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You’re conflating natural rights and legal rights. Just trying shit out is a natural right because nobody can make up a law to prevent that. But people can make

You’re conflating natural rights and legal rights. Just trying shit out is a natural right because nobody can make up a law to prevent that. But people can make up laws to greatly limit your enjoyment of just trying shit out. In this case, they have.

jltsiren 3y ago
It was more about contrasting freedoms and rights. If you believe in a right, you also believe that other people should not be allowed to violate that right. In that sense, rights are always about limiting freedom. There are no rights in the nature. There is only freedom. If you want to make something a right – going to the beach or launching a rocket, for example – you need to convince other people of that. And you need a mechanism for enforcing the right.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Natural rights aren't. There is no high authority in heaven enforcing them - it's just things that feel so right and obvious to everyone, that they can serve as universal common ground. The only hard laws are laws of physics. Those laws say that, ultimately, if I can beat you to death, my wants trump yours. Everything else is built on top of that. "Might makes right" never went away. It just got pushed upwards to nation states with monopoly on violence, which can create conditions that allow its populations to enjoy different rules. It still holds between nation states, which is why everyone keeps an army. The world being mostly at peace in the past decades is a result of a multi-layered Mexican standoff. Nuclear powers are locked in MAD, and everyone else allies themselves with one. So, to answer the original question: > What supernatural being descended on earth and gave governments the supreme right to own the path from earth into space. Nuclear weapons do. Or, in general, superior military strength. Governments are free to regulate whatever they want, however they want. They're limited from by self-preservation from both directions - from the bottom, avoiding a civil war; from the top, avoiding breaking the Mexican standoff.

jltsiren 3y ago

It was more about contrasting freedoms and rights. If you believe in a right, you also believe that other people should not be allowed to violate that right. In that sense, rights are always about limiting freedom. There are no rights in the nature. There is only freedom. If you want to make something a right – going to the beach or launching a rocket, for example – you need to convince other people of that. And you need a mechanism for enforcing the right.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Natural rights aren't. There is no high authority in heaven enforcing them - it's just things that feel so right and obvious to everyone, that they can serve as universal common ground. The only hard laws are laws of physics. Those laws say that, ultimately, if I can beat you to death, my wants trump yours. Everything else is built on top of that. "Might makes right" never went away. It just got pushed upwards to nation states with monopoly on violence, which can create conditions that allow its populations to enjoy different rules. It still holds between nation states, which is why everyone keeps an army. The world being mostly at peace in the past decades is a result of a multi-layered Mexican standoff. Nuclear powers are locked in MAD, and everyone else allies themselves with one. So, to answer the original question: > What supernatural being descended on earth and gave governments the supreme right to own the path from earth into space. Nuclear weapons do. Or, in general, superior military strength. Governments are free to regulate whatever they want, however they want. They're limited from by self-preservation from both directions - from the bottom, avoiding a civil war; from the top, avoiding breaking the Mexican standoff.