Monday, November 21, 2016

What Are Rights?

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I just realized that in the few years I have been posting here on the various aspects of freedom, I have never specifically addressed the issue of rights in any direct depth.  Oddly, I thought I'd done so in my very first essay, "What Is Freedom?", but as it turns out, I had not done so sufficiently.  While there isn't all that much in terms of fundamentals to the notion of rights, it still serves us well to have a proper understanding of what they are.

The correct understanding of rights is sorely absent from the repertoire of most people's educations.  This is not only shameful, but very dangerous.  I will, therefore, endeavor to provide the world with a sufficient synopsis of what rights are by type, there being two.

Before we begin, we should once again consult the dictionary for the proper definition(s) of the word "right" as it would correctly apply in the context of freedom.

From Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of 1895, the relevant entry defines a right as:

Right,    n.  ...

2.  That to which one has a just claim

(a) That which one has a natural claim to exact

(b) That which one has a legal or social claim to do or to exact; a legal power; authority

(c) That which justly belongs to one; that which one has a claim to possess or own;
      the interest or share which anyone has in a piece of property; title; claim; interest; ownership

(d) Privilege of immunity granted by authority


And from Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1785:

Right. n. s.  ...

3.  Just claim

4.  That which justly belongs to one

5.  Property; interest

6.  Power; prerogative


From the definitions above, it is clear that a right is that to which one is entitled and to which he may validly claim ownership.  Also note the implicit references to property rights.  As it turns out, a right is centrally important to human freedom, for without respect for the rights of men, there can be no freedom, but only degrees of servitude, which I cover in "Degrees Of Freedom."

There are, however, two senses or types of rights.  The first and most important is that of the inherent or natural right.  An example of this would be a man's right to life - which is another way of saying his claim or title to life, further implying a man's life as being his property, what I call his "First Property", or "FP" for short.  Another would be a man's freedom.

These rights are those that are born into us as matters part and parcel of our human fabric.  There is, therefore, no possible manner by which one's rights may be separated from the rest of one's being as there is no line of demarcation between the two.  You and your rights are one and the same**.

The second sense of a right is that of those of a contractual nature.  An example of this would be your right to vote.  As a citizen of a given nation whose political structures includes the process of voting, there is most often an implied and assumed right to vote in elections.  It is the reason why a citizen of one nation may be prohibited from voting in a nation of which he is not a citizen.  Being contractual in nature, which is to say by way of agreement, this right may be stripped from you, which is the reason why a man convicted of a felony in America may have his right to vote removed.  Men are not born with the right to vote.  They are granted the contractual right as a matter of agreement that this is what men in good standing may do during elections.

All rights imply the right of exercise.  If I retain the right to keep and bear arms, it perforce follows that I hold the right to exercise.  This may seem redundant or even silly, yet it is an important philosophical point, as well as one of great practical importance.  Despite our inherent right to keep and bear arms, many governmental institutions and agencies nevertheless disparage and violate it by enacting statutes and adopting policies that serve that end, despite lip service to the core right itself.  It matters no whit that one acknowledges the right to keep and bear arms while preventing by some means the right of exercise, no matter how obliquely.  "Yes, you have the right to keep and bear arms.  No, you may not walk down the street with a gun on your hip."  The violations are often precisely that blatantly illogical, invalid, and felonious.

The right of exercise directly implies the right to acquire the means thereto as one's just abilities may allow.  What this means is that if I retain the right to keep and bear arms, implying my right of exercise and therefore the right to acquire the means of exercise, I rest centrally within the sphere of my just abilities to secure for myself those weapons I deem suitable for my purposes.  It does not mean, however, that I am entitled to be provided with a weapon or that I may steal one in order to secure my right to exercise.  It only guarantees my right to acquire such means as my abilities allow through non-criminal action.

By their very nature, inherent rights may be exercised for any reason whatsoever, or for no reason at all.  No man may oblige or force another to justify the other's exercise of his fundamental rights and the prerogatives that follow therefrom.  For example, a man decides to openly bear a weapon during a stroll downtown.  Police hold no rightful authority to so much as ask even the most seemingly innocuous question of him regarding his comport of arms, and yet they violate these basic rights of good men daily, often for no other reason than they feel that they can.

Contrary to popular misconception, and this is very important so please pay special attention**, all fundamental human rights are in fact absolute.  Lawmakers, judges, other government figures, and large proportions of most populations are quick to assert the gross falsehood that the inherent rights of men have limits.  They do not.  My right to keep and bear arms as a Freeman cannot be rightly limited, save in those cases where my rights come squarely in crossing with those of another whose prerogatives supersede my own under very narrowly defined conditions, an example of which shall be forthcoming.

Were such rights not absolute, they would not be fundamental, but rather contractual or otherwise arbitrary in nature, meaning somebody somewhere held the authority to bestow and rescind such rights.  Such a person would be your master and you, for all practical intents and purposes, his slave.

The fact that I may not murder someone with my weapon is not a restriction on my right to keep and bear arms per sé, but rather the simple denial of any right to murder my fellows.  The two propositions seem similar, and yet they are at wide variance with each other.  This is where my right to act ends and my neighbor's nose begins, as the old saying goes.

When I am traveling freely as a natural man upon the Commons, no other man may order me to disarm or otherwise molest me as regards my state of being armed, precisely because I retain the inherent right to keep and bear weaponry.  Therefore, my exercise may not be questioned, all else equal.

Another man does, however rest within his prerogatives to prohibit me from coming armed on to his privately held property, or that over which he wields valid private control.  For example, a shop owner may validly and lawfully prevent from entering his place of business those who are armed, even if he is not the  actual owner of the real estate in which the business is located.  Customers hold no inherent right to enter upon the private property of the shop.  The shop owner may set the conditions of entry, including a policy of no weapons.  If a customer finds the condition of entry unacceptable, he may choose not to enter.

Contractual rights are different in that they arise not as matters inherent of the fact that we live, but by conscious agreement or deign.  For example, Acme Anvil Co. hires a new blacksmith and part of their employment offer is stock options for ten thousand shares such that any time within his first five years of service with the firm he may buy shares at some pre-set price, say $1 per share.  That means that at any time during that period, the new hire holds the contractual right, or privilege, to purchase at $1/share as many shares as he wishes up to and including ten-thousands.  Beyond five years, he no longer retains that right, an example of how such rights may be limited by essentially arbitrary (though agreed) condition.

As we can see, this is not quite the same as an inherent right in that it is contrived-by and agreed-upon by men through free and voluntary accord.  In other words, it may not be absolute, save that it becomes so by such agreement.

The inherent right cannot be constrained in this way unilaterally, and while Freemen may waive certain of their fundamental rights, there is nothing in principal to suggest that they may not re-assert those rights at a later time.

Just because the fundamental rights of men are violated in gross and shamefully criminal fashion on a minute-by-minute basis by other men, most often those identifying themselves as "government" or "the state", it does not follow that those rights do not exist.  It only testifies to the violations themselves.  This is an area of reasoning where most people fail miserably in their analyses of such situations, falsely concluding that because rights are violated all the time, they therefore do not exist. Were this the case, then there would no such things as contracts because by this reasoning, if you and I enter into an agreement and I violate the terms, you have no recourse because rights, whether inherent or contractual, clearly do not exist as demonstrated by my violation.  This is wildly failed logic, if "logic" can even be said to live there at all.

Our natural rights are the unalienable property of Freemen and as such cannot be righteously curbed, diminished, removed, violated, or otherwise disparaged save where a Freeman becomes a proven Criminal, in which case some of his rights may be curtailed for a limited period coinciding with the term of any sentence he may have earned as the result of his unrighteous acts.  Short of that, no man holds the least authority to diminish another through acting as if to be the other's master.  This is a felony of the highest order, regardless of who is committing it, or their purport to authority, for such claims are damned lies and may be validly met with extreme prejudice and non-equivocation.

It is my hope and desire to disseminate this information to as wide a population as is possible.  The lack of proper understanding by so many regarding their birthright is both frightening and appalling in the level of danger it threatens to all men.  If you do yourself no other honor in life, at least do that of learning in deeper stance that which no other man may take from you.  Your rights are your first property.  Treasure them and honor them properly, for to neglect this is to invite calamity upon yourself.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.


** It behooves one to read these sentences however many millions of times needed to make their messages soak in fully.  Tattoo it onto the insides of your eyelids if you must, but never forget them and endeavor with all good faith and diligence to understand them wholly and with great precision and clarity, for it will benefit you and those around you endlessly.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

The Freeman and the Weakman




There are two kinds of people in the world.

The first is what I call the "Weakman" and is as common as dirt.  The second is the "Freeman", who is rare as hen's teeth and as precious as life itself.

The Weakman could be epitomized by the so-called "progressive", which in point of practical semantic fact is represented by individuals of a decidedly regressive mindset who cling to wholly corrupted, self-contradicting, and thereby nonsensical notions of words such as "equality" and "justice".

The Weakman is a paradoxical creature.

For example, he is in many ways a fine and empathetic individual with a good and generous heart, while on the other hand he is petty, ill-bred and ill-mannered, vicious beyond fault, unreasoning, and driven by brute and primitive id-emotion to act in the most atrocious ways when the demented fantasies to which he has welded himself come under the least perceived opposition.  He believes that the use of physical force to compel the compliance of those not on board with his ideals is just and always warranted, yet hypocritically rails against any such force applied against his own behaviors, regardless of how atrociously he may act.  Where the realization of these ideals are concerned, for the Weakman there is no tack or measure that is beyond propriety.  The Weakman will gleefully see you and your children murdered for the sake of establishing upon the earth his deranged ideals of social "justice".

Furthermore, the Weakman is marked by an aversion to responsibility akin to that of vampires to crosses, holy water, and mirrors.

In short, Weakmen are essentially infants in grown human bodies.  They are of ego so fragile as to make an adult cringe in empathic agony.  The typical and so-called "millennial" is a penultimate example of the Weakman.  On the one hand there stands this aforementioned glass-like fragility and brittleness.  On the other, we find the wild viciousness that becomes manifest in such copious abundance once the Weakman's delicate sensibilities have been feather-bumped, as to amaze even the most jaded adult.  He flies into rages of such all-consuming performance that I daresay most are deserving of an Academy Award such that an intact, rational, and nominally healthy adult is left utterly dumbfounded and in slack-jawed incredulity upon bearing witness to such senseless displays.

Add to all this the rise of the new vocabulary to assist the Weakman in his efforts to force his dangerous tyrannies upon the world.  Over the past several years I have become familiarized with the perilously childish and unhealthy "social justice" terms that include but are not limited to "trigger", "micro-aggression", "safe space",  "cultural appropriation", "equality", and "justice", etc.  The diabolical feats of mental midgetry that lead to the rise of such terms and their definitions are worthy of pause.

The Weakman is a nearly perfect stooge for the Tyrant, the proverbial "useful idiot"of Soviet Russian fame, at least in terms of his blind devotion to whatever plate of nonsense is served up for his consumption.  So long as he is provided with the right lies by the "government" to which he is pathologically devoted, The Weakman will do nearly anything asked of him, so long as responsibility and construction are not parts of the deal, for another characteristic of the Weakman is a love of destruction and an aversion to responsibility that well approximates the mathematical notion of infinity.  Weakmen populate the ranks of our contemporary equivalents of those useful idiots.

Weakmen kneel and praise at the altar of the "state", for government is the only apparent source of their sense of purpose and self-worth.  Their entire concept of self appears to be deeply tied to the notion of government, particularly where de-facto collectivism provides their aversive selves an escape from individual responsibility.  Despite this, Weakmen will spontaneously fly into fits of hypocritical rage and violence against the very government before which they kneel when that institution fails them in some perceived way, real or more likely imagined.

Yet, despite all these terribly unflattering characteristics, the Weakman's basic instinct appears to be that of generosity; at least so long as:


  • he is being generous with someone else's assets;
  • the giving is easy;
  • he's already gotten "his".


There is more one could write about the Weakman, but there is really no point in going on too much further, suffice to say that he manifests all the worst attributes of the human animal - fear, avarice, ignorance, and lassitude, the proverbial Four Necessities.  I will nonetheless contrast him with his opposing counterpart.

Behold the Freeman.  He is courageous - enough to accept the sometimes dire risks and terrifying realities that are part and parcel with freedom in specific, and the world in general.  The Freeman claims all benefits of being free, but is also accepting of the costs, which he pays gladly in exchange for that which freedom brings, the proverbial animating contest, as well as all its benefits and risks.

The Freeman acknowledges reality as it stands, yet maintains his ideals as targets after which to shoot without any expectation of striking with perfection.  Unlike the Weakman, the Freeman shows the proper respect for the rights of his fellows, having learned what those rights are and why they are important.

The Freeman is an adult, rather than an infant throwing a hissy-fit through the agency of a grown body, or worse yet - government stooges.  He neither shirks nor shrinks from his responsibilities as a Freeman toward himself or his fellows, no matter how it may inconvenience or otherwise pain or aggrieve his convenience and patience.

The Freeman is the master of his emotions, using his reason in place of brute feelings, whereas the Weakman is the willing and dutiful slave to emotional caprice.

The Freeman is courageous, facing his fears and the dangers of this world with intelligence and discretion.  The Weakman is a dyed-in-the-wool coward with little to no personal grace to which one might bear witness.

The Freeman is generous, even when generosity has become difficult, and often precisely because it has become so.  The Weakman is generous only when it suits his mood, and usually only with the assets of others, ill-gotten.  He will rarely if ever give to others, particularly if his own coffers are not overflowing with rude excess.  This is why the Weakman tends to be a big fan of, and advocate for progressivism, proclaiming his subscription with abundant noises and chest pounding.  He is all on board for any political philosophy where he feels he can hide from responsibility and labor, and do whatever it is to which his unrestrained emotions may lead.

The Freeman endeavors with humility to improve his state of ignorance.  The Weakman revels in his ignorance, praising it explicitly as such, or relabeling it as "knowledge" and "wisdom" in his attempts to fool himself into feeling he is better than the rest.  He is a weak and unrestrained ego, blown up like a balloon, endlessly professing his innate superiority over those who do not agree with him.  Most of all, the Weakman hates with bitter venom the Freeman, for the latter always serves to remind the Weakman of his terrible and pitiable shortcomings and inadequacies.

The Freeman is industrious pursuant to the goals he sets for himself.  The Weakman expects others to hand him that which he capriciously demands.  There are endless examples of such debauched attitudes, including but not limited to the demand that "government" provide every man, woman, and child with a guaranteed minimum income for life.

The Freeman is worthy of one's trust.  The Weakman cannot be trusted to the door, save that he will betray you at his first convenience and experience no sense of having done anything wrong, particularly where his visions of the "greater good" are concerned.

The Freeman is quietly tolerant of that with which finds himself in disagreement.  The Weakman noisily spouts off about his tolerance while wishing misery, prison, and even disease and death upon all with whom he disagrees.  I have seen and heard such people literally wish others to be stricken with cancer for no other reason than they had the temerity to disagree on a matter of pure opinion and personal preference.

The Freeman tends by his nature to comport himself with a certain humility in the knowledge of his shortcomings.  The Weakman, being of a collapsing-ego, never shuts his mouth such that the world is painted in his mind as revolving around him and his precious and all-consuming "feelings".

The Freeman is thereby open-minded about everything, tolerant of much, and accepting of some.  The Freeman allows others to hold to their values, opinions, and practices.  The Weakman's tightly shut mind is peddled to the world as open to all, yet his pompously professed tolerance is belied by his open and spewing hatred of all that which does not mesh with his world-view.

The Freeman retains the courage, responsibility, and moral fiber to judge for himself the merits of the manifold things he encounters in life.  The Weakman shuns all courage and responsibility, all the while denying the existence of morals such that he abjures and forswears all proper judgment for his opinions and actions in his pathological need to avoid accountability at any cost to himself and those around him.

The Freeman accepts responsibility for what he feels, says, and does.  The Weakman denies any such responsibility, especially for his feelings.  He discounts language and thereby the responsibility for his utterances.  He accepts responsibility for his actions only to the very narrow degree that the circumstances in question mesh with his world-view.  For example, he may apologize in the wake of calling a black man "nigger", but only if such utterances are claimed as repugnant to him.  In the same breath he will almost always attempt to excuse himself or mitigate his culpability by citing how his "feelings" got the better of him, or some similar nonsense.  By that means will he apologize, but only with the subtext that he's not really responsible.  The Weakman's greatest device for evading responsibility is victimhood.  Ever the victim, whether of his emotions, the words of others, or any of a vast set of "outside" influences, he is never really responsible for what he says, thinks, or does.

In short, the Freeman defines the Realman.  The Weakman defines a flailing, lost, helpless infant of ill-breeding and great distemper who, despite his lack of skills of true and lasting value, nevertheless represents a clear and present threat to himself and all others, for he has neither the cloth nor discipline or decency to live by the tenets of that which he so vociferously boasts as being sacred to him.  Most notable among these self-professed virtues are those of love, kindness, respect, generosity, tolerance, learnedness, non-violence, and open-mindedness, all of which the Freeman carries with him without the self-serving pomp and idiocy of the Weakman.

The Weakman is the perfect hypocrite and the most hollow of all creatures imaginable.

So tell me, which would you consider yourself?

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.