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Talk about unalienable rights to life and liberty
Most of the rights after the first 10 are 100% alienable in a naturalist sense. A man in the jungle will speak freely and associate voluntarily... A man in the jungle has a right to not be lorded over for more than 8 years by one individual (a la 25A, for instance)...? The verbiage becomes meaningless.
Uh if a jungle cat wants you to shut the fuck up then your inalienable right to free speech won't protect you lol
Eh, I could try my primal scream :] Even empty-handed, I'd fight. And you would too!
Sure! But if you have to fight for a right it's not really inalienable, is it?
But fighting IS the right ;] Even struggling with in handcuffs is envoking your animal nature.
And if they shoot you for resisting arrest you won't be struggling much after that.
Nothing is inalienable.
Yes, I can be killed. And, sure, inanimate objects and the deceased do not have rights. However it would still be questionable as to why a restrained person was shot :p Further, our mortality does not mean that we dont have rights, lol. This is objectively true as you will die yet you have inalienable rights.
Our mortality literally does mean we don't have inalienable rights - rights are things we fight to have and maintain, not something we're just born with by virtue of being alive. All rights can be taken away if they aren't protected, they aren't sacred or magic or God-given.
The Founders considered these rights inalienable because they were superstitious and believed in immortal souls. In their minds, death didn't really rob people of their rights because their spirit would always be free.
Without 1700s superstition to justify the concept it doesn't really work.
Okay, this is getting good now :] I actually agree with their premise, that the dead are free. I mean, unless theres a whole bureaucracy to the underworld, lol. I think we will both agree that the dead are not pestered by corporeal issues like war and taxes, and so on. That there is no boot that can be applied to them. Souns nice :p
I think our rub is predominantly 'Positive vs. Negative rights.' Positive rights require Uncle Sam to hold them together, whereas negative liberty is innate, and our Constitution forbids government from trying to stop it. I think Negative rights are more real than Positive rights (like voting).
So-called "negative liberty" is only innate if you accept superstition. Without souls or other such magical concepts, we are slaves to our mortality. Freedom is something we must fight for every day of our lives, and the moment we stop living our freedom is gone too. How free are the sick? The starving? The children gunned down in schools?
We will only be free when we defeat death, and we can only do that by working together. Until then, we need a government to ensure our right to life isn't taken from us by a cold or famine or jungle cats.
The dead are not free. This is where I reject the Founder's ideology.
I agree with a lot of your sentiment :] I also agree that we must strive to hold our precious (negative) liberties. That they erode quickly. However, the government does not ensure our rights-- they're the entities our rights protect us against! Like literally, lol.
You can say they've made us safe from disease and harm, but theres been an awful lot of disease and harm lately. There is no amount of tax revenue that will make that happen. 'Full luxury gay space communism' is as bad a larp as AnCaps. Probably even worse, tbh.
If the dead are not free then who is their oppressor? Sounds spookier than the Founder's take.
The government is a tool, not an entity. Rights protect us against people that would use the government against us. Like Elon Musk here!
As for disease and harm, think about healthcare - countries where the government provides healthcare have healthier citizens than America does. Objectively, it's better to let the government handle disease. Even China has surpassed US life expectancy! How could you look at that and then conclude "There is no amount of tax revenue that will make that happen."?
As for the dead, they are robbed of freedom by nature itself. Time, chemistry, physics, simple material forces are humanity's greatest enemy. To defeat them, we have to work together.
I've never been extorted by an inanimate object before :p Not knowingly at least. I guess printer DRM is close, but you know what I mean. Hell, even corporations are considered entities by our (foolish) legal standards.
Covid is a great example of why this doesn't work. It was clearly made in a bio-lab. It leaked. Covid would not have happened without government funded research. We can say more could have been done, yet its too late. They made a mistake and it shocked the Earth. Our intellectuals later went on to sell vaccines with questionable efficacy rates and forced a voluntary product to maximize profits. This is not a success story.
Forgive me for not really beliving China's own internally collected data. However, even if true, a long life is not necessarily a good life. You can have the social credit system and live to 101. Ill keep my liberty and die at 70, lol, thanks.
I think we are diametrically opposed in this death-freedom thing. Funny enough your position sounds awfully theological... This is fine if you believe in lawful evil entities like Satan or Hades, but I suspect you do not. The dead are beyond the control of mortals. However I suppose you are correct in they are (seemingly) barred from their speech on the mortal plane. And I do feel the struggle gainst time and physics quite often. I dont see them as antagonistic forces. Like they are not preventing me from living my life. Not in the way taxes and ordinance does, at any rate. Im not a fan of transhumanism, for instance.
lol im done
No, it just randomly selected to mutate into a super-spreader with unique features in a wet lab a few miles away from a Level 4 lab that was creating Coronaviruses. Is this Occam's Razor? Anywho, hope you come back :] We can avoid the topic, if you'd like.
Edit: You had the most interesting take of the commenters :3 Easily the most candor.
The US Bill of Rights only includes the first 10 amendments, so the 25A isn't included. It also doesn't itself contain "unalienable", that being only in the Declaration of Independence, and in the discussions around the proposal of the amendments.
While the whole unalienable rights of all people that we're just stating as one country rather seems like Enlightenment ridiculousness and extremely pretentious, and I've certainly seen interpretations that are extremely hegemonic, such as arguing that the US Bill of Rights applies to all countries, it doesn't include later amendments.
A man of civics :] Very cool.
I agree with pretentiousness-- They were trying really hard. By and large I like that, the big ideals. The unavoidable glaring problem is the paradox of freedom AND governance. Like, even lawless pirates begged the question; 'What do we do with a drunken sailor?'. Its not trivial.