A new pandemic treaty is in the works. Countries are negotiating its terms, along with amendments to the International Health Regulations. If ready in time, the World Health Assembly will approve them in May. The deal may give the WHO power to declare global health emergencies. Countries will promise to follow WHO directives. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, travel restrictions and more will be in the works. Critics say that the agreements will override national sovereignty because their provisions will be binding. But international law is the art of the Big Pretend.
You drive down Main Street. Cars are parked everywhere. The signs say “No Parking” but they also say, “The City does not enforce parking restrictions”. In effect there’s no rule against parking. Laws are commands imposed with the force of the state. Rules without sanctions are mere suggestions. Some people may honour the request, but others won’t. Those who disagree with the rule can safely ignore it. In domestic law, “enforceable” and “binding” are synonyms.
But not in international law, where promises are called ‘binding’ even if they are unenforceable. In the international sphere, countries are the highest authority. Nothing stands above them with the power to enforce their promises. No such courts exist. The International Court of Justice depends on the consent of the countries involved. No international police enforce its orders. The UN is a sprawling bureaucracy, but in the end, it is merely a place for countries to gather. The WHO is a branch of the UN whose mandate countries negotiate amongst themselves.
In the proposed pandemic treaty, parties are to settle disputes through negotiation. They may agree to be subject to the International Court of Justice or to arbitration. But they cannot be required to.
Yet international law jurists insist that unenforceable treaty promises can be binding. “The binding character of a norm does not depend on whether there is any court or tribunal with jurisdiction to apply it,” Daniel Bodansky, a Professor of International Law at Arizona State University, wrote in a 2016 analysis of the Paris climate agreement. “Enforcement is not a necessary condition for an instrument or norm to be legally binding.” Without this Big Pretend, international law would collapse like a house of cards on a windy beach.
All countries are sovereign. They are free to retaliate against each other for perceived wrongs, including breaches of treaty promises. They can seek to have other countries censured or expelled from the international regime. They can impose trade sanctions. They can expel ambassadors. But retaliation is not ‘enforcement’. Moreover, international relations are a delicate business. Aggrieved countries are more likely to express their disappointment in carefully crafted diplomatic language than to burn bridges.
The threat from WHO proposals come not from outside but from within. We live in a managerial age, run by a technocratic elite. Over time, they have acquired for themselves the discretion to direct society for the common good, as they declare it to be.
As journalist David Samuels puts it:
Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun.
These bureaucracies regulate, license, expropriate, subsidise, track, censor, prescribe, plan, incentivise and inspect. Pandemics and public health are the most recent justifications for yet more control.
Domestic governments, not international bodies, will impose WHO recommendations on their citizens. They will pass laws and policies that incorporate those directives. Even an exasperated WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said so in a briefing this week:
There are those who claim that the pandemic agreement and [amended regulations] will cede sovereignty… and give the WHO Secretariat the power to impose lockdowns or vaccine mandates on countries… These claims are completely false… the agreement is negotiated by countries for countries and will be implemented in countries in accordance with your own national laws.
Ghebreyesus is correct. Local and national authorities will not give up their powers. To what extent international commitments will be ‘binding’ on a country depends not on international law but on that country’s own domestic laws and courts. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, for example, provides that the Constitution, federal laws and treaties together “shall be the supreme Law of the Land”. That does not mean that treaties supersede the constitution or federal laws. Domestic legislation and policy will be required for the proposed pandemic treaty and WHO directives to be enforced on American soil. Such legislation is an exercise of sovereignty, not a repudiation of it.
The proposals are not benign. Domestic authorities seek cover for their own autocratic measures. Their promises will be called ‘binding’ even though they are not. Local officials will justify restrictions by citing international obligations. Binding WHO recommendations leave them no choice, they will say. The WHO will coordinate their imperatives as the face of global public health.
The WHO is not taking over. Instead, it will be the handmaiden for a coordinated global biomedical state. Managers hate straight lines. Diffuse, discretionary powers avoid accountability and the rule of law. The global health regime will be a tangled web. It is meant to be.
Bruce Pardy is Executive Director of Rights Probe and Professor of Law at Queen’s University. This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
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A threat to identity? He should be looking at mass psychosis.
You’re looking through the wrong end of the kaleidoscope pal!
Because, funny enough, on the list of 30 pre-approved dissertation topics, mass hysteria wasn’t on it, and students don’t get the last say in what their dissertation subject would be. What do you think this…. academic freedom?
Out of curiosity – was the dissertation topic about the identity process theory you mention below in a general sense, with your choosing the face mask aspect, or was the topic very specifically identity and face masks?
Did the dissertation topics focus on matters relating to the current mass manipulation or was there greater freedom than that in how you chose to flesh out a topic? I’m not having a go, I’m just curious as to whether the topics were chosen to fine-tune the ‘nudging’.
Think it’s a her – am I allowed to say that? He/She/Him/Her/They/Them/It.
I would have liked to contribute but it seems to require an identity.
Why ‘treats to identity’?
Why can one’s desire not to wear these rags not be about the simple desire to breath (a rather fundamental need in the grand scheme of things) unfettered? To not end up with a headache after 10 minutes? To not want to be inhaling plastic particles or cotton from masks which are evidently pointless? To not want to be inhaling the bacteria/viruses that research has found on the outside of masks?
Or to not want to be picking up throw away masks off the roads, to try and stop it from causing harm to wildlife?
Or the simple fact that it has been presented as a legitimate excuse for some people to let their inner nazi out? There is no end of people who, with own mask firmly under their nose/chin, have no problem calling out someone else for not wearing their mask properly – usually so frightened from being infected, they must come within 2 inches of your face to make their point.
In terms of ‘identity’, it might make more interesting research to find out how many law breakers have made grateful use of the face rags to hide their identity.
Identity Process Theory is integral to Nudge techniques. It’s vastly more important than you realise.
So how do we break it?
Muzzles will be socially acceptable for years to come enabling the criminals to hide their faces for the foreseeable future. You can’t scare people into wearing muzzles for 18 months and expect to just turn it off one day. We’re going to be seeing a minority of people wearing muzzles for years or, maybe, even decades. This will provide an excuse for anyone who wants to hide their face—they can just claim to be part of the OCD set.
The dealers round our way just LOVE the nappies! Face panties and hoody in the winter; face panties and shades during the summer. Can’t even tell whether they’re male or female: just arseless wasters.
Indeed, and about a dislike for going along with something you know is a Big Lie
The mask wearers that baffled me were the ones who would pull them down under their chins to smoke a cigarette – I have no problems with people who smoke – everyone to their own I say – live and let live etc … but that fact that they would religiously wear a mask to protect themselves (or think they are potecting themselves) from a virus with a 99+% survival rate while at the same time inhale all kinds to harmful toxins from cigarettes that could potentially cause much more serious life-threatening lung diseases seems not to have crossed their mind at all.
There was no face rag mandate in NL until 1 December 2020.
Following pressure from Brussels, end of October 2020 it was said a mandate would come into force 1 December for indoor public spaces, but it was ‘advised’ as of 1 November. As of that date I’d say a good 80% of the people immediately started wearing them. At that time, at the local shopping centre, I noticed several people (at that point wearing them voluntarily) walking out of the shopping centre, pulling down their mask and having a smoke – I had a good laugh.
One thing I can say – during the month of November, being one of the few still enjoying breathing freely, it was clear that not wearing face rags greatly contributed to physical distancing (nothing social about it). Standing out in a sea of masked faces, when I was in a shop everyone would stay about 3 metres away from me – while happily getting very close to fellow maskees.
Smoking takes away far more life-years every year than SARSCov2.
That will change once the injections kick in.
Mainly in people with preexisting respiratory conditions who smoke excessively.
Ah but nicotine binds to the ACE2 receptors and helps protect them!
Because you don’t get to pick what you study. There is a BPS pre-approved list of dissertation topics, and although you can voice a preference for your top choices, the assignment of what you will be studying is out of your control.
Do the topics look like conditioning?
Having done research myself in a previous life, I have a natural instinct to help out anyone pursuing this path, if I fall into the range of possible subjects.
But, I’m afraid that, although identity is obviously a relevant factor the mask wearing issue, this take on it is too tangential to the issues of real interest.
I would also question that there is a clear distinction between those claiming exemption and those not – its a spectrum of principle and pragmatics.
I was going to do it but stopped at that question. In reality from memory I only had to claim an exemption once. I think claiming an exemption is demeaning and almost defeats the point of not wearing one. So I didn’t know how to answer and left it !
I have an exemption but mostly I don’t use it. I don’t like wearing my yellow star equivalent.
That’s quite right – it is a spectrum and was very difficult to define, because it means something different to everyone. Ultimately, it’s for the participant to decide if they would use that terminology or not. Ideally, however, looking for people who would call themselves “noncompliant” rather than “medically exempt” as one conveys that the person is a dissenter, and the other is woolly and unclear.
I hate yes/no answers. It means the questioner can tag whatever belief they like onto the answer.
BBC lying again
“‘Explosion’ in Covid infections in Poland”
reality
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/poland/
The funny thing is that when they had 30K+ daily cases in April they didn’t even bother to report it that much. I observe the same about Germany, looking at the past charts I am surprised there were days of 30K cases. Although I’m following the “news tickers” day by day, I don’t recall this ever having been reported much less made fuss about. There were plenty of “explosions” when the cases advanced by 20% or so week-on-week, and even some grand explosions when there were hardly any cases at all (e.g. at the beginning of the current autumn “wave”).
I also remember how during previous winter there was an incidence of 1000 per 100,000 in some cities in Poland – I had to calculate it myself because they did not even report it that way. Meanwhile Germans, hell-bound on incidence reporting from the get-go, were declaring approaching apocalypse with their incidences well below 100. Right now the incidence is >500 among kids in Germany and it is just being shrugged off (as it should).
I discovered early on when I was muzzled and tried to have a joke with my wife that she couldn’t see my wry smile. The muzzle really interferes with proper communication much of which is non-verbal. Whitty, especially, doesn’t look like the kind of person who understands interpersonal communication, maybe that’s why he didn’t raise this rather important issue.
The way to sum it up for me is: wearing a muzzle makes an in-person conversation feel like a phone.
It is because of “Hayekian liberals” we are in this mess. Under the influence of classical liberalism the right have been MIA for decades and stood by as as every institution was infiltrated and captured. Now that our enemies have us right where they want us liberals are slowly waking up to the seriousness of the situation and are crying about “muh freedom” like a football team losing 4 – 0 hoping their opponents will go easy on them.
Government bureaucrats and politicians being in league with corporations, ie; “corporatism “ is not Hayekian liberalism, although plenty of crony capitalists hide behind that label.
It’s much worse than crony capitalism. We’ve had that forever. This is something new and much more sinister, witness the “lock-step” progression across the world.
Absolutely. Unfortunately the ‘free market’ has given the Gramscian believers a foothold in the education system. Scotland being at the forefront of the brainwashing.
Free Speech is all very well, however when the Mullahs have control of the temples, you will need to purge the temples. No amount of understanding and reason works with fanatics.
Fauci and Daszak lied Who’d a thunk it.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/nih-admits-funding-gain-function-covid-experiments-gives-ecohealth-five-days-report
As a youngster I had such low esteem that I tried my best to hide from other people; it got so bad that I at times I deliberately walked off-piste to avoid passing people in the street. So, from personal experience I know about fear and self-loathing. When this whole charade started off I was amazed when, one day, a youngster veered around me and walked into the road. That decided it for me – I will not go along with this ridiculous panic. So when I see people of all ages still wearing these stupid masks I know they are hiding – from their fellow man (meant generically) and from reality. They are still living out a fantasy of fear conjured up by the scumbags in charge.
In London in early 2020 walking in the road risking death was considered safer than walking near a fellow human on pavements,
They are living a fantasy that their government cares for them and that their well being is someone else’s responsibility.
The hypothesis sounds like a pre-judgement of non-mask wearers for being against mask wearing on British cultural, libertarian and political grounds. There may be some truth in that I guess, but I think sceptics a a little bit more intelligent than that.
The problem is with this study is that it will not look at the counterweights and counter-factual I’m guessing. The issue you have to grapple with first is whether the mask mandates and various other mandates are actually proportional and effective against the level of threat faced. Only then can you decide if someone is simply behaving rationally.
In truth, it is more likely that the mask mandators are guided by political and cultural identity than the mask refusers. Covid has become a great way for people to signal their virtue and stick their colours to political mast. Mask refuseniks just want out of the whole circus!
Yes, it does have a whiff of pre-judgement about it, as if looking for a rational way to explain why us risk-taking lunatics are non-compliant.
If non-maskees had been told to wear a covering over the nose/mouth, eyes, ears and behind (or a whole body condom, even better) and had questioned this, would someone be asking whether we were reluctant to comply because of identity, rather than the more logical and obvious reason that the demand was simply ludicrous?
Wearing something that restricts your breathing is not normal and is clearly not effective. Having said that, the ability to think logically and rationally is a part of my identity, so maybe he’s on to something…
She
Linguistic gymnastics are necessary in academia. Especially for those beholden to the grading system.
No one will have an identity if digital IDs get implemented globally.
We will be reduced to a bar code and facial recognition file.
Seen this short film?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8&t=3s
Perhaps a study is needed to see if people who wear masks are more like cattle in other ways as well.
“Vaccine” – from the Latin “vacca” meaning “cow”. Not that that proves anything, but it’s still funny.
I can’t believe how totally stupid the majority of people are. When I have challenged people to go analyse the data the fecking idiots tell me they don’t need to because the BBC told them … Aaaargh!
The BBC is pushing their mask agenda again, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to ask the obvious question
“Why do I need to wear a mask if yours works?”
The level of cognitive dissonance was off the scale.
So I never got to question 2
“Why do you want to slow down catching a disease where the chance of a bad outcome are greater as you get older. Surely you want it sooner rather than later”.
Art degrees have a lot to answer for…
That argument doesn’t work for me. To play devil’s advocate, let’s say masks work and are 30% effective. If that’s the case, both you and the other person would want to wear a mask to maximise your odds, IF there were a really dangerous virus about.
But they don’t and there isn’t, so this is all very hypothetical.
90% of people are not considering probabilities when they wear a mask or take a jab? It’s the reasoning process he’s questioning
You are completely logical – how dare you!
If you haven’t seen the Australian vid on the futility of mask wearing here it is
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/dPsp917ky6Gj/
I think I would have to know one thing before I’d be willing to participate:
Does the researcher wear a mask?
I can see the identity angle. I identify as a sensible chap who appreciates science and reality. I believe in building a society that seeks truth, then uses this accumulated wisdom to improve things further. So wearing a mask that doesn’t work and simply creates fear is clearly counter to everything I believe in.
I’m more worried about the perception given to gullible people though – the act of obscuring my face doesn’t bother me in of itself.
Never.
The identity angle will be whether non mask wearers are right wing, nationalistic, low educated, libertarians probably – that’s the stereotype the mask wearing, right-on, goody-too-shoes’ are trying to prove …
Perhaps you should read the participant information available at the link before casting aspersions and stereotypes of your own?
Never
I have a modicum of sympathy for mask wearers. We can point at studies and they can point at studies, but the fact is that this is a very hard area in which to come up with firm answers. The number of confounding factors is overwhelming.
In such a situation I would advise people to:
If we did not know (or you did not know) that the virus was small enough to get through masks, and we did not know (or you did not know) that it spreads through aerosols, then it could make sense to wear a mask.
Now that we do know these things, it does not make sense to wear a mask to protect yourself, but nevertheless you may not want to have somebody (a customer in a shop say) talking straight at you two or three feet away, should they suddenly sneeze.
The evidence that mask wearing has no impact on infection rates at a social level obviously also means that in most circumstances there is no benefit to individuals of other people wearing them (and none from wearing them themselves, as noted above).
I consider the costs of mask wearing to be exceptionally high, as they help normalise the whole nonsense notion that there is a medical emergency going on, with all that stems from that belief. However, if I were to go into a shop and it had a sign on the window saying ‘I am old and vulnerable and my shop is small and ill ventilated, please wear a mask’ then I wouldn’t feel guilty putting a mask on. Of course, I don’t have a mask so I’d just have to stay outside.
Actually, you probably should feel guilty about putting on a useless mask and approaching an old, vulnerable person in an ill-ventilated shop to give that person some false sense of security. Staying away from that shop is a much greater contribution to that person’s health during a pandemic.
We’ve know for decades (every scientist knows) viruses are smaller than the wavelength of light. At the beginning of the panicdemic scientists and officials said masks were not only unnecessary but counterproductive (see fauci et al), then, in mid 2020 all reversed course – unanimously. We must conclude virology, immunology, and fluid dynamics changed in 4 months, or something else was going on. You don’t need a science PhD to know you’re being bullshitted.
It’s really not at all difficult to come up with firm answers. The accepted wisdom was that they don’t work. That changed due to various theoretical studies which claimed the opposite, and governments imposed mask mandates on the back of those studies – but the enforced masking of whole populations produced no measurable impact whatsoever.
The purpose of models is to predict what will happen under particular circumstances – and when real-world data becomes available they are either modified, or discarded if they prove to be completely wrong. What we have seen with muzzles is unprecedented on such a large scale – all the actual stats show the the models are completely wrong and masks have no measurable impact, but their advocates, including many governments, still continue to insist that they work – which is demonstrably false.
I don’t wear a mask because I’m proud of my skin colour and my ‘identity’. I’m a man, not a sheeple and I will not submit to a fucking technocratic dictatorship that wants to kill me. I’m a sceptic and I question. Does that help?
Let’s get married, Patrick.
I have asked to be surveyed.
Should be entertaining.
Useless and lazy. Instead of videotaping volunteers the young researcher should just read through the commment section on this site.
Disagree. That would be wide open to personal biases.
Transcribing and analysing 6 hours of interviews for framework analysis looking for evidence of a specific theory isn’t lazy…. it’s actually extremely tedious and thorough. That’s the “real science” everyone here has been bemoaning no longer exists. What you’re suggesting would be “da science.” Utter schlock.
What a relief to come on here and read these comments. Just before I had ventured onto the Nextdoor app and was captured in a horror film of a thread where local people were shaming, blaming, judging, swearing at and otherwise failing to give any empathy whatsoever to the selfish and horrible excuses for human beings like me who choose to breathe freely and not see myself and others as biohazards. I felt quite sick. I tried to compose a friendly response but I realised there is nothing I can say – as far as they are concerned I’m in that Kafka trap where whatever I do or say will just prove how guilty I am. That masks are saving lives is for them a foregone conclusion. May I have a hug from someone?
Just shows how shallow people’s virtue signaled kindness is.
Walked through the outdoor precinct this morning. Maskholes everywhere. It’s great not engaging with news, I’m so much happier. These people are getting sucked in again for a long hard winter of existing. The highlight from clown world today was this guy, 65+, 6 degrees, damp with a biting wind and here he was in shorts and a face shield(!)
What is a ‘medical’ exemption? I’ve worn a lanyard to demonstrate I am exempt, but I’ve never claimed it was a medical exemption. It was/is (and will be, within a month no doubt) a self-exemption.
I was asked to mask this morning for a blood test at my surgery. I politely refused, no problem.
I asked the nurse if she’d heard of Dr Robert Malone (inventor of MRNA vax). Blank look. Shared his warning against routine vaccination and how natural immunity gives 20x the protrection of the vax. Blank look.
Told her how masking allows breath to escape. Blank look.
Her ‘facts’ came from last night’s BBC bulletin. She was fearful, ignorant and had a closed mind.
Interesting these people are supposed to be the medical experts.
Unfortunately, most (not all) nurses are just thick. I learnt this long before COVID, in hospital. There was one that was brilliant. I guess that’s what happens if you pay crap.
What the hell is “the identity process?” Sounds like academic pseudo- science, i.e. total bs.
The ‘psychologystudent’ is Tylean Tuijl look at the participation info sheet.
Tylan Tuijl is an actres/artist based somewhere near Lochcarron
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6696937/bio
https://archive2021.parliament.scot/S5_JusticeCommittee/Inquiries/JS520HC271_TyLean_Tuijl.pdf
YMMV but I bet this becomes a self promoting art piece.