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A comment on Steve Wozniak: Internet should not have gatekeepers or regulators. Parent comment

Re:Steve Wozniak: Internet should not have gatekeepers or re... by Gormo on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @02:47PM (#4387497)
The concept of "positive rights" really doesn't make any sense - the purpose of defining rights is to delineate the boundaries of the power of others with respect to the individual; i.e. what the individual retains by virtue of being an individual, and isn't required to sacrifice as a condition of entering into a social context. So how can you designate goods that are acquired within that social context to be "rights"?

Mandates that a particular institution must do one thing or another are outside the scope of the theory of rights - this is just policy, which, in a just and healthy political system, is restrained from transgressing against the rights of individuals, but is by definition incapable of altering the nature of those rights.

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Re:Steve Wozniak: Internet should not have gatekeepers or re... by rmc on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @03:00PM (#4387566)
The concept of "positive rights" really doesn't make any sense

Eppur si muove (Italian for 'and yet it moves', fabled as what Galileo said when signing his confession that the sun goes around the sun). Some jurisiticions recognise positive rights. Ergo they exist.

outside the scope of the theory of rights - this is just policy

Again, some jurisiticions recognise these as not a mere policy, but as rights of a person.

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Re:Steve Wozniak: Internet should not have gatekeepers or re... by Gormo on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @03:07PM (#4387602)
Some people may recognize the existence of 'flying bananas': yellow objects which propel themselves through the air by their own power.

This is, of course, due to imprecision in those people's use of symbolic identifiers: those who possess a higher-resolution semantic repertoire might instead call the thing being observed a 'canary', and regard it has having little ontological connection to a banana.

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