Freedom of Speech rights - I will prob tick off someone with this post.

Which most certainly not only outnumber humans, but most definitely there are more than 7 billion space pebbles of a mass greater than the largest human.

Thus gravitationally speaking space pebbles matter more to the universe than humans.

And are comprised of more matter, for that matter.

Which as far of the Universe goes, matters.

In my view:

Humans have rights because human reason and culture have developed to the point where we, as humans, recognize the value of such rights.

Of course this condition has existed for quite some time.

Its the implementation that is the tricky part.

Not quite. We are technically on LL's property(their servers) and are thus held to their rules which are held to US laws.

A good link is...

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=565181

(When will they ever fix the coding?! )

I take it you're trying to say that the simplest explanation here is not mine. I would disagree. To believe that a piece of paper has the power to grant rights requires quite a leap of imagination. To just accept that rights are fundamental to what it means to be human is pretty simple.

The problem here is that civics is not taught much in schools anymore. Most people really do think that rights "come from the constitution" because that's what their teachers told them. For about the first 150-200 years of this country's history, the truth was taught, which is that we as human beings fundamentally have rights, and that we set up our government for the express purpose of protecting those rights. Read the Constitution, word for word, and you'll see that that's precisely what it says.

Somehow in the last few decades though, there was a profound shift in the message being taught. The notion that "the Constitution gives you your rights" was born much more recently than you might think. Before just a few short decades ago, no one would ever have thought that. The change is very sad, and very dangerous.

The rights you are talking about have no existence outside of their acceptance by people as a principle. They are psychological constructs. If this is not the case, I would be interested to hear one solitary thing about the universe that would change if it was _not_ the case that human beings had, say, "the right to life" or any other right by the grace of the universe - yet everyone still believed that they did.

Sod the constitution, I don't care about that in the slightest.

It is of course possible to believe that rights are not "Just there" ,

and still not ascribe to the concept that human rights are granted by the US constitution.


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For example at some point people reasoned out that people should be allowed to live unless they were hostile.

Thus the right to life developed. It was denied countless times since we became aware of it. But at some point it didn't exist, human understanding wasn't advanced enough yet.

To say that all other members of that human species that were killed prior to this realization were denied their rights, somehow seems to miss how human culture, in its most basic sense, began.

I definitely agree it isn't the Constitution that grants us rights, its the Constitution which is supposed to guarantee them.

Guarantee them from those who would deny them; mainly the government, but also other individuals and groups.

Which I think is what the Original Poster was trying to say.

Not that he was right.

If human beings had no consciousness, but still behaved exactly the same way by autonomy, nothing about the universe would change either. Yet consciousness is an inherent property of what it means to be human. You cannot separate the rights from the person any more than you could separate the consciousness from the person. They are fundamental, inseparable.

And if you really want to make the "it's just a psychological construct", well then you could argue that EVERYTHING is just a psychological construct. Gravity is a fundamental property of the universe, but gravity is also a point of view. The universe itself is also arguably just a point of view. That's a bit outside what we're discussing here though.

The purpose of the discussion was to point out that a piece of paper is not where your rights come from. You have them because you are a human being, and the paper in question simply serves to define a particular government. The rights still exist with or without the paper, and with or without the government. That's all that really needs to be said.

If you want to discuss all aspects of what it means to be human, which seems to be where you're taking this, we could be here for centuries talking about it.

Yes! We can agree on that much at least.

As for all the metaphysical stuff, how about we just agree to disagree agreeably on that, and call it a day?

Tooth fairies are also pyschological constructs. But just like rights, they don't exist outside of our heads.

Or do they?.

I'm going to try and excercise my right to flap my arms and fly away like a tooth fairy!.

brb

*laughs* you are the one who brought the metaphysical up:



We can agree to disagree on the metaphysical, sure.

It didn't make much sense to me to bring the metaphysical into the discussion in the first place.

Except for the Jefferson bit, I guess.

Hmm, when you put it that way, I suppose I did. Really, I didn't mean to though.

When I mentioned the word "universe", I had no idea it was going to have such an impact on the discussion. I didn't even fully realize it was happening until we were already well into that aspect of the discussion. My use of that word wasn't intended to spark any metaphysical debate at all. I didn't even mean it in the metaphysical sense.

When I said rights are in inherent property of human beings and of the universe itself, I simply meant in the same way you might say the color blue is a property of your denim jeans and also a property of the universe. It was just meant to widen the focus a bit, to present the topic of human properties from a slightly less human, slightly more neutral point of view, if such a thing is even possible. It wasn't intended to make the discussion take such a 90 degree turn.

I guess it wasn't the best choice of wording in retrospect, since just about everybody who responded to it seemed to think it was intended to be so much deeper than it actually was. And I certainly didn't help to steer it back afterwards either. I suppose I could have said, "Hey, I didn't mean to go there," at some point, but I didn't. Once it was clear that we actually WERE there, I just went with it. I'll try to be a little more careful next time.

If I may jump in here...

Chosen, you seem to miss the distinction between a physical property, which is part of nature and the universe, and a social principle that most of us happen to agree with in our modern times.

Principles are abstract ideas. They don't exist on their own or by definition.

Influenced by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (350 BC), John Locke and the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson later, most of us have come to an agreement that we consider some freedoms as basic human rights and we acknowledge those rights as inherent. Still, those rights are a social agreement, not a physical property of a human.

They don't "just exist". We acknowledge them and protect them because that's we happened to want to do in our times.

I think you're confusing the idea of a moral choice to acknowledge these rights to all humans and hopefully make governments declare in public and in binding terms that they will adhere with such a choice, with the idea that these rights must be some absolute truth floating in the universe somewhere and we are able to observe it, like we observe the color blue or can determine where the north magnetic pole is.

Your insistence to consider these rights as existing independent of human consideration is as mistaken as the idea that a piece of paper is the giver of these rights.

In that way you're overlooking the simple fact that one has to make a conscious moral choice to recognize these rights for others and expect the same from others.

There's no moral choice to acknowledge the color blue or the North Pole. But when it comes to human rights there is.

I understand what you're saying perfectly, Daz. I just don't happen to believe that rights are simply a social agreed upon convention. I believe they are much deeper and more basic than that. They are absolutely a fundamental property of what makes us us. They might not be immediately obvious as properties, in the way that something like a color is obvious, but to that I would go with the old adage "fish discover water last". A thing doesn't have to be immediately obvious in order to be there.

A property also does not need to be physically measurable or quantifiable to be a property. Are emotions measurable or quantifiable? Are thoughts? Is personality? Is humor? No, but they are nonetheless common properties of what makes a human a human. Rights are no different.

Of these, how many have verified their identity, thus proving their citizenship?

You just said you walked away - the very definition of backing down.

Too right! You essentially have the right to do what you have the strength to do. Nothing more.

I would guess the percentage of verified ID's is pretty small. However, you don't need to know who some is to know what country they are logging in from. If somebody logged in from Belgium when they created their account, the chances are pretty high they're not from Japan or something. I think it's fairly safe to assume that with 30% listing as US accounts, at least 29.5% are actually US citizens.

Even if the numbers are grossly inaccurate though, and for some reason lots of vacationing foreigners just happen to think the thing to do while visiting the US is to sign up for SL from their hotel room or something, or vise versa, does it really matter? What was relevant to that particular discussion was that the US, while having the single biggest block of users of any nation, does not constitute the majority of SL users. No single country does have a majority, no matter how much you might reasonably twist the numbers, and that's what's significant.


(Oh, and by the way, please learn how to put multiple quotes in a single post. When you make a new post for each new quote, you fill up the pages unnecessarily, which is just plain annoying. The forum only shows 15 posts per page, and you just ate up 20% of that with what should have been just one post.)

It matters because US rights are for US citizens.

Ok. Please don't report me to the Internet Police.

Basically Mao and Jefferson in the same thread.



Although really thats arguing the ability of someone to deny you any sorts of rights.


The most basic concepts of "human rights" would pre-date actual guns of course. Pre-date recorded history for the most fundamental.

While the "freedom of speech" concept probably came later, wasn't needed till the tribal chief didn't like people talking smack about him and decided to shut people up.

Also "You get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word." While I can't approve of all the things Mao did (due in part to my hatred of anything connected, even in name alone, to any socialist doctrine), I can approve of some of his sentiments - in the same way that I approve of Hitler's sound financial planning.

Does this count for Godwin's Law?

the kind word comment was Capone I'm pretty sure.

I don't know, were the Nazi's responsible for fiscal planning? Their membership before it became unhealthy not to join up was only around 10% of the population.

After membership becomes quasi-mandatory figures are unreliable.

I believe to actually Godwin a thread you have to make a Nazi comparison, not just a reference.

Um ok I try and translate this

Some bissing Bikie mad Max look alike went into Midian in his interceptor, jus to try and get pizza some go juice, The Nazie landed in a Apopalypse now huey and called you a pom, then pointed a bistacular gun in yer face cauze you didn't take his barting price threads seriously.

Then somez in a Cartman AV sprayz all the chegboy homies from above in anoger huey while playing ride of the Valkyres and throwing playzeg cards like it was bistopia. You tooks offense atz his Ageplaying wit a cuggumber

A Lingen came to the sim and chared out the Pinkin Noops, and caust a probz wit the traffic maging everyallz drive rounds the sim.

Yuo feeld homophobic and woulg lyz an intolegrant master.

Chaos is availing a J**dt St**xz pine tree.

Sorry not sure what the question is?

After World War I inflation was out of control in Germany - a man would recieve his weeks pay on Friday and by Monday it was not enough to buy a loaf of bread. Hjalmar Schacht is credited with turning around hyper-inflation in 1923, but the economy was still unstable for a decade afterwards. Under Hitler's government, the German economy became a major powerhouse again. Schact's sound economic management in the 1920s obviously contributed to this, but without continuing Schact's policy fiscal prudence, Hitler's record of economic success would have been substantially worse. So he obviously did something right.


I thought of that as a comparison of sorts - I was using Hitler as an example of how one can approve of one specific action by a person without approving of them generally.
Yes, it was Capone (another example as above). I thought we were just writing quotes we liked?

After all "It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair. But when dogs shame the gray head and gray chin and nakedness of an old man killed, it is the most piteous thing that happens among wretched mortals. ."