Citing the precautionary principle, a Saskatchewan judge ruled against two individuals that sued the government for the province’s outdoor gathering restrictions during the pandemic. The precautionary principle is essentially a ‘better safe than sorry’ metric that is popular amongst activist judges in environmental law. However, use of this tool has slowly seeped out into other fields of the law, most visibly in public health law.
There's a cheap quality to the smug sanctimony of the judge's decision. He's just following a script, written in the same mean sprit and with the same intellectual shallowness as all the performative progressivism. It's so desperately mediocre, and such a demonstration of witless groupthink, that it looks like planned malice.
I was thinking similarly. This judge found a backdoor to CYA. The judge abdicated personal responsibility. I’m not sure which group that goes in; maybe all of them. I pray something can be done about this.
Officials fooling themselves into becoming totalitarians, it would be beautiful if it was some kind of morality play or such, and not reality.
Acting when failure to do so will lead to harm is one thing. Child protective services taking achild from a convicted abuser f.e. Consider the logic: the child is taken because the abuser has been proved to have committed an abusive act (real abuse, not crap like violating pronoun-diktats). So CPS mst act before the next instance of abuse, yes? Therefore, CPS just can't lurk arond surveiling each and every convicted abuser, ready to pounce the moment they do anything untowards. Logistically impossible, and endangering to the child - therefore necessitating pre-emptive action.
Sadly, this isn't just a slippery slope, this is king of the slippery hill.
We have the whole range of nitwits trying to use such things for their own political purpose. From rad-fems aguing the concept of "cis-het families" is the cause of abuse, to Jesus-freak fundies arguing that despite the child being battered it's still best for it to remain in the family (just picking the two most obvious offenders here, not sides). This is just example, the underlying mechanics apply across all large-scale organisations.
And these groups of citizens using their rights and privileges as citizens pull the agency, the politicians and the constituency and the lawmakers and police hither and yon in their application of law and praxis.
And as it's pretty much inevitable that someone, somewhere, choses to weaponise this process to achieve as total control as possible.
Here in Sweden, IQ is about to be criminalised. I mention that just to show that it will get much worse unless you change tack. Consider you neighbours: how did the US throw off british rule?
We have a long history of teaching the precautionary principle in medicine. It's the basis of "first, do no harm." When applied properly, it can be a very good guiding principle in many situations. But, much like "science" can devolve into what CS Lewis called "Scientism", safety can devolve into "Safetyism" -- and can be used to justify any abuse of power (as you so eloquently point out in this case.)
The ironic thing is that, as far as I can tell, we (the medical profession and public health types) completely ignored the precautionary principle with respect to everything COVID--and that is why my husband and I (the pairodocs) spoke up against what was being done early and loud.
One of our wise old professors in med school used to say (sarcastically) that "every new drug has no side effects." What he meant, of course is that the dangers of any new treatment always take a while to become clear. (This is particularly true when you are using a radically new technology such as mRNA vaccines, for which normal safety protocols have been rushed or skipped, and injecting it into billions of healthy people.) Likewise, rushing into unprecedented public health interventions like lockdowns, behavioural psyops, and mask mandates with no idea how these might effect people's mental health, economic wellbeing, other health behaviours, etc. was, in my mind, unbelievably reckless and completely ignored "the precautionary principle" as properly applied.
The problem with the whole COVID debacle was that the caution was only permitted wrt COVID illness and death--all other potential damage was not only ignored, but required to be ignored by medical regulatory bodies and so on. We were told in NS that physicians were required to say they agreed with public health policy (or at least keep quiet about it if we didn't). We were under threat of losing our licenses if we brought up potential dangers associated with these policies. And now it appears that we are reaping what we sow, with economic devastation, a mental health crisis and excess mortality that will likely make the COVID death toll seem minor in comparison.
There's a cheap quality to the smug sanctimony of the judge's decision. He's just following a script, written in the same mean sprit and with the same intellectual shallowness as all the performative progressivism. It's so desperately mediocre, and such a demonstration of witless groupthink, that it looks like planned malice.
I was thinking similarly. This judge found a backdoor to CYA. The judge abdicated personal responsibility. I’m not sure which group that goes in; maybe all of them. I pray something can be done about this.
Officials fooling themselves into becoming totalitarians, it would be beautiful if it was some kind of morality play or such, and not reality.
Acting when failure to do so will lead to harm is one thing. Child protective services taking achild from a convicted abuser f.e. Consider the logic: the child is taken because the abuser has been proved to have committed an abusive act (real abuse, not crap like violating pronoun-diktats). So CPS mst act before the next instance of abuse, yes? Therefore, CPS just can't lurk arond surveiling each and every convicted abuser, ready to pounce the moment they do anything untowards. Logistically impossible, and endangering to the child - therefore necessitating pre-emptive action.
Sadly, this isn't just a slippery slope, this is king of the slippery hill.
We have the whole range of nitwits trying to use such things for their own political purpose. From rad-fems aguing the concept of "cis-het families" is the cause of abuse, to Jesus-freak fundies arguing that despite the child being battered it's still best for it to remain in the family (just picking the two most obvious offenders here, not sides). This is just example, the underlying mechanics apply across all large-scale organisations.
And these groups of citizens using their rights and privileges as citizens pull the agency, the politicians and the constituency and the lawmakers and police hither and yon in their application of law and praxis.
And as it's pretty much inevitable that someone, somewhere, choses to weaponise this process to achieve as total control as possible.
Here in Sweden, IQ is about to be criminalised. I mention that just to show that it will get much worse unless you change tack. Consider you neighbours: how did the US throw off british rule?
"despite, probabilistically, a significant higher chance of dying with the virus in 2022 than in 2022."
I think you meant, "than 2020"?
Oops. Great catch, yes.
We have a long history of teaching the precautionary principle in medicine. It's the basis of "first, do no harm." When applied properly, it can be a very good guiding principle in many situations. But, much like "science" can devolve into what CS Lewis called "Scientism", safety can devolve into "Safetyism" -- and can be used to justify any abuse of power (as you so eloquently point out in this case.)
The ironic thing is that, as far as I can tell, we (the medical profession and public health types) completely ignored the precautionary principle with respect to everything COVID--and that is why my husband and I (the pairodocs) spoke up against what was being done early and loud.
One of our wise old professors in med school used to say (sarcastically) that "every new drug has no side effects." What he meant, of course is that the dangers of any new treatment always take a while to become clear. (This is particularly true when you are using a radically new technology such as mRNA vaccines, for which normal safety protocols have been rushed or skipped, and injecting it into billions of healthy people.) Likewise, rushing into unprecedented public health interventions like lockdowns, behavioural psyops, and mask mandates with no idea how these might effect people's mental health, economic wellbeing, other health behaviours, etc. was, in my mind, unbelievably reckless and completely ignored "the precautionary principle" as properly applied.
The problem with the whole COVID debacle was that the caution was only permitted wrt COVID illness and death--all other potential damage was not only ignored, but required to be ignored by medical regulatory bodies and so on. We were told in NS that physicians were required to say they agreed with public health policy (or at least keep quiet about it if we didn't). We were under threat of losing our licenses if we brought up potential dangers associated with these policies. And now it appears that we are reaping what we sow, with economic devastation, a mental health crisis and excess mortality that will likely make the COVID death toll seem minor in comparison.
I agreed and it turns my stomach