“Straight, and to the point.”
Can I ask you something?
How do you know it wasn’t?
And don’t use English when Anglish will do just fine.
Now that’s what I’m talking about. 
There is no argument against what Parodites said because it is self-evident.
He’s just calling ‘implicit protection’ what is already known as Common Law.
Except it is not common everywhere.
So, maybe a distinction makes sense.
Common law is only the agglomerated opinions of those who have been deemed judges throughout history.
The self-evident rights of the founders of the United States of America, the ones given by God and not any man, requires no such figures. And, in fact, flies in the face of most common law.
As Europe makes evident.
Common law tells us we should beat gays on sight.
The rights enshrined by the constitution tell us that that man, unless he is like fucking on top of you, should be left the fuck alone, and should be armed to ensure this. Or at least has the right to be armed, as the constitution doesn’t assume that he will be protected except by the rights given to him by God, to shoot a man’s face that would beat him when he wasn’t in any way impinging on his business.
It’s true that the independence of the United States is embedded in a historical process that originally didn’t even have much to do with America (the rights of provinces of an empire to legislate and trade freely, and to be taxed proportionally as peers to all other provinces). this historical process was known as the showdown between Monarchic Absolutism and Reformist Constitutionalism.
this is true. But, actors appeared during this historical process, to seize the moment and implement something that was derived philosophically, and not historically.
Malcom X was a constitutionalist. In the end, he saw the idiocy of political Islam and just told his people, AS PER THE CONSTITUTION, to arm themselves and organize into militias.
It is from where the distinctions come, when not specifically stated.
Well Parodites doesn’t make the distinction, because he doesn’t consider it worth his time to even consider common law beyond alluding to it in passing.
But he does give an extremely well founded case for its foundation. The distinction can be made by comparing that foundation to the foundation of common law.
Parodites is not asking you to agree with him. Or at least I hope not, I don’t on most important things. He is asking you to address his points, which are extremely well made. Like, extremely.
The foundation of US Constitutional law, I means.
Taking the US constitution as a premise, there is no disagreement.
The premise itself, though, that there is such a thing as natural rights, wether given by a god or not, is contestable.
Example: are you allowed to take any drug you wish to take? Not if I own you, which coincidentally was implicitly permitted by the original document.
Slavery is probably a more interesting example when it comes to the subject of natural rights or implicit rights, if you take into consideration that the same document which declared all men equal also came with provisions for allocating representation based on ‘the whole number of free persons’ and ‘3/5 the number of all other persons’, perhaps to avoid saying something uglier.
Agreed.
Alls I’m saying is, if you read the stuff he has posted, Parodites has built a fucking impressive case for it.
Pedro I edited my post to include more comments. I should instead have made a new post. Sorry for the confusion.
I have opinions on that, but I will refrain from writing them because I think they would detract from the specific case being made by Parodites.
Suffice to say that the argument for self-evident God-given rights brought up by the US constitution is not the same as an argument for the document itself. In fact, explicitly within the document does not take the document itself as its basis. For the rest, as in what is in fact the basis, I defer to Parodites’ arguments exposed in this thread. My line of interest is more historical than theoretical, so I will stick to that.
Well this is sort of the point. What is considered as self-evidently a right is subjective to a given era and tends to align with the mainstream thinking of that time.
It might have been self-evident when the constitution was written that some people are allowed to own others. Today that would be considered unthinkable in the US.
It was at a time considered evident enough for an amendment that alcohol should not be manufactured or sold.
If you bring someone from the middle east here, he might consider self-evident that he is allowed to beat his wife.
Given that ideas of what is self-evident change, how can you consider rights as god given?
How many times has the Fed passed a bill that’s arguably violated the Constitution?
Dozens, hundreds, thousands?
Institutions and individuals are going to occasionally overstep their bounds.
You’ve got to let some shit slide when it harms no one or even helps.
We’ve got to balance republicanism and legalism on the one hand with democracy, consequentialism and improvisation on the other i.e. only get worked up about the shit that really matters.
One day we may even want to do away with the Constitution altogether or write a new one, just as the founders unfettered themselves from British law.
You guys are like really left brain sticklers.