Re: Natural rights (was Re: Shunning, lesbians and liberty)
-- I and most others on this list utterly reject that crap. As James Donald's .sig used to say (and maybe still does) "We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are." Still does in the newsgroups. For technical reasons I am not using a sig file in email at the moment. But if Sampo continues with his pious and benevolent totalitarianism, I think I will fix that and start using my sig in email again. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 7RXBB96F+KEuHOew1oL5VwfnSt0KYAavfMWY/aZ6 4Bc5vyHAtmzcehTolgQTP47X/iKXVa6NGHuPPo099
Natural rights (was Re: Shunning, lesbians and liberty)
Sampo Syreeni writes: Actually I s ub scribe to neither view. I see rights as something that do not naturally exist, but are purely a societal product, subject to change through redefinition. Whether this happens because the government effects it or if the people start to view something as an inherent right is, to me, immaterial. At heart, the notion of a right is a moral one; it is closely tied to the moral concepts of good and evil. These concepts are known and understood universally among members of our species. Some view them as attributes of their religious belief, but even those who aren't religious and don't think in terms of "sin" recognize the concepts. The idea of right versus wrong is clearly both natural and universal to humankind. While individuals' beliefs as to exactly which "natural rights" exist may differ, all people (save some tiny few sociopaths who must be considered "abnormal") agree on some of them. For example, if you did a poll, you'd find that pretty near 100% of people believe at some level that they have a right to protect their own lives and the lives of their family members. The limits or boundaries of that right would of course be the subject of considerable dispute. A frequent critique of libertarianism (and anarcho-capitalism) is that it advocates a law-of-the-jungle, winner-take-all society: that the strong, the wealthy and the powerful prosper while the weak, the poor and the powerless are doomed to suffering, exploitation and oppression. However, it is this idea that natural rights do not exist, that any right you have is something that can simply be taken away by "society" (in practice of course that means the government), that is the real law-of-the-jungle situation. It is saying, in effect: you have no rights except those "we" (variously defined as society or government, but it always boils down to the Men With Guns from the government) allow you. "And don't complain too loudly or we might have to take those away too" (for the chiildren, perhaps). I and most others on this list utterly reject that crap. As James Donald's .sig used to say (and maybe still does): "We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are." You can't take away my right to defend myself by simply "redefining" it. And anyone who tries to do so has marked himself as one worth careful watching, or even perhaps, as Tim so often suggests, killing. - GH _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
Re: Shunning, lesbians and liberty
On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, Gil Hamilton wrote: And if your neighbours are simply malignant? Since when did people need a reason to harm each other? Then, too bad. They haven't *done* anything to you. A distinction without a difference, I say. Yep. That would be my point. This sounds deceptively like holding someone at a gunpoint. It has little to do with liberty. It has everything to do with liberty. The kind of society you envision is nightmarish: where everyone is required by law to act in certain defined ways (not merely to refrain from acts which harm others). I think it is a workable argument that it is better to have such social rules encoded in law instead of having people come up with them at will and imposing them on others through shunning, lynching or whatever. In theory at least you will then know in advance whether something you have done will be 'illegal'. Besides, current law in most countries holds precisely that sort of stuff. Probably the best Finnish example is conscript duty. (No, I'm not saying that isn't nightmarish.) Well, just debunk it. The point was, really, that even while I do have great reservations about treating shunning and physical violence as equivalent, I do not accept the notion of specific liberties being absolute, either. Indeed, you seem to be quite comfortable with police-state tactics so long as the particular set of rules being enforced are those that you approve of. From somebody's viewpoint you might seem to be quite comfortable with anarchy, injustice and immorality as long as the particular set of rules leading to them is the one you approve of. This doesn't lead anywhere. There is no essential reason why those freedoms couldn't be defined in some more limited form. It's not like these concepts are black and white. Go to a dictionary and look up the several meanings of "freedom". Then come back and tell me which one of those squares with your notion of people being forced to do things they don't wish to do. The dictionary definition is simply one end of a whole spectrum. Besides, if I wanted to nitpick, the Webster definition, 'Exempt from subjection to the will of others' strictly interpreted sort of rules out shunning and other forms of extortion. Look at it this way: if for some reason the survival of each and every human being is conditioned on some part of the population doing thing x, wouldn't you say it is fair to demand that x be done even if the individuals would not want to? It's not a huge leap from this to limiting such 'inalienable' rights as the right to property. I reject the premise as ridiculous and contrived. Let the part of population be those that own farming land. Let x be farming it. But in a word, no, I wouldn't say it is fair. (Nor am I interested in striving for "fairness", about which more below.) You agree, then? It's quite apparent you have no trouble giving up your freedoms. Worse, you have no trouble giving up mine too. Who said you had any in the first place? That is something you have to justify separately. If we, for some reason, have an (in)action, some damage and a strong proof of causality, it is difficult to justify differential treatment based on whether the damage comes from action or inaction. Absent a clearly established obligation or responsibility to perform some action, it is quite easy to justify differential treatment. Do the honors. And our legal system at least has always done so. Which some people could consider odd in the extreme. I do not take such things for granted. I don't consider the radio spectrum to be particularly scarce, If we look at specific applications (like mobile data transfer), we would like to use bands which are below 1-2 GHz because line-of-sight communications limit the usability of any equipment. We would like to get by with a minimum investment of physical resources, implying large coverage for a single antenna installation. In metropolitan areas, this hardly suffices for high bandwidth applications alone - nothing left over. This is what a sane person would do provided no scarcity exists. Now consider what happens when two independent parties do this in the same city. A mess. There is considerable scarcity. Nonetheless, such a shared resource is not at all the subject that was being discussed. But if you acknowledge the existence of shared resources, you will have to explain why, for instance, food, services, whatever really, aren't shared but private. Some of the above, perhaps. If people are indeed dependent on shopping for their survival, I do think their right to live sort of preempts the shop owner's property rights. In other words, the shop owner *has* no rights. Explain. This simply does not follow from the above. In the above situation the existence of a right demands less than in your ideal universe. "Er, I really don't like to get too specific." No. I mean what I say - the specific set of behaviors which have to be tolerated even though they
Re: Shunning, lesbians and liberty (was: Re: nettime Rebirth of Guilds)
Sampo Syreeni writes: On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, David Honig wrote: Exclusion harms you only if it bugs you ---you have to want to be a homosexual atheist boyscout for their exclusion to matter. Non-consensual violence always harms. I do not agree. I think shunning harms you regardless, if it is organized well enough. Say, you do something which causes your whole town to shun you. Where do you suppose you get food, shelter, whatever from there on? You'd say 'just leave', here, right? What if you do not have the means? You just die? This certainly gives one good reason not to piss off one's neighbors, eh? This is of course the whole point of shunning. It is a way of getting people to behave in ways that are approved of by their community. If they do not, they risk being left to their own devices for survival. No doubt you will argue that people must be forced to provide for those who offend them, at gunpoint if necessary. I also think I'm not totally wrong if I claim that even when the physical necessities of life have been taken care of, social contact *can* be essential to the survival of people raised up to be/genetically predisposed to being social or dependent, as modern people tend to be, on the surrounding society for survival. If this holds, shunning someone then becomes precisely as 'violent' as physical violence. Even if psychology isn't the hardest of sciences, it does suggest that isolation does significantly more than simply 'bug' people. Complete bullshit. In other words, "Violence is whatever I say it is." No, liberty is absolute, and probably not being exercised if *someone* isn't offended. I doubt that. Besides, that someone can be offended all s/he wants, s/he just shouldn't be allowed to do anything about it. (Except, of course, what the freedoms of expression/thought/association/whatever guarantee.) So, people should be allowed the freedom of expression, thought and association, yet they are prohibited from shunning? You simply can't have it both ways. Either one is free to not associate with someone or they are not (in which case, their "freedom of expression and association" are nothing but lip service). Your suggestion to "play nice" is quaint but irrelevent when talking about sovereign adults. I don't see it quite like that. In order to have meaningful freedoms one needs to have the possibility of enjoying them. Even if it requires *forcing other people* to do things they don't want to do. When someone claiming their rights in so doing limits the rights of others, I tend to resolve the conflict by limiting the rights themselves. In this case, demanding that people indeed 'play nice'. People must behave exactly as you define "playing nice". Otherwise, you think they must be forced to "play nice". Clearly, you're right and everyone else is wrong and everyone else must be forced to do things your way. "Oh, but if they'll just 'play nice' then everyone is free to do as they please!" This is precisely why freedom of thought and expression are so important and why they are usually thought of as inalienable - thoughts do not usually just jump out and start killing people. They are easy to protect since conflicts between other people's similar rights rarely arise. This is not the case with liberties involving physical violence, property et cetera. Except somehow merely refusing to associate with someone is categorized by you as physical violence. And apparently as a shop-owner I cannot exercise rights over *my own property* if what I choose to do is inconvenient for someone else. Tolerance means tolerating intolerant groups. The latter-day euros (germans and french esp.) don't get it. When you burn nazi literature you have become them. I agree. But the way I see it, tolerance applies to the intangible side of things, not the physical. I.e. you can hate and insult the somali or the Finnish all you want and webcast as much hate speech as you want but once you start beating people, you're off. Similarly, you have to tolerate the speech but not the actions. In the case of our proverbial lesbians, you have to tolerate their 'deviant ways' and even the occasional kiss, while they have to tolerate you speaking behind their back, insulting them and whatever else nasty you can do with ideas alone. What you do not have to tolerate is a lesbian kissing you (a bit of a bad analogy since you're male), or a shop owner throwing you out for a public display of love. The shop owner must be *forced* to tolerate behavior he doesn't approve of? What happened to his right to his own property? Must he also allow people to have sex in his shop? Or masturbate? Or curse? Or insult his customers? Or slander the shopkeeper? Or sing loudly? Which set of things must he be forced to accept? And if he throws someone out for engaging in one of these behaviors, which things will cause the Men With Guns to come and
