Not all rights are equal

[mneme]

I wrote a thing in a FB comment. Since FB comments are fragile and temporary, it's pretty much necessary that I repost it if I want to keep it

Comments

[ex_hrj]

What I would question is how you can achieve the rights of free speech, voting, and association without *first* prioritizing your 2nd-tier rights (life, freedom from undue imprisonment, fairness under the law). Otherwise a government can simply say, "Of course everyone has the right to speech, to vote, and to associate, except for those people we've killed or put in prison...who just by pure chance happen to belong to the groups we want to exclude from 1st-tier rights."

[barking_iguana]

Yeah, Josh's Tier 1 is all about the formalities needed to keep a functioning society democratic. But without the Tier 2 that keeps it a society, they don't mean anything.

[mneme]

I could see reversing the tiers (I'd originally conflated them--but I think that it's important they be separated, since "fundamental freedoms" (my titled tier 2) are distinctly different than "the axioms of democracy" (my titled tier #1

[kalimac]

Another reason I don't want to be on Facebook: I like having access to, and records of, what I say and what others say to me.

[madfilkentist]

My view is that personal autonomy comes first. There's nothing inherently desirable about choosing the people in government by a majority vote; it's just less likely to go bad than the alternatives. And as we've just seen, it can still go bad. Free speech is vital, but more because it allows identification of wrongs and abuses than because of its role in the political process

[mneme]

If personal autonomy comes first, there's nowhere to go from there. Fundamentally, we enter into (or, yes, even force others into) a civil society because we think there are things more important than personal autononomy (not many--but some). The alternative is anarchy, at which point no other rights even matter.

Re that last paragraph: Yup. The electoral system is -exactly- a legacy of slavery.

[agrumer]

The recent election wasn’t a case of a majority vote going bad, it was a case of the Electoral College (plus voter suppression) granting the presidency to someone who didn’t get the majority.