Hyehudi.org

Some excerpts:

Reliance on censorship by itself, writes Doidge, automatically undermines any claim to speak in the name of science — and rather than increasing confidence in science, diminishes it. Yet throughout the Covid pandemic, major media platforms have conducted a nonstop onslaught on dissenting views and exerted efforts to shut down “misinformation,” even when that so-called misinformation came from leading scientists at Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford.

The Royal Society recently protested efforts by governments and social media platforms to combat harmful scientific misinformation via content removal. Such measures, concluded the Royal Society, only drive true misinformation to harder-to-address corners of the internet, while exacerbating feelings of distrust in authorities.

…

Taken together, the impossibility of achieving herd immunity, the demonstration that the vaccinated can still transmit the virus, and the failure of most vaccine mandates to take into account natural immunity, combine to undermine the main pillars of the case for vaccine mandates.

Doidge nevertheless concludes on a tentatively optimistic note, as he reflects on all that has been learned about Covid in the last two years, through a frequent reappraisal of the governing assumptions, much of it by those initially in the minority. And with that recognition goes a call to “give infallibility the day off” so that we can go on reappraising and adding to our medical tool kit against Covid. Perhaps we can even learn to treat one another with respect rather than as mortal enemies.

Continue reading on Mishpacha here…

See a related article by the same author on “safetyism” here.

Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits of Britain is quoted saying:

Now in Judaism, we know of no intrinsic rights. Indeed there is no word for rights in the very language of the Hebrew Bible and of the classic sources of Jewish law. In the moral vocabulary of the Jewish discipline of life we speak of human duties, not of human rights, of obligations, not entitlement. The Decalogue is a list of Ten Commandments, not a Bill of Human Rights.

Gross misunderstanding!

The libertarian Non-Aggression Principle is a negative commandment against initiating unjust aggression against person or property. (There, I said “commandment“. Are you happy now?)

The idea (progressively weakened) of “rights” is the lack of any GOVERNMENT right to impinge on human rights, or so-called “Negative liberty” (actually a tautology, since Isaiah Berlin’s “Positive liberty” means enslaving some to provide for others). For example, the “Right of Return” is theoretically just an attempt by the state to limit its own “right” to offend against immigrants (אכמ”ל).

Of course, Judaism is not practically libertarian-anarchist, but libertarian-leaning, which means freedom is the default position, with many religious exceptions and qualifications. And we are merely reclaiming the Torah idea they first borrowed from us in the Hebraist movement.

Point is, “Anochi Hashem Elokecha”, and religious duties are always curtailed by secular, coercive institutions, no matter the content.

Illustrated by an old line:

Any time three New Yorkers get into a cab without an argument, a bank has just been robbed.

יחזקאל ה’ ה’:

כה אמר ד’ זאת ירושלם בתוך הגוים שמתיה וסביבותיה ארצות.

רד”ק שם:

כה אמר אדני ה’, בתוך הגוים שמתיה, יושביה שמתי בה לטובתם לפי שהיא נבחרת מכל הארצות יפה נוף משוש כל הארץ שהיא באמצע הישוב לפיכך אוירה טוב ומזוג מכל הארצות ויושביה היה להם ללכת דרך ישרה ולעשות משפטי הטובים והם המירו אותם לרשעה מן הגוים אשר סביבותיהם כמו שאמר ויתעם מנשה לעשות את הרע מן הגוים אשר השמיד ה’ מפני בני ישראל והגוים ההם אשר סביבותיהם לא המירו משפטיהם והם המירו משפטי בלא יועיל.

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