So would you be willing to discuss this idea of political realism for our listeners? How does this current of political thinking interact with human subjects research ethics?

Yeah.

So I think it might be useful to distinguish two ways the term political realism gets used.

So one is in the context of international relations and is used by sort of political scientists, and the thought there is basically this sort of realpolitik view about how international relationships actually operate.

So notably, that's sort of a descriptive, this is a descriptive claim, um, when we talk about realism in the international relations context.

So the thought's something like, there's no, you know, world state to keep everybody in line, and so each state is going to have these interests in preserving their security and survival and amassing power and sort of predicts that states won't act that consistently on things like protecting human rights or these sort of higher ethical ideals.

Now, realism contemporary political philosophy, th-- I think that's a bit more the strain that you're, you're drawing on when you invoke people like Machiavelli.

So how should a reasonable person think about these institutions, given that this secretive abuse has happened several times in our country's even recent history? Um, do you have any thoughts about maybe how we could restore trust in public health, uh, or just maybe how the public ought to think about public health measures given this history?

So what did you mean by that?

So one of the arguments that people make against lockdowns is that on a liberty based argument is that basically by allowing the government to implement lockdowns, we're giving them this great power that they could potentially abuse and overreach in a form of sort of government overreach.

And we can point to examples in our history, really like terrible episodes of our history where governments did use emergencies basically as pretexts.

to use powers in ways that are deeply unjustified.

So the key example that often gets invoked in this case is the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the case of Korematsu.

So I'm not the person with the law degree who was helping write this paper, but the basic idea is this.

It's a mistake to frame the decision in Korematsu and the problem with internment of Japanese Americans as primarily a restriction of people's liberty as such.

So walk us through that paper, what we were trying to do with that paper.