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by EdTsft
1854 days ago
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It's interesting how the US has such a different cultural view of rights than other English speaking commonwealth countries that you'd expect to be culturally similar. I can't speak for other countries but as a Canadian I view the idea of "inalienable" or "god-given" rights as preposterous. A right is a promise a government makes to a people. I have a much more expansive right to free speech than someone in North Korea does, that's just an objective reality since the North Korean government does not make the promise of free speech to their people. I have no right to be granted employment if I cannot find it myself, but that right has existed for others in various places and times. You can say that people should have certain rights, but to me it's wrong as a statement of fact to say that they already have them. This view of rights also makes it easy to say that we should have the right to healthcare, or food and water, or housing. You don't have to debate about whether those are "inalienable human rights" to decide that it would be better for our government to make those promises to our citizens. More of an aside, it is weird to me that you would include the right to not self-incriminate among the set of inalienable rights. That one seems like a much more arbitrary detail of your justice system than some more obvious right like access to food and clean water. |
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