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The right to -not- exercise a right?

Do you have the right to NOT exercise a right?


  • Total voters
    38
I think I addressed this - the fact that the government doesn't recognize your rights can only mean the government is wrong.

Or that your assertion of the rights is wrong. You cannot demonstrate otherwise.
 
Or that your assertion of the rights is wrong. You cannot demonstrate otherwise.
The statement is based on the acceptance of the previously mentioned premise.
 
It's getting pretty hot and heavy in here guys...Are we still on topic? i know we're kinda off on a magnificent tangent.
 
The statement is based on the acceptance of the previously mentioned premise.

So you're using circular reasoning, that accepting a premise supports the end-result of said premise. That's a logical fallacy.
 
That STILL doesn't make it true. It doesn't matter how the government was set up, the fact is that rights are not inherent or innate.
Under your theory. Others disagree.

The government works just fine without that assumption...
I'd argue that the governemt worked just fine until that assumption was questioned, at which point we saw the genesis of the majority of political conflicts we face today.
 
Only insofar as the people are the source of the government's power and ultimately are responsible for determining via group consensus what rights people will have and under which conditions they will have them. If the government denies certain rights that the people have asserted, then the government is no longer operating under public mandate. and thus, the people have every right, for lack of a better term, to topple that government and set up another which operates as a representative of the people.

Ok, this is reasonable.

My insistence for rights being innate comes in a very similar form. In that the arbitrariness of rights means that they can be redefined, and defining rights on possible outcome means those with the guns makes the rights. As government holds monopoly of force these days, that makes them decider of rights. And thus if they declare a right non-existent, the right no longer exists. The absolute nature of rights puts all power and sovereignty in the hands of the People. The People absolutely have these certain rights, the government is made in part to protect and proliferate the exercise of these rights. Any act against the rights on part of the government is unjust. If the government trends to grievously against our rights for too long, it is the right and duty of the People to install a new government. All power is vested in the People, the People give some of their power and sovereignty to the State to allow it to operate in the manner mandated by the People. The rhetoric in these cases I believe to be very powerful as you are asserting what is the base of all power and authority. IMO, arbitrary "rights" (which are then technically only privilege) allows the government to usurp the base of power.

Where the laws are derived from? Certainly. They are derived from human observation and testing. All physical laws are simply statements that we have made based upon observation of the world around us. Outside of our own heads, the "laws of thermodynamics" have no meaning. Thermodynamics does, the laws that we created to explain thermodynamics do not.

But the base laws of thermodynamics are amongst the few which do not come from first principle. They are in fact purely phenomenological. But they are an absolute, they cannot be broken. It's demonstration that qualitative evidence can be just as good as quantitative and that absolute law can be discovered through qualitative means. Just like rights. We may not have a "rights meter" which directly measures rights. But there is plenty of qualitative evidence to suggest the existence and absolute nature or rights.
 
That's about as ridiculous as saying "I have a right to fly, it's just being infringed upon by gravity".

Gravity is a law of attraction between massive objects. It's not the same as rights.
 
So you're using circular reasoning, that accepting a premise supports the end-result of said premise. That's a logical fallacy.
Um.... no.
If you accept the premise, then the statement follows.
If you do not accept the premise, then it may or may not follow.
I was responding to someone that accepts the premise.
 
Apparently you are one of this body of mass' rights otherwise it'd let you go.

Just as rights are inherent to my being, so is mass.
 
Um.... no.
If you accept the premise, then the statement follows.
If you do not accept the premise, then it may or may not follow.
I was responding to someone that accepts the premise.

You can accept anything you want, it doesn't necessarily make it so. Racists think that white people are inherently better than black people. They can believe it until the cows come home, they're still wrong.
 
Gravity is a law of attraction between massive objects. It's not the same as rights.

No, rights as you've defined them are a complete fantasy. At least gravity is testable.
 
You can accept anything you want, it doesn't necessarily make it so. Racists think that white people are inherently better than black people. They can believe it until the cows come home, they're still wrong.

They are wrong, as humans are in general the same on the whole; including the same set of base rights.
 
You can accept anything you want, it doesn't necessarily make it so.
Like accepting the premise that rights are granted by society?
I agree.
 
No, rights as you've defined them are a complete fantasy. At least gravity is testable.

You can't test the laws of thermodynamics either. You can see if they've been violated in some way, but they cannot be proven from first principle.
 
Ikari said:
In that the arbitrariness of rights means that they can be redefined, and defining rights on possible outcome means those with the guns makes the rights.

And if you look at history, this has been exactly the case. Rights have been defined almost entirely by the rich and powerful. Whether you like that or not doesn't change the facts. You seem to want to take your personal wishes and translate them into claims about reality and it doesn't work that way.

As government holds monopoly of force these days, that makes them decider of rights.

The government, as an extension of the people, yes.

And thus if they declare a right non-existent, the right no longer exists.

So long as the people allow that to happen, yes. However, we do have founding documents that do grant certain rights to the citizenry that the government cannot simply eliminate by fiat. Those rights were established by the founding fathers and were validated by the citizens at the time when they voted to accept the Constitution. The idea that they were just writing down rights that already existed, no matter what they might have thought, is absurd.

The People absolutely have these certain rights, the government is made in part to protect and proliferate the exercise of these rights.

There you go again, you're just asserting that these rights exist without actually demonstrating it. I keep asking you to demonstrate how you've come to these conclusions and you have entirely failed to do so. First, you'd need to produce an objective reason to think that these ethereal "rights" exist at all in any form, then you'd need to demonstrate why this particular set of rights, presumably "American rights" are the one and only set of rights that are actually real. To date, you've done neither, you've just repeated that it's the case. Stop claiming, start proving.

But they are an absolute, they cannot be broken.

Whether or not they are absolute remains to be seen. At best, we can say we haven't found a situation so far where the thermodynamic laws aren't true, but we once thought the same thing about Newtonian physics and that didn't last forever. Science is provisional, it reflects only what we know today. As we learn more tomorrow, our current ideas are open for revision.

But there is plenty of qualitative evidence to suggest the existence and absolute nature or rights.

And when will you get around to presenting any of it?
 
Like accepting the premise that rights are granted by society?
I agree.

What is true is only what you can demonstrate. So far, you've just taken a position without a shred of objective evidence or logical argument and demanded it's true.

I, on the other hand, can back up everything I've said with history, sociology, cultural anthropology, etc.

Let me know when you find any objective support for your claim.
 
There you go again, you're just asserting that these rights exist without actually demonstrating it.

And I keep asking you to prove the laws of thermodynamics from first principle.
 
You can't test the laws of thermodynamics either. You can see if they've been violated in some way, but they cannot be proven from first principle.

Sure we can, and we do. While this is completely off-topic, we can easily test the ideas of entropy in a closed system and energy loss.
 
I, on the other hand, can back up everything I've said with history, sociology, cultural anthropology, etc.
I'll give you something very simple to do then:
Cite the text of the US Constitution that grants the people of the United States their rights.
 
And I keep asking you to prove the laws of thermodynamics from first principle.

And I keep asking you to prove that "rights" exist in *ANY* fashion. When can I expect you to do that?
 
And I keep asking you to prove that "rights" exist in *ANY* fashion. When can I expect you to do that?

When you do the former. Otherwise, we'll have to accept that qualitative measurement can yield just as fine observation and result as quantitative.
 
That doesn't stop free speech from being controlled.

If it's controlled, it's not free.

Ergo, you should have used the word speech nakedly, without the adjective.

You can't yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater,

Improper freedom of expression that leads to panic, confusion, and possible injury and death to others violates the freedom others to live uninjured by the yeller's irresponsible action. This is a case where the freedoms of people come into conflict, which, of course, is where the limits of freedom are defined.

you cannot slander people,

Slander and libel have the potential to damage reputation and therefore the standing of the victim in his community and thus his financial opportunities. Therefore this infringement on the victim's freedom is a justifiable restriction on otherwise "free" speech.

you cannot lie in court

Yes, because perjury threatens the freedom of the accused.

you cannot give state secrets to foreign governments,

Losing wars threatens the freedom of everyone.

there are all kinds of limitations to what you can and cannot say. Free speech is an ideal, it's not something that exists in practice.

One has to understand that freedom is not an absolute in populations greater than one.
 
Gravity is a law of attraction between massive objects. It's not the same as rights.

Gravity is a specific attractive force existing between bodies that can be mathematically approximated.

Gravity exists and is immutable, and exists completely independently of any human being, to state three conditions distinguishing gravity from "rights".
 
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