Let’s say someone says “government should grand right X”. Inevitably, some people in the replies will screech that governments don’t grant rights, that rights are natural, and so on.
What’s the implication? That the first person somehow thinks anything goes legislatively? No, that’s false. Implicit in the claim “government should grant right X” is that government doesn’t have the option to not grant that right. Do you think people who believe that, say, welfare should be a right, would just roll over if the government refused? Of course not.
We can also look at this from the other direction. Advocates of natural rights will say that their favored set of rights are not determined by the government. That’s all well and good, but that doesn’t point to any particular set of rights. Anyone can say their favored rights “precede the state” in the sense that government has an obligation to codify/recognize them.
Final note: In the context of due process for illegal immigrants, I’ve seen some people say that illegal immigrants aren’t entitled to due process because due process is a “civil right” instead of “natural right”. Pure mental masturbation.
(I was scrolling over some tards on Twitter, so I wanted to vent about this here.)
They have the right to be removed by the law they broke and if they’ve committed no other crimes, have the legal opportunity to re-enter legally…PERIOD!
The government doesn’t grant rights, it guarantees them. It doesn’t bestow them as a privilege, but rather protects them from being infringed upon by the government itself. Rights are typically considered inalienable and exist independently of the government’s authority.
In regard to illegal aliens. They are guaranteed due process rights. There are laws in place to facilitate that due process.
Where many get hung up is on what form that due process might take for someone in this country illegally versus what form that due process might take for an American citizen.
As has often been said, due process is that process that is due. There is the due process required for putting someone in prison…with many cases covering what those processes are and often “finding” new ones.
For illegal border crossers, there has long been applied the due process of someone caught near the border within a couple of years of crossing…which consists of the right to go back over the border. Indeed, in the “bipartisan” border bill, the Democrats proposed that when traffic was high, a border agent could make a determination on the spot and decide whether an amnesty claim deserved further hearing or send the person back over the border.
So the real question is not whether due process is required but what process is due.
Unfortunately, some of this is just assuming the conclusion.
Any “right to welfare” can be rephrased as a negative right.
As far as rights being strictly protections from government: that is a distinguisher that people can manipulate as they see fit, maneuvering their favored rights to one side of the line and their disfavored rights to the other by emphasizing one part of the unavoidable triadic self-others-government nature of rights. Example: Any claim right permits the civil authority—whether that looks like a formalized bureaucracy or Joe Schmoe with a shotgun in a small town—to exercise action against non-holders of the right.
I want people to consider a Nazi. That’s probably a go-to example of someone who thinks governments decide rights. Ask yourself this: if government decided Jews have rights, do you think the Nazi is going to go “Whelp, the government says Jews have rights, so I guess that settles that.”? If Nazis—or communists, fascists, or whomever—REALLY believed that the government “determines rights”, then they would acquiesce. But, no, they won’t. Ergo, they don’t really believe governments “determines rights”. In fact, they could just couch Nazism in the language of “natural rights” like so: “Nature says Aryans have the right to life but Jews don’t, so that’s why we get to kill them.”.
Feel free to show us where Google AI got it wrong in what I posted.
From my experience with GIFs, they have a place when replying to zingers and quips, or even when replying to repeated talking points or lengthy partisan screeds.
But I find that someone using them in reply to a well thought out coherent response just looks plain foolish.
