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Marx RESPONDS to dblack:
A Critique of Classic liberal principles of free competition...inevitably hindering capitalism, ambivalent ingredients to capitalism:
Grundrisse pg. 31
In other words, if you think we attain our self-realization through free markets and private pursuits, we will be naturally led back to the conditions of enslavement by those to whom capital attracts. As capital accumulates to these individuals, they find freedom and free competition increasingly a threat to capital accumulation. Thus, as Marx says, it becomes a fancy thought to those who have become wealthy, "yesterday's parvenus" although it is not based in reality.
Hence your ideology rests on a fundamental flaw and willful blindness to history and reality. That's why so many people think your ideas are not grounded in reality or maybe it's me signing in as other people making the same claim. Either way, loads!
The rebuttal to your argument here, however, is that in Marx's day, there was no such concept as self governance by the people in existence, nor had there ever been such in the history of the world.
The whole of the Constitution is a concept of a government that will provide the common defense to secure our rights, that will enact sufficient regulation to allow the various states to function as one strong nation, and then will recognize the unalienable right of the people to form themselves into whatever sorts of societies they wished to have and govern themselves.
In such a society, there cannot be prevention of competition, except on a very small scale via social contract, and nobody is able to be opportunistic more than anybody else because the unalienable rights of all are protected and defended. Thus the people themselves are unrestricted in seeking and striving for whatever goals do not infringe on the rights of others.
That is factually inaccurate. The term Democracy is from the ancient Greek where all citizens had a vote to elect the leaders of their city states. The Athenian democracy was even more direct where all citizens voted on the laws themselves.
The Magna Carta written in 1215 is the basis for the Constitution and many of the concepts stem from there. The Constitution itself was written in 1787 and had been in effect for 60 years by the time Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848. Self governance was also in effect in France during most of that period too.
Marx RESPONDS to dblack:
A Critique of Classic liberal principles of free competition...inevitably hindering capitalism, ambivalent ingredients to capitalism:
Grundrisse pg. 31
In other words, if you think we attain our self-realization through free markets and private pursuits, we will be naturally led back to the conditions of enslavement by those to whom capital attracts. As capital accumulates to these individuals, they find freedom and free competition increasingly a threat to capital accumulation. Thus, as Marx says, it becomes a fancy thought to those who have become wealthy, "yesterday's parvenus" although it is not based in reality.
Hence your ideology rests on a fundamental flaw and willful blindness to history and reality. That's why so many people think your ideas are not grounded in reality or maybe it's me signing in as other people making the same claim. Either way, loads!
The rebuttal to your argument here, however, is that in Marx's day, there was no such concept as self governance by the people in existence, nor had there ever been such in the history of the world.
The whole of the Constitution is a concept of a government that will provide the common defense to secure our rights, that will enact sufficient regulation to allow the various states to function as one strong nation, and then will recognize the unalienable right of the people to form themselves into whatever sorts of societies they wished to have and govern themselves.
In such a society, there cannot be prevention of competition, except on a very small scale via social contract, and nobody is able to be opportunistic more than anybody else because the unalienable rights of all are protected and defended. Thus the people themselves are unrestricted in seeking and striving for whatever goals do not infringe on the rights of others.
That is factually inaccurate. The term Democracy is from the ancient Greek where all citizens had a vote to elect the leaders of their city states. The Athenian democracy was even more direct where all citizens voted on the laws themselves.
The Magna Carta written in 1215 is the basis for the Constitution and many of the concepts stem from there. The Constitution itself was written in 1787 and had been in effect for 60 years by the time Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848. Self governance was also in effect in France during most of that period too.
The rebuttal to your argument here, however, is that in Marx's day, there was no such concept as self governance by the people in existence, nor had there ever been such in the history of the world.
The whole of the Constitution is a concept of a government that will provide the common defense to secure our rights, that will enact sufficient regulation to allow the various states to function as one strong nation, and then will recognize the unalienable right of the people to form themselves into whatever sorts of societies they wished to have and govern themselves.
In such a society, there cannot be prevention of competition, except on a very small scale via social contract, and nobody is able to be opportunistic more than anybody else because the unalienable rights of all are protected and defended. Thus the people themselves are unrestricted in seeking and striving for whatever goals do not infringe on the rights of others.
That is factually inaccurate. The term Democracy is from the ancient Greek where all citizens had a vote to elect the leaders of their city states. The Athenian democracy was even more direct where all citizens voted on the laws themselves.
The Magna Carta written in 1215 is the basis for the Constitution and many of the concepts stem from there. The Constitution itself was written in 1787 and had been in effect for 60 years by the time Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848. Self governance was also in effect in France during most of that period too.
Correct, and the Assizes of Henry II before that, all forming the foundation of the Constitution, all acknowledging the fact of inalienable rights, well over six hundred years before the advent of the Founding Document.
People are damned and determined to interpret what things do as a "right".
Yin and yang are simple concepts in a meaningless existence. I like them.
Natural rights do exist.
evidence:
all animals and most plants have the ability and "desire" to protect themselves - self-defense is a natural right. No government gives a lion the right to defend itself against other lions or hyenas invading their territory or against an attack. There is a natural right to defend ourselves and that which we occupy or own. (three rights are covered - the second, fourth and third amendment rights)
All animals and plants express themselves in some way. We have a natural right to express ourselves. This covers the first amendment.
As you can see our natural rights are present in all of the natural world - they apply universally.
Natural rights do exist.
evidence:
all animals and most plants have the ability and "desire" to protect themselves - self-defense is a natural right. No government gives a lion the right to defend itself against other lions or hyenas invading their territory or against an attack. There is a natural right to defend ourselves and that which we occupy or own. (three rights are covered - the second, fourth and third amendment rights)
All animals and plants express themselves in some way. We have a natural right to express ourselves. This covers the first amendment.
As you can see our natural rights are present in all of the natural world - they apply universally.
Indeed. Though in the absence of sentience and moral decision, the innate abilities of self-defense and expression cannot be asserted as rights. This is the nexus at which the relativist fails to apprehend the fact that sentience and moral decision are the innate attributes of a specific category of life in nature. They precede government. The only abstract aspect of them is the manner in which they are translated from the state of nature into the terms of civil government.
This brings us to Quantum's point that abilities are the evidence of rights. I now trust that this is his point: he didn't mean ability in the generic sense abused by animal rights activists, for example, but ability strictly in the sense of human attributes.
I see what Quantum must have been getting at now, and would certainly agree with that.
I withdraw my criticism, for that is the sense in which natural law formally asserts the matter.
Quantum?
Natural rights do exist.
evidence:
all animals and most plants have the ability and "desire" to protect themselves - self-defense is a natural right. No government gives a lion the right to defend itself against other lions or hyenas invading their territory or against an attack. There is a natural right to defend ourselves and that which we occupy or own. (three rights are covered - the second, fourth and third amendment rights)
All animals and plants express themselves in some way. We have a natural right to express ourselves. This covers the first amendment.
As you can see our natural rights are present in all of the natural world - they apply universally.
Indeed. Though in the absence of sentience and moral decision, the innate abilities of self-defense and expression cannot be asserted as rights. This is the nexus at which the relativist fails to apprehend the fact that sentience and moral decision are the innate attributes of a specific category of life in nature. They precede government. The only abstract aspect of them is the manner in which they are translated from the state of nature into the terms of civil government.
This brings us to Quantum's point that abilities are the evidence of rights. I now trust that this is his point: he didn't mean ability in the generic sense abused by animal rights activists, for example, but ability strictly in the sense of human attributes.
I see what Quantum must have been getting at now, and would certainly agree with that.
I withdraw my criticism, for that is the sense in which natural law formally asserts the matter.
Quantum?
Natural rights do exist.
evidence:
all animals and most plants have the ability and "desire" to protect themselves - self-defense is a natural right. No government gives a lion the right to defend itself against other lions or hyenas invading their territory or against an attack. There is a natural right to defend ourselves and that which we occupy or own. (three rights are covered - the second, fourth and third amendment rights)
All animals and plants express themselves in some way. We have a natural right to express ourselves. This covers the first amendment.
As you can see our natural rights are present in all of the natural world - they apply universally.
Indeed. Though in the absence of sentience and moral decision, the innate abilities of self-defense and expression cannot be asserted as rights. This is the nexus at which the relativist fails to apprehend the fact that sentience and moral decision are the innate attributes of a specific category of life in nature. They precede government. The only abstract aspect of them is the manner in which they are translated from the state of nature into the terms of civil government.
This brings us to Quantum's point that abilities are the evidence of rights. I now trust that this is his point: he didn't mean ability in the generic sense abused by animal rights activists, for example, but ability strictly in the sense of human attributes.
I see what Quantum must have been getting at now, and would certainly agree with that.
I withdraw my criticism, for that is the sense in which natural law formally asserts the matter.
Quantum?
Natural rights do exist.
evidence:
all animals and most plants have the ability and "desire" to protect themselves - self-defense is a natural right. No government gives a lion the right to defend itself against other lions or hyenas invading their territory or against an attack. There is a natural right to defend ourselves and that which we occupy or own. (three rights are covered - the second, fourth and third amendment rights)
All animals and plants express themselves in some way. We have a natural right to express ourselves. This covers the first amendment.
As you can see our natural rights are present in all of the natural world - they apply universally.
Indeed. Though in the absence of sentience and moral decision, the innate abilities of self-defense and expression cannot be asserted as rights. This is the nexus at which the relativist fails to apprehend the fact that sentience and moral decision are the innate attributes of a specific category of life in nature. They precede government. The only abstract aspect of them is the manner in which they are translated from the state of nature into the terms of civil government.
This brings us to Quantum's point that abilities are the evidence of rights. I now trust that this is his point: he didn't mean ability in the generic sense abused by animal rights activists, for example, but ability strictly in the sense of human attributes.
I see what Quantum must have been getting at now, and would certainly agree with that.
I withdraw my criticism, for that is the sense in which natural law formally asserts the matter.
Quantum?
My instinct as an abused lion or person is to take what's mine because its been taken from me. So my instinct says if I want life I need food and shelter because it's so cold and I'm so hungry I'm about to die. So I see lights and head towards these nice white folks (do different tones have different rights?) I abduct them and thus earn my life. It is my right to life and I was at death so I choose life instead of giving up my right and dying on the streets.
Was this my right to life?
"No because you invaded someone elses life."
Yeah, so my instinct was to choose life and I have a right to life so the only feasible way I was going to maintain life was to take it with or without force.
Natural rights are rooted in Western notions of civilization as evinced above. That is not to be mistaken for their truth or reality. And while we apparently have the right to exist as long as we have the money to exist, it seems awfully suspiciously anti-human when it comes to poor humans. Why do they not have the right to take what's been taken from them?
Marx RESPONDS to dblack:
A Critique of Classic liberal principles of free competition...inevitably hindering capitalism, ambivalent ingredients to capitalism:
Grundrisse pg. 31Karl Marx said:the absurdity of considering free competition as being the final development of human liberty....The development of what free competition is, is the only rational answer to the deification of it by the middle-class prophets, or its bedevilment by the socialists. If it is said that, within the limits of free competition, individuals by following their pure self-interest realize their soical or rather their general interests, this means merely that they exert pressure upon one another under conditions of capitalist production and that collision between them can only again give rise to the vonditions under which their interaction took place. Moreover, once the illusion that competition is the ostensible absolute form of free individuality disappears, this proves that the conditions of competition i.e. production founded on capital, are already felt and thought of as a barrier, as indeed they already are and will increasingly become so. The assertion that free competition is the final form of the development of productive forces, and thus of human freedom, means only that the domination of the middle class is the end of the world's history--of course quite a pleasant thought for yesterday's parvenus [rich]!
In other words, if you think we attain our self-realization through free markets and private pursuits, we will be naturally led back to the conditions of enslavement by those to whom capital attracts. As capital accumulates to these individuals, they find freedom and free competition increasingly a threat to capital accumulation. Thus, as Marx says, it becomes a fancy thought to those who have become wealthy, "yesterday's parvenus" although it is not based in reality.
Hence your ideology rests on a fundamental flaw and willful blindness to history and reality. That's why so many people think your ideas are not grounded in reality or maybe it's me signing in as other people making the same claim. Either way, loads!
That is factually inaccurate. The term Democracy is from the ancient Greek where all citizens had a vote to elect the leaders of their city states. The Athenian democracy was even more direct where all citizens voted on the laws themselves.
The Magna Carta written in 1215 is the basis for the Constitution and many of the concepts stem from there. The Constitution itself was written in 1787 and had been in effect for 60 years by the time Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848. Self governance was also in effect in France during most of that period too.
Correct, and the Assizes of Henry II before that, all forming the foundation of the Constitution, all acknowledging the fact of inalienable rights, well over six hundred years before the advent of the Founding Document.
Declaring that inalienable rights exist does not make it so. It is a concept that was invented basically to contest the divine right of kings. We have no such rights.
Natural rights do exist.
evidence:
all animals and most plants have the ability and "desire" to protect themselves - self-defense is a natural right. No government gives a lion the right to defend itself against other lions or hyenas invading their territory or against an attack. There is a natural right to defend ourselves and that which we occupy or own. (three rights are covered - the second, fourth and third amendment rights)
All animals and plants express themselves in some way. We have a natural right to express ourselves. This covers the first amendment.
As you can see our natural rights are present in all of the natural world - they apply universally.
Indeed. Though in the absence of sentience and moral decision, the innate abilities of self-defense and expression cannot be asserted as rights. This is the nexus at which the relativist fails to apprehend the fact that sentience and moral decision are the innate attributes of a specific category of life in nature. They precede government. The only abstract aspect of them is the manner in which they are translated from the state of nature into the terms of civil government.
This brings us to Quantum's point that abilities are the evidence of rights. I now trust that this is his point: he didn't mean ability in the generic sense abused by animal rights activists, for example, but ability strictly in the sense of human attributes.
I see what Quantum must have been getting at now, and would certainly agree with that.
I withdraw my criticism, for that is the sense in which natural law formally asserts the matter.
Quantum?
Society abhors any self expression that defies the consensus. And our government is quite busy censoring it.
Correct, and the Assizes of Henry II before that, all forming the foundation of the Constitution, all acknowledging the fact of inalienable rights, well over six hundred years before the advent of the Founding Document.
Declaring that inalienable rights exist does not make it so. It is a concept that was invented basically to contest the divine right of kings. We have no such rights.
Yet, somehow, declaring that they don't actually does make it so, despite the fact that multiple posters have actually provided evidence that natural rights exist, and not a single poster who disagrees has anything but bald assertion.
We all saw how well Marx's philosophy worked, yet you are still using him to try to prove that a system that actually outlasted it is an abject failure.
Do you also believe in alchemy?
Yeah. That's only like the 100th time that claim has been made on this thread. Heard that. Dealt with that. Got the T-shirt.
You're making a bald assertion that is actually contingent upon a relativistic-materialistic, metaphysical presupposition.
What none of you on this thread have ever done is provide a rational justification for that claim. There it is again suspended in midair.
What is the argument which actually demonstrates that the realities of human conduct and interaction are not governed by any absolute, universal imperatives at some level of being or another?
Here's an easier one for you: how does one distinguish the formal difference between civil liberties and civil rights? Note: the question is not what they are, respectively, though one must begin with the what, but how one distinguishes the former from the latter.
There's no argument really.
You got that right, in the sense that you didn't provide any argument, really, let alone answer the only question that would demonstrate that all rights are nothing more than social constructs, assuming your answer is coherently rational and backed by some discernible empirical data--either historical or biological.
Once again: What is the argument which actually demonstrates that the realities of human conduct and interaction are not governed by any absolute, universal imperatives at some level of being or another?
Further Proof Regarding the Facts of Natural Law
False. That's you guys and you guys alone all day long. You just think that's true because you've never gotten beyond the red herrings of relativism, and you think the strawmen arguments proffered by others on this thread are the actual stuff of natural law.
We're not talking about the social constructs of political science: civil rights or civil liberties. The latter, by the way, are those readily and universally recognized innate rights as translated from nature into the political conventions of civil government.
How does one discern the difference between the civil liberties predicated on innate rights and the civil rights or privileges of the collective under the rule of law in the state of civil government?
Gee wiz. If what you claim were true that would be a monumental task of the inscrutable kind. But fortunately for you and me, your claim is bunk, so it's a relatively simple matter.
We are talking about innate rights, hence, those that pertain life, to the fundamentals of human action and to property, not the theoretical delegations or arrangements of the institutional powers of political science relative to the state of civil government.
Stop it. You know better. The inherent, universal traits of humanity are self-evident: thought, volition and the related material exigencies and aspirations of self-preservation. We're not vegetables. We're sentient beings. Once again, with regard to these elemental facts of human physiology and consciousness, the elementary innate rights of man pertain to life, to the fundamentals of human action and to property. They are concrete, not esoteric. Your claim is risible. Absurd. Ridiculous. Once again, see above.
You're walking down the street, and someone jumps you out of nowhere and beats on your ass. . . .
Every human being on this planet knows that you have but three alternative courses of action: fight, flee or submit. Every human being on this planet knows that what is being threatened/violated is (1) life, (2) the fundamentals of human action and/or (3) property. Every human being on this planet knows that the violation of these things is wrong, because every human being on this planet knows that the violation of these things constitutes existential transgressions they would not have perpetrated on them. Every regime that exists or has ever existed, including authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, recognize three categories of criminality and punish those who engage in them: murder, the various forms of criminal subjugation, and theft, which correlate with the innate rights of life, liberty and property, which pertain to life, to the fundamentals of human action and to property.
These three things and their respective aspects are universally apprehended.
Say it isn't so again now, and know that you're talking like a fool.
RABBI, G.T., ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?
Even despotic psychopaths like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others apprehend this truth as such always justify their atrocities by first declaring some group or another to be something less than human, renegade citizens or non-citizens (the timeless caveats), who may, therefore, be murdered, enslaved or reeducated. There's always a pretext relative to these three things.
Totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, or institutions akin to such regimes within societies that are otherwise generally freer have always existed. All persons under the sway of the former are decidedly less free, but these three categories of rights and their respective aspects obviously persist and strain against the chains that bind the overtly "subversive" expressions of them therein.
These basic, innate functions of sentient beings have always been known to man, and have been referred to, variously, as the prerogatives of man, the dignities of man or the rights of man, not to be confused with any of the politically abstract accommodations made for them by government, at whatever level, or with any of the additional political privileges afforded by government. They are centuries old, predating the modern expression of them from the Enlightenment in terms of natural law proper, and their historical actuality sure as hell predates the retarded, post-modern, relativistic construct that there exists no universally absolute moral principles or innate rights.
Tell that to the man with the business end of loaded gun pointed at your head should you be caught with your hand in the cookie jar, and see how far your talk about his right to stop you is not real prior to the abstractions of social constructs. Bang, bang.
Your sloganeering is not a material or ontological assertion, let alone an argument, against the fact of these things; you're quibbling over semantics!
Call them prerogatives, dignities, rights, inherent inclinations, the fundamental exigencies and expressions of sentient beings: they clearly are not and have never been the stuff of mere social constructs, niceties, accommodations, or the civil rights afforded directly by government.
You can't even coherently state (1) what you're implying and you're utterly oblivious to (2) the inherent contradiction of your claim.
First, you're implying the same goofy idea as that asserted by gnarlylove: that no rights can be inalienable because all rights, whether they be innate or not, can be infringed. The term inalienable as it pertains to rights doesn't carry any such connotation and never has.
They are inalienable because, as opposed to abstract political rights, they inherently and benignly adhere to the nature of the creature as incontrovertibly demonstrated in the above and, therefore, the violation of them constitutes a transgression that is subject to being put down by deadly force, legitimately and justly so. In the state of nature their violation is an act of war, and in the state of civil government their violation is a crime.
Hence, enslavement and torture in the absence of due provocation are existential transgressions of inalienable rights: acts of war or crimes.
And the Founders knew from the beginning that slavery was a peculiar and destabilizing institution, as it has always been throughout history in the face of the imperatives of human nature, and hoped it could be peacefully and incrementally abolished before tensions escalated to an armed civil war.
Oops.
Second, if, according to you, there are no absolutes of any kind, except the absolute that there are no absolutes, and, therefore, according you, the absolute that there are no absolutes is necessarily false, inherently contradictory and self-negating. . . . Oh, never mind.
*crickets chirping*
But let's pretend for a moment that your contention does not absolutely violate the laws of logic--the law of identity, the law of contradiction and the law of excluded middle--and note the absurdity of a relativist talking about slavery and torture as if these things weren't merely the allocation of human resources and sport.
*crickets chirping*
The point will fly over the heads of some.
Governments are human constructs set up to protect human rights.
That's right. You can't maintain a rationally consistent argument in defense of an absurdity, as you cannot evade the innate and universal imperatives of the rational forms and logical categories of human consciousness and moral decision, can you?
They're natural, innate, absolute . . . inescapable.
Congratulations. You've finally awoken from your fantasy, for whether you realize or not, you just conceded that the materially innate exigencies and aspirations of humanity, including rights, precede the abstract constructs of civil government.
But wait a minute!
But even that construct doesn't work out all the time. If rightwere "natural"? That simply wouldn't be the case.
Back to fantasyland. You just contradicted yourself in the space of four short sentences.
HEY, RABBI, G.T., ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? DO YOU GET THE RELEVANCE OF MY PREVIOUS DECONSTRUCTION OF RELATIVISM, WHICH YOU POOH-POOHED, NOW?
The only ones dabbling in abstractions and esoteric claptrap are those going on about social constructs in the face of real-world scenarios and consequences.
BTW, as a matter of preempting any more nonsense about my posts being paragraphs of empty rhetoric, let's get something straight: any braying jackass can write slogans parading as arguments. Thoroughly deconstructing such crap from first principles and examples routinely takes more space. While the basic facts of the matter before us are self-evident, the reasons they are self-evident in the face of the convoluted machinations of the falsehoods that would obscure them are more complex.
The problem is... everyone has a different definition of natural rights
That is factually inaccurate. The term Democracy is from the ancient Greek where all citizens had a vote to elect the leaders of their city states. The Athenian democracy was even more direct where all citizens voted on the laws themselves.
The Magna Carta written in 1215 is the basis for the Constitution and many of the concepts stem from there. The Constitution itself was written in 1787 and had been in effect for 60 years by the time Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848. Self governance was also in effect in France during most of that period too.
Correct, and the Assizes of Henry II before that, all forming the foundation of the Constitution, all acknowledging the fact of inalienable rights, well over six hundred years before the advent of the Founding Document.
Declaring that inalienable rights exist does not make it so. It is a concept that was invented basically to contest the divine right of kings. We have no such rights.
Correct, and the Assizes of Henry II before that, all forming the foundation of the Constitution, all acknowledging the fact of inalienable rights, well over six hundred years before the advent of the Founding Document.
Declaring that inalienable rights exist does not make it so. It is a concept that was invented basically to contest the divine right of kings. We have no such rights.
Saying they don't exist does not make it any more so.
Declaring that inalienable rights exist does not make it so. It is a concept that was invented basically to contest the divine right of kings. We have no such rights.
Saying they don't exist does not make it any more so.
I'm still waiting for an example of an inalienable right---do you have one ?
Saying they don't exist does not make it any more so.
I'm still waiting for an example of an inalienable right---do you have one ?
I'll give you three.
Life, liberty and the pursiute of happiness.
