BrickHorn

No. I have the right to free speech. That is a right that exists, because it is enforceable by the relevant authority that applies to me. Russian citizens do not. The point you make actually shows that free speech is not a natural right, because its existence is jurisdiction-dependent.

Okay. To be clear: what you’re talking about is not a “right;” it’s a moral principle. A right is a very specific thing. It must be enforceable and recognized by the relevant authority (whatever form that may take). And to address your substantive point: I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the moral principles you listed are universally respected. For each, there are examples of time periods and societies in which that was not true. For some, it may not even be true today in our own society (e.g., the right to live is not recognized in all cases, as there are many, many exceptions).

Thanks for being the first participant in this thread to attempt to list the natural rights. Kudos. But now let’s examine the claim. Many of the alleged natural rights you listed have not been recognized or respected as rights at all in various cultures and periods throughout history. For example, human sacrifice (a common facet of life most recently in Mesoamerica) rejects living as a right. Even in the modern era, we deny the alleged “right” to life during wartime. There is no recourse for killing enemy combatants or inadvertently killing civilians in a conflict. Many societies throughout history have castrated slaves, reflecting a rejection of the supposed natural right to procreate. So what makes any of these things a natural right? I would argue it’s clear that they have at many points not been rights at all; that is, there was no authority protecting them or punishing their infringement. You might argue that murder and castration were always immoral. But even granting that premise for sake of argument, these moral principles do not amount to a right because there was no enforcement recourse. The idea of a “natural right” is defensible, at most, as a shorthand for certain moral principles that seem obvious to most people. But even then, their inviolability quickly crumbles on close inspection. What you end up with is a series of nuanced, context-dependent guidelines. Our shared moral instincts developed through evolutionary processes and are almost never as simple and idealistic as we would like to believe. The world is gray. If you wish it were not and invoking the magical little elves of naturalism help you sleep at night, so be it. But you’ll forever be fighting paradoxes of your own making. It’s more useful to recognize human behavior for what it is and understand morality and legal regimes as tools for guiding that behavior in the most positive direction possible.

No. I’m asking you what, specifically, are these natural rights that totally exist but nobody knows about or respects and we probably wouldn’t know them because they live in Canada.

If natural rights exist but are not practiced in modern society, what are they? And how are they in any sense a “right” if not enforceable? Comprehensive list, please.

…and takes measures to enforce them or punish their violation. Many posters on this thread muddle the distinction between morality (guidelines for how humans should behave) and rights (rules defining how humans are compelled, by agreement or authority, to behave).

Ancient Naturalist: I’m being persecuted for exercising my natural rights! Modern Naturalist: Which rights? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Ancient Naturalist: No, not those natural rights.

Sky man or no, it’s magical thinking. I’m kind of shocked you of all posters are promoting it. And it’s far easier to declare child rape a “natural right” than it is to justify it on utilitarian grounds. How do you think the societies where such odious practices are legal justify it? They claim it as a right, naturally or divinely derived. I’m not sure why yall seem to believe natural rights are some sort of solution to evil. Maybe it’s because the ones you focus on are generally good. But you have to ignore all the horrible, immoral shit that societies have justified on the basis of some natural right claim, like slavery, rape, genocide, the divine right of moron offspring of kings to do whatever the fuck they want, etc. You can argue now that those who believed such practices were natural rights were wrong, but such claims don’t do anything for those victimized by the exercise of such rights for millennia.

That is equally arbitrary.

He’s saying we must pretend there’s a ghost in the machine for the sake of controlling overgrown children incapable of behaving themselves without fearing the judgment of a bearded sky god. Which is idiotic, because (a) reality isn’t defined by the delusions of the lowest common denominator; and (b) naturalism is far more malleable to the nefarious aims of christofascism than is positivism. Pretending natural rights exist and are handed down to us from on high only fuels abuse by theocratic assholes. One can claim any moral edict as a command from God. It’s far more productive to discuss rights as merely a means to achieve positive outcomes for society.

Natural rights do not exist. Absent the state or another form of governance that agrees to enforce them, rights are just moral propositions. You can argue that you should have the rights to do x, y, and z. Unless the rest of us agree to or are compelled to behave in such a way that you may do x, y, or z (or to punish those who prevent you from doing x, y, or x), however, you have no such rights.

+rep for the rare correct use of “couldn’t care less.” Although I considered deducting points for the rare misspelling of “etc.”

To be fair, the fucking losers advocating that angle are just reporting the honest feedback they receive from their sex partners.

I generally focus on the music and don’t pay attention to lyrics. My wife is the opposite. It makes it nearly impossible for either of us to help the other identify a song.

Fify

There are a lot more than that, when you consider that Bitcoin mines are just big batteries that constantly burn energy but don’t store any for later use. Dammit. @Captainant beat me to it.

I ditched the GOP a bit sooner than you did, but am ashamed to admit that I voted for Dole in 96 and W in 2000. It was mostly momentum from growing up in a conservative / GOP loyalist family with an extreme pro-life bent. The Iraq War and the Republican-backed christofascist war on science pushed me firmly away from the right. Everything since only confirms that I made the correct choice, and that I should have made it much earlier.

So the idea is to bombard Mars with asteroids until it has sufficient gravity? Mars has 11% the mass of Earth. You’d have to crash 8 Marses worth of asteroids into it to create an Earth-sized rocky planet. What does that do to the planet? And is the result just a pile of loose rubble or do the collisions result in seismic and volcanic activity of the type necessary to create a stable crust? And we need to make sure there’s enough water in those asteroids to create oceans. Which would in any event be freshwater for the next few billion years or so. And none of that addresses the absence of a magnetic field (creating problems in both the short and long term) and the difference in sunlight intensity. So… what’s easier: building thousands of rockets to propel asteroids into Mars, resulting — at some point in the far future — in at best a shitty imitation of Earth that won’t last long without the protection of a magnetosphere, or shutting down fossil fuel use here on Earth for a short period while we ramp up renewables? Terraforming is fun to think about as an engineering project, but that exercise reveals just how silly the Mars bugout plan is.

Yep, that issue is massive as well. It’s why the idea that we’ll escape climate change by colonizing Mars is so dumb. How do you terraform a planet with virtually no water, no magnetic field, less sunlight, and only a fraction of Earth’s gravity?

Facts like this put into perspective the practicality of humans colonizing another habitable planet. In the time it took for all of its designers to die, Voyager traveled 0.0025 light years from Earth. The nearest potentially habitable planet is 4 light years away - or 1,600x as far as Voyager has gotten so far. Even allowing for continued acceleration, you’re still looking at a journey that would last thousands of years and hundreds of generations - just to get to a potentially viable planet. Unless we discover some new physics that allows for near light speed travel, it will never make sense to send human beings on a planet colonizing mission.

Oh shit. Knowledge Fight covered that episode and debated whether that was actually Elon or just an imitator. Alex sure as shit acted like it was Elon, falling all over himself to kiss “Adrian’s” ass. It was as weird as you’d expect. Jones is such a pathetic worm.

No, we understood it. We just don’t agree that collective punishment is justifiable.

Like “war is hell,” ”these two religions have always hated each other” is a thought-terminating cliche. It’s useless, both for understanding the reasons for a given conflict and for identifying solutions.

There are different kinds of war and not all combatants are on equal moral footing. Just saying “War is hell, shit happens” doesn’t address the issue. It’s a thought-terminating cliche at best.