6 ms·

I agree with you on the legal doctrine piece, but most in the US (myself included) would say that the US Constitution doesn't grant anybody any rights. It codif

by pc86 5y ago

I agree with you on the legal doctrine piece, but most in the US (myself included) would say that the US Constitution doesn't grant anybody any rights. It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence. Every person has the right to speak their mind, to defend themselves, to not incriminate themselves, etc. etc. with all the caveats and potential nullifications that accompany those rights. The fact that some countries may violate those inherent rights is irrelevant, and the fact that some of those countries may be common law is equally irrelevant. It's possible to believe both that Liverpool and the surrounding area is better off without this man free, but that the UK as a whole is worse off for their frequent violation of rights with regard to those in the US Bill of Rights.

pjc50 5y ago
The position that the US constitution applies to the UK is a pretty crazy piece of legal maximalism in the first place, but there is plenty of US caselaw that it doesn't apply equally to non-US nationals even within the US. https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=facpub https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a... https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4170926 https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4170926 (which reminds me of the US failure to ratify certain international conventions under which it provides weaker rights)
- pc86 5y ago
  I'm not meaning to imply that the USC applies to anyone other than US citizens from a legal standpoint. Not only am I not a lawyer, but I'm meaning to draw a distinction between legal rights and human rights in this context. I'm saying that the rights codified in the USC are inalienable rights. The US government isn't granting the freedom of speech, and it can't take it away. The right exists because you're a human being. The fact that a country doesn't recognize it as a right doesn't change its status.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Yes, that's the usual human rights rationale but it's practically a theological one - that the rights have always existed and exist even if you can't see or action them. Interestingly ECHR doesn't bother to define what a right is or where they come from, leaving the implicit position being simple legal realism that the rights exist because this document says they do and the parties agreed to it. https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Archives_1950_Convention_ENG.pdf https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Archives_1950_Convention_...
    - mnw21cam 5y ago
      The other point of course is that even if you recognise a pre-government system of human rights, it is reasonable to apply exceptions. For example, the right to free speech is reasonably curtailed when the person speaking is ordering a lackey to commit murder. Most countries recognise some level of intrinsic human rights, but they all handle these exceptions slightly differently. It's not that the UK is dastardly in violating this person's right to privacy because it doesn't think the rights are worth upholding. It's just that the UK has formulated a particular set of reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy, and has reasoning behind each of them. The US has a different set of formulated reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy that much of Europe is pretty horrified about. Both sides being horrified at the borderline areas of the other is not surprising.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      > Interestingly ECHR doesn't bother to define what a right is or where they come from, leaving the implicit position being simple legal realism that the rights exist because this document says they do and the parties agreed to it. That’s a strange take. It is basically a rewriting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. It even says so right there in the preamble. And it’s a law, part of an international treaty, not a history book. So where the origins of these rights are is beside the point and a legal description is not really surprising.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    I think a lot of people in the US would say that rights like freedom of speech ought to be available to everyone, everywhere in the world. But if you ask them whether 4th-8th amendment rights should extend to detainees at Guantanamo Bay; or whether separation of church and state should be demanded of our Israeli friends; or whether the Queen should be deposed as a tyrant; you would find a lot less support.
wfleming 5y ago
> but most in the US (myself included) would say that the US Constitution doesn't grant anybody any rights. It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence As an American I find this a very surprising interpretation, and I doubt anybody in my close social circle would agree with it either.
- logicchains 5y ago
  It's literally what the constitution itself says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The vast majority of Americans are not Silicon Valley technocrats who reject any kind of deontological ethics.
  - sjy 5y ago
    That’s the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution came 11 years later (and did not, even then, include the Bill of Rights).
    - benjohnson 5y ago
      As I understand it, the Bill of Rights was considered redundant by many people - and some thought that enumerating the rights line by line was dangerously limiting them.
      - FridayoLeary 5y ago
        Not sure where, but i heard once that the constitution was actually only intended to be a temporary document until a more reasonable draft could be hammered out. Even its authors didn't imagine it would still be relevant 200 years later.
        sumtechguy 5y ago
        The first one was more temporary while they figured out what they had just did. (things like how do we pay the bills) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation That is why the one we are under is basically the 2nd revision of that.
Spooky23 5y ago
That's all good for the origin story but obviously lacks impact in reality. The "bug" in the system is that when you talk about inalienable rights inherent by the grace of god or the creator is that god doesn't write shit down. The canonical texts have been edited by various entities for thousand of years in some cases. So you're dependent on the interpretation of others. Usually people's understanding of God's will (assuming agreement on the deity) is influenced by their mortgage. I'm sure the high and mighty philosophy was confusing to any of the 1M enslaved people who were literate. But then again, the fiscal success of the plantation was dependent on those humans being classified by law as more intelligent cattle.
- refurb 5y ago
  You’re interpreting it way too literally. The Declaration of Independence isn’t saying “god said X”, it’s declaring that everyone had these rights, not based on the govt giving it to them, but that they always had them and the US govt is simply recognizing that. There is no religious document one needs to refer back to. I think it’s actually a genius way of describing rights. It’s the same way one might say that slavery ended not because the govt decided to give slaves rights (the government doesn’t have that power), but rather that they always had them and the govt simply stopped denying their rights.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    > I think it’s actually a genius way of describing rights. In context, it absolutely is. Remember that many of the key constitutional framers were believers in deism, and believed in god in the context of a creator, but not as an omnipresent supernatural being. Outside of that context, things get difficult. Looking beyond the slavery example, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was governed in the early years of the republic as compared to New York or Pennsylvania. It demonstrates the differences in how context as defined by religion matters.
simias 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you arguing that you think that the UK police and/or justice system tacitly enforce the US Constitution because they think it's a good idea or merely that you think that the world would be a better place if all of humanity adhered to said constitution? The former is preposterous, the latter is your opinion but it's frankly irrelevant in this discussion.
Mauricebranagh 5y ago
In the US (and associated territories) I think you mean.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
> but most in the US (myself included) would say that the US Constitution doesn't grant anybody any rights. It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence And many outside the USA would disagree with your position that a 200 year old document, written in part by slave owners, is the sole source of truth of our inalienable rights. I for one disagree with the concept of immutable, codified constitutions entirely. I grew up in New Zealand, a country with no codified constitution, and yet somehow a country with a far better track record in human rights than the USA.
- adventured 5y ago
  > And many outside the USA would disagree with your position that a 200 year old document, written in part by slave owners, is the sole source of truth of our inalienable rights. Their disagreement also is meaningless, fortunately. Whether the documents were written in part by Martians or slave owners doesn't by itself alter the words on the documents, as such rationally what is solely to be judged is what was written, not how people feel about some of the contributors. If the world went by the standard you're floating, the last several thousand years of history and all successful political systems of human liberty have to be necessarily obliterated, including New Zealand's entire political system and system of law, which is inherited from a thus poisoned history involving European slavery and conquest. The US, as with most of Latin America, inherited enormous European slavery and has spent its entire existence dealing with the fact of that history and its intense consequences. What has New Zealand confronted that compares to that? Nothing remotely close (and yes I'm familiar with the history of New Zealand). > and yet somehow a country with a far better track record in human rights than the USA. The benefits of being a tiny, largely irrelevant westernized country formed merely a century ago and long after slavery was outlawed in the West. New Zealand's existence has been an exceptionally easy and sheltered one compared to most every other nation, and good for them. What responsibilities globally does New Zealand have? Practically none. It's free to not matter, in the best way possible. It doesn't have to make hard decisions that risk altering the world. It's like a cute little trinket country, lots of preaching and little responsibility. It never has to step inbetween two warring parties going at it in a civil war and decide which side to support, who is right and who is wrong (North Korea attacking South Korea, North Vietnam attacking South Vietnam), or choose not to get involved at all and have that similarly be judged by history just the same as a superpower capable of intervening (and arguably with a moral responsibility to do so in some cases). It doesn't have to decide if it's rational to launch a war to stop a genocide of Muslims in Europe (Kosovo). It doesn't have to decide whether to protect Ukraine against an invading Russia. It doesn't have to decide if it's worth going to war with China to try to save democratic, peaceful Taiwan. It doesn't have to make a decision about maintaining or not maintaining a global superpower military (which comes with severe, inevitable moral consequences whatever direction you choose to go with that). It never has to make any globally consequential decisions what-so-ever, decisions that can remake the planet; it can be a very nice, easy place to be, the life of a sheltered, small population island that rides on the prosperity and protection of other larger successful nations. Dropping context around the birth & existence of New Zealand and its particulars, is convenient and makes your premise very unrealistic. The US was born into a context of European sin and had no choice in the matter. Make any other decisions around the founding documents at the time and you don't get a US to begin with (as demonstrated by the civil war that it took to smash slavery in the southern states a century later). Which simultaneously doesn't excuse any mistakes the US has made since then, however context always matters, and New Zealand has had a trivially easy existence by comparison. There isn't a single nation of global importance without some terrible history behind it and there is a reason for that (it's impossible in actuality; only in theory is it not).
webmobdev 5y ago
It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence ... The fact that some countries may violate those inherent rights is irrelevant Ok, so what is your opinion on the trial and detention of various foreign "terrorists" in the USA who are / were in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base military prison? If we go by the very US laws you believe apply to every human being in the world, that implies the US government tortured, denied due process and illegally detained and treated many foreign citizens differently because they were not American citizens.
EdTsft 5y ago
It's interesting how the US has such a different cultural view of rights than other English speaking commonwealth countries that you'd expect to be culturally similar. I can't speak for other countries but as a Canadian I view the idea of "inalienable" or "god-given" rights as preposterous. A right is a promise a government makes to a people. I have a much more expansive right to free speech than someone in North Korea does, that's just an objective reality since the North Korean government does not make the promise of free speech to their people. I have no right to be granted employment if I cannot find it myself, but that right has existed for others in various places and times. You can say that people should have certain rights, but to me it's wrong as a statement of fact to say that they already have them. This view of rights also makes it easy to say that we should have the right to healthcare, or food and water, or housing. You don't have to debate about whether those are "inalienable human rights" to decide that it would be better for our government to make those promises to our citizens. More of an aside, it is weird to me that you would include the right to not self-incriminate among the set of inalienable rights. That one seems like a much more arbitrary detail of your justice system than some more obvious right like access to food and clean water.

by pc86 5y ago

pjc50 5y ago

The position that the US constitution applies to the UK is a pretty crazy piece of legal maximalism in the first place, but there is plenty of US caselaw that it doesn't apply equally to non-US nationals even within the US. https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=facpub https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a... https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4170926 https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4170926 (which reminds me of the US failure to ratify certain international conventions under which it provides weaker rights)

pc86 5y ago
I'm not meaning to imply that the USC applies to anyone other than US citizens from a legal standpoint. Not only am I not a lawyer, but I'm meaning to draw a distinction between legal rights and human rights in this context. I'm saying that the rights codified in the USC are inalienable rights. The US government isn't granting the freedom of speech, and it can't take it away. The right exists because you're a human being. The fact that a country doesn't recognize it as a right doesn't change its status.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Yes, that's the usual human rights rationale but it's practically a theological one - that the rights have always existed and exist even if you can't see or action them. Interestingly ECHR doesn't bother to define what a right is or where they come from, leaving the implicit position being simple legal realism that the rights exist because this document says they do and the parties agreed to it. https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Archives_1950_Convention_ENG.pdf https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Archives_1950_Convention_...
  - mnw21cam 5y ago
    The other point of course is that even if you recognise a pre-government system of human rights, it is reasonable to apply exceptions. For example, the right to free speech is reasonably curtailed when the person speaking is ordering a lackey to commit murder. Most countries recognise some level of intrinsic human rights, but they all handle these exceptions slightly differently. It's not that the UK is dastardly in violating this person's right to privacy because it doesn't think the rights are worth upholding. It's just that the UK has formulated a particular set of reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy, and has reasoning behind each of them. The US has a different set of formulated reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy that much of Europe is pretty horrified about. Both sides being horrified at the borderline areas of the other is not surprising.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > Interestingly ECHR doesn't bother to define what a right is or where they come from, leaving the implicit position being simple legal realism that the rights exist because this document says they do and the parties agreed to it. That’s a strange take. It is basically a rewriting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. It even says so right there in the preamble. And it’s a law, part of an international treaty, not a history book. So where the origins of these rights are is beside the point and a legal description is not really surprising.
- michaelt 5y ago
  I think a lot of people in the US would say that rights like freedom of speech ought to be available to everyone, everywhere in the world. But if you ask them whether 4th-8th amendment rights should extend to detainees at Guantanamo Bay; or whether separation of church and state should be demanded of our Israeli friends; or whether the Queen should be deposed as a tyrant; you would find a lot less support.

wfleming 5y ago

> but most in the US (myself included) would say that the US Constitution doesn't grant anybody any rights. It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence As an American I find this a very surprising interpretation, and I doubt anybody in my close social circle would agree with it either.

logicchains 5y ago
It's literally what the constitution itself says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The vast majority of Americans are not Silicon Valley technocrats who reject any kind of deontological ethics.
- sjy 5y ago
  That’s the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution came 11 years later (and did not, even then, include the Bill of Rights).
  - benjohnson 5y ago
    As I understand it, the Bill of Rights was considered redundant by many people - and some thought that enumerating the rights line by line was dangerously limiting them.
    - FridayoLeary 5y ago
      Not sure where, but i heard once that the constitution was actually only intended to be a temporary document until a more reasonable draft could be hammered out. Even its authors didn't imagine it would still be relevant 200 years later.
      - sumtechguy 5y ago
        The first one was more temporary while they figured out what they had just did. (things like how do we pay the bills) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation That is why the one we are under is basically the 2nd revision of that.

Spooky23 5y ago

That's all good for the origin story but obviously lacks impact in reality. The "bug" in the system is that when you talk about inalienable rights inherent by the grace of god or the creator is that god doesn't write shit down. The canonical texts have been edited by various entities for thousand of years in some cases. So you're dependent on the interpretation of others. Usually people's understanding of God's will (assuming agreement on the deity) is influenced by their mortgage. I'm sure the high and mighty philosophy was confusing to any of the 1M enslaved people who were literate. But then again, the fiscal success of the plantation was dependent on those humans being classified by law as more intelligent cattle.

refurb 5y ago
You’re interpreting it way too literally. The Declaration of Independence isn’t saying “god said X”, it’s declaring that everyone had these rights, not based on the govt giving it to them, but that they always had them and the US govt is simply recognizing that. There is no religious document one needs to refer back to. I think it’s actually a genius way of describing rights. It’s the same way one might say that slavery ended not because the govt decided to give slaves rights (the government doesn’t have that power), but rather that they always had them and the govt simply stopped denying their rights.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  > I think it’s actually a genius way of describing rights. In context, it absolutely is. Remember that many of the key constitutional framers were believers in deism, and believed in god in the context of a creator, but not as an omnipresent supernatural being. Outside of that context, things get difficult. Looking beyond the slavery example, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was governed in the early years of the republic as compared to New York or Pennsylvania. It demonstrates the differences in how context as defined by religion matters.

simias 5y ago

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you arguing that you think that the UK police and/or justice system tacitly enforce the US Constitution because they think it's a good idea or merely that you think that the world would be a better place if all of humanity adhered to said constitution? The former is preposterous, the latter is your opinion but it's frankly irrelevant in this discussion.

Mauricebranagh 5y ago

In the US (and associated territories) I think you mean.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

> but most in the US (myself included) would say that the US Constitution doesn't grant anybody any rights. It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence And many outside the USA would disagree with your position that a 200 year old document, written in part by slave owners, is the sole source of truth of our inalienable rights. I for one disagree with the concept of immutable, codified constitutions entirely. I grew up in New Zealand, a country with no codified constitution, and yet somehow a country with a far better track record in human rights than the USA.

adventured 5y ago
> And many outside the USA would disagree with your position that a 200 year old document, written in part by slave owners, is the sole source of truth of our inalienable rights. Their disagreement also is meaningless, fortunately. Whether the documents were written in part by Martians or slave owners doesn't by itself alter the words on the documents, as such rationally what is solely to be judged is what was written, not how people feel about some of the contributors. If the world went by the standard you're floating, the last several thousand years of history and all successful political systems of human liberty have to be necessarily obliterated, including New Zealand's entire political system and system of law, which is inherited from a thus poisoned history involving European slavery and conquest. The US, as with most of Latin America, inherited enormous European slavery and has spent its entire existence dealing with the fact of that history and its intense consequences. What has New Zealand confronted that compares to that? Nothing remotely close (and yes I'm familiar with the history of New Zealand). > and yet somehow a country with a far better track record in human rights than the USA. The benefits of being a tiny, largely irrelevant westernized country formed merely a century ago and long after slavery was outlawed in the West. New Zealand's existence has been an exceptionally easy and sheltered one compared to most every other nation, and good for them. What responsibilities globally does New Zealand have? Practically none. It's free to not matter, in the best way possible. It doesn't have to make hard decisions that risk altering the world. It's like a cute little trinket country, lots of preaching and little responsibility. It never has to step inbetween two warring parties going at it in a civil war and decide which side to support, who is right and who is wrong (North Korea attacking South Korea, North Vietnam attacking South Vietnam), or choose not to get involved at all and have that similarly be judged by history just the same as a superpower capable of intervening (and arguably with a moral responsibility to do so in some cases). It doesn't have to decide if it's rational to launch a war to stop a genocide of Muslims in Europe (Kosovo). It doesn't have to decide whether to protect Ukraine against an invading Russia. It doesn't have to decide if it's worth going to war with China to try to save democratic, peaceful Taiwan. It doesn't have to make a decision about maintaining or not maintaining a global superpower military (which comes with severe, inevitable moral consequences whatever direction you choose to go with that). It never has to make any globally consequential decisions what-so-ever, decisions that can remake the planet; it can be a very nice, easy place to be, the life of a sheltered, small population island that rides on the prosperity and protection of other larger successful nations. Dropping context around the birth & existence of New Zealand and its particulars, is convenient and makes your premise very unrealistic. The US was born into a context of European sin and had no choice in the matter. Make any other decisions around the founding documents at the time and you don't get a US to begin with (as demonstrated by the civil war that it took to smash slavery in the southern states a century later). Which simultaneously doesn't excuse any mistakes the US has made since then, however context always matters, and New Zealand has had a trivially easy existence by comparison. There isn't a single nation of global importance without some terrible history behind it and there is a reason for that (it's impossible in actuality; only in theory is it not).

webmobdev 5y ago

It codified inalienable rights that exist for all people merely by virtue of their existence ... The fact that some countries may violate those inherent rights is irrelevant Ok, so what is your opinion on the trial and detention of various foreign "terrorists" in the USA who are / were in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base military prison? If we go by the very US laws you believe apply to every human being in the world, that implies the US government tortured, denied due process and illegally detained and treated many foreign citizens differently because they were not American citizens.

EdTsft 5y ago

It's interesting how the US has such a different cultural view of rights than other English speaking commonwealth countries that you'd expect to be culturally similar. I can't speak for other countries but as a Canadian I view the idea of "inalienable" or "god-given" rights as preposterous. A right is a promise a government makes to a people. I have a much more expansive right to free speech than someone in North Korea does, that's just an objective reality since the North Korean government does not make the promise of free speech to their people. I have no right to be granted employment if I cannot find it myself, but that right has existed for others in various places and times. You can say that people should have certain rights, but to me it's wrong as a statement of fact to say that they already have them. This view of rights also makes it easy to say that we should have the right to healthcare, or food and water, or housing. You don't have to debate about whether those are "inalienable human rights" to decide that it would be better for our government to make those promises to our citizens. More of an aside, it is weird to me that you would include the right to not self-incriminate among the set of inalienable rights. That one seems like a much more arbitrary detail of your justice system than some more obvious right like access to food and clean water.