Your argument is without merit to the extent that it stands on the proposition that "[i]t needs to end because it is not the government's right to dictate what we can put in our own bodies as long as we are not hurting others."
It's not all about you. You live in a town or city, with hundreds if not millions of people. Who are you to say that the people collectively do not have a right to impose whatever order they see fit to impose?
Looked at another way, the whole idea of "inalienable rights" is a fiction. The order in human society comes from men. It comes from the testosterone driven competition between man and man and between man and Nature, to seize territory and to impose dominion and order upon that territory so that the people who live upon that territory can live with peace and security and prosperity. That is the nature of the world. That is where order comes from.
In today's urban society, people do not see these fundamental realities and do not comprehend them. But if you pierce the veil and see how things really are, and how they really came to be the way that they are, you find that the order that makes your life possible was given to you by men who died on battlefields and by kings who seized land and imposed order.
You think like a child. People generally who live in urban society today think like children. This is not a criticism of you; you were born and raised into this situation. But now you must do something to leave your childish thinking behind and to grow up into good strong men and good strong women. When you do that, you will together in community use your collective force to seize a place for yourselves, and then you will impose whatever order you see fit, whether it is a libertarian order in which cannabis is legal, or the order of a Caliphate in which using cannabis is a capital crime. You will, collectively, have the right to decide. That right comes from your power, from your strength, from your ability to impose your collective will upon territory, upon other men, and upon Nature.
My experience is all about me, as yours is all about you, and hers is all about her. Each of our experience is centered exclusively in ourself, in our body, in our mind.
Because no group has any rights more or different from those of any given individual in that group. Otherwise, any time two (or more) men decided to rape a woman, they would have that right because there are more of them.
So anyone can do anything the want to you, with your body?
You are referring to people killing each other, raping, pillaging, and destroying the land as order, peace and security... Order comes from nature, from the evolution of any given system towards equilibrium.
Actually, most of the order in the world exists in spite of those men killing on command and the "kings" commanding it. Genocide is anathema to order, war is anathema to order, punishing others for actions that harmed nobody is anathema to order.
By identifying as a slave with no agency in your own life, except that allowed by the masters who "maintain order" for you?
The flag on this post illustrates why steemit will fail. A single turd whale can censor any post that he/she/it wants to. The flag cannot be justified as due to spam. It is clearly censorship of either the idea that I express or the way that I express it.
The flag also proves the point by demonstrating WHY people in urban environments think like children. The turd whale flagged my post to keep the idea from reaching you! Wake up, people! You live in a world where Truth cannot get to you because it is stopped by intolerant censors.
What tangible right do YOU or any majority have to impose on someone who hasn't hurt you? It sounds like you're relying on some variation of the social contract, which none of us ever actually consented to.
Thanks for engaging me. My position is that "rights" are illusion. Order is imposed by force. "Rights" are merely words used to express the imposed order. We like to say that the order in our societies is imposed by "the majority". But that is also an illusion, though one that contains some truth. Whoever imposes the order in your life will do so by threat of lethal force. You are utterly powerless to resist. Only by gaining control of that entity ("the majority", "the deep state" or whatever) will you be able to determine the order that is imposed upon you. And if you succeed in doing so, you will accomplish it by using the threat of lethal force.
That is the way of the world. "Rights" do not come into it. This is why I say (perhaps too much) that you people of urban society think like children. You have no clue as to your true situation. Nor do you have a clue as to where the order in human society, and also in Nature, comes from.
Perhaps, if you allow me to, I will be your clue, and you will thereby become good, strong men and women, leaving behind your childish illusions to seize your world and determine its order for yourselves.
It's rare to come across a person who properly understands rights. I like to joke, how humane our rights are, since the most conscientious government of Netherlands recognized a gorilla as innately having 'human rights'! - how really, truly humane is that?
Interesting point. What I said can also be applied to speaking about animal rights. I'll resist comedy here regarding gorillas voting, owning property, etc.; I presume that such rights involve conditions of imprisonment and such.
You state that rights don't exist, but that's fallacious.
A gazelle has the right to life, as do lions. People, on the other hand, have those same rights, and the need to defend them, but are also bound to a higher standard: to respect the rights of others.
To fail to do so is a moral failure in every society that has ever been, and continues to be so now. Therefore, lawful societies are bound to recognize that individual persons have rights that must be respected, or criminal depredation--we are not animals that can prey on one another--results.
Just societies are bound to enforce the rights commonly enjoyed by their people, and the degree to which a society is just can be measured by the degree to which the rights of man are enforced.
To claim otherwise is to claim we are nothing but animals, and the sheep need fear the wolves without hope of lawful remedy.
I am a man, not a sheep nor a wolf. I am bound to respect your rights, and you are mine. Are you a man or an animal? You answer not with words, but with your life. As you live, you either live as a man, or an animal.
Rights exist because we are people, and inure to people by sole virtue of their existence. To maintain otherwise is to impugn the very essence of society, and reckon us chattel.
Your post exemplifies social media at its best. We are both correct. It is our nature as humans to construct societies characterized by liberty and justice, and it is our nature as humans to speak of "human rights" and "animal rights". But how do such words become realized in the societies that we construct? With the threat of lethal force.
IOW, notions of rights, of justice, of liberty, are just that: notions and words and visions of possibilities. To make such visions real, order must be imposed, and that is done by the men, with lethal force.
There are other ways to create order than lethal force.
Indeed, almost all order is created by other means.
That lethal force exists does not obviate rights. Crime exists. There is no doubt of that. Crime is the violation of the rights of another.
Rights are the very basis of human society, and if we have no rights, crime doesn't exist.