https://x.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1953838468498382990?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw
"Rights" are, by and large, meaningless concepts outside of a society that enforces them. "Philosophers and poets argue that certain standards for everyone SHOULD exist. But, even here, Westerners, Muslims, North Asians, and other civilized peoples disagree perhaps 80% of the time as to what these should be. And, more importantly, even the few basic/consensus legal rights don't exist in practice until we make them up and write them down. Afgan women don't have any real rights as of today. If I am confronted by three chimpanzees, or enemy soldiers, or tribal head-hunters - all sapient beings, to duck a common and silly objection here - while doing research overseas, I cannot tell them they have no "right" to kill me. The very frame would be nonsensical. Stable, civilized societies are the sole guarantor of law and feminism and all the rest of it."
Reilly isn't necessarily a conservative, and certainly not a Christian but he does say some interesting things. The founders and most Christians would say that rights are inalienable and from our Creator. But from a non Christian/materialist standpoint this makes a fair degree of sense.
2 comments:
And certainly, those non-Christian Americans will still regard "rights" as unalienable, including some they make up. It's something I've been dealing with in FB discussions with lesbians and homosexuals. They'll speak of no one being able to take away their "rights", but what they mean is no one can take away the special privileges granted them by the unConstitutional Obergefell ruling.
If rights are inalienable and from our Creator, and are limited, that's one thing. Reilly seems to be saying that there are no inalienable rights, but that rights are only what a government grants. By that standard, you are right that we can find all sorts of new rights. The difference, as I think Reilly is getting at is the what the government giveth, the government can taketh away. That it all comes down to "might makes right".
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