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Episode 253: Vaccine passports, Social credit system
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yeah i don't know i don't know if it's news on the coronavirus per se from but there's certainly there's a lot of um as we're recording this uh you know for this week's podcast a couple days before it airs there's a lot of discussion going on about um what looked like very uh actual active plans to put something resembling a vaccine passport into place um at the you know a sort of a government mandated government organized you've got a little app on your phone that uh you know you're able to flash at all sorts of different businesses and airports and everything else in a really uh synchronized system to let all kinds of merchants know if you're vaccinated or not so this is something that you know a year ago would have been a really far-fetched idea um that people from all across the political spectrum would uh be horrified by um [Music] you know politics in the time of corona where it's all upside down and you and you're having so the partisan lines being drawn around this where a lot of people that i would not expect to be supportive of such nighty are very supportive of the idea um and vice versa so um where you know i certainly don't consider myself a full-blown libertarian at all uh not not even as far in that direction as you are doug but i mean the idea of a government mandated uh vaccine passport that that aggregates all of the personal data not only our health data but you know all of the other information that exists about us on all of the apps on our phone and all of the ways that information is already being shared you know people have heard me rant at length about data analytics and um how we're already being manipulated in so many ways by all of our data and all of our comings and goings on the internet and everything else and i just i am very skeptical of any claim that this would be of limited scope to only cover vaccine information and and would be uh sufficiently protected and unhackable even even if it were limited to that um and not to other health information other health information at a minimum let alone everything else that you could see people making a case to integrate with this kind of system so this is like the slipperiest of slippery slopes and and it's uh just just gives me uh great angst to think about where this could go and what's amazing to me is it's like the same people who are advocating for this are you know if this were promoted by a republican government oh yeah as as as things like i mean i'm old enough to remember you know the people rioting in the streets over the privacy intrusions of the patriot act in the wake of 911 and the idea that we would have dossiers of who you'd been in contact with and what books you'd checked out from the library and and you know what you were spending your money on um and that the government would be tracking that kind of information had leftists out in force and and so now you have the tables turned because we're in this very different political context and i'm just wondering where has the high concept gone where where has you know civil liberties and and the protection of of personal privacy gone um in you know it's it's a very comparable case because with the patriot act that was um also on the you know it was it was justified behind um kind of emergency powers and the suspension of rule of law was justifiable you were people were willing to make some trade-offs in their personal in their personal civil liberties to feel safer and we're in exactly that same context now but the political fault lines have been drawn entirely differently based on who's in power so it's uh it's interesting it's interesting to watch it i'd be um i'd be very interested in hearing your libertarian take on it yeah i have i have such a uh a you know a variety of perspectives on that and that is that um i don't i don't often or at least for not a very long length of time maybe an hour or two uh at most i don't often lose perspective about about where we are in history and how it is that we live here in the united states so the united states was vastly less free in terms of your ability to express yourself under woodrow wilson than it is now so uh that that guy was a monster his administration was monstrous uh you couldn't you couldn't say negative things about the government or you'd be in jail so you know we we have been in in much worse spots than we are now uh but we're definitely in a worse spot now than we were 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago so the uh this is some creepy crap and so yeah as a libertarian uh i actually had a a guy that i really like a very smart guy that that is in the in the um it's in the medical industry and he kind of called me up and and was arguing with me about my position with a with a caller or not a caller a question that we had a couple weeks ago about a woman that was getting social pressure um from her from her social circle about whether or not she got in the vaccine and my attitude was you know i said hey just tell them you got it the hell with them in other words the ie it's really nobody's business and and therefore i don't feel any any moral obligation to say oh i haven't gotten it knowing full well i'm about to get a title wave of [ __ ] so my attitude is no i'm not interested in having that discussion and he's he was upset because uh being in the middle medical industry he he felt like that was an irresponsible position and he felt like um essentially that that in uh i'm not sure where he stands on whether or not you should get the vaccine but whether or not you tell somebody you've had it uh that he was upset about this now we have kind of a heated discussion and you you can this starts to be this interesting problem that that many issues about personal freedom uh very often they're not black and white the they want you wind up on a continuum and it gets complicated which is why you've got millions and millions of pages of civil and criminal law in fact the distinction between civil and criminal law is an odd idea like where exactly does that go okay so if you do if you fake receipts the irs then that's criminal but if you under report your income that's civil really i mean that's that's literally what it it it's arbitrary uh but it's not arbitrary when we well it's it's how much how much evil is in your heart doug [Laughter] well if anyone could know it would be the irs yeah this is why the irs in the catholic church you know what i mean really should emerge because it's really you know in confession it's about it's not about what you did it's about what you think exactly totally so this so i i could see in this discussion how suddenly it turns into a gray area and people can argue like okay well suppose i'm a nurse and i'm going into a nursing home with a bunch of elderly people and they ask me have you had the vaccine and i say yes but i haven't had it well now that's interesting that's a you know if that situation exists and if the uh if documentation isn't required and is it actually a requirement that you have had the vaccine but they're not checking and you're lying okay well that's a that's a somewhat different ethical issue that i'm sitting around a table with half a dozen friends and now we've got a different discussion and they've all got the vaccine and they're all and i'm i'm smelling the push okay now and and now now we wind up with some interesting discussions it's like well if you guys have all had the vaccine then theoretically even if i had the virus and hadn't had the vaccine i couldn't give it to you right which means you can't give it to your grandmother right so what business is it of yours okay so so now it becomes well there's immuno compromised people out there that you can come in contact with and my attitude is that's their problem you know i'm not the only vector on earth and and therefore it's not my responsibility to be solving this problem it's my responsibility to be looking at my personal individual issues and trying to make a decision for myself and if you think that's creepy i want you to look in the eyes of your eight-year-old daughter and realize that child has zero chance of dying of covid and you're gonna you're gonna give that kid a vaccine wow for whose benefit and so my attitude is whoa this notion that that we have a personal responsibility to unknown people in the society who are immunocompromised i.e and let me explain why that's an important issue as was explained to me in this conversation but my attitude is if you need if you feel like you need the vaccine go get it that's not my problem so how can i be a problem to you if you've had the vaccine shut up i don't need to hear your opinion about me being irresponsible you take care of yourself and then if you're well what about the people who didn't get the vaccine that's not my problem that's their problem yeah i mean that this is the drunk driver argument right yeah that you're this is if we're looking at this from sort of a political you know just moral ethical point of view that it's not it's not just your risk analysis it's you're you you are you your decision and we're sort of we've morphed this discussion from one about vaccine passports to one about the vaccine itself and these are just to just to kind of remind folks who are listening these are separate debates you know it's we can be opposed to one and not the other and and you know we can have different conversations about these things but i think it's important to have open conversations about all of these things rather than just stepping into any kind of uh pre-ordained party line but i you know it is you will run into that critique very often um that you don't get to make an individual choice um for your life and liberty when it has like direct harm potentially on other people who are just wandering into you know they through no fault of their own they're not necessarily choosing to come into contact with you um you're just intermingling in the public sphere yeah now we're but now now he starts the game okay because the truth of the matter is supposedly just about every damn person could be vaccinated to their benefit if they choose to so now now we're starting to look at a very tiny slice of humanity a very tiny slice of humanity who is immuno compromised and therefore cannot make use of the vaccine okay so now now i want to know what that number is okay because those are people that theoretically can't be helped and now i want to ask how did they get so immunocompromised that they cannot make use of the vaccine okay how much of that was personal responsibility on their part about their diet and lifestyle issues how many of those people smoke smoking now you're victim blaming you're going to get us canceled doug these are all these are deep libertarian questions okay because the truth is is that that you know vaccine to me is a great thing it's a great opportunity for an individual to choose to do that to themselves if they so choose i'm not anti-vaxx i'm anti-forced facts that's a whole different issue okay i'm particularly with anti with this particularly with respect to this candy cane virus that we have that isn't even remotely similar to the epidemics that we've seen in the past that were vastly more lethal so this is a fascinating point in history about the hysteria about this and how much tremendous expense that the society is going to at this point to start talking about this issue who the hell is it that's a menial compromise right this second that cannot use the uh the vaccination processes that we have available wow like who the hell is it who is it that that everybody's deciding now or at least there's strong political force now as we start to head towards possibly mandatory vaccines or at least mandatory vaccines to do anything the the who who is it who exactly is it that we're attempting to save it's not people that are not vaccinated that isn't who it is it's people for whom the vaccination process right now can't help them why is that what do they look like what are the underlying conditions and so we're all gonna like more far reality around one-tenth of one-tenth to one percent of the population of whatever the hell it is and who are those people and where they where are they living and what is their behavior if they are one of those individuals that they would be out in a public sphere exposing themselves i think it would be their responsibility to make sure that they are in a low risk situation okay so you know this is this is a deep libertarian issue but you know the libertarian position i.e that government which governs police governs best that's being thrown out the window and and an appreciation for the gray area of control and the cost benefit analysis that every individual should be able to be running on this this is not bubonic plague this is not what we're talking about here we're talking about a virus now that if you somehow somebody could tell us and probably will it be by the time somebody hears that somebody can email me the evidence on who the hell is it that can't make use of the vaccination i.e immunocompromised how many of them are in the society and how the hell did they become immunocompromised because if they're 200 pounds overweight and they they they have terrible respiratory problems and they smoke cigarettes okay it's like whoa you're asking me to vaccinate my child so that that individual who can't make use of his existing vaccine is a little bit safer the hell with that i have no interest in that so anyway that these are these are the ways that that a libertarian thinker at least this libertarian thinker and i think many more like me would think about these issues so uh yeah when it comes to the vaccine card so that i can get on an airplane i mean i have to shrug my shoulders and say well if every airline is going to require that then i'm going to have to make that decision at some point but you know i'll make i'll make that decision on whether or not i ever get on an airplane again behind that you know once all of those decisions are made and i've got personally more evidence about the safety of that vaccine okay so but right now i don't have jack information that i have any confidence in about the safety of that vaccine so once again to anybody who didn't hear this clearly i am not at anti-vaccine i'm anti-ignorance okay and i don't want to be making decisions under ignorance which is exactly what i would be doing right now and anybody who thinks they're not making that decision under ignorance is ignorant you are well because nobody is nobody because that's not a conversation that is ever being had i mean you're not the the sort of conversation about yeah who who is this group that needs this protection you know this medical group like that's that's third rail stuff that you you can't i mean anything that would look like that sort of victim blaming immediately gets you know pulled under this umbrella of systemic oppression of various groups and so um you know the sort of politics of inequality and so none of it gets talked about in a very precise way it all just immediately gets swallowed up by highly charged political discourse and so everybody just kind of backs away puts their hands up and says okay well we're not let's not you know let's not go into this really charged territory where it's going to be an unpleasant conversation for everybody involved and people are going to get their feelings hurt and people are going to feel personally attacked um it's it's better just to kind of brush all of that under the rug and have a much more abstract conversation so yeah there's just so many moving parts here and i i you know sure if there if if private enterprise is required you know including airlines or are requiring a specifically proof of vaccination to board the plane that's one thing and that's that's something that i i could reckon with and i would be probably able to come to an equilibrium with right i would feel okay with with doing that but it's very i mean that's what you do when you fly to many parts of the world you know you got to show you got documentation you're vaccinated against yellow fever or whatever it is you know it's sort of like okay yes i have here's my vaccine quote-unquote passport so i can travel to places that's a very different proposition than an app on your phone that your vaccine status is is just part of a catalog of data that that app is is tracking about your comings and goings in the world um regardless of of how safe and how limited in scope the they tell you that that data is particularly if that app is is coming it is a governmental app it's like here is the department of homeland security's you know this this is the the universal past to participate in public life in the united states and oh by the way part of that is whether you have a little green check mark next to your vaccine status but it's also integrating with everything else that you do i mean this is this is the road to something like china's social credit system yes i mean i don't i don't think it is overly hysterical to make that point i think it's a really important civil libertarian point that needs to be made if it's going to be made at any point in the course of this debate it needs to be made now i mean how do you think these things start i think it's already started we we already do have a de facto social credit system and this would just make it du jour it's this is like this is this makes it actually following you around in the form of an app on your phone that starts to tell civil society whether you're a good citizen or not and and you know how what what prices you should pay for things and whether you should get credit extended to you and all of all of these things that are subsumed in that in that kind of system yeah so which of course i mean there's there's already there's already the biden administration has already come out saying that they are developing better tools for figuring out who is susceptible to false narratives on social media and so that that gets part of your social credit score you know if you're the kind of person who's retweeting misinformation according to the regime your social credit score goes down and your your fewer doors are going to be open to you so um this is all like it's all well and good when the side that you like is in power but this is why you need to keep your eye on the ball of the principle involved this is this is high level high concept civil liberties that we should be worried about not who is benefiting in the moment at any given time um that's a that's the road to tyranny when you start thinking that way this is what were you gonna say you were yeah i was gonna say share with uh people because they may not have heard any detail this i you first described this to me like in the last 60 days about china's social credit situation explain to people what the hell this is and why why you should have your ears perked up when we do anything that remotely resembles it yeah well it's it's just this sort of thing it's a highly integrated system where the you know china has a deep deep surveillance state on its own people um where it has it has actively integrated everything that currently in the us you know all of these companies and all of these all of these apps and everything that we're doing all day long online and elsewhere um is still to some degree disaggregated so you know that all of these companies are not talking to each other it's not there there are avatars of you that exist and that drive algorithms of your behavior but those are not um openly traded back and forth between all actors and certainly not necessarily with the government china has brought all of that information under one umbrella so you there is an avatar of you there is your name your your facial recognition analysis with all of the cameras that are on every street corner and every subway tunnel and every you can't go anywhere in china without getting your face scanned um and in fact the way that you pay for goods and in most stores now is through facial recognition software if you just like look into the little camera at the register and it brings up your your social credit profile which is a little dossier of your citizenship and things things that we would be comfortable with in the west like your credit history your credit worthiness those kinds of things were already sort of we already trade a fair amount of personal information in exchange for that sort of assigned value but also you know how how troublesome are you what kind of uh you know what are your politics who did you vote for how often do you vote what kind of neighborhood do you live in who are you connected to on social media what did you what sort of stories have you have you posted on social media what are your political leanings what um what upsets you what uh what do you support all of these kinds of things are linked they're they're all tied together and all of that information is available at the touch of a button um or of a scan of your face and so this is like some deep dystopian [ __ ] yes it is and it sits out there as this kind of like specter of oh well that's china because they're an authoritarian regime so of course they're doing [ __ ] like this but we would never do anything like this but we have all of these technologies they're just not united under one umbrella um and certainly not uh you know by the government from the government um we moved down that road and i don't see any any meaningful distinction between the two systems at that point yeah well what's creepy about and here's the problem uh this is why why you know i mean obviously any discussion we have is meaningless in the in the tides of the world but the the reason why it's an interesting one uh and has a feeling of importance is it's only a one-way ticket you you never go back the other way people you you're the the chances of them saying oh well corona wasn't that big a deal now because it turns out that we calculated over the next three years that the the average length of life lost but by the you know the uh one in a thousand individuals or one in six hundred individuals that that perish from covid was about you know six months of life so now that we actually calculate the the the social costs involved to this it's actually about one thirtieth of cigarette smoking okay so actually we made way too big a deal out of this uh tear up your your little card it's [ __ ] everybody plenty of people are vaccinated and screw the whole thing up we don't need your personal information anymore like never mind yeah we're spreading all the documents 93 of two weeks to slow to slow the spread yeah that's depressing so this is this is why this is chilling stuff of that so jen just briefly again i think you explained to me the social credit score in china actually this isn't a theoretical thing like this is actually an open score that people are hustling to make sure that they look like good compliant little sheep and never say anything against the government and so it doesn't come up literally a comment on some little social media thing that's being scanned organized etc this is unbelievable well it's it's what you're looking at is a is a communist dictatorship that is going to make damn sure that there's no dissidents well that's where they that's where what it emerged from of course is to keep you know monitor the dissidents and or potential dissidents and uh any kind of discontent with with the regime whatsoever so yeah i mean you can't you can't do i mean even i haven't been to china in a long time i think the last time i was there was 15 years ago um but even then um you know i was in this little hippie hostel and uh there was it was you know early enough that nobody had smartphones or anything so there was still a bank of computers in the hostel that people could use to send emails home and everything and the the people people at the desk of this hostel said you know just fyi um you nothing that you do on these computers is remotely private so everything all your all every keystroke is being logged everything is completely being sent right up to the highest levels like you're there's there's no concept of personal privacy so they started from that premise very very early on and um as technology has advanced as ai has improved um they they just have every single one of their citizens incredibly well mapped and incredibly well predicted and um i mean you're able to maintain any kind of system of power with that sort of information yeah incredible so yeah i think that once again you know i can uh i look at this with a a the same feeling of horror that that many libertarian thinkers have looked at you know across the the landscape of of america's you know uh existence and they've seen things that that scared them and bothered them and and when we look back in retrospect you know it's like eh it wasn't too great but it wasn't that bad and there was a trade off and you know etc so um and one could make that argument with the backs thing for a god knows kovid you know i don't know why that's such a big deal but i guess it's for everything and everything that exists now and everything to come um the with respect to getting on an airplane or i don't know visiting the dmv um the so i can i can see i can see a world where 10 years from now i'm shrugging my shoulders and there wasn't any any major clipping of my personal freedom's wings behind that other than just what it is that i'm staring at and the decision that i make it etc so i i can you know i probably will feel that way but but i feel this creeping um uh i don't know how many of our listeners have ever ever watched you know much star trek but there there was a very creepy uh a very creepy episode in star trek the next generation that was that was beyond belief good it was sort of the i i can't imagine that in 48 minutes or however they did this thing that they so succinctly put together essentially this the story of this along with the invasion of the body snatchers um and it was a it was an episode called the game and it was when riker goes you has a frolic with some gal you know on some outpost and she says hey are you playing the game and it's on effectively a cell phone or whatever it is that they're carrying and he as soon as he puts the little maneuvers the little with his mind the little wedge into the little slot and it lights up you see his his facial expression it's very much like somebody that just got drugged and he's like hey that's really cool and she's saying yeah everybody's playing it okay and then you watch as this spreads through the enterprise and you watch it take over and then everybody's staring at screens everybody's doing their little stuff on there and you know there's uh the the great drama is you know this thing's going to [ __ ] and nobody's paying any attention and you know it all it all gets rescued in the end and it's incredible brilliant drama in 48 minutes or however they did that it's an amazing show but that you know i i look at some of that now and it's like hey you're looking at a world of super normal stimuli and everything about your contact with it as jen would say is being recorded they've got an avatar of you they're feeding it back to you uh this is this is uh we're yeah i don't kind of like the feeling that kids don't go outside and throw a baseball around anymore you know they're looking at a screen and i don't know this is a this is an odd looking world as i'm saying it and things like this and more and more uh essentially government scrutiny government knowledge of who it is that you are um uh also the the uh as jen is concerned about the sort of burgeoning uh antipathy that goes on as as social media feeds back to us our own uh what it is that we are interested in and who who our enemies are and it sort of swells into a a constant you know pretty edgy conflict um kind of you know i'm wondering about the day when people actually go out to a little league game and nobody's worried about anybody else's politics because it doesn't really matter and everything's cool and um you know i wonder i wonder where we're going yeah well that's the intersection here is that you know we have big tech has demonstrated its willingness to to censor self-expression in a very real way so yes and we can have a whole big philosophical debate about you know where is the line where is the line with free speech and free expression from you know saying things that are unpleasant or or even potentially hateful versus you know shouting fire in a crowded movie theater right there there is a line this is something that american jurisprudence has struggled with mightily and you know come to some kind of conclusions about what constitutes free speech even even speech that may be quite detestable and that you know people don't don't want to hear very uncomfortable with is still protected speech um someone who is actively agitating who who is you know um really trying to mobilize particularly behind legitimately false information i.e fire in a crowded movie theater right that is not protected speech but right you get into social media and it's like well how do we know we're in this post-truth you know sort of fake news paradigm um where yeah first blush it looks like some of the people who have been cancelled deserve their cancellation and some of them undoubtedly do but not all of them do um and so how are we arbitrating what what is protected speech and what's not well we've left it to big tech to figure that out for us big tech in their algorithms um and now we're having the marriage of big tech and their algorithms with something like a a passport that you know on the premise of of communicating our our vaccine status is a gateway to consolidating huge amounts of information about us um and you know it's being designed by exactly the same kinds of engineers who are building these other systems that are uh censorship happy and so so your social credit score um you know is in china very much linked to your political beliefs very much linked to uh you know how how friendly toward the regime you are and how many of your personal beliefs and the ways that you express them are acceptable or not acceptable and until now these sorts of ideas are were completely protected and that the notion that we would go after this was just anathema in in first amendment thinking and it no longer is it's it's become something that we're much more comfortable uh negotiating in a new way and holding people to a different standard and i think there are important conversations to have about that because i'm i'm sympathetic to the idea that you know it's not a it's not a simple free speech debate when you get something like social media involved because now you have people who have potential access to megaphones that that they wouldn't have had so the whole idea with free speech is that bad ideas get shot shot down with better ideas you know it's sort of a an equitable playing field where everybody's able to have open debate and and bad ideas are driven out of the marketplace by better ideas um and that's all of really kind of beautiful john stewart mill sort of notion that does to some degree get distorted when you get something um like someone on twitter who has millions of followers who who has who's able to communicate in a way um that is disproportionate to the voice that they would have had in an open free speech field um so you know through bots through through who else who knows what else is going on there there's some complexities to this debate i don't want to oversimplify it but we're not even having it at that level we're we're just sort of slowly boiling ourselves to death in the water and accepting one little intrusion after another intrusion all and and i just it's it's like i my you know i used to work for the aclu before the aclu became completely corrupted and lost it's lost its north star and completely abandoned its mission um but years ago i was i was a volunteer and then an intern and then an employee of the aclu and it's the the whole idea is that you you keep your eye on the notion of free expression over beyond everything else it just does not matter who who's saying it what they're saying you you protect the detestable speech just like you protect the the speech that you like you have to you have to maintain the principle you've lost the entire the entire premise of what you're there to do yep yeah this is amazing dr hawk thank you for your for your input dr lyle thank you for your for your input as well i've got a question which is um is there a beat your genes theme around this topic that we could kind of look at with everything going on what would you advise you know a listener to do uh if this is kind of creeping up kill kill kill your kill your internet yeah and kill your computer because i i mean i someone sent me this information about the vaccine passport and i read it and i was like i'll start getting worked up but i really i've been right i've been absent from the political you know news for for a few months now so i this was i don't know you know i guess my my feeling which which usually in my best interest is to just be basically ignorant uh because uh the the truth of the matter is is that any any government moves that go on in the world actually go on slowly and whatever alternative actions that you have uh i guess this this boils down to a critical principle uh identified by i i first became aware of it in reading how i found freedom in an unfree world by harry brown it was sort of the the libertarian thinker that sits right on top of my own personal philosophical view of the world and harry distinguishes between direct and indirect alternatives and he uh a direct alternative is something that you can do that depends on nobody else an indirect alternative is something where you have to convince somebody else to do something in order to get what you want and so these are these are hugely important concepts to have in your head and so i any given problem in my life i flash through those two chains you know basically alternative uh chains of events and i want to know what i'm in control of and what i can do and therefore in other words can i solve this problem it may be inconvenient to solve it but can i solve it as opposed to if it requires someone else to do something then i'm not in control okay and now i'm i'm have to do nothing other than its manipulation or influence uh incidentally when i generally try to use the word manipulation i'm trying to have it in its purest sense which means not doesn't mean deception or pressure it means simply uh to alter okay so all communication is fundamentally manipulative in other words you're attempting to make an impact on the receiver to influence them in some way that's the only reason that any animal would ever communicate anything the uh but we could we could alternatively use the word influence and that might be feel like it doesn't have quite the pejorative feel to it but the point of it is is that indirect alternatives require you to influence or manipulate other people in order to get what you want and sometimes very much that's necessary and you're you're in situations where there's no other way for that to happen so if you're writing an essay to try to get into uc berkeley i strongly suggest that you don't write something that has a libertarian flavor because you're attempting to influence the people on the other side of that so that essay you and i all know what that essay should smell like politically okay the um uh i just thought i'd take that shot you know at the situation here but um but the point here here is that i'm not i'm never too disturbed as i look at the world that we sit in here and in many other places uh that are very free full of opportunity uh full of fine people of all persuasions and all all viewpoints of everything and talents and and looks and interests and everything else under the sun we get along very well uh generally with with each other here and other places and and the notion of curtailing of our freedoms is irritating and slightly alarming however you have a great deal of freedom and freedom is never uh in by any means uh you know essentially infinite so you in order to have the benefits of any group living you have to essentially uh have some of your behavior uh you know under control of the group's uh rule rule making strategies etc so that's fine i can live with that uh how much openness i would have and what control i would want the government to have is it's not even remotely close to any government that we have on earth in other words i'd have a hell of a lot less control uh in other words i uh all kinds of things that the government would be considering illegal and problematic and etc i would never have the government involved we saw an example of that this week with uh i think cuomo or new york talking about this card and uh the the governor of florida said you're never gonna expect your excelsior pass yeah yes which again if if i can just like let's go back you know if people have watched wayne's world if they remember the time travel like let's get in the time travel machine and go back to 2004 and imagine george w bush holding a press conference saying we have this new vaccine passport called the excelsior pass you know it's like they're riots in the streets they burn the cities down like leftists would be up in arms and so the the political pivot on this is just fascinating to me to to watch how um you know the the the these high principles of civil liberties become politically expedient and situational depending on who's who's advancing the limits to them yeah that's right it's amazing yeah yeah anyway sorry i interrupted you just reminded me of it like the name is just so dystopian i just can't handle it yeah it's a i.e no integrity to any high principle and um and so that's that's uh so obviously i mean i look at this and i'm not particularly worried in the sense that my life is un very unlikely to be impacted by almost anything that is going to happen in the next 30 years in with the government of the united states the government united states won't become much more oppressive and problematic than modern-day france i don't believe that in other words you just wind up with you know increasing government intrusions increasing government clipping of economic opportunity increasing government you know transfer payments in other words that's what your and all kinds of other little things uh i i talked to a guy that that wanted to start a shave ice business in cancun and uh he went down there and he said man there's just no reason we shouldn't have shave ice down here it's hot it's you know cheap it's sugar water you put put it on you know uh ice and you sell it for four dollars or five dollars this is a winner and later i talked to him and he said impossible you have to get 37 permits to open one stand it takes like three years to get through the permanent process it's like there you go everybody off that's why everybody's broke and they have an incredibly poor civilization down there and why they're an economic disaster area it's not because their people are stupid it's not because they lack natural resources it's not like they couldn't have a middle class that looks like the united states no that's not what it is people it's 37 freaking permits it's a completely corrupted complete disastrous of a governmental system where one little government bureaucrat after the next and his buddies engineered a bunch of stuff that was somehow advantageous to them for some strange reason and you wind up uh basically you know battering and bullying this uh vibrant animal until it's barely alive and that's that's what a socialistic european socialism looks like and so you know the us just in general is you know it has been creeping that direction and it has survived fine but you just wonder uh with all of the of the strong drift to the left and everything that can happen as a result of that you know like i said no big impact to me and it it it won't be impacting probably in any big way the the upper third of the ses of the society particularly uh the people who pay the price are ostensibly the people it is that you're trying to help which is the people are at the bottom of the society which gain the most when an economy is vibrant and people are as free as possible to do the trading that they would do and uh that's when you wind up with you know 14 unemployment and think about that the uh that's that's uh anyway that's my rant i don't even know where it started or why oh i think it's how to beat your jeans yeah i'm not catastrophizing over it so the beating beating of the genes is like hey understand that you have direct alternatives you know you you do um i think the the uh the william graham and graham sumner argument about you know a b and c with respect to anything that you know the world hail when when a takes money from b and gives it to c then everybody hails a as the great savior and worries about the plight of of c i but but uh but what about b and the answer is b starts pretending to be c it's it's real simple okay it's not a problem the uh the that's that that's how it works so we can you know you can always individually maneuver your way around probably almost anything at some degree of cost or or uh or you know personal inconvenience it's fine it's not going to be the the civilization of the world is going to be wealthier and outstanding in the united states the the the the future is bright but boy when you when you see um horrendously unprincipled aggressive uh decision making that you know it's just like i i i shrug my shoulders and roll my eyes and i think about basically poverty and curtailing of freedom around the world and the enormous human expense uh that is derived from these kinds of attitudes um you know anybody that that thinks that uh you know that that they know better yes so did mao okay and people people need to understand an unbelievable fact of reality that this is one of the most astounding statistics uh in world history we actually have good records because people been writing for six thousand years we have good records about the standard of living in china in the year one thousand eighty okay it turns out that under mao the average standard of living of the average chinese person was below what it was a thousand years earlier okay that's what you get when you let your government take over and control human behavior etc so this is why people like myself when we start hearing about you know essentially all the rules that need to be coming and all the crap that need that we need to impose on people yeah we shake our heads and realize you you are curtailing the potential of human existence from beat your gene standpoint you know a big part of the beat your gene standpoint is don't take up arms you know don't try to go to the government and change anything don't waste your life with an indirect alternative that's a total waste of your time if you enjoy the process if you love it that's one thing but if it creates a great deal of frustration and anger for you and a feeling of angst and a feeling of terrible losses that are incurring and you're you're on the wrong side of a tidal wave forget about it don't worry about it the the country this country and western democracies are free enough prosperous enough and wonderful enough for you to enjoy your existence okay the fact that they don't run the way some of us who know better would run them is just the way it is okay that's okay uh it's like it's like a company that does a pretty good job at making whatever it is that they make and you look at it and you say you could do an awful lot better job and it's like yeah they could but they're functioning it's like okay you know that that that's such as life and don't don't sweat it beat your genes is you know there's no reason uh i don't spend a lot of time frustrated but when jen starts talking about social credit scores in china my blood starts to boil yeah yeah i mean there there's i yeah i totally get where you're coming from and i am totally sympathetic to that perspective i think i also have spent too much time looking at you know fairly open fairly democratic regimes that have flipped alarmingly quickly behind you know emergency powers like that's that's kind of the it's one of the themes that you see through comparative politics is that you you can have a pretty well consolidated democracy but you know you've always uh people in power always want more power that's just sort of how that how it goes um and if they have the pretense and the pretext to to grab it they will um and we're we're in sort of an unusual confluence of factors that are making that more possible um than it has been in our lifetime and and so that that definitely raises the alarm bells for me just you know both from both from its effect on me personally and my ability to express myself freely and um and everything that that i would be worried about just at it optimizing my own life and happiness kind of level but just also as somebody who has studied political philosophy and and cares about uh small l liberal principles and post enlightenment principles of freedom of expression and assembly and and individualism and all of these things that uh the united states was founded on um were you know if there's a if there's a hill to die on yeah if you're gonna if you're gonna get yourself agitated um this this seems like it should get you a little stirred up um but i i'm totally sympathetic to you know me going out there raging in the streets is at this point you know we're not in the same context that the people who did that in east germany were in even i mean the world has really really changed and the the cost benefit on your um well at this point you you go out and you protest it in the wrong way it's going to be a real dock on your social credit score so you got to be careful right yeah so dr hawks yeah mr garbachev tear down this mask [Laughter] yeah no i i i hear you i i uh yeah having lived 20 years longer and and my feeling is and i think we're going to be okay but but i but i also hear we could be we could be a whole chunk worse off than than i'm anticipating in terms of freedoms we're not gonna be a chunk worse off than i think economically uh economically we can't help but succeed just because of the nature of of human innovation at this point so uh that that can't really falter particularly in any substantial way but what you're talking about i think jen is you you've got my attention and you've got my eyebrows raised and it's uh disturbing because i didn't even really know what the hell canceling was until we started talking you know you brought it to my attention maybe a year ago and i'm like yeah whatever it was to me it was way out at the periphery and now it's like whoa you get your uh i think did you did you say that something you and i talked about got marked on youtube as questionable i think it that was uh we did yeah yeah our um some one of our um early discussions on kovid which you know has a i i we could argue about how well that stood the test of time and whether we would say things in exactly the same way now that we said them then um i i i think for my part i probably would not have i probably would would have adjusted some of the things that you know some we were a little cavalier in early days um and uh but you know we were working with the data that we had at the time and making i think i you know we would absolutely stand by the inferences that we made based on that data and no one else could have made any other inference based on the same data and so but yeah it's it's marked as uh i i forget what the it wasn't it wasn't banned from youtube but it definitely it was marked as misinformation essentially um which is interesting because it's it's a historical artifact it's like okay my position has evolved in order for it to evolve it had to start somewhere so you're just going to erase where it started from and and i am i'm only a creature of what i i believe in this moment without seeing the entire kind of intellectual and informational legacy and and pedigree of how what got me there like isn't that how knowledge builds on itself isn't that how we learn from each other isn't that what this whole uh enterprise is supposed to be about but no we're we're losing that because something anything in the past that is not a perfected expression of what we believe right now or what our dear leader tells us to believe right now is is suspect and it must be erased and that is very maoist it's not even soviet it's maoist um yeah and you know and the other aspects i mean we could we could go on it this is why i now you know we have the the weekly show the pure politics show on hawk blocked so we can get into this stuff more but it's starting to leach into future jeans now too but the um the i i am personally having the the experience and i know many people who have where your politics now like this is this is uh it's it's dividing families you know that sort of like close friends and family members can no longer talk to each other because of these profound disagreements on on principle um and that is something that you didn't i mean even you know growing up i had my grandparents were notorious for saying that they cancelled each other's votes out you know what my grandmother very very liberal my grandfather very very very conservative yeah yeah and and that was just you know it was sort of this kind of agree to disagree yeah it wasn't this like i i do not acknowledge you know your that your ability to hold like i don't i don't see how you got to your point of view at all and i think it is completely invalid like that is a is a completely new aspect in the the way that we debate with each other and that we co-occupy space which which leads me to like i think you're right that you know it's probably no uh no huge catastrophe for for most people in terms of their daily experience but i think you're going to see more and more and you're already seeing the emergence of parallel economies of parallel spheres of kind of um de facto segregation along race lines along class lines and certainly along ideological lines where you're going to have places like florida and texas that are you know doors open no no government intrusion come on in and it's it's you have essentially sub-autonomous enclaves within a federal system like that that are pushing the limits of that autonomy um and what that means at the at the level of kind of political philosophy like what does this mean for the american experiment is this like without some kind of uniting philosophy to hold the whole thing together does that spell doom for the whole thing or can we find a new equilibrium with essentially coexisting states we certainly couldn't manage to do that the first time that was not not something that worked for us in our history before a house divided against itself cannot stand um but you know maybe it's different now maybe you can have sub-autonomous enclaves that have very different ideologies very different economies very different rules of civic and and civil behavior i i don't know i don't know i don't know what that looks like or how that functions but i think that's where we're heading you
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