$0.02 from peanut gallery...

equal rights belong exclusively to individuals. all rights rest upon the ability to say "no" and have that respected without reprisal. otherwise consent is impossible. fundamentally, to respect the word no is the first mutual agreement which must precede all others.

since an individual cannot delegate a right they do not possess, a group can no more rightly supersede or abrogate the rights of the individual (save to protect another from such a violation), lest the foundation of society rest upon coercion rather than liberty.

following that there's the question of tension between private ownership vs perceived public need. now if you put our society in view of that lens, you'll start to see how things go off the rails. in the typical western democratic models we try to make the end justify the means by extorting our way to philanthropy, euphemizing it as taxation.

yet to correct course would start as simply as replacing taxation with voluntary crowd-funding. there would be some growing pains at first, but I'm sure we could adjust without major calamity. anyway I think that would make the powers that be a lot less prone to corruption and waste, if people simply had the ability to say "no" and choose a different provider. if people understood that saying "no" is the fundamental basis of their rights.

@toiletpaper @freemo @LouisIngenthron

By this reasoning - if I don't like the speed limit, I can just say "no" and ignore it?

When we live in civilization, we give up the ability to do whatever we want; it is the price you pay to participate. I can't just drive 90 mph on a residential street without breaking the law and expecting to be punished for it - and that's good. Anyone who thinks "rights" means "I can do whatever I want in all circumstances without cpersonal consequences" is using a very non-standard meaning and is being disingenuous. That's not rights - it's anarchy.

@Biggles

Sure you could just say no and ignore it... its just, there are consequences :)

@toiletpaper @LouisIngenthron

the question you're asking has largely to do with public vs private property rights. as long as people agree to it, and they are not exercising rights they do not possess, then it's fair game. this kind of issue can be negotiated successfully outside a formal governmental framework. the late nobel prize winning economist elinor ostrom wrote extensively about it in her book "governing the commons" where she discusses hundreds of case studies both ancient and modern, where communities have had to mediate the use of public resources (eg. irrigation, forestry, aquifer, fishery, etc) without succumbing to the tragedy of the commons, or other anti-social conduct. she outlines 8 features which make or break such frameworks of agreement, one of which is to safeguard against the state's destructive meddling or outright shutting it down.

https://wtf.tw/ref/ostrom_1990.pdf

a historical aside: many of the rights you take for granted were won by anarchists at various periods of history, including your contemporary use of computing devices and the internet (incl. fedi). democracy itself was equated with anarchy by plato, and it was anarchists who pioneered many variants of democratic process still in use today by field testing them in their workers collectives.

https://libcom.org/files/LeonardIKrimerman-LewisPerry_PatternsOfAnarchyACollectionOfWritingsOnTheAnarchistTradition_1966_594pp.pdf
http://www.ditext.com/woodcock/anarch.html
https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/67479457/the-internets-first-anarchist
https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

trivia: the circle around the A in the Ⓐ symbol represents the O in the word Order. Ⓐnarchism is Ⓐrder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnarchyIsChaos

@toiletpaper @freemo @LouisIngenthron

I'm entirely unconvinced that most human beings, without some sort of compulsory framework, will do the right thing - simply because history, especially recent history, has given us so many spectacular counter examples. Argue philosophy all you want, but when it comes down to it unless we stop them, we repeatedly screw over others for profit or convenience or sheer bloody-mindedness. As they say - every consumer protection law was written in blood.

@Biggles @toiletpaper @freemo @LouisIngenthron I don't know that is both universal and true throughout human history. I think it becomes a lot easier when we live in larger and larger social groups. Then you can ignore the humanity of the people you are scamming, because you never have to see the consequences. Few people aggressively and voluntarily screw over their family members, for example. A huge part of humans' evolutionary fitness, with our soft hides, lack of claws, and totally helpless offspring, is our cooperativeness. Without it, our brains could never have grown so large in the first place.

@freemo @toiletpaper @Adrasteianix @LouisIngenthron

It may well not have been true at the village level in the distant past when everyone you ever interacted with lived in your monkey sphere. But - I don't live 800 years in the past. Which is good, I like medicine and cheeseburgers, and I like the fact that people I don't know and have never met can mostly be trusted for both of those because we don't just let people do anything they want. The minimal loss of freedom seems an excellent trade-off for the safety and prosperity we gain.

what you said the other day reminded me of the saying "my right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins". I found this q&a which traces the history.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/15/liberty-fist-nose/

in essence I feel this simple notion forms the underlying precept for devising things like speed limits, and so on. rights are mutual agreements/consent to avoid violent action and needless harm. when rights are breached, that becomes a far more likely outcome. so there is mutual self-interest in agreeing to abide by the obligations/taboos implied by our rights. if you read that elinor ostrom link I pasted she distills a lot of this down to basic points, albeit in an economic rather than human rights context (though it's a dense read unless you like econ+game theory). not that these things are without their challenges. one of the case studies in that book is the aquifers in california, which are in the news again recently for the same issues she described.

@Biggles @freemo @Adrasteianix @LouisIngenthron

#rhetorical #poll

Do you agree this new tax law?

Everyone whose username begins with "L" will be taxed at 100% of wealth and earnings and the proceeds of the tax will be evenly distributed to everyone in this thread.

@Pat @Biggles @freemo @Adrasteianix Any reasonable person would understand why that's an unjust law and vote against it, even if doing so would be against their own best interests.

The goal, then, is for a society to consistently produce and select new generations who are more reasonable than selfish.

Obviously, that tends to work better with larger sample sizes and lower margins of error, but we'll see if this poll can end up demonstrating my point anyway...

@LouisIngenthron

All I heard was free money, Im in!!! Besides fuck those L-named haters, what have tthey ever done for me! They only look out for their own interests.

@Pat @Biggles @Adrasteianix

@Adrasteianix @Pat @freemo @LouisIngenthron

It's also worth noting that democracy doesn't exist in a vacuum - indeed, one of the first things the US founding fathers did was the Bill of Rights, precisely to set expectations and prevent abuses.

The original assertion was overly simplistic - in reality, democracy and rights and laws have feedback loops and influence each other in both directions. There is no absolute hierarchy - nor I think would we really want one.

@LouisIngenthron

It's a rhetorical poll. I'm not actually expecting responses. The point is, that putting democracy ahead of rights exposes people to dogpiling. Assuming that people will always vote against their own personal self-interest and choose what's best for the common good, is to expect people to be angels. If all people were angels, no government would be needed (paraphrasing Madison).

Governments need to be designed to withstand the worst of human nature, because at times people can get really evil. (Here in the US, we just had a few people in the CDC kill over a million Americans, for greed, power or who knows why).

>"The goal, then, is for a society to consistently produce and select new generations who are more reasonable than selfish."

A worthy goal, but I've never seen that happen in the real world. Natural selection in politics supports the opposite -- the most ruthless gain the power.

@Biggles @freemo @Adrasteianix

@Pat @LouisIngenthron @Biggles @Adrasteianix

A tyramny of the majority as the founding fathers put it.

@toiletpaper That's nice in theory, but in practice, the world just isn't that simple.

How do you say "no" to someone polluting the river you depend on to live 500 miles upstream?

There are a lot of benefits to individualism; I'll give you that. But at some point, this rock will get crowded enough that we need to start thinking as a collective species.