The principle of Proportionality may apply to resolving conflicts between different rights. It cannot justify taking away the same right from one person in order to secure it for another; this is not proportionality, not discrimination between different rights, but discrimination between different people.

“The view that constitutional rights are nothing but private interests whose protection depends, on each occasion, on being balanced with competing public interests, in fact, renders the Constitution futile. Indeed, if constitutional rights protect the same kind of interests as those of the government, and if the protection depends on considerations of some kind of relative “ weight ” given to the confl icting interests, it follows that the protection accorded by the Constitution can never be stable but is always conditional on various circumstances and depends on the outcome of balancing. On this view, not only is it doubtful whether the Constitution is the kind of law that includes stable and knowable propositions, but it also renders the very idea of such a constitution futile.” https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/7/3/468/703178

The right to life cannot even hypothetically be “proportionally” restricted, unlike the freedom of movement or expression. A person is either alive or dead; you can’t be slightly dead but mostly alive in a “balanced” way.

The argument from proportionality is typically used to justify actions or policies that ‘limit’ human rights (where ‘limitation’ has the sense of depriving a person of something that persons normally have the right not to be deprived of) for the sake of a politically contingent, ungrounded, vague, unstable and logically inconsistent idea of Greater Good. The alleged rationale of this approach is to ‘balance’ the rights of one person against those of others in the right way, without engaging in moral discourse about the normative premises. Proponents of the ‘principle’ of proportionality may argue that when the conventional moral premises expressed in the form of human rights come into conflict, any deeper moral evaluation would be too analytically demanding to be comprehensible and persuasive to the general public, whereas the pretence to ‘balancing of interests’ allows all three sides to the conflict (including the judiciary) to save face, even if one party is objectively wronged in the process. On this view, the injustice of proportionality is in continuity with the prejudice of culture: it is more likely to be seen as justice because real justice is incomprehensible to prejudiced minds.

When words are used to covey a meaning that is the opposite of what the same words in the same context can be interpreted to mean, then the sense of those words is lost. For example, if “she/her” is taken to mean either a male or a female, then it signifies neither but implies both, hence (ironically) the genderless and plural token “they/them” is often assumed.

The idea that the will of the ruling power can be defeated by ‘protests’ is at best naive. Protests are anticipated, can be intentionally provoked, and are easily guided to serve the will of the ruling power. Moreover, protesting (insofar as it demands compliance with its own will and moral judgement or else) is a feeble attempt at tyranny, an endorsement of tyranny. It is therefore not surprising that every ‘successful’ revolution became the new face of the official tyranny. The ruling power cannot be defeated by force or coercion (which is implicit in the premise that it is the ruling power). The ruling power can be occasionally persuaded by competence, but never by weakness, never by emotions, never by pity.

The ‘education system’ is to kids what puppy farms and animal shelters are to pets: commodification and degradation of that which people purport to value. It is thousandfold more difficult to correct the harm of bad foundations than to avoid them in the first place.

Perhaps a suitable (albeit non-exclusively so) starting point to engaging with the ruling power is to consider it as a natural predator and yourself as its natural food. The task is then to transcend the non-rational but deterministic predator/prey dynamic by cultivating both yourself and the predator at a higher metaphysical level, because neither is JUST a predator or JUST food. Failing that, it may be worthwhile paying attention to the multiplicity of the predator, who is not a univocal/integrated being but prone to internal conflict insofar as it is not metaphysically developed. Predators cull one another, keep one another in check and can themselves become food. Neither being food nor being predator is a sophisticated, conscious state, and both are defeated by death.

“Defending your Country” is the oldest and most reliable means of population control and pacification (by directing the human propensity for violence against itself).

I would neither support nor oppose any specific model of government. This is a choice I am happy to relinquish to others, and let them fight over it. I do not think it matters much what model of government is in place, because there is always a ruling power that sanctions the model, and presents the model as its public face.

In political systems that are functionally deficient (communism/socialism), political corruption is the means of supplementing the system and making it work on the existential level. It is the inescapable shadow of the system. In political systems that are functionally sufficient (capitalism/democracy), human corruption is integrated into the system itself, normalised, legitimised.

A potentially harmful medical intervention is justifiable when someone is sick (only insofar as it remedies the harm of the illness), but not when someone is healthy.

There are two ways of interpreting an arrow in the bullseye of a target: 1) someone accomplished a perfect shot into the target, 2) someone painted the target around the arrow. The fact that the universe is improbably ‘just right’ for the emergence of consciousness assumes (1), but we can alternatively interpret the outcome as (2), as the evidence that the universe was intentionally ‘fitted’ to consciousness, which implies that the universe emerged from or with consciousness, not independently of it. Only this second interpretation avoids the circular logic of positing ‘the world as we know it’ (meaningful only in the mind, a concept) as something that exists independently of the mind, but still as that concept.

The majority of people are functionally antisocial, insofar as they are unwilling or incapable of constructing consistent arguments to support their claims. Sociality is coextensive with meaning, with the capacity to cooperate to make common sense. The majority is content with asserting their convictions and do not care how those convictions could be derived from common premises. They are concerned only with finding prejudiced support for their own prejudices.

It appears that Sanjeev did not bother trying to understand the ontological foundations of my moral argument against vaccine mandates. By denying the objective distinction between Right and Wrong actions (which is the domain of morality and ethics) he implicitly invalidates his own position, which is also moral/ethical insofar as it asserts what ought to be the ‘correct/valid/true’ distinction between right and wrong actions (a judgment implicit in the generalised concept of “costs” vs “benefits”). https://t.iss.one/sanjeevsabhlok/11300

“The Australian Human Rights Commission is examining the human rights impacts of Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a chance for you to tell your story about what happened to you.” Until AHRC will acknowledge that the right to life was violated by vaccine mandates and publicly apologise for their failure to exercise jurisdiction when it mattered the most, they lack any moral or professional credibility. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/email-to-australian-human-rights

Hitchens's razor ("what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence") is a paradox (Hitchen’s paradox), since it is asserted without evidence. A rational refutation of any claim made without evidence must be supported by evidence, which is of course available. A consistent razor could be formulated as follows: any claim of knowledge asserted without evidence is false (and must be rejected) because it violates the law of non-contradiction (and thus negates itself). https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/derivation-of-the-principle-of-sufficient-reason-from-the-law-of-non-contradiction

Governments: ‘we need more soldiers to kill one another and any non-combatants standing in the way’ in patriotically motivated defence of their local branches of our global banking cartel.

It is a folly to assume that doctors, activists or politicians who show sympathy or express agreement with your concerns have Your best interest at heart instead of Theirs. It is also a folly to assume that their idea of self interest is aligned with yours.

Public officials are, in general, not personally liable for causing harm if they acted within their authority and bad faith cannot be proven (i.e. intending to cause harm). This makes artificial intelligence, algorithms and incompetence such effective covers for systemic corruption. The system is evidently designed for systemic corruption.