Covid and the Three Tests of Compliance (Jeffrey A. Tucker), How the “Unvaccinated” Got It Right & The Shift from Personal to Positional Morality (Robin Koerner)

Covid and the Three Tests of Compliance 

By Jeffrey A. Tucker   February 5, 2023  

Brownstone has been accumulating all the receipts: the emails, speeches, edits, threats, impositions, demands, and so on. In the face of all this attempted revisionism, it’s hard to keep one’s bearing. 

One way to think about these last three years is a succession of compliance tests: how much liberty and good sense are we willing to surrender to the regime and on what terms?

Have we learned?

How the “Unvaccinated” Got It Right

By Robin Koerner   January 31, 2023

What follows is a personal response to Scott, which explains how consideration of the information that was available at the time led one person – me – to decline the “vaccine.”

Whatever the risks associated with a COVID infection on the one hand, and the “vaccine” on the other, the “vaccination” policy enabled massive human rights violations. Those who were “vaccinated” were happy to see the “unvaccinated” have basic freedoms removed (the freedom to speak freely, work, travel, be with loved ones at important moments such as births, deaths, funerals etc.) because their status as “vaccinated” allowed them to accept back as privileges-for-the-“vaccinated” the rights that had been removed from everyone else. Indeed, many people grudgingly admitted that they got “vaccinated” for that very reason, e.g. to keep their job or go out with their friends. For me, that would have been to be complicit in the destruction, by precedent and participation, of the most basic rights on which our peaceful society depends.

People have died to secure those rights for me and my compatriots.

 

The Shift from Personal to Positional Morality

By Robin Koerner   January 21, 2023

Namely, it is the apparent fading away of the experience and idea of morality as personal, constraining one’s own views, speech, and actions – and its replacement with an experience and idea of morality as positional, concerned with constraining the views, speech, and actions of others. 

This weakening of personal morality manifests repeatedly as moral cowardice in the face of policies and practices that cause discomfort of conscience whenever resistance to them comes at a personal cost. Increasingly, comfortable Westerners of the English-speaking world seem willing and able to rationalize away the moral compromises they make when they comply with – and thus lend the weight of their own moral agency to – social and cultural norms, expectations and mandates that offend the values that they otherwise like to believe that they hold.