and disappoint you. The only way you will ever get the State to change its course is to somehow convince it, or hope that it will at some point be convinced, that it is in ITS, not YOUR, best interest to choose a different direction.

And here we DO actually get a glimps of the ethics of government. What is “good” for the State is technically an ethical question. Yet we must make a distinction between MORAL ethics and LEGAL ethics. In this article, for semantic’s sake, I used “ethical” as a synonym for “moral”, which I’m sure you understood. After all, any discussion of ethics as it involves human beings may typically be seen as a discussion of morality. But moral ethics are not the same as legal ethics, and I have several articles on this blog where I deal specifically with the difference, so I will not do that here. The point I want to make is that in order to convince the government to change its course, one must convince it that such a change is first and foremost GOOD for the STATE. What is good for the person, for you and me, for the individual, for the human being, is entirely irrelevant, and will never prove efficacious in persuading the government to do anything.

END

Coronavirus Hysteria 2: We were promised an apocalypse, and the State will deliver what nature has not

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So here we are, in the sixth or seventh week of “quarantine”—which, what a lovely little euphemism for “house arrest”—and damn it, the numbers are just not what we were promised. And at the rate things are going, they never will be. We were promised millions dead, and dozens of virus mutations, each more deadly than the last, and instead we got a virus that doesn’t really mutate much at all. We have our mask-wearing laws, our “shelter in place” laws, our stockpiles of toilet paper…so just where in the hell is the insatiable and genocidal mass murdering little packet of RNA called Coronavirus that we were promised?

Now, thanks to prevalence testing (finally…better late than never; well, actually not better late than never, but whatever) we know that the mortality rate of this virus is in the vicinity of the common seasonal flu, maybe even less, and that those most at risk of death are those anyone with an IQ over 90 could have guessed—the elderly, and those with preexisting conditions, mostly lung, heart, and other cardiovascular related issues. In States and Nations which did not threaten state violence to compel economic shut downs and massive unemployment, large scale house-arrest, small business collapse, and the atomization of society through “social distancing” laws, which here in the US are just about the most unconstitutional thing one can imagine short of a rank despot seizing control of the nation and summarily burning the original copy of the Constitution to char right on the Capitol steps…yes, nations which did not decide to rule by throwing all reason and sanity into an infinite abyss and replacing them with psychopathic political expediency—like Taiwan, Singapore, Sweden, and South Korea—have experienced none of the disasters foretold, and have far fewer cases and deaths than many other countries. This of course is objective, emprical, and verifiable evidence…it is evidence that all of the “public health” measures forced upon a compliant and complacent citizenry in other countries has done nothing to save lives, stem the infection rates, or bring greater security and well-being to the people. On the contrary, it has done the exact opposite. Not only has it prolonged the virus pandemic via hindering the ability of the masses to acquire the herd immunity necessary to build long-term protection against the coronavirus, like it protects us against many other viruses, it has doomed them, and particularly here in the United States, to economic insecurity, psychological chaos, bankruptcy, drug addiction, alchoholism, suicide, unemployment, domestic violence, welfare dependency, stress-related health problems such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes, and general ruin…along with prolonging their risk of infection, almost certainly increasing propagation of the virus, which means more death from the virus itself and from complications related to comorbidity.

In addition, we are seeing this disturbing push-pull of manipulative reporting from the mainstream media, which is merely the propaganda wing of the government, and primarily for the Left (today’s neo-Marxist sychophants). We are given reason to panic, then reason to hope a little, then more reason to panic, and on and on. It’s what they call in the military “psy-ops”…never let your enemy establish a sense of certainty about the situation and reality in general. Keep them confused and blind to reason and the truth at all times. This virus is hella-dangerous we are told, but we will be just fine if we comply with our quarantine; wear our masks and wash our hands; collect our welfare checks, and stand on those little markers on the floor at the grocery store. But then, you never know…the second wave might be even worse, and we aren’t sure the economy will ever fully return to normal, because there’s no telling what this virus might do; only a few have died relative to the numbers of infected, but watch out! The mass graves of billions is a reality which is just around the corner!

We are psy-op-ed into docility. We are to be controlled through confusion; managed through uncertainty…caged metaphorically, but not physically. The former is much cheaper, and much more effective, and much more profitable.

*

You see, the root of what is going on here is that we were promised an apocalyptic hellscape of dead bodies and ruined lives by the millions and even billions, but here it is six months into this thing and it has fizzled like a match in a hurricane. The virus isn’t doing its job…it got lazy and took an early retirement. The mortality rates are falling fast in most places, and at present the coronavirus isn’t any more deadly than the common seasonal flu. Infections are still going on, but this virus has such a lengthy incubation period and the country initiated the collective house-arrest orders so late, and the “public health” measures of blindfolds and handcuf…er, I mean masks and gloves, and the unconstitutional restrictions on freedom  of associa…er, I mean “social distancing”, are so haphazard, ill-informed, and ineffective, even according to medical experts in the World Health Organization and National Academy of Sciences, that infection rates have only been slowed only insofar as people aren’t moving around as much. The curve isn’t being flattened because we are beating the virus, it’s simply because the government put a moratorium on living life in this country…in an effort to save it. Well…no one does irony like the State. But infections are still happening, and will continue to happen as long as people are alive and breathing. I wonder what government orders are being cooked up as I write this to deal with THAT little problem? (Of course I’m being sarcastic here…for now).

And this is the corner into which our incompetent politicians and policy-makers have painted themselves. By overreacting to this relatively harmless virus, and giving into the conspiracy theory panic-mongers on social media, YouTube, in the mainstream media, and even in medical institutions which exist to advise the State on public health issues, all of whom were telling us such fantasies as billions could die, and that this is a Chinese bioweapon, and that it is mutating into an unstoppable perfect viral storm of certain death, and plastering dozens of contextless videos of people in Asia being thrown into quarantine camps, barricaded in their homes and apartment buildings, and crematoriums with bodies lined up like a street parade to be disintegrated into a black-smoke oblivion as though Auschwitz had been rebooted…yes, by overreacting to this deluge of rank spectacle with almost zero actual information about the virus and then summarily assuming almost plenary control of every aspect of the life of the citizen, the government doomed the nation to the apocalypse which the virus was never, ever going to actually deliver by itself.

Like I said, no one does irony quite like the State.

In other words, here is the corner which at this point pretty much guarantees that this “lockdown”…this suspension of basic life and freedom in this nation will go on pretty much indefinitely at this point. At least, this is the rational perspective…thankfully the State has a habit of acting irrationally, so there might be hope. Anyway, the government, by allowing this lockdown to continue, creates an economic, social, psychological, medical, and political disaster which rapidly approaches the point of irreversibility with every passing second, and in addition to this doesn’t actually do anything  to halt the threat of the virus but merely prolongs the existence of it as a threat by hindering any chances for herd immunity to develeope and deal with it. And this could threaten the positions of those in power in the long run.

But if they lift the lockdown the coronovirus will ineluctably spread and the numbers will climb…this is the dreaded “second wave” they are talking about on the news now. Of course, there is nothing to fear from a second wave, because the mortality rates will not change…it will not make the virus any more deadly and will in fact, create mass immunity rather quickly as people get it and recover, so there is nothing to be afraid of. But the State knows how ignorant and short-witted and reactionary and fickle the public is and when the people see the number of infections rise again they will of course completely lose their collective shit and blame the State for opening the country up too soon. And this will turn out very bad for politicians and policy makers in the short run.

So…understand this: this forced house arrest and economic cratering we as citizens are being forced to endure at this moment has absolutely nothing directly to do with cornonavirus, and all attempts to present this virus as some kind of actual, visceral, clear and present threat to life and limb is pure fear-baiting and propaganda for power and profit. There is nothing about the virus itself for the overwhelming majority of people to be afraid of. This has everything to do with the ruling class biding their time until they can create an artifice of plausible deniability. In other words, they are opting to go with the long-term disaster approach of holding fast the nationwide lockdown in the hopes that this buys them enough time to come up with a plan to save their reputations, and with it their positions and power. Of course, the longer they let it go, the more short term the long term disaster gets. Now, I’m sure that there are some in power who are looking to the Golden Knight of the Glorious Vaccine to come and rescue them out of their self-sabotage, but that necessitates that this lockdown proceed for at least another eighteen months if not two years. This scenario leaves them with no country left to rule at the end of it all, of course, but if you think for a second that the government isn’t seriously considering a lockdown which extends until a vaccine arrives (and that a vaccination can even be created is no certainty), then you don’t know how insatiable the State actually is, and how ferociously self-interested it can be when faced with what it believes is a true existential threat. Not only are they considering a two-year lockdown, but right now this IS the ACTUAL plan which is being implemented. It IS the reality at present. The government has not equivocated in the least about their power and intention to extend the lockdown for as long as it is “necessary”.  Where “necessary” means “serves its own interest, period”.

*

So, the virus isn’t doing what the government told us it would do. The “public health” measures are not and will not have the effect on the virus that we are told they will. But see, this is not the fault of government, lest anyone get the wrong idea about the point of this article. I am by no means criticizing the State. I am merely pointing out the perfunctory and necessary failure of it when it assumes responsibilities that are not inclusive of its nature, purpose, and abilities. I would no more accuse the lion of failing to build a canoe than I would accuse the government of failing to handle a crisis, or promote the health and well-being of humanity.

Well, I suppose that’s not completely true…the government could be blamed for making the attempt to go beyond its endemic and singular purpose; but I’m not sure that’s even what it is doing. I believe all of these attempts to address real problems in a productive and satisfying way are merely a facade for rank power grabbing. I believe the State knows exactly its purpose and its skill set, and relentlessly pursues these to the exclusion of all else. Perhaps I’m simply being too cynical, but really…eventually the lion, no matter how naive and ambitious it may be, WILL realize that it’s really only good at being a lion.

Here’s what I mean: the government’s only real purpose and talent is to annihilate. It’s like Ivan Drago from Rocky IV that way—whatever it hits, it destroys. Government is force. Government is an instrument of destruction…it is the centralization and monopoly of overwhelming compelling violence. It’s only job and only talent is to destroy the individual in sacrifice to a collectivist Ideal that it represents incarnate. in the US the Ideal is “the People”, but it can be anything—the Church, the Nation, the Race, the Worker’s Utopia…etc. It may try, and even in good faith, and in earnest altruistic intention, to correct social injustice, or to ensure economic stability, or to protect the health of the public, or the educate the masses, or to feed the them, or house or clothe them. But it fails, always, and at all times. Whatever problem it tackles, it makes worse, sooner or later, because it MUST. Because in all cases except destruction, the government is the lion which is trying to build a canoe. No matter what it does, or how hard it tries, or how good things may look for a while, the canoe must inevitably sink. It won’t work, becasue it simply can’t EVER be an ACTUAL canoe. Because lions do not build canoes.

What goverment does do… what it is so very good at that it does it perfectly even when trying to do the exact opposite, is wreck peoples’ lives. At the end of the day it murders, hinders, starves, threatens, imprisons, abuses, corrupts, and buries any and all expressions of individual autonomy, freedom, free will, and personal responsibility. Fiat currency, unrestrained debt and money printing destroy the econonmy; govenrment schools become institutions of collectivist and moral nihilism indoctrination; government wars begot from emprical meddling annihilate entire generations of men; social justice programs alienate and oppress the majority in the name of “equality”; tax collection takes the competent and productive and feeds them into farms and charnel houses where they are fleeced and butchered to buy the votes of the incompetent and unproductive, and on and on. And that is why, even though the virus disappointed in its foretold disaster, the apocolypse we were promised shall come to pass. Because where nature fails to heel and hobble mankind via its pestilence, meteorological disaster, or disease, the State takes up the slack. The virus failed to annihilate us, but don’t you worry, there will be destruction and death, in the millions and billions, just as we were promised. The virus won’t get you, but here’s what will: depression, anxiety, heart disease, cancer, unemployment, indigence, bankrupsy, alcoholism, drug addiction, desperation, loneliness, domestics abuse, crime, uneducated youth, economic depression, inflation, debt, anger, frustration, mistrust, indolence, early death, loss of friendship, loss of avocation, chronic sickness, failure to obtain preventative healthcare intervention and regular check ups, and on and on…all brought to you courtesy of your “public health” officials who are so desperately trying to save you from that which you will in all probability never see, hear, feel, or even notice should it by happenstance come upon you. Indeed, you may never personally know anyone who has truly suffered from the coronavirus, but you will certainly know personally one, and likely many, who has and have suffered from the State’s policies to protect you from it.

Yep.

No one does irony quite like the State.

END

 

Coronavirus Hysteria: Mask Panic, Mask Confusion, and Why One Law is Infinte Laws

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Go look at the literature concerning the effectiveness of masks in slowing or stopping the spread of coronavirus. What you will find is this: that masks both do and do not work.

Now, we know that something cannot both be “is” and “is not” because that’s a contradiction, and contradictions are null. Meaning they invalidate both premise and conclusion and thus result in a net 0…they are valueless and non-existent, and thus should be entirely rejected out of hand.

But the contradiction here is merely figurative…we can safely assume that the scientists and medical professionals who lead the discourse on mask-wearing in the midst of this virus kerfuffle do not mean to give a non-answer, and do not mean to confuse or mislead the public. So what it means is that there is benefit to mask-wearing, but with that benefit is a corresponding risk.

Now, I am not going to ramble on about the why’s and wherefore’s of masks and mask-wearing…about their usefulness after moisture saturation, effective resistance, virus transmission routes, moisture droplets, and all of that kind of thing. All that can be found in hundreds, if not thousands, of articles online. But distilling down the literature, there is a consistent conclusion that can be inferred from all of it, and that is this: That for every benefit to mask wearing there is an equal and opposite risk. For example, a mask may be effective in stopping large droplets of water from spreading to surfaces and other people, whilst at the same time they are not effective in halting the virus on smaller air droplets which can permeate the mask. Masks can give wearers a false sense of security causing them to become careless in social distancing, or deciding that it is safe to be around someone who is symptomatic, or that it is safe to go out when they are sick. Masks can reduce the risk of face-touching, which is likely a much more prevalent route of virus transmission than airborn inhalation. Yet they may also significantly increase the amount of face touching due to people having to readjust their masks, or taking them on and off, or pulling them down and then back up again for whatever reason. If you are a glasses wearer like me, you find yourself constantly having to readjust a face mask due to fogging. It is such a problem for me that I am not actually comfortable wearing a mask out of fear of catching the virus via face-touching. Masks may present as a comforting psychological bromide, yet this may backfire due to overconfidence. Masks are effective to some extent in preventing the inhalation and exhalation of the virus, but only for about twenty minutes, after which they become too moisture saturated to serve as any kind of preventative measure. In order for masks to reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus and not actually promote an even greater risk, the paper-based surgical masks must be discarded after a single use, and never worn for more than twenty minutes; the cloth masks, the makeshift homemade masks, the bandanas, must be washed after every use, and never worn for longer than twenty minutes. Hands should always be clean when affixing or removing the mask, and once on, should not be touched, ever. Failure to do these things not only voids the usefulness of the mask in preventing virus transmission, but can actually increase the risk of someone getting sick and spreading the virus to others.

Now, you may think the point of this article is to assert that mask-wearing is a zero-sum activity. And a very compelling argument can be made for that, and is what I happen to believe. I believe that mask-wearing is nothing more than a public spectacle, and does little more than promote a panic and hysteria with respect to a relatively harmless virus, which does nothing in the end but to prolong the economic, psychological, and even physical destruction of our nation, not to mention the already-irreversible and massive demolition of our Constitutional rights and freedoms, which we will never see returned.

But that’s not really what I am interested in here. The point I want ot make is much more academic, much less idealistically charged…perfunctory. After all, rational consistency is the only real discourse of substance. Everything else is just barking.

Let’s talk law. Let’s talk the idea of mandatory mask-wearing. Which is not such a far-fetched notion, and in some places in this country is already a reality. A law, or requirement, which demands that people wears masks in public or else suffer punishment is ostensibly designed to save lives, right? To protect people from this rogue virus that is ravaging the nation and the world (well, okay, 2.2 million out of a world population of 8,000 million is hardly “ravaging”, but let’s just assume the media’s self-serving perspective on this). And certainly there is some evidence that wearing a mask may save lives by halting or slowing virus infections. But—and here’s the rub—there are a lot of ifs which must be given asterisks…a lot of caveates. Masks may be effective in doing what the law ostensibly intends them to do IF masks are worn no more than twenty-minutes; IF we do not allow them to be moisture saturated; IF they are not handled once they are placed on our faces; IF the paper ones are disposed of after each and every use, and IF the cloth ones are washed after every use and never worn more than once UNLESS washed; IF we only put them on and take them off with clean hands; and IF we don’t allow them to give us a false sense of security and thus IF they do not tempt us to violate other preventative protocols.

What all of these IF’s mean is that simply applying a law which requires citizens to wear masks in public will not actually DO that which the law is intended to do, because for every increased benefit there is an increased risk. Failure to wash masks or discard them, to wash hands before and after touching masks, to not wear them longer than twenty minutes, to not allow them to become moisture saturated, to not wear them more than once, to not allow them to become an excuse to forgo much more important preventative measures, to NOT allow them to become a false sense of security is to INCREASE the risk of spreading the virus. Masks are a razor’s edge of risk…fall off that edge, and you make the problem worse than if you’d never worn a mask at all.

It is clear from this then that one law is not going to do the trick. We will need dozens and dozens of related laws in order for that one law—mandatory mask-wearing—to actually do what we are told it will do: keep us safe. Otherwise it is merely a law for law’s sake; the exercise of authority for authority’s sake. The law which says you shall wear a mask must also say you shall not touch your mask with unclean hands; you shall discard your paper mask after a single use; you shall wash your cloth mask after a single use; etc. etc. You get the idea. And this is the problem. Tyranny is a destination born of ostensibly benevolent intention. Once you allow one law to pass, you imply that ALL others must necessarily follow, and that you shall allow those, too. And before you know it, you are told where and when you  can and cannot open your business that YOU built with YOUR own time and money and resources; what you can and cannot sell; what you can and cannot spend your money on; where you can and cananot go, and with whom you can and cannot associate, and what the nature of that association shall look like; where you can and cannot work, and for how long, and so on and so forth.

Oh, wait a minute. We are there already. My bad.

So it has always been with law and government, and always will be. At the end of it all, the only real State solution to public health situations like we are seeing now is to save lives by disallowing people to live them. At the end of the day, mask-wearing is just another part of the hammer used to bash the virus into oblivion and you and me along with it. For the law cannot recognize the difference.

END