The Glade 4.0

True dat.

Besides, folks don't care about rights.

They have the right to remain silent, you ever see anyone exercising THAT right 'round here?

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In time, this too shall pass.

What you posit has absolutely happened during the course of human history. The human sacrifices of the Mayans come to mind. Or the duels for honor during the middle ages and renaisance periods of European history. Then there's the wild west.

We say murder is a crime, because our society has collectively decided that we don't like killing people for no or little reason so we've created the idea that someone has a "right" to life.

I don't see a plus side to arguing the point, myself. I see no shame in listening to other opinions, expressing my own opinion, and then walking away.

There is no shame in that, Farther, many times there is much wisdom in that stance. Here, in our own little corner of the interwebs, myself and others believe that an illogical statement of fiat spoken from a position of ignorance shouldn't be allowed to stand untested. Quite a few here, and I number myself as one, have learned much by participating in honest discussions. It may, however, be tilting at windmills when dealing with some folks.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

And, of course, having said that another thought comes to me. If rights are only a construct of government, then freedom is superior to rights. Freedom is the natural state of being, whereas rights are artificially imposed on people, willing or not. If 50.1% of people believe "X" is a right, and they can convince government to declare it so, the 49.9% who vehemently disagree are going to get the shaft.

Which is why "might makes right" such a compelling argument.

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In time, this too shall pass.

You have to be careful around here using the "G" word. Government comes with a shit-ton of baggage with a lot of posters.

To be clear, I never said that rights are a construct of government. They are a construct of man. An individual can decide that certain "rights" are ones they want to support. Government certainly gets involved, because that is the usual mechanism for multiple people who live together to agree on how "stuff should work", but the origin is man.

Running around buck naked could also be argued to be the "natural state of being". As well as eating with your hands, pooping on the ground. And while I wouldn't mind seeing some people running around naked, there are many more that I can probably do without seeing.

Personally, I'll take civilization.

Not hardly.



That isn't how our system is set up. We live in a representative republic, not a direct democracy. Furthermore, that republic is set up along lines that restrain government and also the vagaries of popular opinion. We have plenty of checks and balances built into our system (mind you, not enough, in my opinion). A more perfect union is the goal. If you look at the overall history of our particular society, we have been slowly marching towards more civil rights, not less. We have become a more perfect union, and as we continue to toil and strive to progress, we get even closer to a better overall society.

Our concept of rights evolves. It *must* evolve, or we will fail as a society. We have to be able to adapt our core principles to current needs. Technology advances. Ideas advance. Everything advances. We can either go backwards, or we can go forwards. What we see as a fundamental right today is likely to be expanded in the future. Some rights may be contracted in the future, given new understandings. We can see this process happen throughout our history. During the civil rights era, many rights were expanded, and some contracted (Blacks earned the right to vote and marry outside their race, but businesses lost the right to segregate based on race). It's not perfect. In fact, it's an ugly and often brutal process. But it is what it is.

If rights were inherent, they would be unchanging. They would be quantifiable biologically. They are not unchanging, and they are not quantifiable, because they are ideas made real by man.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Just to be clear, the Jewish Holocaust was alright in your mind, assuming you hold yourself to a consistent viewpoint.

Also, you should really not state that fluid rights are "factual." It is your opinion that they are a fact. I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree with this opinion, but stating opinions as fact is just a bit absurd.



As an aside, healthcare as a right certainly and exclusively hinges upon the definition of "right." That makes the discussion of the "semantics" of rights to be anything but superfluous, despite all the hand-waving around here.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Monte:

It's the same gene, or sequence, which scientists today believe may never be knowable, which gives rise to human self-awareness and identity. The same gene which gives us our basic understanding of ourselves, which filters everything through our own thought process, rendering those thoughts as ours exclusively. This is the basic reality of being a human which created the identification of property, IE what is mine and not yours. Whether this engineering is devine or otherwise, it is what it means to be human, and any ideology which fails to consider the way we function in our basic engineering is ill-formed.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Rynar - that's philosophical claptrap unsupported by existing science. There is no "rights" gene. If your rights can be taken away, abdicated, waived, or otherwise removed, they are not inherent. We aren't talking about an organ here, or a limb. We are talking about an idea. A relatively new idea in the long history of man, to be honest. In a state of nature, there are no rights. Only violence.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

He may mean "superior" as in above or the defining reference, not better as you are probably taking it.

It is supported by reality, not philosophy... or are you sharing my thoughts right now? Who's thoughts are yours? Do they belong to anyone else? Are all people not engineered that way?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Godwins. And a huge, disgusting straw man argument to boot. No one has said that the Holocaust was "alright". Fail.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

You did, actually. The government of Germany did not confer any rights on Jews, so the Jews did not have any. Everything Germany did was alright.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Score.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

I guess that makes sense.

The right to life is self evident, don't you think?

I'm confused as to how you think that I personally would think that the Jewish Holocaust was alright based on anything I've posted. Nothing I've said indicates that in the slightest. If you're asking for my personal viewpoint, no I don't think the Holocaust was "alright".

I haven't stated that fluid rights are "factual". I've stated that all rights are a creation of man. That is not the same.

Healthcare will become a right if our society decides that it is a right. Other countries have made that determination already, others have not. The defintion of a right is not in the slightest way a part of this discussion. I believe that we all understand what a right is. The points of contention is the source of the creation of those rights.

From the perspective of the government of Germany at the time, you are correct. Luckily the rest of the world felt otherwise and interestingly enough put an amazing burden on Germany.

But rights don't come from the rest of the world. They come from national government. Not to mention that the rest of the world didn't fight WW2 to put an end to Jewish oppression by Nazi Germany.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

And once again, might made right.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I suppose that the flip-side of the argument is that if rights are natural then the Germans would not have taken the lives they did (not would anyone else) because they'd recognize the inherent primacy of the right to life.

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Just to be clear, if Hitler had won the war and ended up subjugating the world with a moral system of his choice, the holocaust would have been "alright." What is right or wrong, moral or immoral, good or evil...that's really decided by each person individually. Then society forms some kind of consensus on it (either through some kind of popular opinion poll, or through other means.) Even in the unlikely possibility that there's some all-powerful invisible tyrant in the sky to dictate it, the only reason "right or wrong" are defined is because He defines them and His subjects have to some degree accepted that definition. Nature has no inherent good or evil.

The Holocaust was not "alright" because we have decided it was not alright--and that's the only reason.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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