people have a very skewed view of the idea of rights. rights that you have because your parents happened to be citizens of one country instead of another aren't inherent, and we didn't do a damned thing to deserve them, in most cases. it's the people who have done nothing to deserve such rights (in which i'm not so much saying "people who haven't served their country in some way" as "kids who haven't even held down a real job yet and paid taxes on their income" and most anyone who has more or less ridden their parents to the point that they are now at, which is not wrong but simply means you can't claim to have earned much of anything in this world) but who demand them and constantly talk about how they are losing them because someone in charge is just trying to stay in charge (which is obviously what the people in charge want to do... because those same kids, if they were the rich, would do the same thing... i especially hate the kids of the rich, who will rebel against it until they have to make their own living, at which point they are quite happy to use the education their parents paid for to get jobs that they will defend in the same way their parents defended theirs).
But take that idea of tapping someone's communications. It sounds like a right that's been taken away by "the man," but do we have an inherent human right to personal communication through technology we purchase the use of that cannot be heard by anyone but those people we specifically choose to allow to hear it? Which brings me to part of my point: I don't believe that we have any more inherent human rights at this moment than we did five hundred years ago. I don't think that technology can create extra human rights. This means that things like that, and things like many of the rights which people say are being taken away, aren't really human rights, and are merely things we've come to see as rights, especially as we live in a society that has so much to give to individual citizens. One other example: I don't believe that we have the right to an education. I believe that it is the parents' responsibility to see that a child is taught all that they need to survive and prosper in life. In the case of a national education system, the parents of a nation have chosen to educate their children together, and have given the task of this over to a central authority. They pay taxes for the right (thus granted by the governmental entity which was created BY THEM for that purpose) to send their children to those schools. Thus that is a right which they have to earn, through a system they chose to submit to. They could always home school. This, by the way, is one of my problems with illegal immigrants. I do not mind Mexicans entering the US to work, in fact I'd prefer that they did, instead of having factories move to Mexico entirely. But when they send their children to public schools without paying taxes, that is a breach of the system of education as it has been set up. It's not that I don't think their children need schooling, it's just that I think the workers need to pay that part of our taxes which go to schools.
Honestly, I'm not sure that I agree that it's a violation of my rights to be listened to in a house. I just don't see how privacy of conversation is a human right. I feel that is something that you, in many ways, give up when you choose to become a part of a community. It's not so much social contract theory. It's more to do with the idea that you're paying for the ability to call someone else, using technology you don't own. If you had signed a contract with the phone company that specifically said that your phone conversations would not be listened to, then I would see your rights as being violated... but they would be contractual rights, granted by the phone company, with the phone company at fault, and not a human right being violated. It's not a social thing, it's a commercial thing. Yeah, I'm totally with you on the healthcare thing... but I won't start in on welfare, because I might kill somebody. As to marriage, I'm once again with you. We have given the government the ability to tax us, in order to pay for the services they provide. We have chosen to deligate the authority for overseeing those taxes to our representatives, and if they decide that part of the tax system will be affected by marital status, they also have the ability to define what that is. It's not a social construct or institution, it's a legal term. They can define it however they choose, with or without gay marriages. They could define it as any union between two people with a dog.
As to the fear of widespread bugging, well, the plain truth of the matter is that the police don't have the money, manpower or will to do it. It wouldn't make sense. No one wants to sit around listening to every conversation that everyone has. Also, if, in that social contract, you are expecting the police to provide the service of a safer environment, they, in turn, must expect certain things, in return. They can't expect that law-breaking citizens will tell them that they are breaking the law, so they have to seek out the criminals on their own. That being the case, I think that having your home bugged is a far better deal than the methods used by police the world over. With bugging, the police are able to leave you alone if you aren't doing anything illegal. Unless you happen to find the bug and get paranoid, it doesn't really change your lifestyle. And isn't free speech just the right to say whatever you want to say (within certain limitations, those being that what you say doesn't violate the rights of anyone else)? Why does that imply that you should be able to speak privately?
I agree that its not cool for people to mooch of their parents or others that actually fought and worked for those rights, but I disagree that those rights are not inherant. If you talk about why people fight or work hard the most common reason given is so that their children will not have to. People work to ensure the livlihood of their children and make sure that their rights, money, life, whatever is insured against whatever hardships they may have faced.
As a famous quote (paraphrased since I dont know the exact workding) about world war II goes: We will go and fight this war so that our children can be doctors and lawyers, and so that their children may be artists and writers.
It's entirely true that most people who fight and serve are doing so for those whom they love. It's why I do, and why I am glad to. But when you start talking about rights it gets tricky. There are two types of rights, two of the different definitions of the noun: One is something that is proper and fitting, and that a child should benefit from the work their parents have done in order to provide for them is proper and fitting. I do not deny that. This is, in a way, inherent in the relationship between a good parent and their child. The other, however, is something which is a matter of either law or justice. Then you get into the tricky part, because people talk about rights of the first type as if they were rights of the second type. The second type, legal rights, are rights which are contractual (though in most cases it is a social contract and not a signed one when it comes to the government of the nation you live in), and thus are guaranteed by an organization. In the social contract which one lives under in the United States of America, one has to abide by the laws set forth by the government. In return, there are certain services that are provided to you. Different organizations within the government provide different services, many of which you don't use except in specific circumstances, and the government decides if you have responsibility to those organizations when you aren't in need of their services. Take welfare. You pay for it when you do not need it. Now, I'm against the system entirely, but as it exists, in order for it to continue to "work," those of us who simply live with the possibility, no matter how small, of one day needing it's service have to pay money in order to maintain the organization's ability to provide that service. In turn, even when you are not in need of the protection of the government, be it the military, the police or even the Department of Defense (no snide comments, because that's an entirely different debate), they require certain things. The problem is that the things which would most benefit them are not given to them. People do not simply turn criminals over to the authorities. The various organizations which exist to protect from specific harms are required to come up with their own methods for finding and stopping crime. The problem is that the criminals, due to the vast and constantly changing state of technology in today's world and to the fact that they are, by their very nature, willing to live completely outside of the rules of conduct which divide citizens from criminals, cannot be found passively. However, there are so few active methods of tracking criminals that do not affect non-criminals in some at least slightly negative way.
Think about the idea of complicity. People who do not commit crimes but are aware that other people are committing them. I am complicit in the illegal abuse of narcotics in "people you know." If I were to go to the police and tell them this, give them names, locations, all the information I have, I would be aiding them in eradicating something which is defined by our society as illegal and undesirable. But I don't. I am forcing the police to actively search for those people. They don't even have the time and manpower to even care about people who simply sit in their back yard and smoke marijuana, because they are understaffed. With not enough people, not enough time, not enough equipment and very little help from the citizens of this country, they are asked to keep drugs at bay. Parents complain that there are drugs in the schools. Men and women complain that someone is selling drugs in their neighborhood. Even in the days when I was "actively involved" in the "use and sale of illegal narcotics," I did not want to come home to my neighborhood and find drugs being sold. We are asking a great deal of the police and other organizations working within our country, but we are not willing to help them. As such, they have to find ways to help themselves. You may say "then they should leave the drug users alone and concentrate on other criminals," but that requires changing the law. So many illegal acts are paired together in this world, murder and theft, embezzlement and fraud, use and trafficking, that to say that one crime needs to be focused on and another ignored doesn't work. And when someone has done something that gets a policeman or government agent's attention, it's because they actually think there is a threat. You can discuss personal acts of prejudice by an officer somewhere else, because this is a system, not a case study. When a threat is perceived, the least invasive methods are hopefully employed to discover whether or not crimes are being committed. Sometimes these methods are blunt, such as a bust or an arrest and interrogation. Other times they are more subtle, with informants and tapping and record-researching. I simply can't see a way that they can do their job, the job which we require and demand of them as a society, without having to trade some privacy. And, if you are unwilling to trade that privacy (which historically has always been growing in the direction of more privacy being given up, because the ability to hide criminal activities is always increasing), then you simply move to a place where the social contract does not guarantee you that which it cannot supply: namely security. If complicity is a crime (which it is), then most all of us are guilty. Thus, in a more minor but still entirely legal way, we all have forfeited some small portion of our civil rights (those which are guaranteed by the government within the social contract of citizenship).
... You went way off into a certain scenario to describe a very broad set of problems, your example seemingly focusing on the paradox of people demanding privacy rights yet expecting extensive criminal justice, the type of which would require us to "lose" certain rights. I do not think that people inherantly have a problem with giving in certain rights when the crime is applicable to someone else rather than themselves. The problem with your example is that certain members of our soceity have legislated morality which infringes on peoples natural right to their own bodies. This is not a right which is up for debate, or one that can be legislated through various bodies of government. The right to our own persons is inherent in human nature and would fall someone into natural law. The U.S government takes this one step further and actually legislated this into the consitution to prevent the very legislation of morality that was given in your example. However the constitution is not perfect and many attempts have been made to alter this to the benefit of certain subsets of society. The very people that are complaining about the loss of rights are concerned that the imbalance is skewed to something that no longer protects everyone through the course of natural law, but instead seems to benefit the monetary or ideological purposes of someone else. So as your example of drug usage - drug usage was not construed as a problem until propoganda was spread about its (sometimes) unfortunate sideeffects. This disinformation was produced by those in a "moral elite" class that felt they jusifiably had hte right to "save" everyone else. Those rights were then infringed on for the greater good of society even though there was never a true problem to begin with, and if there was some sort of issue the laws created against it served no purpose other than to add gasoline to the fire. Now the balance of rights has been shifted - the "moral" classes have the power and the rest of society does not. There should theoretically be no imbalance in pwoer or rights - yet because of certain legislation and action there is - and this falls under both sides of the political spectrum. Politicians love to take away my social (mostly from the republican side) and economic (mostly from the democratic side) freedoms. It is not enough to argue that because the government has legislated such a contract that I must abide by it because I am the government, and so is every other citizen of this country. If there is no other duty as a citizen it would be to carefully monitor and criticize those in the government that represent us. Without that check in the balance of power, the rights of many shift in favor of others. To be more specific I do not consider the there to be any rights beyond the inherant natural rights - as to your paradox it really does not exist because people do not have the right to be rid of drugs in their neighborhood because it infringes on others rights - their only true right is to their property and livilihood. The rights of the people are written in the constitution - it is what we as a country could mostly agree upon, any actions by individuals that attempt to usurp those rights are inherantly wrong for all of us - and worthy of all of our complaints.
Dont step in line and fall in place in the name of what someone might consider safety and security - the only true safety and security is written for everyone equally, and those that are blind to it do not deserve to live in this country or be its citizen.
I'll respond more later, but for right now I need to explain one point: I think that the freedoms you see as being taken away are important, I just think that they are not rights as such, within the social contract of living in the United States. I think they SHOULD be made rights, by amending the Constitution. Sadly, however, until it becomes an essential part of that document, such things aren't rights granted by the government, and they aren't inherent human rights (especially if you believe that humans once did not have language to express conceptual ideas, and only had vocabulary for tangible objects and actions).
I know youll respond later, but anyway...They are rights and freedoms because they are already granted in the constitution - people simply debate the interpretation of the amendments. They are inherant human rights because of things like language and vocabulary - simply because we did not possess them formerly does not mean we do not possess them now. That is was makes us sentient - the very fact that we have language, can think abstractly and conceptually - its what seperates us from every other living thing. Before I begin ranting again ill wait for your other comment.
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Which brings me to part of my point: I don't believe that we have any more inherent human rights at this moment than we did five hundred years ago. I don't think that technology can create extra human rights. This means that things like that, and things like many of the rights which people say are being taken away, aren't really human rights, and are merely things we've come to see as rights, especially as we live in a society that has so much to give to individual citizens.
One other example:
I don't believe that we have the right to an education. I believe that it is the parents' responsibility to see that a child is taught all that they need to survive and prosper in life. In the case of a national education system, the parents of a nation have chosen to educate their children together, and have given the task of this over to a central authority. They pay taxes for the right (thus granted by the governmental entity which was created BY THEM for that purpose) to send their children to those schools.
Thus that is a right which they have to earn, through a system they chose to submit to. They could always home school.
This, by the way, is one of my problems with illegal immigrants. I do not mind Mexicans entering the US to work, in fact I'd prefer that they did, instead of having factories move to Mexico entirely. But when they send their children to public schools without paying taxes, that is a breach of the system of education as it has been set up. It's not that I don't think their children need schooling, it's just that I think the workers need to pay that part of our taxes which go to schools.
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It's not so much social contract theory. It's more to do with the idea that you're paying for the ability to call someone else, using technology you don't own. If you had signed a contract with the phone company that specifically said that your phone conversations would not be listened to, then I would see your rights as being violated... but they would be contractual rights, granted by the phone company, with the phone company at fault, and not a human right being violated. It's not a social thing, it's a commercial thing.
Yeah, I'm totally with you on the healthcare thing... but I won't start in on welfare, because I might kill somebody.
As to marriage, I'm once again with you. We have given the government the ability to tax us, in order to pay for the services they provide. We have chosen to deligate the authority for overseeing those taxes to our representatives, and if they decide that part of the tax system will be affected by marital status, they also have the ability to define what that is. It's not a social construct or institution, it's a legal term. They can define it however they choose, with or without gay marriages. They could define it as any union between two people with a dog.
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Also, if, in that social contract, you are expecting the police to provide the service of a safer environment, they, in turn, must expect certain things, in return. They can't expect that law-breaking citizens will tell them that they are breaking the law, so they have to seek out the criminals on their own. That being the case, I think that having your home bugged is a far better deal than the methods used by police the world over. With bugging, the police are able to leave you alone if you aren't doing anything illegal. Unless you happen to find the bug and get paranoid, it doesn't really change your lifestyle.
And isn't free speech just the right to say whatever you want to say (within certain limitations, those being that what you say doesn't violate the rights of anyone else)? Why does that imply that you should be able to speak privately?
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As a famous quote (paraphrased since I dont know the exact workding) about world war II goes: We will go and fight this war so that our children can be doctors and lawyers, and so that their children may be artists and writers.
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But when you start talking about rights it gets tricky. There are two types of rights, two of the different definitions of the noun:
One is something that is proper and fitting, and that a child should benefit from the work their parents have done in order to provide for them is proper and fitting. I do not deny that. This is, in a way, inherent in the relationship between a good parent and their child.
The other, however, is something which is a matter of either law or justice. Then you get into the tricky part, because people talk about rights of the first type as if they were rights of the second type. The second type, legal rights, are rights which are contractual (though in most cases it is a social contract and not a signed one when it comes to the government of the nation you live in), and thus are guaranteed by an organization.
In the social contract which one lives under in the United States of America, one has to abide by the laws set forth by the government. In return, there are certain services that are provided to you. Different organizations within the government provide different services, many of which you don't use except in specific circumstances, and the government decides if you have responsibility to those organizations when you aren't in need of their services.
Take welfare. You pay for it when you do not need it. Now, I'm against the system entirely, but as it exists, in order for it to continue to "work," those of us who simply live with the possibility, no matter how small, of one day needing it's service have to pay money in order to maintain the organization's ability to provide that service.
In turn, even when you are not in need of the protection of the government, be it the military, the police or even the Department of Defense (no snide comments, because that's an entirely different debate), they require certain things. The problem is that the things which would most benefit them are not given to them. People do not simply turn criminals over to the authorities. The various organizations which exist to protect from specific harms are required to come up with their own methods for finding and stopping crime. The problem is that the criminals, due to the vast and constantly changing state of technology in today's world and to the fact that they are, by their very nature, willing to live completely outside of the rules of conduct which divide citizens from criminals, cannot be found passively. However, there are so few active methods of tracking criminals that do not affect non-criminals in some at least slightly negative way.
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We are asking a great deal of the police and other organizations working within our country, but we are not willing to help them. As such, they have to find ways to help themselves. You may say "then they should leave the drug users alone and concentrate on other criminals," but that requires changing the law. So many illegal acts are paired together in this world, murder and theft, embezzlement and fraud, use and trafficking, that to say that one crime needs to be focused on and another ignored doesn't work. And when someone has done something that gets a policeman or government agent's attention, it's because they actually think there is a threat. You can discuss personal acts of prejudice by an officer somewhere else, because this is a system, not a case study. When a threat is perceived, the least invasive methods are hopefully employed to discover whether or not crimes are being committed. Sometimes these methods are blunt, such as a bust or an arrest and interrogation. Other times they are more subtle, with informants and tapping and record-researching.
I simply can't see a way that they can do their job, the job which we require and demand of them as a society, without having to trade some privacy. And, if you are unwilling to trade that privacy (which historically has always been growing in the direction of more privacy being given up, because the ability to hide criminal activities is always increasing), then you simply move to a place where the social contract does not guarantee you that which it cannot supply: namely security. If complicity is a crime (which it is), then most all of us are guilty. Thus, in a more minor but still entirely legal way, we all have forfeited some small portion of our civil rights (those which are guaranteed by the government within the social contract of citizenship).
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Dont step in line and fall in place in the name of what someone might consider safety and security - the only true safety and security is written for everyone equally, and those that are blind to it do not deserve to live in this country or be its citizen.
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I think that the freedoms you see as being taken away are important, I just think that they are not rights as such, within the social contract of living in the United States. I think they SHOULD be made rights, by amending the Constitution. Sadly, however, until it becomes an essential part of that document, such things aren't rights granted by the government, and they aren't inherent human rights (especially if you believe that humans once did not have language to express conceptual ideas, and only had vocabulary for tangible objects and actions).
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