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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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catastrophizing about the level of that restriction with hyperbolic language detached from reality, using rhetoric you'd use to describe being herded off to a concentration camp, is unhinged.

What principles do you hold that would lead you to reject concentration camps?

My principle is that arbitrary imprisonment, the imprisonment of someone who has not committed a crime or is not suspected of having committed a crime, is a violation of human rights. This is not some rare stance. It's contained within the UDHR. It's implied by Habeas Corpus. As a legal concept, it goes back centuries if not millennia. It is the very bedrock upon which rule of law lay. And it interlocks with all other human rights. For example, a right to religion cannot be protected if the state can arbitrarily imprison people of the wrong religion anyway.

I do not believe lockdowns are in any way compatible with this idea. Certainly not as they were carried out in the UK. It was made illegal to leave your house without one of a specific list of reasons to do so. This meets the conditions of home imprisonment, as defined in Jalloh v. Home Secretary. The reason the bounds of imprisonment need to be broad is to protect people from being placed into imprisonment-like conditions and not have any legal recourse against them. I do not believe there's any "negotiation" or "democracy" than validates arbitrary imprisonment, and believe that any polity that endeavours to imprison the entire population immediately illegitimizes itself.

Because of this, it is unclear to me on what grounds supporters of lockdowns can claim to meaningfully oppose concentration camps beyond specifically rejecting concentration camps for aesthetic reasons. How can you okay the repeated arbitrary imprisonment of billions of people on the flimsiest of pretexts yet draw a sharp line only at that specific form of arbitrary imprisonment? To me, that they were imprisoned at all is the crime, not the specific details of where you then place your prisoners. Imprisoning people for no reason does not become good because you give them nice, cushy prisons. It does not help that Australia actually did set up camps, either.

Similar applies to vaccine mandates. Medical treatment without informed consent is somewhere between assault, battery and grievous bodily harm. Injections specifically are likely to be the latter because they pierce the skin. Even leaving the vaccine mandates aside, informed consent under duress due to lockdowns is a serious problem that was entirely ignored. How many people got the vaccines because they were suffering under the indignity and abuses of lockdowns, and falsely believed that submitting to vaccination would end those abuses? They would not believe it for no reason, because governments claimed that people being vaccinated would end lockdowns. Did those carrying out vaccinations early on, even before any of the mandates, ever take pause to consider whether the people they were injecting had actually given informed consent, or were instead doing so under duress?