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by thraway23
3316 days ago
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Where do you (and who are you to tell) put the treshold of number of people who have to agree with someone's right? If some mob me on the street, and I'm outnumbered, do I loose my rights in this kind of "vote"? What about when police does it? What about police state? Or maybe "when the president does it it's not illegal"? I have to say I'm astonished by HN lately. I havae not seen so many badly rationalized apoloegtic arguments on slavery in my long life nor in 10 years at HN as these past three months. |
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In my mind, I'm making a distinction for a very real reason -- to say that, e.g., freedom of speech is a universal human right explicitly whitewashes over the fact that a tremendous number of people are deprived of that right.
What I want to make very explicit in the language I use is the idea that you have only the rights that you can reasonably pursue your daily life comfortably exercising. I find slavery abhorrent, as does pretty much everyone. Which is why I don't want to pretend like the problem just doesn't exist anymore, because after all, everyone unambiguously has the right to an existence free from slavery. They absolutely don't. There are plenty of people who can point to that idea as a travesty.
There's no specific number of people they need to convince otherwise to gain that right. They need to exist in a governmental, societal, political system that demands that that right be conferred on them. Until that happens, they don't have it and we shouldn't be saying otherwise.