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David Shane's avatar

I hope I'm not misidentifying the source here, but if memory serves, G.K. Chesterton rather famously remarked that you should be able to meet with your leaders under the tree (with the further implication that, if they did evil, they could be hung from that same tree). What we live under today is exactly the opposite. It is impossible to ever reach or question the people who are really making the decisions that affect you. The immediate actor may be your employer or a local school board, but try to question them and... no no, we're just following the guidance of some bureaucrats a thousand miles away. And them you can never reach.

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adjunctprofessoremerita's avatar

In our present situation, I do not think we can overestimate the danger of bureaucratic rule, rule by decree rather than procedures established in the context of democratic oversight, in a political order in which consent is the legitimating principle.

I happened to come across an essay Fauci's bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, wrote. In it she argues that informed consent is not required for a biomedical experiment to be ethical. She mocks the "American obsession with autonomy," and cites the bureaucratic code according to which the the biomedical experimenters can obtain a waiver for the informed consent requirement. If it is an emergency, DARPA, or Pfizer, or the NIH, can make a request and never need to actually tell us what they are doing to us....At least that is how I read it.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/cphs/docs/jama-article.pdf

And as I suppose you surely know much better than I, the military gets such waivers to experiment on the troops on the regular.

I cannot help but wonder if there is a document somewhere with a president, secretary, or IRB chair's signature on it. I imagine all it would have to say is that it is an emergency and this is in our interest, perhaps that telling us would be counterproductive to national security.

Perhaps this is obvious. It does seem to make some sense of the bureaucratic craziness.

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