16 thoughts on “Human Rights”

  1. I disagree that “health” is a human right, though.

    Rand, I need your participation in my mandatory vaccine trial…

  2. How about this assertion:

    Human rights are relevant in the context of commercial outer space exploration, mining, tourism and eventual habitation because the pursuit of these activities may impact the recognition and applicability of these rights. For example, it is well known that space debris is a serious threat to life, health, cleanliness and even property here on earth. However will incidents associated with space debris be analyzed through the lens of human rights or strictly tort law. Further if human rights are non-discriminating, how will equal protection concerning these hazards and accidents be enforced?

    Glancing at Wikipedia, I see over the history of space flight, six human injuries from space debris, and 1 sheep death with a second injured. There’s a number of cases of environmental contamination, but a small town probably generates more of that.

    That’s the threat of 66 years of space debris (from Sputnik I reentering in 1957) to the present day.

    As to the claim that we need to specifically include space in order for rights treaties to apply to space. If we need to specify location for those treaties to apply in space, then why don’t we need the same thing for them to apply on Earth?

  3. Rights only exist where people are able to enforce them – on earth, or off. Same with laws.

    The UN cannot enforce anything, anywhere. So I personally rely on myself for safeguarding my human rights (among them, but not limited to the unique human right to exist – which naturally leads to the right to use whatever tools are necessary for me to do that).

    The UN is overtly opposed to me having those tools, so they are opposed to my rights. Why would I rely on them in space?

    2. Ditto. Without the Right To Personal Property™ starting with your owning yourself what do any other putative right mean? The UN is a cabal of second rate of second-rate grifters that couldn’t win in their own little kleptocracies so they were shipped off to afflict the rest of us.

      For ‘enumerated rights’ little can match the blazing hypocrisy of the USSR Constitution? All of those ‘freedoms’ annotated by the asterisk that the Communist Party decides when, where and if they apply…

  4. Agreed on right to health, although I would qualify that as right to health care. If I am entitled to health care then someone is obligated to provide it. They would be, in effect, my slave. That is unacceptable to me, and I do not want to be part of a system where folks are entitled to the work of others.

    2. Ken, that is exactly how I respond to those who claim that there is a right to health care.. The whole problem with this mess as posed by the posted article is over the entire concept of “rights”. The go-to obfuscation of that concept for the past 150 years has been to make the word synonymous with “privileges”. This allows people to posit all kinds of benefits as “rights” while curtailing actual rights. Even more destructive, though, was the introduction of the word “human” before “rights”. Why? If we are speaking of rights in a political sense, then we are referring only to human beings, so what is the point of adding that word? Well, it is to divert attention from the adjective that is inextricable from the concept of rights: individual,

      The best definition of the word “rights” I have encountered is: “An unconditional freedom of action, requiring no one else’s permission.” An implicit premise of this is that it applies to the individual human being. The term “human rights” doesn’t contain the concept of the individual nature of humans; the individual is the fundamental manifestation of humanity, and it is the sovereignty of the individual that establish his or he rights.

      1. This allows people to posit all kinds of benefits as “rights” while curtailing actual rights.

        I used the rights to destroy the rights.

  5. We will take our rights with us and others will take what they consider rights with them and the age old debate about what those rights are will continue.

    1. “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

      1. Home in this case meant either immigration back to England or to one of the Canadian maritime provinces. Once the shooting started and the casualties mounted there was not much sympathy for Tories in Sam Adams’ Massachusetts.

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