TomAiello 26
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Andy9o8 3
Quote
What are "The Rights of Man"?
Who defines them?
You realize that married women everywhere will laugh at this question.
Like we care
(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome
nerdgirl 0
QuoteQuoteDo you think that rights are the same as liberty? That may be the confusion.
Liberty is one of the inherent rights of man.
If we define/accept rights as inherent either through nature, given by any deity, or conveyed by a monarch (it doesn’t matter for this situation), they are characteristics that other people (in whatever form) cannot remove. One has the same inherent rights whether in Atlanta or Afghanistan.
Liberties are the ability to exercise those rights, which includes freedom to exercise those rights.
One’s inherent right to autonomy of personhood doesn’t change if one is in Atlanta, Algeria, Afghanistan, or Antarctica. If one tries to exercise that right in Afghanistan or Algeria, particularly as a feisty, educated, single, young woman; my liberty will be significant infringed. The infringement will not be the same on a man. The government one of those guarantee those rights regardless of chromosomes … not so in Afghanistan or Algeria.
If one wants to see a counter-example of how lack of government does *not* enable greater exercise of rights, i.e., liberty, one can look to failed states, such as Somalia. Taxes may be very low, as there is no infrastructure, but liberties to exercise rights is also very low. There is no functioning government there; do you want to argue that the rights and liberties there are greater?
Some rights may be trumped by other factors as well. In addition to the example Bill cited w/r/t investigatory needs of law enforcement, national security is another example. When one enters The Pentagon, Y-12, CIA headquarters, etc one gives up most all rights to privacy. Some might think that everything should be accessible to everyone; I disagree. Some think everything should be kept secret; I disagree with that too.
Quote… second is that legalized slavery is alive today and increasing. Most notably in the form of economic slavery where every child born in the United States today has more than $36,000 in their share of the current national debt.
You are correct that slavery does still exist today. I disagree strongly that the US debt and taxes are the “most notable” or anywhere near the top. Or even the middle for that matter.
Sex slavery, as one of the most egregious forms of human trafficking, is rampant in parts of the world and is not unknown in the US. Child slavery – for use as soldiers, domestic servants (that one’s from Virginia), sexual exploitation, and other hideous forms persists. That’s real slavery. Lack of effective rule of law and strong legal systems encourages/supports/allows/permits/tacitly enables that slavery. Many of those occur in the least governed areas of the world … not in Sweden, Norway, or Denmark with high taxes and lots of government.
Perhaps there should be a corollary to Godwin’s law, that anytime one invokes slavery, it should be about real slavery rather than as a metaphor to advance one’s ideologies, eh? Marx also talked about ‘wage slavery’ as legalilzed slavery. (Disagree with him too.)
Rights & liberties are more than just taxes.
/Marg
Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying
nerdgirl 0
QuoteThat is, perhaps, a good place to start but presupposes a Supreme Being and suggest that there are sacred but are actually only the opinion of the group that wrote them down. They have no intrinsic world wide or human value.
So what 'Rights' do we ALL, every man woman and child on the planet 'actually' have?
Bingo - and there in lies the problem.
They are undefinable, therefore of no value.
The closest to a universal declaration of human rights that we have is … the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Groups of people came together in the last century and decided what they would be. They are constructed. In March 1989, President Reagan called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“For people of good will around the world, that document is more than just words: It's a global testament of humanity, a standard by which any humble person on Earth can stand in judgment of any government on Earth.”In our (Westphalian) world, nation-states are responsible to protect and guarantee for their citizens the ability to exercise those rights. (That’s my realist take on it.)
There’s an underlying concept that I’m going to pull out of your responses … to which I think you’re alluding (I might be wrong) – perceptions of rights change. They evolve. Just 500 years ago, many of our deeply internalized concepts of rights (e.g., private property) and notions of ability to exercise those rights (liberty) were radical ideas!
The ability to exercise rights, i.e., liberty, correlates directly to rule of law and is dependent on the strength of civil law enforcement and the strength of the legal system.
It’s a good question to think about tho’ … we did here as you might remember.
To me, once one understands the differences between rights and liberties and how they have changed over time (history – know it or you’re doomed to repeat it
), the more interesting question is to try to imagine what rights will be perceived as in 100, 500, or 1000 years? 
Especially considering advances in cognitive science … what is the right to privacy of thought?
Folks are already using fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] to ‘read minds’ – the most successful application from a capitalist perspective thus far has been spouses/partners concerned about cheating by their partners. But the intelligence and security communities are also considering/investigating w/r/t new interrogation methods and methods to detect terrorists, e.g., think of a new TSA screening machines. (And I thought getting my anti-cavity mouth rinse through TSA was a pain -- pulled on Friday at ATL, only the 7th departure through ATL this year with same container ... sigh ... I will be perpetually delayed.
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/Marg
Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying
tbrown 26
QuoteQuoteWithout a healthy democracy, there can be no safeguarding of anyone's liberty. It's why the founding fathers nixed the idea of America ever having a king.
Didn't the North American colonists originally petition the king, asking him to overturn the acts of the (democratically elected, at least for the time period) parliament?
Good question, but I think the colonists didn't have representation in Parliament. Thus the outrage over "taxation without representation". To this day the Brits insist they were only trying to get the American colonies to pony up for the ruinous expense of the French & Indian War of the 1750s, where they had in fact protected and saved us from some really brutal attacks from the French and their Indian allies.
But the Brits were soon taxing everything, from window glass to decks of playing cards and forbidding the colonies to trade with anyone else but Britain. THEN they started removing American colonists to England for trial, rather than trying real or imagined offenses in courts in the colonies. Things spun out of control rather quickly after 1770, until by 1775 Boston was under military occupation, with people turned out of their homes to quarter British soldiers who'd been sent to "protect" them (which by the way is another of our Constitutional rights - the US govt can never force us to quarter soldiers in our homes).
The Continental Congress sent King George an "Olive Branch Petition" in 1775, humbly asking the king to restore our rights as British subjects and to negotiate our differences in good faith as his loyal subjects. He refused to even read the petition, let alone answer it. That would be an example of relying on the good will of one person, who in that case wasn't willing to extend any good will.
Liberties can only be protected from below, not from above.
Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !
Skyrad 0
What do you mean by liberty Max?
When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Didn't the North American colonists originally petition the king, asking him to overturn the acts of the (democratically elected, at least for the time period) parliament?
Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com
SnakeRiverBASE.com
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