Fun fact: The vast majority of our "rights" are natural. The question is who protects them?
Fun fact: The vast majority of our "rights" are natural. The question is who protects them?
A marginalized group does not receive human rights, they are stripped of them. The removal of your birthrights should be violently opposed as soon as possible.
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I don't think I believe in natural rights.
Our so-called natural right to free speech doesn't give me the right to scream at a hungry bear and not face consequences.
A marginal group does not receive human rights, but neither are they born with them and then have them stripped away. Rather, they gain rights through struggle. Rights are not natural, every single one was fought for and won.
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Rights are not natural, every single one was fought for and won.
Umm wasn't there something called primitive communism? I assume they lived in peace without "rights" written on a piece of paper
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Those rights weren't written, but even the right to live was fought for and won by those primitive hunter/gatherers in collective struggle against nature itself. Primitive communism was how humans protected human rights from nature before we dominated it.
Today rights are mostly threatened by other humans, but nature was the enemy of human rights once upon a time.
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It's ok, I hereby declare it is a natural right to face the consequences of your actions.
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So there's a proper, Marxist way to understand "natural rights," but you need to be careful here, because generally, it's a term used by Lockeans and other "classical liberals." Rights exist socially, because what is characteristically human is a social phenonomenon, rooted in humanity's ability to collectively transform the world around us: as Marx puts it, "man is a species being," and the humanity comes to know itself by production. Liberalism makes rights abstract and inhering solely in the atomized individual (himself a kind of abstraction, since there is no human being who does not exist and reproduce his nature via participation in some kind of collective), which ultimately means that rights can be debated and curtailed (or expanded). The concrete cannot be easily changed, but the fully abstract can. Thus liberalism is, in effect, a giant con game. It claims to make "human rights" unassailable by rooting them in the individual, but in the process makes them such that they can be defined out of existence.
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I think you hit the nail on the head.
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In the context of the meme, those "inalienable rights" were only for people like those who wrote those words, land owning white cis males. That is how rights are interpreted within US law. It's the right to deny rights to others.