The Atlantic Tells Us About “Good” and “Bad” Liberty
(media.communities.win)
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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.
Let me guess: you bitched about a negative HIV test, didn't you?
Let me guess: you said tolerance was a good thing
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?