A marginalized group does not receive human rights, they are stripped of them. The removal of your birthrights should be violently opposed as soon as possible.
I don't think I believe in natural rights.
Our so-called natural right to free speech doesn't give me the right to scream at a hungry bear and not face consequences.
A marginal group does not receive human rights, but neither are they born with them and then have them stripped away. Rather, they gain rights through struggle. Rights are not natural, every single one was fought for and won.
It's ok, I hereby declare it is a natural right to face the consequences of your actions.
That just gets silly.
Going to prison for reading communist literature is just me facing the consequences of my actions. Getting put in a ~~concentration~~ conversation therapy camp for being trans is just the consequences of my actions.
I mean, life is as life is. Would you stop talking on the street if society decides that is a crime, or if that means you'll be discriminated against? Some people might, but you can't expect everyone to do it.
It's all a big dance and societal rules fluctuate depending on who's dancing. You just gotta dare live life (preferably in a good way).
I think you just conveniently defined the concept of “rights” out of existence
No, it's in there. The "rights" are part of a number of societal rules which depend on the "dance" (of life). In this case, the fighting for said rights and communicating that they exist are part of the "dance".
The rest of it I was describing life, because consequences matter where I live at least. And since it seemed "natural rights" were bound only by the consequences you are willing to take, then they are the same as life itself, which I thought was pretty funny.
Okay, but then they aren't rights. They're just things that we like and agree to protect.
Which only supports my point - natural rights aren't real.
They aren't real "rights", but they are real. You just defined them.
I don't mean to be hard headed. I feel like I agree with you since the beginning on the idea of it. I'm just stuck on the "isn't real" part of it.
Because I can very easily say "rights" aren't real as well. It's just pixels on a screen. :)
So when I say that "natural rights" aren't real, I'm saying that they don't really come from nature. They come from us, because nature was the first threat to our rights.
Yes, you're right, the rights we call "natural" exist in some form, because rights exist. I am not disputing the concept of rights or whether they exist at all. A right is just a fundamental building block of society; it is a First Principle that can be used to derive essential freedoms and justice within society.
My overall point is "natural rights" don't exist because there's not a good way to distinguish them from other rights. It's just ideology. All rights are unnatural because all rights are human social technologies. Rights don't come from god or nature or the inherent goodness of the human spirit, they come from human struggles.
Rights are not natural, every single one was fought for and won.
Umm wasn't there something called primitive communism? I assume they lived in peace without "rights" written on a piece of paper
Those rights weren't written, but even the right to live was fought for and won by those primitive hunter/gatherers in collective struggle against nature itself. Primitive communism was how humans protected human rights from nature before we dominated it.
Today rights are mostly threatened by other humans, but nature was the enemy of human rights once upon a time.
But the fight against nature is 100% natural? The predatory animal and humans dont try to "outdo" one another because of money(this motivates people to oppress others)?
Well literally everything is natural, the supernatural doesn't exist. :V
If the term "natural" is to mean anything at all, it must be "distinct from human choices." Dying to a predator is natural because it's something that happens to humans. The primitive commune making weapons to protect themselves from predators is not natural, that's human struggle against nature. Nature didn't give us natural weapons like claws or fangs or venom, every weapon we have we have to make ourselves. Our right to not be eaten was hard fought and won through countless deaths and through human ingenuity.
but once the struggle to survive is gone. There is no longer any money and people have plenty of food. Everyone has their materials need met plus luxuries. Why would people fight?
Even after we have abolished private property and wage labor, nature will keep creating new threats to our rights that we have to struggle against. Perhaps in some far future under FALGSC we can surpass nature and the eternal struggle for our rights will finally be won, but how could you call the rights we artificially constructed for ourselves "natural"? We only gained those rights by defeating nature!
Ok but there must have been a time where people lived in peace. Then the farmers made the concept of money in the world. The word natural is extremely misleading.
People lived in peace with other people much of the time, but we never lived in peace with nature itself. Drought, flood, fire, predators, disease, infection, and many many other natural threats to our human rights have always existed. Furthermore, natural scarcity meant that even other people could become a threat - people from a different gens/tribe could decide that it's better if the other gens/tribe dies than if everyone eats a little less to make the food last longer. Nature was humanity's first enemy, before we divided up into class society and started to war with each other.
I will say "natural" is misleading, because humans are natural too. That's why I said in order for "natural" to mean anything at all then it must be distinct from human choices. If we include humans into nature, then natural rights don't mean anything because everything is natural including human oppression.
oppression people is an action(a thought such as making the other village the enemy put into action) while not oppressing people is nothing(natural).
Animal intelligence and its products and human intelligence and its products are fundamentally the same. If beaver dam is natural then Three Gorges Dam is also natural. Difference is only in degree of sophistication.
Animal intelligence and its products and human intelligence and its products are fundamentally the same.
This may be true from the "outside" -- i.e., from the perspective of some hypothetical non-human observer -- but what it doesn't consider, I think, is the subject-object distinction so important to historical progress. Humanity experiences itself most purely as subject (intelligible) and the non-human worldmost purely as object (alien and unintelligible). Since humanity begins in bondage to external nature, the original traumatic experience is the collective discovery that subject is in fact, and from a certain view that may be considered more "correct," also object, and this with regard to the brute, unintelligible forces of external nature. Historical progress is humanity asserting and maximizing its subjectivity by control over the external world. Thus, dialectically, a real distinction between humanity and nature develops. Nature is that which cannot be known (by humanity) as subject, and over which humanity is struggling to assert control; humanity is that which can be known as subject, which itself struggles, and which is experienced as struggling. The precise boundary between the natural and the human is discovered and created within the conflict itself.
So a bear choosing to eat me isn't natural?
If we say "okay, bears are natural so anything they choose to do is natural" then you have a problem because humans are natural too.
That's why I made the distinction between humans and nature. Everything humans do is unnatural, including when we choose to do nothing at all.
What do you mean by choosing. Thats sounds like a choice? something that can be debated in the head with words?
Yes, anything that can be debated internally with words or even with feelings.
The only human behavior I think that can be called natural is truly thoughtless or automatic action. Natural breathing is when you breathe without thinking about it, unnatural breathing is when you become conscious of your own breath and start thinking about it. And it really does feel unnatural! I'm sure you're manually breathing now too, and I'm sure you'd agree it's quite different from natural breathing.
It's you who did this to me but that "control" came from outside my head is not powerful enough for me to oppress others. my motivation to oppress others would come from food/money
I don't think motivation matters. You can oppress others thoughtlessly by complete accident.
what does that have to do with removing the rights of a certain type of people. What you said sounds like just one person oppressing one person
A group of people can, in fact, thoughtlessly oppress a certain type of people through their thoughtless collective action.
I would say that in "full communism" that would not really exist. similar to my idea of primitive communism
I agree! But we can hardly call that natural. That's a carefully cultivated world and society that ensures fair and equal distribution to everyone according to their need - something that has never existed. Even under primitive communism the gens/tribe might be motivated to oppress outsiders because nature itself imposes scarcity or disease or disaster on them.
In order to ensure all rights for all people, we must also conquer nature. It just doesn't make sense to give credit to nature for our rights, when we have always had to fight against nature to have the right to live.
I'm basically saying "human nature" is really good and its 99% changed due to external reasons. That was this whole conversation :P
I agree! However, human nature can be changed due to natural external reasons as well. That complicates things.
Nature must be defeated >:)
OK but what is this motivation that changes that?
We are confusing the word nature because of "human nature" and nature such as the world outside the head.
No? i don't think with words in my head if I should oppress a certain type of people? I just naturally dont do it
Okay, if someone calls me a slur and tells me to kill myself, I definitely have to choose to not take away their right to free speech.
why would someone do that. whats the motivation?
Why does that matter?
honestly i dont know why you even said that yourself but whatever
The concept of money was put into the food. But before that people respected each other "naturally". until those scumbags farmers put the concept of money in the "world" ---outside the head
"food" is the first "money". Those who controlled the food had the power(the farmers themselves). they started to remove the rights(oppressing people) because they wanted more power. I assume they probably wanted power because of the woman. You know how "these people" are.
The rise of agriculture/property and the historical defeat of the female sex go hand-in-hand.
The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State is essential proletarian feminist reading.
Again, you've got to be careful here, because historical and dialectical materialism makes this tricky. The pure idealist position -- not saying you're advocating it, but it's certainly easy to fall into -- is that of Rosseau and his ilk: under primitive communism, humanity lived an idyllic life, and then property and the agricultural revolution entered and started us off on a long train of opression and conflict within the species. There is truth to this, but isn't the whole story. As every new mode of production brings with it an increase in human power over nature, it also brings an expansion in concrete "rights," because humanity can now better defend itself against external nature. Thus the great slave civilizations of the ancient world were actually an improvement on hunter-gatherer society, and feudalism was an advance over slavery, since the average medieval peasant lived a better life than the average Roman slave, and the average Roman slave was better off than the average tribesman under primitive communism (if only in terms of life expectancy and being able to preserve his subjectivity in the face of hostile nature). The long view is that humanity moves from primitive communism to advanced, technological communism, with everything in between a neccesary transitional stage as humanity pauses and asserts its control over the external world. But what we need to be careful of is applying a moral valuation to any point in the transition. The level of social development can never be higher than the level of economic development, and at any point in history, humanity basically tends to the most equitable arrangement possible under the current development of productive forces.
Truly the bear's biggest flaw. They just don't have that sigma grindset.
So there's a proper, Marxist way to understand "natural rights," but you need to be careful here, because generally, it's a term used by Lockeans and other "classical liberals." Rights exist socially, because what is characteristically human is a social phenonomenon, rooted in humanity's ability to collectively transform the world around us: as Marx puts it, "man is a species being," and the humanity comes to know itself by production. Liberalism makes rights abstract and inhering solely in the atomized individual (himself a kind of abstraction, since there is no human being who does not exist and reproduce his nature via participation in some kind of collective), which ultimately means that rights can be debated and curtailed (or expanded). The concrete cannot be easily changed, but the fully abstract can. Thus liberalism is, in effect, a giant con game. It claims to make "human rights" unassailable by rooting them in the individual, but in the process makes them such that they can be defined out of existence.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
In the context of the meme, those "inalienable rights" were only for people like those who wrote those words, land owning white cis males. That is how rights are interpreted within US law. It's the right to deny rights to others.
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