Comment by themafia
14 hours ago
> a fundamental human right
No. It's not. Governments are not natural. So you have no "fundamental" rights here.
> and obligation
No. It's not.
> It is something that you should do as casually as you would voting
I would say voting is _not_ something you should do casually.
> something you do from time to time when the moment demands it.
Then you should expect some consequences in your life. If you actually want to avoid those then put your casual demeanor down and get serious. Otherwise there's a decent chance you will make things worse and do nothing to solve your original problem.
> See also: https://enwp.org/Chilling_effect
We all know what a chilling effect is. You have no right to communicate on signal. This does not apply.
> No. It's not. Governments are not natural. So you have no "fundamental" rights here.
You could make the same moot point about all societal laws. Fundamental rights are determined by the constitution, the UN declaration of human rights, as well as any other local charters.
Rights are granted by God, the Constitution merely acknowledges them. If you don’t believe in God, or think human hierarchies determine rights, then they aren’t really rights anymore. They are privileges.
Barring physical limitations, what you can and can't do is ultimately determined by what the society you are by and large a part of deems to be acceptable behaviour.
Government rules and social norms can change over time, it ultimately doesn't matter what you feel is "right" or what some law says is "right", it's really about what you can get away with.
A large part of what you can get away with is determined about whether or not you will ultimately be penalized for your actions (possibly through violence), and laws can keep people aligned on what is or isn't going to be accepted and when people deemed to be acting in a socially unacceptable way are likely to be penalized in some form.
While "rights" may be somewhat philosophical, they can have very real physical "weight" behind them in the form of other people "enforcing" them.
And finally, in case you are mistakenly under the impression that I think it's okay for anyone to do anything they want so long as they can get away with it, I don't, but that discussion drifts into the territory of morality and ethics which, while related, are nevertheless different and very large topics of discussion in themselves.
Which god grants these rights? Krishna? Elohim? Muhammad? Jesus? Buddha? Allah? Ahura? Yahweh? The flying spaghetti monster?
Please provide real proof to such a claim.
And if it is indeed God who grants rights, why are such rights not universal to all of God's creations, and instead, only granted to white rural Americans when it is convenient to them?
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If you believe rights are what God and the Constitution grant, then they're meaningless. Some piece of paper has no real–world relevance. Cops shooting people in the face has real–world relevance.
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God doesn't have a typewriter, as far as I know. When he gets one I hope he clears up which 99.9% of human religions are heretical and which 0.01% are divine law, that would be really helpful.
In the meantime, rights are not granted by anyone. They are a contract between the governed and those that govern. Breaking that contract is the sort of thing that doesn't end up working out well for the governing class.
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Governments are natural; nature abhors a vacuum.
Governments which at least pay lip service to the premise of respecting people's rights are another matter entirely.