Alentrix blog

Who was or will be the first American denied his gun rights due to a diagnosis of hoarding?

I have translated many hundreds of thousand words for TransPerfect over the course of several years. As evidenced by my ever-increasing rates and TransPerfect’s continued patronage during that time, I understand that mine was quality work.

I worked on a split job in September 2009, for which I was paid in November of 2009. Incidentally, if you do quality work, split jobs are almost never worth the hassle. If one of your fellow translators performs poorly, the end client will often have a bad feeling about the entire job. He or she may not even be told it was split.

In January of 2010, a person with whom I had never communicated before sent an email to me which said, in part:

“Unfortunately the client has come back with some negative feedback and is now refusing to pay his invoice. We will therefore need to cancel yoru [sic] invoice for this job. I understand it is both an unfortunate and exceptional situation but we are looking to salvage the relationship and ensure that we continue receiving work from this client.”

Subtext: The relationship with me be damned. Anyway, I figured that since the invoice was already paid, it was an internal accounting matter that was not my concern.

In April and May of 2011, I translated and billed TransPerfect for two jobs, which were accepted and forwarded to the client without complaint. The invoices were not paid. According to sources at the company, these new invoices were being offset against the old cancelled invoice from 2009. Using what is apparently the terminology used in-house for this behavior, a project manager explained that TransPerfect was “docking my pay.”

Translators beware. TransPerfect will treat you variably as an independent contractor or an employee, depending on how it suits the company’s needs in any given situation.

Coda: I still receive emails from TransPerfect project managers begging for my assistance with jobs that are difficult to place. After the stink I’ve raised with people at various levels of the company regarding the ongoing lack of payment, I can’t believe I’m not banned. Either TransPerfect is really desperate for quality translators, or their internal communications system is completely ineffective.

There’s quite an eye-opening dialogue at http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block217.html. Libertarian Walter Block is defending his position, which in essence is that (1) an infected person violates the non-aggression principle when others become infected after contact with said infected person, and (2) forcing said infected person to be vaccinated for said infection does not violate the non-aggression principle.

Some thoughts:

1. The non-aggression principle is almost entirely useless.

The provision in the non-aggression principle that allows for the use of defensive force turns the supposed statement of principle into a tautology. When is a particular instance of force defensive, and when is it not? Since it is clear even in this simple case that reasonable people can disagree, the non-aggression principle is useless in application at any level of sophistication above the most basic. The Block dialogue is a perfect example.

Here we have (a) a small number of people involved in a dialogue (b) who presumably care deeply about limitations on the use of force (c) who ostensibly share a philosophy about it (d) faced with a simple, stripped-down, hypothetical thought experiment. The planets and stars are aligned in favor of an agreement. Instead, there is significant disagreement about whether offensive and defensive force is involved, and the factors that should be involved in the analysis thereof.

2. Block’s position is utopian.

Bad things happen. Sometimes these bad things are merely inefficient, other times they are awful. Sometimes they are even preventable. This does not necessarily mean that it is acceptable to use force to try to stop them from happening.

Germs exist. They use human bodies as hosts. This is a state of nature. Why can’t Block just accept that when he chooses to go out into the world and interact with other human beings (or even simply by choosing to remain alive), he is running the risk of exposing himself to such germs?

I shudder when an ostensible lover of freedom like Block classifies as a murderer (!) someone like Typhoid Mary. It’s amazing (and sad) how a human mind can take something that is really about Walter Block (the risks he faces by existing on the face of the earth, and by engaging with other people in that world) and turn it into something that is supposedly the fault of a disease carrier like Typhoid Mary.

The idea of forcibly vaccinating a disease carrier like Typhoid Mary is officious, interventionist and utopian. It is officious and interventionist in that Block would chose to act, rather than abstain from action, in the face of (a) his own use of physical force, (b) reasonable arguments against the propriety of it, and (c) serious uncertainty about the possible outcome of the use of such force. It is utopian in that Block seeks to turn a simple, sad fact about the state of nature (humans beings catch diseases and sometimes get sick or die as a result) and turn it into an excuse to lash out with a needle pointed in the direction of the rest of us with whom he shares the face of the earth.

It is as if Block accepts the “freedom from…” logic of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and would add “freedom from disease” (or, perhaps more precisely, “freedom from diseases that Block thinks may be preventable with actions which Block thinks are reasonable”) to a utopian wish list that will be instantiated for humanity by force.

3. Forced quarantine and forced vaccination are different concepts. Both are both immoral.

A call for help from our medical friends: does vaccination even help a person like Typhoid Mary, or those who might be infected by her? As I understand it, the immune system of someone already infected by a disease is already being challenged by that disease to create antibodies to that disease. Would vaccination add anything to that process? In the Typhoid Mary example, wouldn’t quarantine, rather than vaccination, be the intervention on the table?

With respect to quarantine, who gets to determine whether an alleged disease-carrier is actually carrying the disease? Does it matter whether the disease-carrier is contagious or not? Who determines the criteria for contagion? Can the nervous Nellies of the world simply retreat to their private real estate to avoid infection? I guess if I’m faced with a scenario so fraught with evidentiary issues, my tendency is err on the side of caution and forgo the use of force, even if someone somewhere might convincingly argue that the use of force would be defensive. Isn’t a magnanimous abstention from the use of force (even if justifiably defensive) more becoming a supposed freedom lover? What is the harm in defaulting to non-violence in ambiguous situations, especially when compared to the harm in using force at the drop of a hat? The world is filled with people who will argue that force is defensive (and thus justified) in almost any situation we might describe. Shouldn’t we freedom lovers at least try to promote the concept of not using force?

With respect to vaccination, I briefly touched on some of the issues at http://blog.alentrix.com/?p=191 under the “Page 104” heading. In essence, the question comes down to “Who gets to determine whether the costs of vaccination outweigh the benefits?” Since we’re talking about (a) a needle being stuck into my body and (b) foreign substances being introduced thereto, my answer, to put it bluntly, is that it should be me and me alone, and not Walter Block or anyone else, who gets to make that determination.

4. Summary

Allow me to suggest an approach more parsimonious, generous and more generally applicable than Block’s. In the face of serious ambiguity about cause and effect, and serious disagreement with respect to costs and benefits, why wouldn’t a freedom lover simply choose to abstain from the use of force? Why not assume that any use of force is not defensive unless proven otherwise?

Page 5. “As citizens of the world’s richest country, we expend little energy worrying about the millions of vital yet mundane functions our government undertakes. Roads are built, sewer systems maintained, mail delivered. We aren’t preoccupied by the thought that skyscrapers will come crashing down because of unenforced building codes; we don’t fret that our nuclear arsenal will fall into the wrong hands, or dread that the tax collector will hit us up for a bribe.” 1. Surely some people consider roads, sewers and mail to be vital. Is it possible to conceive of a reasonable person who might disagree? Is it possible to conceive of leaving such people alone by not requiring them to pay for these things? 2. Does Mr. Hayes really think that it is building codes that keep skyscrapers from falling down, rather than the goodwill and/or naked self-interest of those who front the money for skyscrapers, and the people who construct them, of their respective insurers? 3. A not insignificant number of humans on the face of the planet consider the nuclear arsenal to in fact be in precisely the wrong hands. 4. What useful distinction exists between a tax collector’s extractions and a bribe?

Page 13. Hayes needlessly amalgamates two different definitions of authority, dumping the wind from the sails of his argument. On one hand, there is authority based on expertise (consensual authority), in which one person voluntarily chooses to defer to another because of the latter’s perceived ability to make wiser choices that the former. This is a car mechanic in Hayes’ example. On the other hand, there is authority based on political sovereignty (imposed authority), in which one person involuntarily submits to another because of the latter’s use of force (or threat thereof). Hayes’ conflation of the two makes it seem like he really doesn’t understand the phenomena about which he is writing.

Page 16. “We have accepted that there will be some class of people that will make the decisions for us, and if we just manage to find the right ones, then all will go smoothly.” I’m not sure how broadly Mr. Hayes intends to extend the “we” who have accepted a class of people to make decisions for them, but it certainly doesn’t extend to me. This phrasing makes it seem like Mr. Hayes cannot even fathom the notion that such an abdication of responsibility might be anathema to a reasonable person. By the way, you will never “find the right ones”.

Page 22. Another way to look at the rise of Hayes’ Meritocracy is simply the expansion of the pool of people from which those with a certain authoritarian, institutional mindset are drawn. Where it used to be that only those who were white males could be Organization Men, now blacks, females, and homosexuals can join the party, so long as their mindset is suitably authoritarian and institutional. Diversity is increasing in terms of superficialities that don’t threaten those who benefit from institutional violence; diversity is decreasing in terms of fundamental values and acceptable choices about how to treat others and the environment in which we live.

Page 104. “The Crisis of [Imposed] Authority has produced a particularly virulent strain of this kind of rejectionism, as millions of parents refuse to have their children vaccinated because they believe – against the evidence and a broad and durable medical consensus – that vaccines cause autism and other conditions.” Page 106. “History has shown time and time again that the medical consensus at any given moment is far from infallible”.

First, who would Hayes have making vaccination decisions? Individual parents? Approved authorities who accept “far from infallible” medical consensus? Hayes himself?

Second, there are certainly reasons why a parent might choose to refuse to have their children vaccinated for reasons other than simple contrarianism (which I assume is what Hayes means by rejectionism), or that they believe vaccines cause autism (notwithstanding the fact that either of these rationales would be reason enough for anyone who accepts others’ right of self-ownership). First, a parent might perceive that the risk of a vaccine injury outweighs the expected benefit of potential immunity. Yes, vaccines demonstrably can and have caused injury. Who is Christopher Hayes to tell anyone that he or she must incur a risk of same? Second, a parent might decide that the level of herd immunity is sufficient to protect his or her child. Third, a parent might believe that a child has a right to control what happens to his or her body, and the child chooses not to get an injection. These are just three examples. Mr. Hayes would do well to consider opposing arguments before publishing his next book. It would make his argument much more persuasive.

I ate the first-ever of my orchard’s fruits today, a Sugar May white-fleshed acid peach. A tree-ripened peach is definitely better than store-bought. It’s even better from a tree you’ve taken care of yourself. The tree set a total of two fruits.