MOVE. Or better, ARGUE and get others to agree with you.

I’m sure you know that these are not the only options.

Rights are not like magic ponies or talismans. They are an act of fiction

Well if they are an “act of fiction” then they are like magic ponies or the powers attributed to talismans, aren’t they?

In truth, there’s nothing fictional or “random” about fundamental human rights. Of course they require — and inspire! — human action for their defense, but they’re no less real for that.

Enjoy your tea and twaddle.

The problem with the erosion of the contract is that it is being applied top down, rather than bottom up. There is no denying that the American Founders had every intent to create a government structure where people in a town/community who liked pickled cats, could eat them, and create a law to do it. Only the Feds couldn’t impose that restriction.

“Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles of its association, and to say to all individuals, that if they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and pseudo-citizens, on such terms. We may exclude them from our territory, as we do persons infected with disease.”
–Thomas Jefferson, 1816

As to the idea that “force” is involved, it dismisses reality and personal responsibility, and is a half-truth. It assumes that you move to a place where the laws were a great big mystery to you, and the consequences an even bigger mystery. That person’s ignorance of the laws and the consequences for breaking them does not a tyranny make. That’s just simple ignorance. MOVE. Or better, ARGUE and get others to agree with you. Reciting a list of rights as an incantation is not going to help you. Shouting “I have rights, you can’t do that” is not going to stop bad people from putting you on cattle cars. Only other people can do that.

Rights are not like magic ponies or talismans. They are an act of fiction, a random thought, made real by a people’s desire to make them tangible by taking actions to protect/recognize them.

Just as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” rights are the same: “Rights don’t protect people, people protect people.”

Linda appears to be operating from the assumption that rights will spring forth to protect you, like some sort of tangible Magic Muffin Man. That’s where you get to fixed assumptions about what they are, and what they actually do… by believing in them and clicking your heels together to make them tangible.

They’re not real, unless the people decide they are, and act as if that’s so. And even if you’re lucky enough to get the larger group to recognize and respect them in a compact, that still doesn’t help you when the next generation comes along, or others move to your neighborhood. The Great Conversation never ends. You’re never done. It is a never-ending battle to educate people to prefer to recognize and then defend the rights of others. We aren’t born that way. It is a by product of our socialization, and a social custom.

Rights don’t do anything, except give us something to discuss.

Unless you can get other people to agree to what they are, and then take actions and make decisions to make them real, you and your ideas will fall victim to Darwin.

I’m sure there are plenty of folks who see great martyr opportunities available in that, but dying is easy. Any idiot can do that. Living honorably and successfully with your fellows is hard.

What you emphatically do not have and cannot acquire by joining any group is the right to wantonly legislate away the freedom of other people to conduct on property you do not own activities that do you no harm. Were you to do that, you would be engaging in tyranny, and it would be made worse if you, like government, took from your victims the money with which to enforce such unjust laws against them.

So when I say:

It is not tyranny to uphold the right of people in Somewheresville to dance on any property whose actual owner does not forbid it, nor is it tyranny to defy those Somewheresvillians who would hold that passing a law erases a right.

And you reply:

Of course it is tyranny! Just saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so.

You are wrong, and not just because I say so. You have no more right than any tyrant to spew laws prohibiting peaceful exercise of the harmless freedoms of your fellows.

You instruct me:

you have to convince them that allowing dancing is the better way, not deny them the right to decide it.

But you and your goons may use force to outright prevent your neighbors from dancing when you fail to persuade them of your “better way”? Of course you have no such right, and those whom you bully may ultimately find means to convince you of that.

Of course it is tyranny! Just saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so. You’ve decided that criminalizing dancing is something you wouldn’t allow, but I’d bet dollars to donuts you’d feel differently if it was a child porn ring operating in “any property whose actual owner does not forbid it.”

Back the hell up! Banning dancing is the same as banning child pornography?

Did you miss the difference? One (presumably) involves only consenting adults and the other does not. (It HURTS to have to agree with Billy Beck about something! Don’t do that to me!)

No group of people has a right to force others to comply with rules of games they have not agreed to play, or to punish them for not playing, to use the terms you use above.

That would be correct, but with a huge caveat: They’re on the field! They can leave the field, but they’ve CHOSEN not to. They’re making it difficult or impossible for others to play, and whining about getting hit in the nose, while others are trying to avoid them. They’re a tiny few, interrupting the game’s play, shouting “CRICKET IS THEFT!”

Analogy exhausted.

It is not tyranny to uphold the right of people in Somewheresville to dance on any property whose actual owner does not forbid it, nor is it tyranny to defy those Somewheresvillians who would hold that passing a law erases a right.

Of course it is tyranny! Just saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so. You’ve decided that criminalizing dancing is something you wouldn’t allow, but I’d bet dollars to donuts you’d feel differently if it was a child porn ring operating in “any property whose actual owner does not forbid it.” You’ve decided which is a tolerable set of things that fit into your criminalization model on private property, but you want to deny others the right to decide their own list, and enforce YOUR rules among OTHER willing players. THAT is tyranny.

You only get to decide the rules for your group or yourself, not for every other group or other persons. Doing otherwise IS the definition of tyranny.

You’re essentially saying that a group of people cannot enter into a group contract, and even if they do, they can decide to withdraw from it without the consequences of dissolving it (which was ALSO in the contract), or cherry-pick which rules they’ll follow.

If a community of people had a set of covenants and restrictions that clearly established the body who made the rules, and the method by which those on the board were elected, then the homeowner acknowledges that there are restrictions on the use of his property, and freely chose and accepted them when he or she completed the sale. Or are we now suggesting that “acceptable enforcement of laws” doesn’t extend to enforcing contracts, freely entered?

When you violate the terms of a contract you FORFEIT benefits and/or incur penalties. When you enter into a contract, you are delegating some of your rights, FREELY. You haven’t surrendered them, just as you haven’t surrendered child custody when you hire a babysitter for the night. The child is still your responsibility, even while the child is in the care of someone else. As such, your rights have not been forfeited when they’re in the care of the group or freely given to someone else for their safe keeping. You can regain them simply by taking them back AND take back the responsibility for protecting them YOURSELF, without relying on the group’s protection. That also requires that you go to a place where the delegation of some of your rights is not a cost of entry. That’s what citizenship in a country confers: Both the protection of rights the group acknowledges and the delegation of some rights for the group’s benefit… and the group decides the balance. If you don’t like the balance they’ve struck or the evolving balance they strike, then play somewhere else!

True, so long as the cricket players have the deed to the park and came by it honest.

Every property owner has signed a contract with the land office when they take possession of the deed, in their respective country, so the moment you become a land owner, and want the group to protect and recognize that the property is yours, you HAVE entered, WILLINGLY, into a contract to play by the country’s rules.

Governments are really no different from homeowners associations. If you don’t want to abide by the rules of the association, then don’t buy property there or accept a land deed, and live somewhere else. It really IS that simple.

If a homeowners association (or a community of citizens in a town or a country) decides that they don’t want dancing on their group’s property and you do, live in an association/country that allows it, or in a place where there is no homeowners association/country. Continuing to accept the benefits of the group (maintenance, stable property values, security details, street maintenance, etc.) and cherry-picking the rules makes someone a scoundrel and a lawbreaker, not a cool rebel. In plain speaking, that’s called a MOOCH.

How long has it been since folks have been trying to develop the Free State project? It’s tough to enter into a group agreement with people who refuse to enter or acknowledge a groups’ right to exist or a method of determining how rules should be made, eh?

I acknowledge that the real problem is that there is no place else for the mooches among us to go, ie, no other field to buy where other games can be played or dancing to be performed, but that does not negate the fact that others have every right to play the game they want to play, and demand that if others enter the field that they follow the rules.

Before you can alter the rules/laws that everyone plays by to improve them to the way you think it should be, you first have to acknowledge their right to have laws of their own making…. by all means, influence it with whatever ideology floats your boat, but you have to convince them that allowing dancing is the better way, not deny them the right to decide it.

Samizdata.net: where arguments are not conducted about the numbers of angels dancing on pinheads, but on pinpoints.

So it could seem to pinheads unable to argue a point.

However, all I really wanted to point out is that a pre-condition of the Rule of Law is a sovereign government and that governments rule.

In a democracy, the “ruled” – the electoriate – are the “rulers”. Your formulation also ignores the importance of things such as a separation of powers, with government – the executive – being just one part. A government, if it is not to become tyrannical, needs to be suburdinate to a written or unwritten constitution. (it is arguable that the UK government is dangerously out of control).

This is not pedantry, as some folk here seem to think. We are not Leninists who argue that all that matters is power, not law.

[Our rulers] have a deep horror of the “sexism” of the 2012 games – there being events that are only open to women, and other events that are only open to men

See. Dull (in the sense of retarded, particularly) and frivolous. There you go.