The Atlantic Tells Us About “Good” and “Bad” Liberty
(media.communities.win)
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It's not positive and negative liberty, it's positive and negative rights.
Negative rights are things that you inherently have due to being human that people (especially the government) shouldn't take from you - things like freedom of speech, ability to defend yourself, right to control your property, etc. (basically, the bill of rights type stuff)
Positive rights are when people get greedy and say they have a right to take stuff from someone and give it to themselves. Such as "Other people should pay for my education!" "Other people should pay for my health care!" "Other people should pay for my internet access!" etc. (basically, the DNC platform)
Again you’re playing by their framing, positive and negative have direct intent, you are either adding or detracting. There is nothing negative in inherent rights, neither is it what they argue. “Negative” liberty is liberty, “positive” liberty is communism. If we were to use positive and negative as they words intent implies then positive liberty is additional freedoms without cost applied to others. Negative liberty is additional freedoms at the cost of others.
Positive and negative aren't synonymous for good and bad in this context. It's from the perspective of the government. Negative rights are about what the government isn't allowed to do, like jail you without cause, restrict your free speech and gun rights, ect. Positive rights means the government has to take action to fulfill them rather than just refrain from tyrannical behavior. Examples would be all the free shit the left wants to give free loaders to buy votes. In effect this means robbing Peter to pay Paul, which is why positive rights are bad. But positive and negative are not moral judgements in this context.
Notice what you did. You defended an avenue of thought after you acknowledged it was inherently flawed. Positive and negative in terms of government should never be defined on how it impacts government. Government is a system built by citizens, therefore the only metric of impact that matters in the aspect of positive and negative is the impact upon the people.
I'm not defending anything. I'm simply pointing out how those terms are used. Negative rights forbid the government from taking certain actions, and positive rights mandate the government take certain actions. You're still assigning normative values to positive and negative and they're purely descriptive terms in this context. We're talking about definitions, not value judgements. Those terms don't mean good/bad any more than protons have "good" charges and electrons have "bad" charges because we use the terms positive and negative to describe electrical charge. The terminology is shitty because it confuses rather than clarifies but it's not being used in the way you think it is.
I’m well aware of how the verbiage is being used, the problem is the same as ac vs dc. Positive and negative in any sense should always be implied as their natural function. The inability to do so is human error. This does not stop the need to properly categorize things as they impact the objects we describe.
But it is used correctly.
Negative : the Government can't do this.
Positive : the Government is obliged to do this.
Absence vs presence of Government Action. Stop nitpicking against the poster, the terms are neutral and correct and used by about everyone with a functioning level of understanding of politics.
Its not used correctly, again this method of thought is completely irrational. To ascribe status you must attribute correctly. This labeling has one intent, to make government seem good and citizens bad.
Obviously not if you're still opening that cock-hole on your face.
Let me guess: you bitched about a negative HIV test, didn't you?
Let me guess: you said tolerance was a good thing
Understanding linguistics and language is not tolerance. But you enjoy hyperfocusing on semantics and optics. I'm sure that will pay off and really convince the people who hate you to not hate you anymore, because it's worked so well in the past.
Sure, but that's the standard terminology that's always been understood, even by those of who know there are only "negative" rights. Perhaps we should reformulate the terms to make it easier to understand for noobs.
You mean don’t use communist Russian diction to describe the traits of liberty? Did it really take you this long to get that?
―Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France
Rights and liberty are ideas that only emerge from western peoples. They are not and cannot be universal, even within the west. Liberty can only exist in a high-trust society that is already well ordered with shared values. Rights are derived from sovereign power to facilitate the uplifting and prosperity of the people. When a society is disordered and incoherent, the sovereign has a duty to ruthlessly crush subversive and corrosive elements that dissolve society.
Not really, rights and liberties exist as a reaction to impositions applied by rules over the world. It is only the west that founded a philosophy on the idea and applied it universally in order to prevent generalized tyranny.
It's unfortunate that the east and south live as slaves to their rapists and killers, but I'm not prepared to accept slavery because of the threat of subversion.
And it is the duty and moral obligation of every man to remove that sovereign by any means necessary. This is normally because the very concept of human freedom is the most subversive weapon against all authority. So, any freedom is a subversive threat to any order. In response, many sovereigns are prepared to systematically exterminate most, if not all, of their entire population with foreign armies in order to maintain an order that they impose, because allowing any dissent, of any kind, can undermine that order. They will always accept that hollowing out your lands and re-populating it with loyal foreigners is better than allowing your own subjects to reject your assertions, even if your assertions are patently insane and damaging.
The problem with most sovereigns is that they, without exception, are the most dangerous threat that any society faces at any time. The fact that any and all freedom of any kind can be seen as subversion of the order they impose, justifies unlimited atrocities. The more totalizing the sovereign's scope, the less dissent can be tolerated.
Both the American Revolution, and the English Civil War, explicitly demonstrates why Kings and Sovereigns can't be trusted. In both cases, the unflinching rejection of the King to disruption of their government's absolute authority, lead to them allying with foreigners to kill their own subjects and murder their own people. This because to every authoritarian, it is better to have most of your population die, rather than to have any one person disobey. Most importantly: at no point is the sovereign prepared to believe that he is wrong.
This is the lolbert idea of freedom that only works for a society of 120IQ white boys that reproduce without women. If you haven't noticed over the last two years, most people desperately want someone to tell them what to do, which isn't a bad thing. A vicious king can be less free than a virtuous slave, as a man has as many masters as his vices. Classical tyranny, as described in Plato's Republic, is when slaves and women are elevated to positions of power over better men. Somehow tyranny has been redefined to mean when sovereignty simply exists, which is delusional as the existence of sovereign power is inescapable.
Classical liberty comes from order.
Order is an emergent property of Chaos.
Chaos is an emergent property of Order.
The idea that that only white people can have freedom, when it is white people who are the primary source of the destruction of that freedom with Leftist shows this is nonsensical.
Yes, the political Left cultivated a culture of slaves for nearly a century. That's actually a bad thing.
Cool, cool, so you've never read a single history book in your life then?
History is literally filled to the brim with not only viscous kings, but in some cases, literal psychopaths who are kings, queens, lords, duchy's, dukes, etc. They normally survive all possible challenges, because no one can hold them to account before opposition murders them.
I would honestly expect better from you, since you've at least read the history of gender.
Literally not where the word tyrant comes from. Tyrants, and their tyranny, is simply when someone (typically some kind of gang or factional leader) takes over a city state.
Plato's Republic, in and of itself, was a tyranny by the fact that his Philosopher Kings would have unchecked power, and are effectively a good description of the environment we have at this very second, with self-anointed intellectualists declaring themselves the unchangeable arbiters of the world.
It is the self-anointed "Better Men" that we should seek to uncompromisingly remove from society, given their utterly unaccountable nature, and the fact that no human suffering can dissuade them from their arrogance.
Your Whig history is silly and cringe. Most people never felt any effect on their lives from the king. Crazy kings mostly terrorized their court, while good kings uplifted the nation.
This is a good demonstration that lolberts and socialists are practically indistinguishable. Both are seeking to liberate the individual from any responsibilities, which is characterized as oppression. Both are progressive diseases that tear at the fabric of society. Go read Hoppe to find some non-cringe libertarianism that bridges to monarchy.
Spez: Here is some Mosca.
-The Ruling Class
You should define what you mean by lolberts, because it's a vague made up epithet for an already vague set of ideas held by a broad spectrum of people. But libertarians - except for the fringe "I just want big government to legalize all drugs and guns and shield me from social responsibility" - are individualists, while socialists are collectivists. They may be Liberals, but they couldn't be indistinguishable unless you ignored that most important dimension.
The collectivist-individualist distinction is far less important than one might imagine, in much the same way as the distinction between capitalism and communism isn't particularly important. Lolberts are any of the non-Hoppians as best exemplified by Reason. Rothbard would have called them modal libertarians.
They primarily act as the deterritorialization force within the progressive dialect because they refuse to acknowledge the reality that power and hierarchy exists. Sovereignty cannot be stripped from the state and given to everybody/nobody. It will always be conserved and go somewhere that will recognizably become the State. Communists literally have the same insane goal of flattening society such that sovereignty is dissolved, but with a slightly different road map to get there.
Assinine beyond words considering how Feudal systems worked. When you had peasants pledging their children's children to their direct lords, who were forced by feudal order to pledge their absolute loyalty to barons, and then to kings; and kings had literally unlimited scope and power to make law by decree; the idea that people just didn't feel the effect of kings is laughably insane. Not to mention the Guild system which was aligned entirely with the monarchy's control over the economy.
The Magna Carta was built as a kind of threat to the power of an English King who was literally imprisoning people at will. Oliver Cromwell fucking banned Christmas and the English made a protest song about it. Being caught with this song's lyrics was a death sentence. Hell, during the Hundred Years War, the English troops burned and pillaged through French villages, murdering with impunity, in order to demonstrate that the French King couldn't protect them, in order to recruit the population into swearing allegiance to the English king. We can also talk about the English Crown's courts that were set up to impose the King's power over the general population in the "Star Chamber".
And all that is from England, which by all respect had one of the least repressive, violent, murderous, and freedom loving of monarchies that I'm aware of. You try any dissent with the French, Austrians, Hungarians, Spanish, or Portuguese; they'll kill your whole family.
That's to say nothing of non-European civilizations of other eras. We can talk of the first Totalitarian state: Ancient Egypt. We can talk about how Caesar's ascent to power relied on manipulating grain and land re-distribution schemes. We can talk about the Spartan king's control over pregnancies by killing daughters with infanticide. We can talk about how Tokugawa in Japan made northern forests sacred in order to secure the wood supply of the country, and regularly executed people seen attempting to cut trees. He also exterminated the Portuguese. And fuck, do I really have to explain why Vlad The Impaler was an absolute autocrat who terrified the absolute bejesus out of everyone in Wallachia at all times? Or are we going to pretend that impaling 300,000 people just doesn't have an impact on anyone. Oh yeah, I forgot the Ottomans. I'm sure the Ottomans and their Janissaries made of stolen subjugated children didn't effect anyone either.
Seriously, where the fuck do you get this idea that a monarch basically doesn't effect his own people? Even by your standard, the concept of the sovereign is that he shouldn't betray his own subjects because he effectively owns them and wants them to improve. It's not true, but that should be your argument. Not that they are unrelated. By the very nature of "having the right to destroy subversion", a King gives himself the unrestrained right to control all aspects of the lives of his subjects.
Daft idiocy. The entire concept of a Liberal Philosophy is that a man is his own sovereign, and therefore his responsibilities are his own mandate to fulfill. Not that he doesn't have them. Your ignorance of Liberalism doesn't mean that it's the same as Leftism, which is inherently anti-Liberal.
And literally no part of that stops anyone from being a violent, bloodthirsty, savage. In fact, all it does is allow the subordinates to make excuse for it, and continue institutionalizing slaughter.
The Feudal Ages repeatedly show both the general population and subordinate barons lamenting the rise of bad kings which no one can do anything to stop for multiple decades at a time. The wrong king gets into power, sorry: but you're just gonna have to deal with arbitrary beheadings for the next 40 years.
The Magna Carta was a threat FROM HIS DIRECT LORDS, not the peasants. It was a drama within the kings court.
This whole screed is silly progressive cope. You'd have to believe that 99%+ of history was just masses of people wallowing in misery without fullfilment for arbitrary reasons. You clearly don't even keep up on current libertarian thought, such as Hoppe who is the intellectual backbone of the Mises caucus which recently took the LP—as ineffectual as the LP is which Rothbard correctly recognized in 1984. While it is unfortunate that you've taken such an absurd position that leaves you unable to fend off trannies and pedos, it also makes you unable to threaten any other power, so your cringe opinions can be safely ignored.
???
Meaning that it can't exist. Women destroy the utopian conceptions of libertarianism by their very nature.
Precisely.
The concept of "Positive Rights" comes from Rouseau's conceptualization of a "Social Contract": whereby, the government representing the "General Will" (a more insane concept than what it sounds) creates "rights" for the people who subject themselves to it, as a form of political reward at the expense of their freedom.
Rouseau is explicit that you must sacrifice your actual liberty to the state in order to be bestowed the benefits of your loyalty to the state.
The very concept of "positive rights" is antithetical to the idea of inherent and fundamental rights. If someone else has a right to your money, your time, your property, then you have no rights.
Bullshit. Every leftist program out there that's supposed to "create opportunities" only does so by ripping the same opportunities away from someone else that they deem to be "privileged" over the recipient of the "opportunity". While they may look good in theory, they've all been bent and perverted.
Leftism can be summed up as theory despite practice.
Opportunities unless you deviate slightly from "right"think. Then you're cancelled.
It’s hilarious how they frame bald faced lies. I remember asking a history professor how many permanent jobs/industries the new deal built, I received a similar argument about “good” theft of individual income.
Slavery’s got plenty of them as well. People frequently claim it didn’t end until the 1960’s or 70’s now. That sounds provocative, so you listen to what they have to say, and it’s always “I’VE REDEFINED SLAVERY SO THAT I CAN SAY IT’S STILL GOING ON EVERYDAY IN AMERICA RIGHT NOW.” Then you look across the pond and actual slavery’s still going on and they don’t give a shit.
Or ‘The Great Party Switch’. Then you look into who and when and it approaches nobody and never.
I like getting info from varied sources but it’s increasingly hard not to turn out anything leftist in any context. All they do is word dance.
"Positive liberty" my ass. A statist framing of shitty services created by burdening everyone with tax.
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
-Thomas Sowell
The "Acksually" fallacy
The Atlantic Leftist:
Positive Liberty = Leftism
Negative Liberty = Freedom
Renaming Things to angle for rhetorical advantage, whilst sidestepping or outright-corrupting actual dielectic and Meaningful Categorization: is MO for leftists. Expect it.
Alexis De Tocqueville had a much better understanding of liberty (at least for the time) and knew that government promising something - be it "liberty" or some other specific right for the masses - only means the government will get bigger, which will eventually lead to less liberty.
So basically, positive liberty is no liberty, since the government can just take whatever you have and make you do whatever they want for "The Greater Good" and "Fulfill their potential" (whatever that means) ?
Just reading those definition makes me feel like they switched where negative and positive liberty belong in that sentence.
"Positive" liberty/rights are a direct infringement on actual liberty/rights.
"Freedom bad. Socialism good!"
Fuck Isaiah Berlin
Berlin associated "positive" liberty with the Soviet Union, a country he fled. He also considered it the most easily perverted of the "liberties" - something abused by tyrants and people who think you are too stupid to understand that they know better (a paraphrase of his actual words). He was on the side of "negative" freedom with a touch of the "positive."
I doubt they even address this and just want to use the rhetorical impact of those words. Well, their readers probably won't question it.
This doesn’t stop Berliner from being wrong altogether. Much like Nietzche they are misinterpreting intent with diction.
lunk?
That Berlin guy and the atlantic don't know what liberty is.
Don't even need an early life
"Postive liberty" is like the patriarchy. It's a lie. For every "positive liberty" that is created / enforced by the government, actual liberty is taken from someone else, because the government cannot create rights out of thin air. They have to take something away from someone else. The "someone else" are usually people feminists have designated as "privileged" or "dominant power" etc.