Tag Archives: rights

Rights from Men, Not from God

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That’s the view of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Tim Kaine.

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

Kaine is deliberately distorting (because I don’t believe so intelligent a man doesn’t know better the logic he’s tacitly using) the situation: he claims that because others make similar claims, they must all be equally false. Analogies, as Kaine is using here, can be useful in clarifying phenomena, but they also can be useful, as Kaine is doing here, to obfuscate and to seem to disprove phenomena (without any capability to prove or disprove anything).

Kaine chooses to ignore the differences between a culture, one the one hand, in which its citizens believe fundamental rights come from our Creator and that government is subordinate to the sovereign people. In our culture, our laws are intended to defend and implement those fundamental rights, not to create them.

That’s in contrast with nations (not necessarily the cultures of those nations) whose governing men and women insist that government is sovereign and its people subordinate and whose governing men and women speak words of rights coming from God but who appoint themselves as God’s interpreter and then define those rights for themselves, adjusting them from time to time at need to maintain their power.

In Kaine’s view, our fundamental rights would come from men like Kaine, who Knows Better and would define our rights in accordance with his superior knowledge, and women like Kamala Harris, whose handed-down rights would be salads of words, or Nancy Pelosi, whose handed-down rights would be State Secrets, allowing us to know what is in them only after she chooses to publish them.

In Kaine’s world, too, “rights” would evolve as the men and women in power change over time, and that would evolve as the men and women in power change their minds over time while they’re in power. Because they are rights created by men and women, they cannot be fundamental, intrinsic in our being. They are merely political rights, politically granted and politically taken away as the men and women in power deem fit.

This is entirely consistent with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal of fundamentally transforming our nation (Barack Obama) and of fundamentally changing our economy (Joe Biden). This is the risk we face in 2026, 2028, and subsequent elections.

H/t ralflongwalker

A Misunderstanding

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This one, a Wall Street Journal editorial centered on a coerced unionization of ride share companies Uber and Lyft. The editors got their misunderstanding in early, via their lede:

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday announced a “deal” with ride-share companies Uber and Lyft that they couldn’t refuse. Democrats in Sacramento will reduce auto insurance coverage mandates that are driving runaway litigation in return for the companies letting drivers collectively bargain.

Yes, they could have refused the deal. The California government foisted onto them a supremely ugly choice, but it was no less a freely taken choice for all its ugliness. The companies’ managers were just too timid to resist, too timid to leave the State altogether, as their own powerful alternative to Sacramento’s demand.

There’s no reason for any business, not just Uber and Lyft, to suffer the politically imposed costs of operating in California. Nothing is stopping businesses from leaving other than the timidity of their managers.

I alluded to it just above: the cost of doing business in California isn’t just fiscal. It’s political, too, reducing as that cost does, a company’s ability to manage its own business affairs in accordance with its own free market imperatives.

The Core of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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It’s moving ever closer to Party’s grass roots. The face of that core is Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his parallel membership in Democratic Socialists of America. DSA’s core position is

“dismantle and move beyond” America’s capitalist society and create a “wholesale socialist transformation of our national and global economy.”

DSA’s platform is specific, too, including such nakedly socialist things as these:

  • city-run grocery stores
  • free bus rides
  • increased public funding for hormone therapy and surgery for transgender people
  • rent freeze, not just rent control
  • ending “all misdemeanor offenses”

It’s not just Mamdani, either. The Progressive-Democratic Party selected its own socialist candidate for mayor of Minneapolis, Omar Fateh, who is a carbon copy of Mamdani. It’s true enough that Party then unendorsed (leaving him on the ballot) Fateh, but only on a technicality regarding their convention nominating process and only in response to some opprobrium. But here, Party spoke their truth in selecting Fateh and now only is covering its political behind.

In the end, the two, these most public two, are simply concretizing prior Party commitments: then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s brag just prior to his first election that he was just “days away from fundamentally transforming” our nation, and then-Progressive-Democratic Party President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address saying that he intended to “fundamentally change” our nation’s economy.

This is Party initially acting at the national level and now trying to move down into our cities.

“Materiality”

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Texas voting law requires voters voting by mail-in ballots to verify identity via a state ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number (SSN4). A Federal district judge ruled in 2023 against the law using the fictive logic that

It is self-evident that a voter’s ID number is not material….

Judge James Ho, writing for a unanimous 5th Circuit, articulated how clearly the appellate court saw through that district judge’s…argument.

The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is indeed who he claims he is. And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.

He expanded on that [citations omitted]:

The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is indeed who he claims he is. And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.
So there is no “disconnect between the State’s announced interests and the statute enacted.” And the ID number requirement “meaningfully corresponds” to the State’s legitimate interests in preventing the scourge of mail-in ballot fraud.

It seems to me the district judge slept through his high school logic class, and his law school provided no training in logic at all.

The 5th Circuit ruling can be read here.

Fault and Blame

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This example is all too typical. An elderly couple was scammed out of their life savings–$5 million—by a “pig butcherer” who conned the husband into wiring the couple’s savings, in a number of tranches, to the scammer under the guise, among others, of investing the money in a sure-fire investment.

What happened:

A year or so earlier, Craig had responded to an online ad about investments and later received a text message from someone calling themself Tiffany, according to his hazy account. The person struck up a flirtatious exchange and was soon telling him about a lucrative opportunity. All he needed to do was wire money from his bank account.

And

The adviser [at an earlier bank where the husband had begun his “investing” with Tiffany] had repeatedly tried to convince Craig that “Tiffany” was scamming him, to no avail.

The husband after that had pulled his—their—money from that bank and placed it with another bank, from which the husband continued “investing” with Tiffany.

And

Shortly after discovering the scam, Anamarie learned something else about Craig that helped explain what had happened. His doctor told her that Craig had vascular dementia, likely due to a brain injury from a fall he took in 2015 while walking his brother-in-law’s dog.

The first the wife knew anything was amiss was when her credit cards were declined at a Walmart.

In the end, the couple is blaming bank for their having been scammed, claiming that the bank hadn’t acted nanny-ish enough [my term] to protect the couple from themselves.

I have questions, and I’m not entirely sympathetic with the couple or with their blame-shifting.

Why didn’t the wife know more about the couple’s financial situation? True enough, they’re of an age where money matters usually was the husband’s job, but that doesn’t excuse her ignorance; it only illustrates how widespread such ignorance is.

What was the husband doing getting flirty with an online person about whom he knew nothing about, including whether the person even was female? See below for this before readers get up in morality arms.

Why didn’t the wife know anything about her husband’s medical condition? Certainly, this is related to a couple’s internal dynamics, but there’s little reason for one member of the couple to be so ignorant of the other member’s medical state. This is another aspect of couples of an age, but again, this doesn’t excuse the ignorance; it only illustrates the widespread nature of it.