- The dilemma of balancing rights
Posted by Der
on October 27, 2021, 9:01 am, in reply to "Re: Brilliant! nm"
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When did violence against your political opponents ever work out well? You must have been watching a different video to me, Ian. It looked to me as if the angry guy was insisting on the right to endanger others by not only not wearing a mask in an indoor public place but insisting that the others had no right to wear masks to protect themselves from people like him. People first tried to use non-violence by reasoning with him. He interpreted that as weakness and attacked a guy and tried to intimidate everybody else. One guy fought back and the other guy then backed down. People have the right to defend themselves and others. Re. Chomsky: Chomsky is simply trying to lookout for everybody. Blumenthal is trying to be sensationalist, implying that people won't look out for the weak and vulnerable (even when they choose to make themselves weak and vulnerable). Chomsky is trying to suggest the need for a system whereby non-vaccinated people are prevented from endangering others but at the same time will have their needs catered for. He's simply initiating a much-needed discussion that most people are too afraid to touch lest they get described as 'authoritarian'. And yet, they offer no solution to the dilemma. Or even deny there's a dilemma. We've been here before in this forum. Myself, I have no sympathy for people who go around endangering other people's health whether it's non mask wearers in public places or non vaxxers working in care homes or the NHS or indeed, any service where they come into contact with other members of the public. I see little difference between them and climate sceptics who insist on the right to live their lives the way they choose and to hell with the rest of us. I remember when after that bad Ebola outbreak in Africa an Irish nurse who had worked there came back to Ireland, was found to have Ebola but refused point blank to quarantine herself on the basis of "her rights". As far as I remember, measures were taken, quite rightly, to restrict her movements. Incidentally, the dilemma of balancing rights rose up during the Spanish Revolution of 1936 regarding collectivization of the land. Some smallholders refused to give up their land to be collectivized. They were not forced to do so but they were excluded from the benefits of collectivization. Some, eventually, saw the advantages of collectivization and the disadvantages of being one of the few not in the collective and chose to join later. Others stayed outside. By their actions they were endangering the collective. But they were left alone. Quite literally. They were deemed to have chosen to no longer be part of the community. They went their own way. It was very difficult. All the local shops and services were collectivized and consequently refused to serve them. (They must have been simply delighted when the communists eventually destroyed the collectivization experiment.) Coming back to today, the difference is that non-vaxxers and non-mask wearers not only refuse to join the collective, as it were, but insist on the right to risk endangering themselves and everybody in the collective by spreading a highly infectious disease among the collective's members. Ian, you keep on about the rights of the non-vaxxers and not a word about the rights of everybody else. Emphasised even more by dismissing the hundreds of thousands of lives lost as merely "a hint of death". |