re: #214 wrenchwench

Regardless of who is inaugurated in 2021, there will be a new statue attending the inaugural luncheon in Statuary Hall. Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca was the first Native American to win civil rights in 1879. His statue will represent Nebraska, replacing William Jennings Bryan

this is a huge peeve of mine

Philosophers and lawyers bicker about what grounds human rights. Do we acknowledge them and use government power to protect against their violation simply because we have a history of doing it? Does a right just pop into existence as soon as a certain number of human beings clamors for getting a law passed in its name?

danger says no:

no one is ‘granted’ human or civil rights

what happens is the mechanism of enforcement is forced into not preventing people from exercising rights they always had - and were unable to because they were repressed by the state, or, sometimes went unquestioned/unrecognized

civil rights weren’t new rights granted to people in 1964. those rights were always there. to say less is to dehumanize them as people, and to give those “granting” the rights some sort of superior benevolence in “allowing” this to happen.

these types of rights are intrinsic, even when their exercise is repressed by the state. the rights dont go away.

“giving, granting, allowing” burns me