APTYP said:
You don't argue with the insane, the zealots, or Welsh the Loony Old Man. How many sane americans do you know who think that the best thing for America to become is a benevolent police state?
ATPYP- If all you are going to go for the flame fest, insult post with little content, post elsewhere.
Frankly, you’ve been doing this too much here and I am tired of it. Chill out, think about it, and come back in a week if you want to post here. Temp ban.
You can feel free to call me a Nazi. I don't mind. I just don't have the time to waste with your bullshit.
alec said:
Plato was the first to make it into a crime. A crime against the state (of all things). But most old cultures and many other philosophers didn't see it as a crime whatsoever. They saw it as a decent and often as an honorable way to take leave of this life if you couldn't cope with it anymore because of grief, poverty, loss and so on.
Yes, that’s true. But that was also Greek society and Greek culture- which emphasized honor as central virtue would make suicide more acceptable. Only recently has suicide been linked to despondency, and a mental illness.
Whether one should have the right to kill oneself or not is a valid question. But for the past few hundred years, suicide has been seen as a crime. A silly crime, but there it is. The state could commit you to an institution if you tried it and failed. No civil right to suicide.
SuAside said:
i wont comment on the civil liberty thingy as i find it entirely irrelevant, but i'll say this: …..
obviously, it's harmful... just as harmful as any other legal drug...
…..
don't you have liquor stores? during the time when drinking alcohol was prohibited in the US, had Canada become a shithole just because there you could buy alcohol? what harmful effect would there be in selling cannabis?
Ok, Suaside- much of your comments deal with whether it’s fair to make pot illegal and alcohol legal- or which is worse.
Personally I agree with you. Grass should be legalized, it should be produced and monitored under regulations for purity of content, and it should be taxed. In terms of harmful affects it is, in my opinion, less harmful than alcohol and probably just as harmful as would be unregulated tobacco.
But that’s not the point. That goes back to the two wrongs don’t make a right argument. Is grass harmful- yes- or so many experts would have us believe. Sander might say that’s all bullshit, but the experts would counter that position. I will assume it does and still think it should be legal.
Does that make it a civil right? No.
It used to be that people had a right to drink at 18 in the US. Now they are supposed to wait till 21. At one point there was no right to drink – drinking was illegal. It used to be that you could smoke anywhere, now you can’t in confined public spaces. Those liberties were constrained because they create no constitutional challenges- there was no civil right to smoke or drink.
It is not a civil right to take substances that have a harmful affect on your body. If the government fails to regulate some substances because of political pressure (and there would be huge pressure against alcohol or tobacco) than it won’t. But that comes down to the political bargaining between state and society.
We might have a liberty to have a drink, or smoke a cigar, and in some countries smoke a joint, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a civil right, but rather a liberty.
You also make a comparison between alcohol and Canada and the US. It’s a good analogy- Canadian Club Whiskey- came from Canada. Much of the alcohol that came into the US came from Canada and significant capital was spent to try to stop the spread. That trade funded much of the mob violence of major cities- Capone got a lot of his money through speakeasies and booze. Lots of bad booze got sold as homegrown moonshine, people got poisoned by some types of alcohol, criminal organizations sprang up around the trade and even in rural areas. SO yes, it had problem.
Would a lot of this be removed if grass was made legal- yes. That’s one reason I support legalizing it.
But is smoking or trading in marijuana a civil right?
(1) There is no unqualified civil right to utilize substances that are harmful to oneself or which can cause harm to a society through it’s use.
(2) There is no civil right in the trade of substances that are deemed to be harmful.
Like it or not, most people thing marijuana is harmful.
Ok, civil rights-
http://search.eb.com/ebi/article?eu=295500&query=civil right&ct=
Noteworthy- there were no civil rights until you have the beginnings of democracy. Why? Because democracy means that the government is constrained from using its’ coercive or repressive power (under the color of law) to deny you privileges.
According to Black’s Law Dictionary- Civil Rights- or Civil Liberties- are those rights guaranteed and protected by Constitution (feedom of speech, press, from discrimination). Body of law dealing with liberties shorn of excesses which invade the rights of others. They are constraints on government.
If you open a civil liberty to smoke grass- why not heroin, cocaine, angel dust, crack. If the person can do anything harmful they wish to- when does the line end? Making anthrax in your basement?
So Sander- the freedom to act is not fundamental. The freedom to act in ways that are not harmful to others is more acceptable, but even that is not fundamental. If you were to say the freedom to act is fundamental than so is the freedom to put up child porn on the internet, the freedom to own automatic weapons, the freedom to maintain hazardous substances.
That’s the problem- the notion of a freedom to act is too broad to be practical. Civil rights need to have boundary conditions- like the freedom of speech doesn’t include the right to slander, the freedom to worship doesn’t include human sacrifices, the freedom against discrimination doesn’t mean that people are not allowed to think racist thoughts.
Note that even the freedom to think is not unlimited and without boundary conditions. If you think certain thoughts you can be thrown in an insane asylum.
Note that I was never arguing that historically speaking civil liberties were natural. I was always talking about the natural state of affairs in modern day societies.
Fair enough, modern democracy allowed us this return of a notion of “natural” rights protected by civil rights. But this was also based on an argument that there exists a natural “social contract”- a concept of Locke and Hobbes that Hume disproves.
What democracy allows is for citizens to contest for greater liberties, and liberties need to be fought over. Much like how the early revolutionaries in the US had to fight for the right to vote, free speech and religion, and black had to fight for civil rights, and women had to fight for equal rights and gays are fighting for their share of the rights.
Civil rights need to be fought for, they cannot be presupposed.
If your argument is that people should have “a basic right to act” than this is a normative argument. I would say this is still too broad and needs boundary conditions.
But you are arguing that people have an unlimited right to act- untrue. That people have the right to smoke pot, which I would say is a liberty found in a few countries and not in most. It is also a liberty that could be taken away.
If the majority of the Dutch felt that smoking pot was harmful and had damaging social consequences than the Dutch could remove that liberty.
In the US we are having similar arguments about whether people have the right to burn a flag (a violation of free speech?) whether gays have the right to marry (the right to have a family) whether religious schools should get money from the state (free exercise and establishment rights). More- the right to die, the right to an abortion? These are rights to be free of government influence on your individual person. But these are not rights to act.
No, history indicates that countries have not adhered to my defintion of civil liberties. COnsider the following thing: would you consider freedom for slavery a civil liberty? Because according to you, such a thing could never be considered a civil liberty until it was accepted. The point of the basic civil liberties is that they are basic, and therefore should exist always, not just because the government was kind enough to make it into a civil liberty.
And that’s the point- no countries have adhered to your definition of a civil liberty.
Honestly, I agree that the creation of civil liberties usually involves a society looking back at the way it decided what liberties were allowed and deciding that those liberties should be allowed. Some rights have been lost- the right to have slaves or to keep someone in involuntary servitude.
That’s the point- it wasn’t that the government was kind enough to change it’s mind. The government is rarely kind enough to grant a civil liberty to anyone. Civil Liberties need to be fought for. Usually that’s done through the courts by opposing laws which would conflict with expectations drawn from the constitution of a state. For example- laws limiting the right to sue fast food companies because of the food they sell, or gun manufacturers for selling guns that were used in crimes- can be contested under constitutional rights to due process which allows an individual to obtain legal recourse through the courts without being exempted by legislative statutes.
Civil rights are restraints on government action. For example, if the government passes a low that one set of schools would be for muslims another for Christians, or if it would fund only Christian organizations and not Hindu- that’s discrimination and against the law.
Nothing works that way for smoking pot.
Name them, I will show you that they aren't the fault of the legalisation of pot.
The question is not whether pot should be legalized. Frankly I support legalizing it.
The question is whether there is a civil right to smoke pot. Under what standard? You submit “The right to act” which is just plain wishy-washy nor is that, as you admit, a standard that exists.
The second issue is whether the Dutch benefit from a trade that causes harmful effects to it’s neighbors. Using the illustration offered by SUaside and elaborated above, yes and those effects are predictable.
The freedom to act is quite fundamental.
The freedom to act as you define it makes little sense since it offers no boundary conditions. If a civil right is a restraint on the state, than a civil right to act would include the right to commit a variety of crimes, irregardless of consequence. One cannot drink and drive- even if one does not cause an accident.
Very much so. This, however, in no way answers my question of "Why should someone not be allowed to harm his own body?"
Because of the notion that the state has an interest in protecting the live of its citizens, even against the wishes of that citizen. Why you don’t have a right to suicide, why you might be prevented from using certain substances.
Whether you like that or not, is not the point. One can fight for that right, but it doesn’t mean that right currently exists even if it “should” exist.
Note- my position on this is not whether a person should be allowed to smoke pot, rather it is that there is no civil right to do so.
The state is there for the citizens, the citizens are not there for the state. Remember that.
You’re lecturing a person who studies politics, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and the nature of the state-society relationship and who used to practice law? “Remember that?”
And no, you’re wrong. Empirically- there remain absolutist and autocratic states in which civil rights don’t really exist. Are they less states because of that?
The state exists as an institution that evolved allowing rulers to dominate, repress and extract resources for society and to defend it’s territory from outer rulers. That the democratic state offers rights has much to do with the seizure of the state by elites that didn’t want absolutist kings to deny them access to property rights. That the franchise of rights have expanded to the mass of citizens took time and effort to fight for those rights.
Workers got the right to vote late by challenging property restrictions on the right to vote. Blacks in the US got it by the Civil Rights movement, women through protests. Rights are acquired by fighting for them.
The state has not evolved much beyond that. The Weberian definition of a state still emphasizes a centralized institution that governs within a bounded territory through the monopoly of the use of legitimate force. Who controls the state determines what the relationship of that state to society is. State’s are just institutions- they are not thinking, self-interested people. It is the people who rule who decide what the state is.
The state is less a servant to the citizens than the means of domination and control possessed by those who rule over those that don’t rule.
The point is that there is no current civil right to smoke pot. Not that there couldn’t be a civil right to smoke a joint. But that such a right needs to be fought for and won. There is no “inherent” right to smoke a joint because there are no “natural rights” except those that are fought for and won.
Back to Canada- these guys say there is a civil right to smoke pot. Doubtful. But they can fight for it. If they win, they can overturn current laws and liberate potheads everywhere. If they lose, it’s off to jail. Fights are not without consequences- they could lose. There could be a legal right to smoke pot in the US. The problem might be that too many of the potential protestors are too stoned to organize and fight for it.
You're conceptualization of a civil right is overly broad- basically you are saying "anything goes."
As long as it doesn't hurt anyone but yourself: yes.
Ok, then beastiality would be perfectly legal.
Hurts the animal, so: no.
Animals don’t have civil rights but are commonly considered property. You can own a dog, a cat, a fish. You can generally slaughter an animal you own without legal sanction. Based on your definition, a citizen (a human invested with civil liberties and rights) can do what they want with their property. But you can’t fuck a dog without going to jail or the loony bin. Why? Because the government has a right to protect you, and that includes your mental wellbeing. The government can also regulate what it deems deviant social behavior.
Sander- I know you’re an idealist. But you need to start with some empirical basis in reality before you go off on these kinds or argument. And while you enjoy using complex ideas, those ideas need definition. A universal right to act- is just too broad and civil rights don’t exist just because you want them to. Rights exist because enough people fought for them that the government was forced to make them rights for society and forced to live under restraint.
Selling your property as a dumping ground for hazardous waste would be legal.
Hurts the environment and other people in the direct environment of your grounds so: no.
Shooting off a 9mm into your backyard would be perfectly legal even if it's in an urban area.
If done in such a way that no-one would get hurt: yes. If doner uncontrolled with the risk of someone getting hurt, then: no.
Try really thinking about what you say to try to take down my theory before posting.[/quote]
Ditto- Why are those acts considered illegal or highly controlled- because the government has the right to protect the well being of individuals and a society and does not trust individual to act in ways that may cause damage to others.
Sure, one might be able to sue if one was hurt by any of the acts listed above. But the government restricts those actions because of the likelihood that they may lead to some harm to society. Why? Because the state has an interest in maintain social peace and preventing harm to others. It’s not that these acts are definitely going to cause injury- but that they could cause injury, and as such the interest of the state to sustain social peace (prevent social deviance, protect well-being, maintain public order, etc) kicks in.
Half their posts are about one accusing the other of not reading what he had posted.