On Rights
Sven Gelbhaar
12:51 PM 11/28/2018
With the amount of laws and statutes being drafted and enacted every year,
perhaps it’s time we as a society focus on rights, which the laws etc are
slowly erroding.
There are Natural Rights and then there are Legal Rights. Natural rights are
derived from either god, gods, and/or nature. These typically encompass what
we otherwise take for granted, like the right not to be killed; the right to
life. Mentionable examples also include the right of free speech, but these
vary based upon your creed, nation, and so on.
Legal Rights, on the contrary, are man-made — it is claimed — and consist of
such liberties as the right to vote. These rights can be forfeited, such as
when a felony is committed. Strangely enough, here in the US one of the
inalieable rights, the right to possess firearms, gets stripped away from its
felons. Strange, huh?
I maintain that actual rights cannot be forfeited. This includes both
categories. Yet when I joined the army as a medic, I was stripped of my
so-called inalieable — natural — rights. The right to life (I could be
executed for desertion, for example, according to the UCMJ), the right of
free speech (I could be ordered to shut up), etc. Rights that can be taken
away are not really rights.
The same happens overseas to drinky girls, largely found in the human
trafficking market (if I can call it that). These women are promised opulent
futures overseas as professional singers, actresses, etc. Instead they are
turned into prostitutes whose debt to their captives increases with each and
every passing day, meaning they don’t have ANY rights until they, or some
lucky guy, buys out their contracts. When this doesn’t occur, the poor drinky
girls live a short life of indentured servitude.
I maintain that there is a further dichotomy of rights: government vs social
rights. The government can enforce its laws on its citizens (at least as far
as the so-called legal rights are concerned), but in this day and age
corporations are becoming a ruling body as well. The agora, the marketplace
of ideas, is becoming increasingly corporate-facilitated. Things like
chatrooms, forums, websites themselves, are all either hosted by corporations,
or are routed and mediated by the same. These corporations are in a position
to censor and forge all manner of communications, and have ennumerate exactly
what sort of communication is censored. This is usually outlined in something
called the End User Agreements which nobody really reads, but is held accountable
to throughout their entire online experience. There are, currently, no such
thing as social rights — rights of the “end user.” This is a Bad Thing ™!
Currently there exist software platforms which are encrypted (so your ISP doesn’t
know what to censor, etc), but they are usually associated with criminality and
are frowned upon by your average respectable, tax paying citizen. Many countries
are starting to crack down on the HOW side of the phenomena, so you don’t and
can’t enforce your government rights as social rights. Add to this the PATRIOT
Act, DMCA, etc, and you have a recipe for a dystopian disaster of a society
forming and manifesting.
Clearly something must be done, but what can we do? Please leave your solutions
and ideas in the comments. As always, I hope you’ve learned something. Have a
good one.