Galt's Gulch

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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 6 years, 2 months ago
    At a panel on "inalienable rights", you would get an argument that no rights are "inalienable", and then you would be accused of being a racist for using the word "alien".
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    • Posted by $ blarman 6 years, 2 months ago
      Lol. Nice.

      You know, I was just reading George Washington's farewell address and Thomas Jefferson's Inaugural address and it struck me that the quality of language they employed was just so much higher than that of today. They really studied and invested in a command of the English language. Their speeches were elegant and sophisticated - a far cry from the political sophistry so many employ today. I think the loss of that richness in common speech and understanding is one of the signs of a society which has allowed technology to supplant critical thinking.
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      • Posted by $ jbrenner 6 years, 2 months ago
        Brevity is the soul of wit. - Shakespeare
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        • Posted by $ blarman 6 years, 2 months ago
          That's another thing that struck me. Washington's speech is about seven pages and could be delivered in about 12 minutes or so. Jefferson's was much shorter and was probably about 5 minutes. Current Presidential speeches go on for 45 minutes or more - and that's besides the ridiculous applause...
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  • Posted by Commander 6 years, 2 months ago
    Folks....you can add to the rhetoric or be part of the solution.
    I just put in a phone call to Emily Sissell. She is named as the contact for more info regarding the formation of this committee. I left a message. "I'd like to participate in this endeavor"

    What are you going to do?
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  • Posted by mia767ca 6 years, 2 months ago
    ...and the religious right will want "god given" rights...
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    • Posted by ewv 6 years, 2 months ago
      The announcement in the Federal Register is deliberately vague. A definition of "human rights" in a foreign policy context for the State Dept is relevant to how we deal with oppressive foreign nations, but who knows what this is intended to turn into with this "Advisory Committee". Conservatives typically have no rational basis for rights of the individual, and the left wants to turn the topic into its ethnicity-based entitlement mentality enforced globally.

      The false alternative will not be rationally discussed in a government-appointed "committee". We can expect more false alternatives combined with political pandering.
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    • Posted by $ blarman 6 years, 2 months ago
      Well, that was how they were couched in the Declaration of Independence... But I'd certainly take the notion that the rights are independent of human beings rather than a product of government by human beings, because what government giveth, government taketh away...
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      • Posted by ewv 6 years, 2 months ago
        "God" was not in the Declaration of Independence. It was based on the Enlightenment values of natural rights for the individual in accordance with his nature, with a vague notion of "creator" in the distant past because nothing was known then about evolution. There was no idea of a god selecting specific rights. The Enlightenment held that it is up to man to rationally analyze nature and discover the proper principles.
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        • Posted by ewv 6 years, 2 months ago
          Blarman's religionist revisionist history is false. He has previously demanded that I not respond to his posts. He was reminded by the moderator that this is a public forum, but all such responses to his posts are now rotely 'downvoted'. He cannot tolerate his religious promotions being rejected on an Ayn Rand forum.
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  • Posted by $ 25n56il4 6 years, 2 months ago
    Why can't the loonies in the House of Reps settle down and help solve some of our real problems? There is now one confirmed and five being observed for Typhoid in California. And, there is now Bubonic Plague because of the food and feces on the streets and rats and fleas. Good luck Sanctuary Cities. Hope you confine it to California. I don't think that's going to help your tourism. The people who want to leave your state can't afford to.
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    • Posted by $ allosaur 6 years, 2 months ago
      All their razor sharp minds https://tenor.com/view/crackup-g-you-... are riveted on is keeping The Donald from being reelected because they hate him so much more than doing their jobs to make anything better for Americans. After all, making anything better for Americans may give The Donald something he may take any credit for. So meanwhile let's just talk impeachment! Impeachment! IMPEACHMENT! Impeachment for what? Who gives a damn! Just make that usurper of The Evil Hag's glass ceiling look bad.
      Oh, yeah, and Trump's a racist, by the way. A racist! Racist! RACIST!
      Yeah, dem dim Dems really got to paint the hated Donald to look really bad if Creepy Joe or another candidate from that gallery of Jackass Party twits can have any hope come 2020.
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    • Posted by $ Thoritsu 6 years, 2 months ago
      Because allowing focus on actual problems precipitates actual thought and actual work.

      Redirecting at crazy stuff, distracts the public from reality and though. Go home, plug in to the TV and be instructed...
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    • Posted by $ blarman 6 years, 2 months ago
      There is a reason they are loony - they have no interest in fixing problems because it is only through crises they can effect the kind of cultural change they want to impose. They live for chaos as a means to bring about their one-world government which enslaves us all.
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      • Posted by $ rainman0720 6 years, 2 months ago
        I completely agree, blarman. Rahm Emmanuel was fond of the "never let a crisis to go waste" idea. What to do if there isn't a crisis handy? Why, create one, of course.

        (Putting on my cynic hat.)

        So much of what the dems/libs/progs think are good ideas are NEVER intended to succeed.

        For example, I can't believe there are still people who truly believe that ObummerCare was actually designed to make our lives better.

        I have believed from Day 1 that the ACA was meant to do one thing only: Crash the entire healthcare system and throw it into total chaos. The government then steps in and offers a solution--what they've been dying to implement for decades--Single Payer.

        They manufacture the healthcare and insurance crisis, then just like the ACA, they shove Single Payer up our collective backsides.

        So yeah, they do live for chaos so they can impose their solutions on us.
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  • Posted by lrshultis 6 years, 2 months ago
    For what it's worth. The panel was to be a discussion of unalienable rights. Usually unalienable is taken to mean the same as alienable. There have been a number of discussions about them not meaning the same thing. Here is one of them.

    http://www.teapartytribune.com/2012/0...
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    • Posted by ewv 6 years, 2 months ago
      The Declaration used "un", which is probably where the use in the Federal Register announcement came from. The modern spelling is mostly "in". The difference between Hobbes and Locke is valid, but today it's a matter of accepted word usage, not definition of concepts, with "un" and "in" regarded as alternate spellings of the same word and "in" being most common now.

      Ayn Rand used "in" except when quoting the Declaration, reflecting a use of modern spelling.

      A government-appointed advisory committee won't resolve this, either.
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      • Posted by lrshultis 6 years, 2 months ago
        How would you distinguish the two different concepts of rights that may not be chosen to be given up and rights which one can give up by choice. The first would have to be forcefully violated and the second one could chose to allow the right to be violated as in a collectivist society where one is born with the potential for rights but do to the belief that one has no rights, the rights are put out of mind, i.e., surrendered. That would mean rights are a matter of choice and not some kind of natural attribute of each person, i.e., natural rights as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.
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        • Posted by ewv 6 years, 2 months ago
          No rights can literally be 'surrendered' because they are philosophical principles based on the nature of man. Neither violation of rights nor self-renunciation can make a true principle false. An individual can only choose how to exercise his rights and voluntarily act accordingly; he cannot negate his own rights, in the sense of giving them up in principle, any more than a government.

          The question of renouncing rights can only arise in terms of legal rights -- civil rights encoded in law to implement natural rights and government procedures to protect rights (or improperly violate them as now happens all the time). For example, you can make contract agreements limiting your future actions, which are enforceable, or you can waive a right like a civil right to representation by a lawyer. Such decisions may be sensible or not, but they don't negate philosophical rights.

          An extreme case like agreeing to subject oneself to permanent indentured servitude is dubious, and would be governed under what is properly enforceable contract law as for what is consistent with principles of natural rights.

          That kind of choice pertains to normally functioning people. If someone commits a crime then laws may properly incarcerate him for the sake of protecting the rights of the innocent. If done properly that is consistent with the moral principles giving rise to rights, which are moral principles in a social context (Rights are not the starting point.)

          The only way someone can choose to literally wipe out his philosophical rights is to commit suicide so he is no longer an entity to which rights apply.
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  • Posted by exceller 6 years, 2 months ago
    High time to expose the abuses of the left.

    “creating new rights based on membership in special identity groups corrodes principles of equality and universality.”

    There should be an end to the excesses that don't seem to stop by the left.

    Of course they are howling because it threatens the very foundation they built over time toward only one goal: to control.
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    • Posted by Solver 6 years, 2 months ago
      It’s the group that believes freedom means other people should be forced to pay them a certain amount regardless of the value they actually provide.
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