Transcript of the above video:

Let me just preface this video by saying we are having some air conditioning issues here in the office so if I am perspiring a little more than usual, I do apologize, but we are stuck dealing with what we are dealing with.

The reason for the video: I got a rather interesting comment on one of the videos, specifically the one where we were talking about Human Rights a couple of weeks ago or whatever it was, a week ago. I wanted to go ahead and read it. To be clear there was actually a really cogent response to this comment that responded to this comment and I thank that viewer. I thought it was a nice response. I wanted to go ahead and respond to this on my own as well, point by point frankly. Quoting directly: "You use exaggerations and jargon, "stabbed in the head", "polymerase chain reaction" to avoid addressing the central question. When does your freedom stop in order to protect another person's "right to security of person"? Does your discomfort from a nose swab really equate to a loss of another person's life? Is that what you are saying and as an American lawyer I know that you are fully aware that there are limits to one person's freedom when it affects somebody else's freedom. You can't yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Likewise, likewise you can't run around unvaccinated, untested and spewing your germs to the detriment of others. There are lots of people who are unable to fight the virus via vaccine not the least of which are small children. I think that your argument is legally obfuscating and morally bankrupt." 

Okay. As I said there was already one, what I thought was a pretty cogent response to this and I almost decided to go ahead and read it but that but just reading the comments of my YouTube channel is not exactly what this thing is meant to be. I did want to respond point by point.

"You use exaggerations and jargon, "stabbed in the head", "polymerase chain reaction" to avoid addressing the central question." Let's start there. This isn't exaggeration and jargon. When something is entering your body, an object is entering your body through your nose or otherwise, that is a stabbing. Yes you are being stabbed in the head when they are poking something all the way up into your sinus cavity. That is not an exaggeration, that is what it is. Further, “jargon polymerase chain reaction” that's the name of the test, that is why it is called PCR test. Polymerase chain reaction, I would argue it is a misnomer to call it a polymerase chain reaction test. It is just a polymerase chain reaction but okay I am not going to get too far into that. Maybe you could argue that it is a semantic point. It is being used in a test capacity; there are some out there who have argued that maybe that is not the best thing to do. I am not going to get into that because it is beyond the bailiwick of this. "To avoid addressing the central question", okay. "When does your freedom stop in order to protect another person's right to security of person?" Well in point of fact you are inverting what is going on here. So what I am trying to say is when does your freedom stop in order to protect another person's right to security of person? How do I have security of person if someone else's fear is driving a policy that allows people to invade the orifices of my body with a stabbing object, with a probing object, call it that, fine. How is that security of my person? Why does somebody else and their desire that there be no disease in the world for example or a level of concern about disease that I would argue is pretty much unreasonable, that is impacting whether or not I have security in my person. So I find it odd that this becomes the central question, "when does your freedom stop?" When does your freedom to be afraid of disease stop?" Do I have to abide by an invasion of my bodily integrity if enough people in the world are afraid of disease? That is not me begging the question? I am posing a genuine question? At what point does that end? I am sorry, it is just not reasonable to think that just because a group of people is afraid of disease, they should be able to tell other people what to do with their body unilaterally. Just this is how it is without any kind of due process. Let's be clear, we were talking about human rights before and there are notions of due process under that Declaration of Human Rights. I have discussed this in other videos in the American context. Most assuredly there is a search and seizure going on when you detain someone, stick something in their body in order to test the genetic material within their body. That is by all definitions a search and seizure. There is due process supposed to be associated with that in an American context, I would say that is pretty well the case here in Thailand although I am not going to get too far into that. That's really more for Thai lawyers, but I have discussed this with them.

Now look, at some point we discussed this. It has become concomitant in the ability to travel usually because there is a private carrier involved where they say "look we need you to be tested in order to go to this country, that country", and some countries Thailand included have exercised their sovereignty to say "look if you want to come in you have to abide by certain Public Health standards that we are going to set at least for the moment". But I don't understand why it is on just people walking around who just want to live their life and be left alone, especially asymptomatic people who don't have any reason to believe that there is anything wrong with them, why it is incumbent upon them to be detained, to be searched, to be poked and prodded just because a group of people in society is very afraid of disease. Quoting further: "Does your discomfort from a nose swab really equate to the loss of another person's life?" Well that is a nonsensical question. It is not a matter of "and/or", I either get a nose swab or somebody dies! That is not what we are talking about here okay? We are talking about basic human rights to the integrity of their body and to not have quite frankly things pushed into their body without them really wanting that to happen. There comes a certain point where you have to ask yourself in terms of freedom and life, what kind of life is worth living if the moment you step outside your door or even before that, anyone can come up to you, stop you and shove something up your nose. Is that a life we really want to live? Honestly, I don't really want to live that way. So again it's not a discomfort of a nose swab equate to the loss of life of another person is like well no it doesn't because that's not an equation and that is not the equation. As we have discussed, I will get into this here in a minute in proximate cause. Hold on. "Is that what you are saying? And as an American lawyer, I know that you are fully aware that there are limits to one person's freedom when it affects somebody else's freedom. Well yeah and I would say that back to the commenter. Your freedom to be hysterical about the situation stops at my nose. Your hysteria does not get to penetrate my head! Literally penetrates my head, with a swab. That is what I would say at first. The next thing is the entire premise is bogus. We have talked about this in other videos; I will put links to one of the main videos I talked about this on "proximate cause". This is a common law notion; you learn about it in the first year in law school in Torts, proximate cause, okay? The proximate cause of the virus is the virus, not people wandering around who happened to get into the chain of the virus and what it does. The virus is the virus; people are not the problem, the virus is the problem. The analogy I used in the video before was a tornado hitting somebody's barn destroying it and then the barn goes everywhere. I am from Kansas so tornado analogies are natural to me. The barn goes everywhere and it kills a cow and a piece of the barn, a plank off the barn kills a cow in one guy's property; it smashes somebody's window in a house. Can they sue the barn owner? No, because the proximate cause of the destruction is the tornado, not the barn that just happens to be in the way of the tornado. Much in the same way an innocent bystander who happens to be in the chain of transmission of a virus, they did not proximately cause it, they did not cause the damage. Now people that are tested, that know they have something, that is a different story. I am not going to get into that because if you know you have something or even if you have a reasonable degree of suspicion, you can maybe make the argument somebody has really bad symptoms of something, they should stay home. I understand that argument. But this notion of people just walking around asymptomatic who have no issue are somehow affirmatively liable for something, a being, an organism that is beyond their control aka the virus, something that that thing does, that is unreasonable. That is not how legal systems work. That is why proximate cause exists. Similar notions exist in the Civil Law like here in Thailand as well as in the Common Law. This is out there because we don't want to hold people liable for things they can't control. That is the situation we are in right now where there is a group of people that wants to hold people liable and wants to quite frankly restrict their freedoms over something they can't control. 

So moving forward, “you can't yell fire in a crowded theater!" Yeah that's right but that analogy does not apply here. There is no one who is wanting to run out and yell “virus” into a crowd in order to stimulate a stampede. That is not what's happening. What is operating here is negative freedom. People just wanting to be left alone. Yes you have a right to be left alone; you have a right to your integrity of your body being left sacrosanct where nobody touches it. I'm sorry it is just, "fire in a crowded theater", is not even the same; we are not talking about the same thing, it is a false analogy. "Likewise, you can't run around unvaccinated, untested and spewing your germs to the detriment of others." Look, living your life is not aggression. This is what I have disliked about the mask mandate from the get-go; this notion that exhaling is aggression. Look we are all part of the social compact; it has been around far longer than any of the technology we currently have. I always find it funny when I talk to American lawyers who sometimes start down this path and I say to myself, "do you remember that George Washington had smallpox?" I would argue the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in the United States, were far more keenly aware of the deadliness of disease than anyone here especially post antibiotics, is currently aware of and yet they believed enough in the notions of basic liberty that they didn't put an asterisk in those documents that said "well unless there is a disease on the loose, unless that. We will make exception there." No that wasn't what they did. This is kind of a general topic. I am not talking about Thailand specifically, USA, international, I am talking about it all, just conceptually. This notion that you are somehow a bad actor for walking around and living your life because germs exist, disease exists and yes people spread disease. That is the way the world has worked since the dawn of time and we should not be losing our fundamental rights and fundamental security in our own personages, simply because there are people out here who believe that we should. I'm sorry, I just can't get on board with that. "There are lots of people who are unable to fight the virus via vaccine not the least of which are small children." Okay understood. Again, how is that incumbent, I mean I can't do anything about that. This whole notion that the individual is subservient to the collective good really rankles me on a fundamental level because these are the kind of notions that led to things that happened like describing gulag archipelago; things like the cultural revolution in China that led to mass scale death because a lot of frankly self-righteous people were doing the right thing, they were helping everyone.

At the end of the day yes there is a balance. In one of the videos before, I love the end of the movie Schindler's List. There is a great scene at the end of the movie where he saved these people and they give him a ring and they write a scripture on it in the ring, they engrave it. Basically it is from the Talmud and it says: “He who saves One Life, saves the World entire”. I like that because it encapsulates the balance we are talking about. There is a balance between the individual and the group. If you single out an individual and persecute them only because of how they want to live their individual life, then that is a real problem. It is the inverse of what they are saying. That is to "hurt the group entire" in a way. What I am trying to say here, I understand the balance and the other thing is the facts on the ground at this point I don't think justify any of this, frankly any of this argument at this point. I mean we are two years out from this thing; we know what it is. It is not the massive existential threat that we did worry about at the beginning and I think reasonably so. We are not there anymore but more than that, again the notion of saving One Life and saving the world entire thereby, that operates in the inverse. People that want to run around and single out people to destroy basically, or in a way put in a situation where they are made to do something that they don't want to do for arguably specious reasoning under current circumstances most especially, it really calls into question the entire paradigm of that society.

Finally and in closing, I think the argument is "legally obfuscating and morally bankrupt". Well “legally obfuscating”, I am not trying to obfuscate anything. I haven't used any sophistry, I am just describing law as it is. I am trying to be as transparent as I can be with respect to my opinion on this. I am not hiding here. Then "morally bankrupt", I think perhaps you are being, I don't want to get into back and forth or calling names but it seems to me that there is nothing morally bankrupt in believing in the sacredness of the individual's soul and an individual’s right to live their lives with dignity and without being persecuted and without being essentially battered by a society that thinks it's okay to poke and prod that person without any justifiable reason for it. If that is morally bankrupt, then I guess that is what I am.