I’m sure you’ve helped plenty of children get off the streets. Let me guess: restricting everyone’s rights helps the children—unless it’s Hollywood. They can hire whomever they want.

What will a child do if they are forced to work because the rest of their family is unable to, but they are not allowed to work because some white night fears a Dickensian nightmare? Selling Chiclets to tourists or far worse.

No it wouldn’t.

It’s true. I wasn’t directing it at you.

I do not think so.

You restrict the rights of children to work. What if they want to? Instead they have to sell chiclets on the streets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

It’s a fallacy for a reason.

Why not?

But you don’t restrict the rights of everyone to be alone with children so as to protect children. Isn’t that so?

Still appealing to the populace. Cringe-worthy.

My only point is that restricting someone’s rights is not the same as protecting children. You’re welcome.

No. In order to protect someone they must first exist outside of the imagination.

Yes. Do you believe you’re protecting some potential human, in some potential situation, at some time and place in the future? What does he look like?

I don’t think restricting someone’s rights protects anyone. Protecting a child from being shot involves putting life and limb on the line, or neutralizing a threat. Advocating for policy is advocating for policy.

Of course.

The idea that some men must work for governments in order for rights to be meaningful and useful is nonsense. I can confer a right to you and defend it just as any king or official can.

Clearly the overriding consensus here is to restrict gun rights, to defang the populace, and to turn whatever remnants of social power that remain into state power. Americans ought to look at nations with the most placated and controlled citizenry, turn around, and assume the same position. The more padded the cell, the better the existence. Protect the children from being shot, but gnash teeth if you aren’t allowed to abort them with scissors and vacuums.

We know that the DA, among others, campaigned on getting Trump. Statin’s secret police chief’s infamous quote, “You show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”, is exactly the sort of justice at work here. A possible misdemeanor, well beyond the statute of limitations, speciously elevated to a federal crime; the use of a disgruntled perjurer as a star witness; a politicized DA and Attorney general who both campaigned on getting the man; all of this indicates the failure of the American justice system, particularly in New York. A travesty.

It’s about time. Very interesting. It’s safe to say that everything they cried foul about Trump was a reflection of their own impulses. They are indicting their greatest political opponents on trumped up charges, as if there was no political animus behind it. Trump is now like Navalny, and Biden like Putin. It has all been proven true.

Cool, like the right to life- via not getting shot.

Is that how you protect someone’s right to life, by begging the government to restrict our rights?

Or in other cases, abortion control, the right to life via not being chopped up in a womb and sucked out with a vacuum. All this talk of protecting life suddenly falls on deaf ears when this subject comes up. I don’t believe any of it.

What kind of weapon would you use to protect your children, should the need ever arise? Ballots and petitions? Beg a politician?

Obviously I see it differently. I own property because I purchased it or made it. But then again, I only own the title. The government doesn’t claim to own my land, but it can except use tremendous control over it. I’m not even allowed to collect rain water. The government takes taxes on that property, and should I not give it to them, they take my property. Where I live they take my property, the fruits of my labor, in the form of taxes, at nearly every point of purchase. Sales tax, income tax, property tax, capital gains tax, are all instances of the government taking my property. Rather than protecting my right they outright violate it. Whatever is left over for me is akin to a fief.

Besides, governments have eminent domain. They can take my land at their whim and fancy so long as it suits their interests.

That’s how feudalism works. I get to live on a plot of the lord’s land, pay them a certain percentage of what I myself make and create through my own industry, so that I might find solace in the chance that my government will protect me should war come knocking. No thanks.

Sometimes, in order to protect the rights of an individual constraints are put on the rights of other individuals. If you are a business owner, for example, you cannot hire children to work in a sweatshop.

Restricting my rights to own a gun does not protect the rights of anyone else, for I have not violated anyone’s rights. Because of this, restricting my rights, and violating the rights of all across the board, is unjust and contrary to individual rights.

That is an overly broad, vague, and simplistic generalization, intended to pit the government against the individual. The interests of the state are not necessarily antithetical to the interests of the individual. The example, chosen to stay on topic, is gun control.

Yet the government reserves for itself the right to own weapons that can destroy the whole planet. Where is the gun control then? If this isn’t antithetical to the interests of the individual I don’t know what is.

What this all boils down to is that some people, those who get to don the dress of officialdom and power, get all the rights, while the rest of us get…what, exactly?

They do not protect your rights, and the ongoing attempt to restrict your rights is evidence of this.

I am down for any law that is just and protects the rights of the individual. Laws that protect the state, its own interests, or some other interest group are unjust and do not protect the rights of the individual.

Yes we all know your tired, boring views on majoritarianism and general hatred of democracy in general. Has nothing to do with me.

Maybe you didn’t get the gist but your continuous invoking of democracy is a trite piece of propaganda to disguise your deep-seated authoritarianism. That much is obvious.

An anarchist who whines about his rights. Who do you think will protect your rights?

Certainly not you. Certainly not the government. Neither of us can name one right in the Bill of Rights that has not been violated. So how can you trust that they will protect your rights?

Thanks for the summary.

I do not believe rights are conferred by god or nature, which is absurd. Rights can only be conferred by men. But the idea that only man in his official or government form can confer rights is equally absurd.

We have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds to develop some sort of moral fiber and the results are nothing to be proud of. But since one cannot intervene in someone else’s life all of the time, and since one must have some idea of when and for what reasons one should intervene in another’s life, one must formulate principles on the matter. I prefer natural law and natural right because they take into account human nature and justice.

If I watch a swallow build a nest and lay some eggs I come to understand that he is doing what swallows do. Since it is in his nature to do this for the sake of his survival, and since he is not harming anything else, I afford him the right to build his nest and lay his eggs, and for the same reasons, to defend them if necessary. For these reasons I do not destroy his nest and steal his eggs, and believe he has every right to defend his nest and eggs if I were to do so. It is from these reasons that I would not dull his beak in the off chance he pokes someone’s eye out.

Observations of nature can inform one’s judgement and principles far better than any observations of law or constitution, in my opinion.

No need for sour grapes. What’s your hip political theory called?

Legal positivism is quite medieval. But then again maybe you’re speaking of some other theory, perhaps one arising in the disco era. No wonder.

You make rules for family. Very good. You can govern your own household. Except it doesn’t follow that you or anyone else ought to have the same authority of over people who are not your kin.

But then you sell your own and anyone else’s authority to the next political campaign. In this we get the greatest political theory known to man. “I make a mark next to someone’s name. if I don’t like what they do I put a mark next to someone else’s name in a few years. Something something democracy”. Except it’s the rule of some people over others, what with politicians with constituents in the millions.

Your insistence on controlling people and restricting their rights betrays whatever obsequious obedience you’ll display at the ballot box every other year, and whatever nonsense you speak in the name of democracy. You participate in the charades of the greatest monopolies known to history, and advocate for corporatism of the worst kind. Sorry, man, that’s a hard pass for me.

Exactly, “the people” is in fact not the people, the flesh-and-blood residents of a given jurisdiction. Like the “general good”, it’s some abstract universal found floating in the mind of a collectivist, and rather than apply to all people, it apples to some people.

The constitution still allows slavery and taxation. I do not look at it as any standard-bearer of rights, but nonetheless, the bill of rights says “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”. We do retain the right of yahoos to keep and bear weapons.

Human nature has already taken its course and I’ve long resigned to my fate as someone’s serf. I can only hope that I pass before it self-immolates.

Since people make rules all the time, and since you’re a person, what rules have you made?

So be it. I suppose the one consolation is that history looks kindly on the just, while those who control us live on in a rogues gallery.

To argue that only those in power get to make rules is absurd. No man is good enough to be another’s master

I would.

Of course I oppose any monopoly on violence. Arms races and the control of resources by that monopoly is occurring right now.

And if all those restrictions disappeared tomorrow would you start driving through red lights and murdering your fellows?

I believe rights are naturally founded, derived from human nature, and not the edicts of those in power. I believe I and others have the right to defend our lives from those in power and those who would otherwise threaten it. Guns in particular are a great equalizer in this regard.

Maybe you can, but I cannot abide by controlling people’s lives and letting them control ours. The ease with which you advocate for it only hardens the heart and closes the mind on the matter.

I believe both, that no one’s rights should be restricted and that innocent people do not deserve to die. So any attempt to ameliorate the situation should be fit for both. You believe only one. So any restriction of the former is justified so long as it serves the latter.