4 ms·

God forbid anyone should have their time wasted. Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights and should be treated accordingly.

dctoedt 4y ago
> Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights 1. Recall the old chestnut that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. 2. There ARE no "natural rights" — what we call "rights" is simply the visiting of adverse consequences upon "bad" actors by others who object to their actions. The Russians who rape and murder innocents in occupied Ukraine are unlikely to have such consequences visited upon them, so we can't really say that their victims had "natural rights."
- EarlKing 4y ago
  1. My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose. 2. "There are no natural rights"-- Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. Rape is evil regardless of whether or not someone gets caught and prosecuted... or are you insinuating that it's OK as long as nobody ever finds out?
  - dctoedt 4y ago
    > My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose. If you spread lies at scale, with the purpose of getting voters to elect officials who will fuck up others' lives, then that's a distinction without a difference.
    - EarlKing 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - dctoedt 4y ago
        Ah, I see you've emerged from cover.
  - dctoedt 4y ago
    > Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
    - EarlKing 4y ago
      ...and that act remained wrong despite it not being stopped. 1 + 1 != 3 just because you want it to.
      - dctoedt 4y ago
        1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right. Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers. It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.
        EarlKing 4y ago
        > 1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right. You're arguing over the meaning of symbols, whereas I'm talking about the underlying concepts. The map is not the territory. Right and wrong are not matters of opinion... unless you really do think that it's ok to rape someone as long as you're never caught.

dctoedt 4y ago

> Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights 1. Recall the old chestnut that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. 2. There ARE no "natural rights" — what we call "rights" is simply the visiting of adverse consequences upon "bad" actors by others who object to their actions. The Russians who rape and murder innocents in occupied Ukraine are unlikely to have such consequences visited upon them, so we can't really say that their victims had "natural rights."

EarlKing 4y ago
1. My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose. 2. "There are no natural rights"-- Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. Rape is evil regardless of whether or not someone gets caught and prosecuted... or are you insinuating that it's OK as long as nobody ever finds out?
- dctoedt 4y ago
  > My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose. If you spread lies at scale, with the purpose of getting voters to elect officials who will fuck up others' lives, then that's a distinction without a difference.
  - EarlKing 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - dctoedt 4y ago
      Ah, I see you've emerged from cover.
- dctoedt 4y ago
  > Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
  - EarlKing 4y ago
    ...and that act remained wrong despite it not being stopped. 1 + 1 != 3 just because you want it to.
    - dctoedt 4y ago
      1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right. Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers. It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.
      - EarlKing 4y ago
        > 1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right. You're arguing over the meaning of symbols, whereas I'm talking about the underlying concepts. The map is not the territory. Right and wrong are not matters of opinion... unless you really do think that it's ok to rape someone as long as you're never caught.