Human Rights

 On this day:

42 BC
Roman Republican civil wars: Second Battle of Philippi – Mark Antony and Octavian decisively defeat Brutus’s army. Brutus commits suicide.
1641
Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
1642
Battle of Edgehill: First major battle of the First English Civil War.
1861
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus in Washington, D.C., for all military-related cases.
1906
Alberto Santos-Dumont flies an airplane in the first heavier-than-air flight in Europe at Champs de Bagatelle, Paris, France.
1911
First use of aircraft in war: An Italian pilot takes off from Libya to observe Turkish army lines during the Turco-Italian War.
1912
First Balkan War: The Battle of Kumanovo between the Serbian and Ottoman armies begins.
1956
Thousands of Hungarians protest against the government and Soviet occupation. (The Hungarian Revolution is crushed on November 4).
1958
The Springhill Mine Bump – An underground earthquake traps 174 miners in the No. 2 colliery at Springhill, Nova Scotia, the deepest coal mine in North America at the time. By November 1, rescuers from around the world had dug out 100 of the victims, marking the death toll at 74.
1983
Lebanon Civil War: The U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut is hit by a truck bomb, killing 241 U.S. military personnel. A French army barracks in Lebanon is also hit that same morning, killing 58 troops.
2002
Moscow Theatre Siege begins: Chechen terrorists seize the House of Culture theater in Moscow and take approximately 700 theater-goers hostage.

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"...job opportunities will exist as long as we human beings have wants to be met, and entrepreneurs and workers are free to bargain with each other to find ways to satisfy those wants.

Unless AI becomes godlike and fully satisfies each and every human desire, leaving no one wanting for anything, humans will have demands that can be met only by cooperating commercially with other humans. This cooperation creates jobs."--letter to the editor WSJ, on AI

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Will AI history formulas emerge from AI writing formulas?

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Which laws approved by duly elected representatives should we oppose in the streets? How is that decision made? Why are some law agents opposed and not others?

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It is said that discussion is an alternative to violence. Here is an interesting etymology:

Polemical:

MEANING:
adjective: Relating to or involving strong, critical, or controversial writing or speech.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Greek polemikos, from polemos (war). A related word is polemology (the science and study of human conflict and war). Earliest documented use: 1615.

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Human Rights

Where are rights from? What rights are inalienable?

Cicero, bringing the Greek Stoics' idea of higher law to Rome, expressed the primacy of moral standards over government laws. These standards became known as natural law. Above all, Cicero declared, government is morally obliged to protect human life and private property.

Natural rights are those inherent to human beings, before any formal legal or social structures were in place. They can not be removed and do not need to be granted. 

Thomas Hobbes, a much later English philosopher, described nature as a “war of all against all,” where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this chaotic environment, Hobbes argued that individuals had the natural right to do whatever they needed to survive, and society's restrictions arose to moderate it.

John Locke had a more optimistic view of the state of nature. He believed that people were generally reasonable and moral, but still needed a government to protect their natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humans were naturally good but were corrupted by society. The development of property, social institutions, and technology led to inequality and conflict.

Jeremy Bentham was a critic of natural rights. He described the idea of natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts,” that rights are created by laws and cannot exist outside of a legal framework.

"Natural." "Rights." A merging. A two-way street. A partnership. The Left takes a leap of faith.

The “nature rights” movement is pushing environmentalism into that unscientific realm. Specifically, the movement promotes a neo-pagan mysticism — such as invoking Pachamama, the Incan earth goddess — as a major basis for its advocacy.

The Left is, in the absence of argument, becoming fantastical. 

Such approaches have reached the highest levels and are in use in medical and scientific journals.

And symposiums.

Harvard Kennedy School hosted a symposium on “nature rights” undergirded by “indigenous knowledge” as part of the 2025 Harvard Climate Action Week. From “Indigenous Leadership on Protecting Water as a Fundamental Right:”

Throughout the event, a recurring theme was the need to reframe the human relationship with water—not as a resource for human consumption but as a living relative with which humans share reciprocal duties.

So, if a river rises and the flood hurts people, should we whip the waters? Or can we sue it?

Or are we above that?

Rights Vs. Wants

Let me offer my own definition of libertarianism. It is the political theory that freedom and peace serve the common good better than violence and state control, thus suggesting a normative rule: societies and individuals must be left unmolested in their associations and commercial dealings so long as they are not threatening others.--Tucker


The Subaru has been rescued.

Global meat production causes more climate change than emissions from every single plane, train, and automobile in the world. The problem is that feeding crops to animals and then eating part of the animal is inherently inefficient. According to the World Resource Institute, it takes nine calories of crops to get one calorie of chicken meat. A review in the journal Nature found that per calorie of protein, poultry causes 40 times more global warming than legumes.
There are so many sinners, so little time.

The Trump administration’s next round of tariffs on Chinese imports will for the first time target an array of apparel, and the brunt of that will fall on clothing for women and girls.
The discrimination never stops.

Lauren Hashian has married Dwayne Johnson. They have two kids. Her father is John “Sib” Hashian, who has been the drummer for rock band Boston since 1975.

Faculty judgments regarding excellence of achievement are subordinated to the moral imperative of greater diversity, as defined by a nonacademic corps of bureaucrats whose involvement in the work of teaching and learning is peripheral at best.--Kronman, on the shrinking academic world.

Berkshire Hathaway holds nearly $100 billion in financial-services stocks, underscoring the size of the billionaire’s bet on the future of the U.S. economy.

Malaprop: To misuse a word by confusing it with a similar-sounding word, producing a humorous effect. For example, “pineapple of perfection” for “pinnacle of perfection.” After Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan’s play, The Rivals (1775), who confused words in this manner. The name Malaprop is coined from French “mal à propos” (inappropriate). Earliest documented use: 1959.

On this day in 1858 Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Abraham Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and one-time U.S. representative from Illinois, begin a series of famous public encounters on the issue of slavery. The two politicians, the former a Northern Democrat and the latter a Republican, were competing for Douglas’ U.S. Senate seat. In the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates–all about three hours along–Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or slave. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party.

                              Rights Vs. Wants

The rights of a man have been a topic of discussion forever. What can a man claim as his own? What he is owed is the result of a contract, what he has by birthright is from either his god or his nature.

In essence, what comes first?

Things can get sticky. Religions tend to have disregard for the temporal; no earthly rewards for them. And those things we deserve because of our nature, what exactly are they? If they are part of our nature, then they can't be one of our creations, our products. Rights, if ours by nature, must have risen with us, developed with us. They cannot be external to us, created by us, be made up of something that in itself is variable. And they cannot depend upon the kindness--or the submission-- of others. We, by our nature, might have a right to life, or freedom, or property but not to Tupperware or Buicks or another's wife or income. Not to something that might be unavailable because of a shipping error or over-demand or because it was another's.

Our rights are not just a product of our nature, they are part of our nature. They are inherent, not granted. And they are profound, not so trivial as to be vulnerable to logistics.

The Birds and the Bees of Human Rights

Wealth and surplus can confuse a lot of people as scarcity is the basic element in all economics and trade.  

A checklist from Perry on the undiscussed birds and bees of human rights:

Every time I hear “healthcare/education/college/housing/food/whatever is a human right,” I ask:

1. What goes in the category of “human rights,” and who decides? For health care, for example: is chemotherapy a human right? Are Band-Aids? What about cosmetic surgery? Does the answer change if the chemo patient was a lifelong smoker who developed lung cancer?

2. Who pays for the provision of the goods and services that are considered “human rights”?

3. Who produces, possibly coercively and forcibly, the goods and services that are considered “human rights”?

4. Which alternative uses of our scarce resources do we give up in order to produce chemotherapy, “free” college or “free” Band-Aids, and who decides on those inevitable, numerous and complicated trade-offs?

5. Given scarce/limited resources, what do we do when these multiple “human rights” inevitably come in conflict with one another? Should we build another housing complex to provide “free” housing or another college to provide “free” education or another cancer treatment center to provide “free” health care? As before, who decides, who pays and who produces?

Rights/Nature

That Which Is, Is Granted, and Is Earned


There is the idea that all people are born with rights, which they hold simply because they are human. This was created in the American Declaration of Independence. This is the idea that underpins Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Not everyone shares this belief. Many people believe that rights are simply entitlements granted by the state and held only by citizens. But for classical liberals, rights are much more than this. They are universal (held by everyone) and inalienable (they continue to exist regardless of whether or not governments recognize them).

The second idea concerns what human rights actually are. Classical liberals believe that the list of genuine human rights is quite short. It is comprised primarily of those things that are necessary to preserve life and individual liberty.

This list includes the right to be free from torture, slavery, arbitrary arrest or detention. Freedom of association and freedom of speech are also seen as legitimate human rights. But other rights, particularly economic and social rights, are viewed as mere aspirations. If those aspirations are legislated as rights, the State must grow to create them.

Thirdly, classical liberals believe that the role of the state in fulfilling or protecting human rights should be very limited. States should do only what is necessary to protect life and property.

Classical liberals believe in a minimal state – as political philosopher Robert Nozick puts it, a “night watchman” state – that does not interfere with the privacy of citizens and their freedom to live, work and be educated in any way they see fit.

A lot of the friction that societies suffer is on this point: What is a right -- which everyone inherently can claim-- and what is an aspiration--which everyone hopes to earn.