So let's talk about hypotheticals that will never come to pass because.. why again?
You are quite lost. This is not hypothetical, it is principle. Not at all the same thing. How can you possibly stare so blindly past the point?
Without enslaving someone, or taking their money (which is a fancy way to partially, retroactively, enslave them) to pay someone else, just how are you going to provide any of these supposed 'rights?'
My definition wasnt relying on the word to prop itself up, it was attempting to direct your attention again to what is right in front of you. The word 'right' has a range of meanings, and in the philosophic and legal tradition it is used in a more narrow, restrictive sense. Looking for a dictionary definition of the word in this specific context may not work well (which is normal for terms of art) so referring back to another sense of the same root that is easier for you to find is hardly malfeasance.
Had you bothered to look it up you would have seen that 'rightful' is defined as 'legitimately claimed.' There is no circular definition here, but perhaps you simply are determined to misunderstand. Indeed you appear rather foaming at the mouth to point out my 'sociopathy' which is utterly absurd and rather makes you look a bit of a nutter at this point. But I will go ahead and give you one more bite I guess.
My argument goes unanswered- what's the point of recognizing airy fairy ivory tower "rights" if you deprive people of food clothing and shelter by saying to them they have no "right" to them.
The point you keep charging right past and pretending not to see is that if you respect peoples rights you cannot deprive them of clothing or shelter! That is the whole point of rights!
What you seem to want to do is conflate the concept of depriving someone of their clothes and shelter, with simply declining to provide them with clothes and shelter. Two very different things. I dont have a natural right to clothing and shelter provided for me for free - I have a natural right to be left to peacefully enjoy the clothing and shelter I worked hard to provide myself with - *and so does everyone else.*
Your alternative is that you have a right to it so it just has to magically be provided for you, and in the real world that means someone will be enslaved, in whole or in part, to pay for it. And that is not right.
But I can live without a slave... so your point is....
That slavery is intrinsically wrong, because it is the denial of humanity, and that if you ever do require a slave to survive, it is your time to die instead.
What are rights except things you can't live without and you cannot assuredly provide yourself ?
That's not what rights are at all. Rights, in this context, means a rightful enforceable claim. If something is yours by right, then you are not morally barred from taking it by force.
The usual, but not the only, way to take things by force these days is to pass a law. Take money from one group of people, give it to another. Usually for the supposed benefit of a third, who are being cynically exploited in the deal, but nevertheless may derive real benefit.
In this case, the taxpayers are being setup to pay money to the cellphone companies, to provide a third group of people with cellphones. Just a recent revamp of a very old strategy. It dates back to Egypt and Babylon.
What's the alternative? You have a right to this all this abstract stuff, just no right to go on living ?
In certain cases, yes. As I said, if you cannot survive without enslaving someone... or killing them, then you have a moral obligation to die.
In most cases, people are perfectly capable of working for a living however. And there are many strategies that societies used before the rise of the state to provide safety nets. Without the constant drain on the economy of redistribution from the middle class into the pockets of the rich (often by way of the poor, of course) that we subject ourselves to in a vain attempt to make a miraculous wonderland where nothing bad ever happens via legislation, those old strategies should rebound with a vengeance.
Even if that doesnt work as well as I would like, come on, could it possibly be worse than the road we are on now?
This is a really hilarious suggestion. Not that I am saying I wont try it, but... let's remember here. Back a long time ago, it was Netscape Navigator that we all adopted because it sucked less than Mosaic. Then it became this whole huge crufty Netscape suite, with a bunch of extra stuff most of us didnt want or use (including a particularly awful mail client.) People slowly quit using Netscape, moving to IE (blech) or Opera in worrying numbers. Netscape became Mozilla, and this Netscape Suite became, if I am not badly mistaken, Seamonkey. Then Firefox was spun off, and it was great, a lean mean browsing machine without all that extra cruft, and it brought us back in droves.
Now Mozilla has gone retard and turned Firefox into a bloaten mishappen heap, and you are telling me the Seamonkey Suite is the one that sucks less?
That is absolutely insane, it makes no sense at all, therefore knowing Mozilla it's probably accurate. Downloading Seamonkey now.
I believe you are dodging the question and putting up a false dichotomy. An unfertilized egg is not human, it is human tissue, the same with a sperm. The have to potential to produce humans. The embryo is always human.life after conception.
But there is nothing particularly special about that moment of conception from a rights point of view. A two-celled fertilised egg is still a microscopic organism - and just as utterly dependent on the being it exists inside of, as part of, as it was a moment earlier at one cell.
Are you saying that as a newborn they have no rights?
No. Not at all. A newborn is a child, with a separate existence. Weak and helpless, yes, but still a very different thing than a fertilised egg or an embryo - there is an individuality there that did not exist before.
The thing is, you want to find a single bright line and draw it and use the power of the state to enforce it. I am not mirroring your position with a different line, however, just pointing out that your line isnt defensible. Various people have proposed various lines that are more defensible - ranging from the third trimester from our Supreme Court, to a week after birth in the Bible, and this is a very difficult question that intelligent and knowledgeable people of goodwill disagree vehemently on.
Understanding that, I really dont want the state involved at all here, picking one line and forcing it on everyone. The people in the best position to try to draw a line are the woman and her doctor, drawing it for her and her alone.
If your gizmo really needs reserved keystrokes like that, then you should think about making it a separate app, not running it inside a browser!
The browser global keystrokes only serve their purpose when they are globally available and always work. This is absolutely fundamental. Shortcut keys that only work in certain tabs, not in others, depending on what is loaded, is fundamental interface breakage. Shortcut keys that do one thing in one tab but something else entirely in another is even worse.
Considering all the stuff "16" was supposed to have fixed, recommending a rollback over this sounds completely incompetent. And therefore expected.
Remember, these are the same geniuses that decided to start rolling the version number everytime someone fixes a typo a few months ago, and thus calling the current version (what is it really, 5.3 or so?) 16. And it isnt truly new either, take a look at this old bug for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414
Been sitting there well over 10 years now. Not one serious attempt to fix it. How many new features that no one wanted and random gui changes to confuse users have they managed to implement in that time period?
So yeah, no surprise here. Please, someone, make a browser that doesnt suck.
all that is required for the right to become a major part of society is that what is defined as a right results in more happiness and productivity.
You obviously did not understand me fully, because the answer to that question should be clear from my first post. The embryo is always human. Just as the fertilised egg is human, just as the unfertilised egg is human, just as the sperm is human - is masturbation murder as well?
Simply being human is not in question. Having natural rights is.
From where do natural rights spring? From being conscious individuals, from having rational faculties. It comes in short from being 'moral agents' - capable of making moral choices. It is only because we are capable of acting morally that we have both rights and the responsibility to allow others their rights. If you are an individual capable of making the choice to shoot or not, then it was murder, but if you are a trained chimp, or a machine, or something else which is not an individual moral agent, then you cannot commit murder, even though you can still kill.
A fertilised egg is quite clearly not an individual, nor a moral agent. It is a biological function of the mothers body - certainly a very unusual and interesting one, but it is only later that it develops individuality and becomes something more - and only in some cases. In fact, eggs are routinely fertilised, malfunction, and are washed out with other debris.
i can murder anyone i want, at any time. if i do so, society will incarcerate me or execute me. that's the only way the idea of a right to life exists: by actively enforcing negative consequences for actions that society considers a transgression of something it calls a right. it is a completely artificial effort
That is not the only way, no sir. Another way in which it exists is related, but not the same thing, and this is what natural law refers to. In the case of murder; this is an act against humanity and individuality, it does not harm only the victim, and the victims family, it also harms the perpetrator as well, and society/humanity at large.
without society, say pre-civilization or anarchy, there is nothing preventing me from murdering someone without any consequences.
This is an ahistorical fantasy. Humans have never existed without society. We are a social species.
i am saying it is possible to raise a child to consider murder perfectly normal, to consider murder a right. no revulsion at all, not a flicker of concern, in opposition to what we consider natural empathies.
It might be possible (though I suspect at least much harder than you think) to do so, but it would amount to murder of the child. You would have prevented that child from becoming human. Why?
of course, such a society would also be a very poor and unhappy society, and that's why we don't see any modern monstrous societies like that. but go back in history and you can see things like slavery, romans being entertained by gladiatorial death, aztecs sacrificing captives, etc.
Don't be so smug, there is plenty still going on today to be ashamed of.
And confusing rights and entitlements, conflating them to the detriment of the former, is a big part of why.
The right to a free press does not include a right to compel others to pay for your press, or to read it.
That said, there is a right implied here, danced around - a right to contract for essential services without interference. If that right were being defended here, I would be all for it. Network neutrality, and deregulation to allow competition. Oh wait, they hate those ideas!
So of course, nothing like that is actually going on. This is just a bunch of plutocrats trying to boost their profits by convincing governments to buy their products and then give them away, to boost their profit margins. What a waste.
This is the fundamental semantic error that is leading you astray. There is no child in this situation.
A fertilised egg is not a child. An embryo is not a child. A foetus, even, is still not a child. Calling a fertilised egg a child doesnt make it one, it only stimulates an inappropriate emotional response that tends to shut down thought and discussion.
Life is simple, it is binary- alive or dead.. Explain please how I'm mistaken.
Life is not so binary (is a virus alive or dead?) but that is really besides the point. There are a great many living things which have no rights. Even with the qualifier 'human' added as an afterthought that doesnt change. We dispose of living human tissue on a daily basis. No one calls shaving murder, yet it does indeed kill perfectly healthy human cells, for just one trivial example.
Sure there are natural rights. They arent material entities, no, they are abstractions, like most everything else high-functioning humans deal with on a daily basis. That doesnt make them unreal.
Nor are they simply the concern and product of a particular culture or society - these are truths that stretch across human experience. Some societies may value them more highly than others, yes, but those that do are more creative, more productive, more excellent at providing for their members in every way.
A cellphone can never be a right. You can never have a right to something that someone else (or many someone elses) has to produce for you - otherwise where is their right to their own labour?
A woman and her doctor have a right to go about their business without interference, and your shockingly simplistic and mistaken analysis of the situation doesnt change that in the slightest.
But you are right, you certainly should not be required to pay for it (assuming you didnt actually have something to do with it to begin with.)
There's a compelling social good in health care. The more people that have decent health care, the less disease going around, the more healthy we all are. That's all it means - and it's a good argument for taking steps that make it easier for people to get health care, particularly for the ones that are having the most difficulty.
It's NOT an argument, however, for enslaving a doctor. A 'right' to health care, if such a thing existed, WOULD be an argument for enslaving a doctor, or robbing a third party in order to pay a doctor, etc.
'Rights' like that are fallacies aimed at destroying the notion of rights itself. Because once you designate such a good as a 'right' you have contradicted the very idea of rights.
No one can have a right to violate anothers rights. My rights end where yours begin. I have a right to *seek* health care without interference - but no right to demand that it be delivered for free, do you not see the difference?
What you are describing is an entitlement, not a right.
For more than a century now we have had a constant assault of people trying to redefine 'right' in this way, to rob it of its meaning, to redefine it and ultimately make our actual rights go away in favour of the privileges and entitlements system.
This is why we keep standing up and saying 'no, that's not a right.'
This document certainly has some good points, but ultimately it also makes a hopeless muddle of the concepts of 'right' and 'entitlement' and as a result amounts to nothing more than a polite sound and some scratchings on paper. Any attempt to take it seriously, in its entirety, would be utter disaster. Fortunately no one is likely to do that, of course. The document was written deliberately for that affect, the powerful may bend it to their will, the helpless and oppressed find no comfort in it, and the comfortable western college student will only be hopelessly confused so that his misdirected energy can be challenged where his masters will, rather than becoming any sort of threat to them.
That's exactly what they have been trying to do my whole life though, and they have the ignorant masses going right along. Just reading the comments here makes me sick. Such incredible ignorance!
Dont have mod points so here's your attaboy instead. Excellent post.
Actually, it's the height of ignorance to assert that your need for something somehow gives you a right to it. If you couldnt live without a slave, would that justify slavery?
Since when did the judiciary stop doing its job and become rubber stampers?
Most severely since the shenanigans that permitted the communist takeover of the US back in the first part of the last century. Not that they were all that effective before that, mind you.
I haven't seen or heard of any instances where America has harassed, persecuted, censored, or arrested ANYBODY because of the opinions they expressed online, or the information they spread.
There are lots of things you can do voluntarily that limit your future freedom.
There are also things that are theoretically voluntary, but for practical purposes less than voluntary, because possible alternatives have been limited by force. A trivial example would be milk. No one is forcing you to buy pasteurised milk, but in many places it is illegal for anyone to sell you natural milk, which limits your choices drastically, if you like milk at least.
It may be a fable but there is nothing here remotely impossible. If you cant figure out how to get a stalkers IP in the circumstances in question, you arent thinking very hard. Several other posts here have already outlined one of the more likely techniques involved.
While in essence what you say is true, in practice, you'll find that not all the police, judiciary and juries are 'on side' with that particular message.
Naturally. And here the mirror is true, while in essence our legal system still recognises a right to self defense, not all police, judiciary, or juries are on side with that either. It's a daily battle to try to preserve it.
Another thing, whilst I'm at it, the UK has three separate legal systems, one covering England/Wales, one covering Scotland, and lastly Northern Ireland. There may be UK wide laws, which are usually 'rubber stamped' by the Scottish and NI legal systems, but the implementation and interpretation of said laws depends on which legal jurisdiction of the UK you're in.
Similarly, the USA has 51 separate legal systems, one for each state, and a federal system which has original jurisdiction in federal territories. Your right to self defense is much more strongly enshrined in, say, Texas or Idaho, than in New York or California.
Having been told by a Chief Constable in Scotland that in the event of anyone breaking into my house, so long as it's within my property, I have the right to defend myself and my family, and if I fear for their or my life, then extreme actions are permissible, then I'd think it's safe to say that I do have a right to protect myself, the issue lies with how much force I use to do so and in what circumstances.
Some US CoPs would tell you the exact opposite here. In both cases it can depend practically on the people involved. If the prosecutor wants to prosecute and the judge wants to convict they can generally find a way, and vice versa.
despite my good self being a somewhat easy individual to spot in a crowd the police never did anything about it.
But in practice they can get away with selective enforcement. The fact that no one bothered to hassle you on previous occasions wont protect you if someone wants to do so in a similar situation in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
You are quite lost. This is not hypothetical, it is principle. Not at all the same thing. How can you possibly stare so blindly past the point?
Without enslaving someone, or taking their money (which is a fancy way to partially, retroactively, enslave them) to pay someone else, just how are you going to provide any of these supposed 'rights?'
My definition wasnt relying on the word to prop itself up, it was attempting to direct your attention again to what is right in front of you. The word 'right' has a range of meanings, and in the philosophic and legal tradition it is used in a more narrow, restrictive sense. Looking for a dictionary definition of the word in this specific context may not work well (which is normal for terms of art) so referring back to another sense of the same root that is easier for you to find is hardly malfeasance.
Had you bothered to look it up you would have seen that 'rightful' is defined as 'legitimately claimed.' There is no circular definition here, but perhaps you simply are determined to misunderstand. Indeed you appear rather foaming at the mouth to point out my 'sociopathy' which is utterly absurd and rather makes you look a bit of a nutter at this point. But I will go ahead and give you one more bite I guess.
The point you keep charging right past and pretending not to see is that if you respect peoples rights you cannot deprive them of clothing or shelter! That is the whole point of rights!
What you seem to want to do is conflate the concept of depriving someone of their clothes and shelter, with simply declining to provide them with clothes and shelter. Two very different things. I dont have a natural right to clothing and shelter provided for me for free - I have a natural right to be left to peacefully enjoy the clothing and shelter I worked hard to provide myself with - *and so does everyone else.*
Your alternative is that you have a right to it so it just has to magically be provided for you, and in the real world that means someone will be enslaved, in whole or in part, to pay for it. And that is not right.
That slavery is intrinsically wrong, because it is the denial of humanity, and that if you ever do require a slave to survive, it is your time to die instead.
That's not what rights are at all. Rights, in this context, means a rightful enforceable claim. If something is yours by right, then you are not morally barred from taking it by force.
The usual, but not the only, way to take things by force these days is to pass a law. Take money from one group of people, give it to another. Usually for the supposed benefit of a third, who are being cynically exploited in the deal, but nevertheless may derive real benefit.
In this case, the taxpayers are being setup to pay money to the cellphone companies, to provide a third group of people with cellphones. Just a recent revamp of a very old strategy. It dates back to Egypt and Babylon.
In certain cases, yes. As I said, if you cannot survive without enslaving someone... or killing them, then you have a moral obligation to die.
In most cases, people are perfectly capable of working for a living however. And there are many strategies that societies used before the rise of the state to provide safety nets. Without the constant drain on the economy of redistribution from the middle class into the pockets of the rich (often by way of the poor, of course) that we subject ourselves to in a vain attempt to make a miraculous wonderland where nothing bad ever happens via legislation, those old strategies should rebound with a vengeance.
Even if that doesnt work as well as I would like, come on, could it possibly be worse than the road we are on now?
Which is why most of the sites that use a lot of javascript are essentially unusable without noscript.
This is a really hilarious suggestion. Not that I am saying I wont try it, but... let's remember here. Back a long time ago, it was Netscape Navigator that we all adopted because it sucked less than Mosaic. Then it became this whole huge crufty Netscape suite, with a bunch of extra stuff most of us didnt want or use (including a particularly awful mail client.) People slowly quit using Netscape, moving to IE (blech) or Opera in worrying numbers. Netscape became Mozilla, and this Netscape Suite became, if I am not badly mistaken, Seamonkey. Then Firefox was spun off, and it was great, a lean mean browsing machine without all that extra cruft, and it brought us back in droves.
Now Mozilla has gone retard and turned Firefox into a bloaten mishappen heap, and you are telling me the Seamonkey Suite is the one that sucks less?
That is absolutely insane, it makes no sense at all, therefore knowing Mozilla it's probably accurate. Downloading Seamonkey now.
But there is nothing particularly special about that moment of conception from a rights point of view. A two-celled fertilised egg is still a microscopic organism - and just as utterly dependent on the being it exists inside of, as part of, as it was a moment earlier at one cell.
No. Not at all. A newborn is a child, with a separate existence. Weak and helpless, yes, but still a very different thing than a fertilised egg or an embryo - there is an individuality there that did not exist before.
The thing is, you want to find a single bright line and draw it and use the power of the state to enforce it. I am not mirroring your position with a different line, however, just pointing out that your line isnt defensible. Various people have proposed various lines that are more defensible - ranging from the third trimester from our Supreme Court, to a week after birth in the Bible, and this is a very difficult question that intelligent and knowledgeable people of goodwill disagree vehemently on.
Understanding that, I really dont want the state involved at all here, picking one line and forcing it on everyone. The people in the best position to try to draw a line are the woman and her doctor, drawing it for her and her alone.
If your gizmo really needs reserved keystrokes like that, then you should think about making it a separate app, not running it inside a browser!
The browser global keystrokes only serve their purpose when they are globally available and always work. This is absolutely fundamental. Shortcut keys that only work in certain tabs, not in others, depending on what is loaded, is fundamental interface breakage. Shortcut keys that do one thing in one tab but something else entirely in another is even worse.
Not acceptable. They have paid developers. This should have been job number 1 until it was fixed.
Considering all the stuff "16" was supposed to have fixed, recommending a rollback over this sounds completely incompetent. And therefore expected.
Remember, these are the same geniuses that decided to start rolling the version number everytime someone fixes a typo a few months ago, and thus calling the current version (what is it really, 5.3 or so?) 16. And it isnt truly new either, take a look at this old bug for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414
Been sitting there well over 10 years now. Not one serious attempt to fix it. How many new features that no one wanted and random gui changes to confuse users have they managed to implement in that time period?
So yeah, no surprise here. Please, someone, make a browser that doesnt suck.
You obviously did not understand me fully, because the answer to that question should be clear from my first post. The embryo is always human. Just as the fertilised egg is human, just as the unfertilised egg is human, just as the sperm is human - is masturbation murder as well?
Simply being human is not in question. Having natural rights is.
From where do natural rights spring? From being conscious individuals, from having rational faculties. It comes in short from being 'moral agents' - capable of making moral choices. It is only because we are capable of acting morally that we have both rights and the responsibility to allow others their rights. If you are an individual capable of making the choice to shoot or not, then it was murder, but if you are a trained chimp, or a machine, or something else which is not an individual moral agent, then you cannot commit murder, even though you can still kill.
A fertilised egg is quite clearly not an individual, nor a moral agent. It is a biological function of the mothers body - certainly a very unusual and interesting one, but it is only later that it develops individuality and becomes something more - and only in some cases. In fact, eggs are routinely fertilised, malfunction, and are washed out with other debris.
That is not the only way, no sir. Another way in which it exists is related, but not the same thing, and this is what natural law refers to. In the case of murder; this is an act against humanity and individuality, it does not harm only the victim, and the victims family, it also harms the perpetrator as well, and society/humanity at large.
This is an ahistorical fantasy. Humans have never existed without society. We are a social species.
It might be possible (though I suspect at least much harder than you think) to do so, but it would amount to murder of the child. You would have prevented that child from becoming human. Why?
Don't be so smug, there is plenty still going on today to be ashamed of.
And confusing rights and entitlements, conflating them to the detriment of the former, is a big part of why.
Your ethics text and teacher have been taken in.
Dig out an older text that hasnt been corrupted and you will find correct definitions - along with some other eye-openers.
The right to a free press does not include a right to compel others to pay for your press, or to read it.
That said, there is a right implied here, danced around - a right to contract for essential services without interference. If that right were being defended here, I would be all for it. Network neutrality, and deregulation to allow competition. Oh wait, they hate those ideas!
So of course, nothing like that is actually going on. This is just a bunch of plutocrats trying to boost their profits by convincing governments to buy their products and then give them away, to boost their profit margins. What a waste.
This is the fundamental semantic error that is leading you astray. There is no child in this situation.
A fertilised egg is not a child. An embryo is not a child. A foetus, even, is still not a child. Calling a fertilised egg a child doesnt make it one, it only stimulates an inappropriate emotional response that tends to shut down thought and discussion.
Life is not so binary (is a virus alive or dead?) but that is really besides the point. There are a great many living things which have no rights. Even with the qualifier 'human' added as an afterthought that doesnt change. We dispose of living human tissue on a daily basis. No one calls shaving murder, yet it does indeed kill perfectly healthy human cells, for just one trivial example.
Sure there are natural rights. They arent material entities, no, they are abstractions, like most everything else high-functioning humans deal with on a daily basis. That doesnt make them unreal.
Nor are they simply the concern and product of a particular culture or society - these are truths that stretch across human experience. Some societies may value them more highly than others, yes, but those that do are more creative, more productive, more excellent at providing for their members in every way.
A cellphone can never be a right. You can never have a right to something that someone else (or many someone elses) has to produce for you - otherwise where is their right to their own labour?
A woman and her doctor have a right to go about their business without interference, and your shockingly simplistic and mistaken analysis of the situation doesnt change that in the slightest.
But you are right, you certainly should not be required to pay for it (assuming you didnt actually have something to do with it to begin with.)
There's a compelling social good in health care. The more people that have decent health care, the less disease going around, the more healthy we all are. That's all it means - and it's a good argument for taking steps that make it easier for people to get health care, particularly for the ones that are having the most difficulty.
It's NOT an argument, however, for enslaving a doctor. A 'right' to health care, if such a thing existed, WOULD be an argument for enslaving a doctor, or robbing a third party in order to pay a doctor, etc.
'Rights' like that are fallacies aimed at destroying the notion of rights itself. Because once you designate such a good as a 'right' you have contradicted the very idea of rights.
No one can have a right to violate anothers rights. My rights end where yours begin. I have a right to *seek* health care without interference - but no right to demand that it be delivered for free, do you not see the difference?
What you are describing is an entitlement, not a right.
For more than a century now we have had a constant assault of people trying to redefine 'right' in this way, to rob it of its meaning, to redefine it and ultimately make our actual rights go away in favour of the privileges and entitlements system.
This is why we keep standing up and saying 'no, that's not a right.'
This document certainly has some good points, but ultimately it also makes a hopeless muddle of the concepts of 'right' and 'entitlement' and as a result amounts to nothing more than a polite sound and some scratchings on paper. Any attempt to take it seriously, in its entirety, would be utter disaster. Fortunately no one is likely to do that, of course. The document was written deliberately for that affect, the powerful may bend it to their will, the helpless and oppressed find no comfort in it, and the comfortable western college student will only be hopelessly confused so that his misdirected energy can be challenged where his masters will, rather than becoming any sort of threat to them.
That's exactly what they have been trying to do my whole life though, and they have the ignorant masses going right along. Just reading the comments here makes me sick. Such incredible ignorance!
Dont have mod points so here's your attaboy instead. Excellent post.
Actually, it's the height of ignorance to assert that your need for something somehow gives you a right to it. If you couldnt live without a slave, would that justify slavery?
Most severely since the shenanigans that permitted the communist takeover of the US back in the first part of the last century. Not that they were all that effective before that, mind you.
Then google Brandon J. Raub.
There are lots of things you can do voluntarily that limit your future freedom. There are also things that are theoretically voluntary, but for practical purposes less than voluntary, because possible alternatives have been limited by force. A trivial example would be milk. No one is forcing you to buy pasteurised milk, but in many places it is illegal for anyone to sell you natural milk, which limits your choices drastically, if you like milk at least.
It may be a fable but there is nothing here remotely impossible. If you cant figure out how to get a stalkers IP in the circumstances in question, you arent thinking very hard. Several other posts here have already outlined one of the more likely techniques involved.
Naturally. And here the mirror is true, while in essence our legal system still recognises a right to self defense, not all police, judiciary, or juries are on side with that either. It's a daily battle to try to preserve it.
Similarly, the USA has 51 separate legal systems, one for each state, and a federal system which has original jurisdiction in federal territories. Your right to self defense is much more strongly enshrined in, say, Texas or Idaho, than in New York or California.
Some US CoPs would tell you the exact opposite here. In both cases it can depend practically on the people involved. If the prosecutor wants to prosecute and the judge wants to convict they can generally find a way, and vice versa.
But in practice they can get away with selective enforcement. The fact that no one bothered to hassle you on previous occasions wont protect you if someone wants to do so in a similar situation in the future.