Can individual liberties be lost?

[pevinsghost]

I recently got into a conversation with gunslnger in which we had different oppinions about whether a person can lose, or even contract away rights. Currently, legally the answer is yes, but I wanted to find out what all of your opinions were on the matter, and if possible I'd like to know what the official line of the LP party is

Comments

[montecristo]

1. Is it ok if AT&T taps your phone and records your conversations as long as you know they're doing it?
   
   If it is voluntary it is not a violation of rights. It is only a violation of rights when one is forbidden to communicate without privacy.


2. Is the current surveilance/neighborhood warnings about sex offenders justified?
   
   It's almost certainly counter-productive. All it does is take the stigma out of sexual offenses by showing them to be commonplace. Look at the maps on a sexual offender website some time.


3. Should people convicted of felonies, especialy violent felonies, lose the right to bear arms?
   
   Do they lose the rights of speech and assembly or any of the other rights?
   Do they lose the right of self-defense? No?
   


4. Is the death sentence, which is the removal of a persons right to life, ever justified?
   Probably it is justifiable all of the time. Human justice is imperfect though. Any system which renders imperfect justice should not be handing out irrevokable permanent punishments.


5. Most importantly to what we had discussed, can you contract away any of your rights?
   People contract away "rights" all of the time. That's what contracts are all about. Trade is contracting to give and acquire rights to all sorts of things, like property.

Consider this: The Bill of Rights grants absolutely nothing to anybody - it is a list of proscriptions on government power! THINK about that. Asking about exceptions is like someone in authority asking for exceptions to the Bill of Rights, as if there were exceptions to the proscriptions on government power in cases where persons have been convicted of felonies. You are looking at the Bill of Rights in a way that the Anti-federalists were worried that people would come to see it. The Bill of Rights says NOTHING about the rights of the people - it circumscribes without exceptions the ambit of federal government (and state government) power. What part of "CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW..." do we not understand?

As for contracting away rights, you can't contract away some rights, which are essentially inalienable as long as you live, because they derrive from your nature as a living human being. You can sign a contract to become a slave, but your freedom arises from your power to control your own body and to think, from minute to minute. You can contract away your free will, but no other brain in the universe can exercise YOUR free will for you. That's why certain rights are inalienable.

[rasilio]

"You can contract away your free will"

I wouldn't go that far. I would say you can contract away the right to control your actions, but free will would still allow you to struggle against that control should you desire it.

As you said, Free Will is inalienable, it is essentially the right to try which nothing can prevent.

Re: Due process.

[pevinsghost]

Human justice is imperfect though. Any system which renders imperfect justice should not be handing out irrevokable permanent punishments.

Absolutely true. And since there will never be a perfect justice system, well I'd rather pay for keeping people imprisoned than find out "Oops, we imprisoned an innocent man!" But of bigger concern to me is that I don't trust the government with much, and trusting it with the ability to end life.. Just not a good idea in my book, too easy to silence those that don't do as their told.

I do think people can lose their right to life, if they are threatening a life or have just taken a life and still have in their hands means to take more, anyone that killed our theoretical villian would be completely justified. But death sentences don't take place in situations like that, they take place months later while the criminal is in jail unarmed. If someone is not an immediate threat to anothers life then killing them is a violation of their right to life.

Re: Due process.

[montecristo]

Agreed on all counts. Well said.

[amazinggoatgirl]

All it does is take the stigma out of sexual offenses by showing them to be commonplace.

Well, most sex offenders were convicted of bullshit that shouldn't be illegal, like statutory rape. (Sometimes mutual statutory rape.) So what's wrong with removing the stigma?

We are on the same page here but I think you may be mistaking what I am trying to say.

[montecristo]

You're absolutely right about the nature of some of the "bullshit" criminal classifications. Look at a database map of sexual offenders though. The nineteen year old caught fondling his eager participant seventeen year old girlfriend in the backseat of the car is right there on the map juxtaposed with the comparatively rare, 38 year old serial pedophile rapist who preys upon five year olds. Note also, that because the "bullshit" criminals are more numerous, "sexual offenders" appear to be everywhere. Really. Check one of those maps for any reasonably sized community and find out that you are literally surrounded by "sex offenders"! Does this elevate the nineteen year old's crime to the same status as the pedophile's and "raise our consciences" to the grim reality of sex crime? NO, it does not. It merely demoralizes everyone and desensitizes them by telling them that "sex criminals" are literally everywhere and/or that the government and law enforcement believe in stigmatizing everyone for anything, no matter how trivial, thus undermining our ability to distinguish the heinously guilty from the merely irresponsible, anymore. In other words, in much the same way that imprisoning harmless, self-abusing, non-violent drug users tends to desensitize everyone to real, rights-violating crime, mapping "sex offenders" tends to desensitize everyone to real, heinous sexual offenses.