tweto https://x.com/souljagoyteller/status/2085558616992444753
more takes
Natural rights are what guides my politics. The social contract exists to both protect people and protect their rights, and governments should be toppled when they void said rights. The thing that separates man from animal is that God delivered us with the privilege of basic rights
other poster: where do these natural rights come from?
sami gold: 1. God 2. Human existence
First off rights come from god, so jot that down.
Gotta be a debate bro about it cause he’s pretending to be intellectual. Marx has a pretty famous saying regsrding philosophy and whether its duty is to describe pr change society. So im pretty sure Marx himself would have some degree of leeway regarding where someone came from if they agree with his prescriptions.
I don’t see why him saying that the purpose of philosophy is to change rather than just interpret the world operates as any kind of defense for what this guy is saying besides that it is the category of ethics and political philosophy and therefore has concrete prescriptions.
Its not a defense at all. It was a criticism. He can disagree with a Marxist description as long as he’s with the prescription, this should not be a sticking point to him and based on the quote I quoted, I think Marx himself would agree, i’d prefer someone get there via materialism but someone doing a Marxism means infinitely more.than someone believing a Marxism
If you are acting on the basis of fantastical prescriptions that you believe God etched into your soul based on a natural rights framework, you will inevitably fall against Marxist conclusions because different analytical frameworks generally don’t have identical outputs across most cases.
To give a slightly more concrete explanation, a major problem with natural rights (besides those rights being totally made up by the person speaking or whoever that person arbitrarily agrees with) is that they are an attempt to depoliticize legal rights in the sense of claiming that people’s “true” rights precede any social decision, i.e. they are not constructed politically. This has notoriously been used to question-beg the rights that the speaker is personally interested in (Locke does this flagrantly with supposedly self-evident private property rights, for example) rather than observing the reality that we decide what rights are and the most functional answer changes in different circumstances, because human governance is constrained by material reality.
I dont wanna give them position on the fucking politburo, im just willing to take a willingly useful idiot where I can. Im not philosophically consistent anymore at all. Im.goal oriented.
The main point of useful idiocy here is that he is correct that these two frameworks contradict and doesn’t have the guile to mask how absurd his side is.
Revolutionary movements require revolutionary theory. I don’t think your argument is exactly tailism, but it functionally has a similar problem, because if you are goal-oriented then you should want to have and promote a framework oriented toward achieving those goals and, as I explained above, his framework will frequently contradict those goals, so his framework should be opposed by socialists. Can you not see how “we should follow these arbitrary commandments because I say that God said so” being treated as equivalent to dialectical materialism in terms of legitimacy is probably not good for a communist movement?
Your argument reminds me of what dem-aligned people say about only caring about results but then sacrificing everything that is the basis for achieving those alleged results because they mistakenly think (or lie and pretend) that it’ll make reactionaries into helpful allies. Obviously I think you are being honest, but you’ve fallen for the same trap some of the supporters of those politicians have.
I want better results and dont have any interested tied up in the current system. Simple as.
Sure is funny how “natural rights” just so happen to align with the interests of the ruling class everywhere and every time they’re invoked
were those natural rights present on the slave ships or during nakba, mr. i’m “one handshake removed from netanyahu”?
Ok listen, you don’t get it, natural rights are only for white peopl-
That’s the likely response
oh shit he owned us I guess we have to destroy the biosphere to make five billionaire pedophiles richer
Kinda dangerous to believe you have natural rights that can’t be taken from you. Everything can be taken from you including what you came into the world with.
White libs have never feared for their lives and it shows
It’s a perpetual struggle in neoliberal society having people not even really recognize the terms of the debate we’re interested in having, e.g. undercutting discussions about democracy by conflating it with liberalism, so it’s always interesting to me when someone very clearly and explicitly delineates the sides in the same way that I would but then comes down on the other side.
This is some real gourmet slop
That’s legitimate brain rot
Its true 16th century liberalism.
If given lots and lots and lots of charity. Maybe like…early Quaker style socialism.
I’d like to ask him why these god ordained social contract “rights” keep changing everytime capitalism undergoes an overhaul or evolutionary development?
Is capitalism more powerful than GOD!?!
Is God a tailist for the capitalist class?!? Does the God of Abraham bow to the Machine God?
Isn’t the whole point of the social contract that once you break it, you fall outside of it? So if your rights come from the social contract, they can be taken away?
There are differing views on the true purpose of the social contract, but the argument he is presenting is that we have natural rights, i.e. rights that precede any human construction or even really humans themselves, and the function of a social contract is to create a social framework (particularly laws, including legal rights, i.e. rights constructed by humans for governance) that allows us to make sure our natural rights are observed.
You are right about social contract frameworks normally being based on unpersoning, which brings into question how seriously the social contractors are really taking those supposedly-transcendent natural rights, but I think the more fundamental issue really is what the commenter in the OOP says, which is that natural rights are literally just totally made up and fictitious.
everybody who’s ever read a philosophy book should immaterialize
okay but… he isnt wrong
marxism explicitly rejects so called “natural rights” and accepts that all rights are those which the lower clases have struggled to fight for and win
in some ways marxism is very idealistic because it says that the real source of ideals is not from a supernatural being but from the good nature of common people who are willing to put it on the line and fight for it but thats a matter of interpretation
rights don’t exist in material world, if i put you on the desert island you will have exactly zero rights, so where does the naturalism comes from? moreover, if i put 50 babies of lawyers on the desert island, and they grow up, the rights still wouldn’t exist. so neither your own conception or brain shape pre-figures those “natural rights”. therefore those rights are social rights, and historically contingent ones, not natural ones.
rights don’t exist in material world
Exactly. “Rights” are just a name for encouraged behaviours in social interactions. There’s no more divinity in ‘rights’ than in chugging a beer, it’s just a subset of behaviour.
Is this not that far removed from the concept of the Mandate of Heaven? You can make it compatible if you approach it from the correct angle. You can even convince them that the existing capitalist powers have broken that mandate and need to be overthrown.
These dudes probably aren’t saying this in good faith but there’s probably some people that are.
Nah, people conflate the Mandate of Heaven with European Divine Right of Kings.
While they both seem to be using the divine to justify the legitimacy of the ruler, they differ in how they relate to said ruler losing legitimacy.
The Divine Right of Kings precludes any thought about removing the monarch as taboo and expects unconditional obedience.
The Mandate of Heaven is used to explain why certain rulers get overthrown by peasant rebellions and others don’t (either the peasants don’t even try, or they’re unsuccessful). Basically getting overthrown means losing the Mandate of Heavens, resisting the rebellion proves holding it.
The Mandate of Heaven ultimately says the legitimacy of rule comes from the consent of the ruled.
I can only speak from my limited reading, but the Daoist meaning appears more like “you’ve clearly fucked up - so either get a grip, or retire to be a fisherman”.
The heavens show displeasure through famine, banditry, unrest, etc - which is to say all the things that result from poor governance. Not keeping your generals under control results in corruption and theft, meaning extortion of the farmers, reducing food security, and turning merely poor weather into apocalyptic punishments.
At which point your rulership is fair game for someone who can fix your mess, humble warlords, and feed people.
Afaik, the Mandate of Heaven is basically the approval of a monarch by the divine as legitimating their authority. It’s not really a social contract except in sort of a “right to work” sense where the divine holds all the cards and is merely condescending to tentatively accepting your appointment until it changes its mind. There are said to be conditions, but it’s not any observable objective metric that defines whether you have lost legitimacy or not (e.g. certain specific actions that you did or did not do), it is the declaration of Heaven in the form of various manifestations of ill fortune.
I welcome correction from someone more familiar with this topic.
Bet he doesn’t even know natural wrongs come from eating too many beans.
society doesn’t even exist. however, there’s this dude that’s everywhere, invisible, all powerful, and his will was perfectly described by the people in charge of one area of the planet a long time ago.
