Ian Murray:
> Why Hobbes you've aged well. :-) Of course the same logic applies to
> individuals. ...
Not quite -- the individuals could be endowed with rights by God, by a state, or by common agreement among them. But if the states are sovereign there is no one but God to provide them with rights.
> So no one has the right to say someone else or some
> institution has no rights, which makes Chuck0's assertion meaningless.
> Damn, we're back to paradox again.
Speech doesn't require rights. The problem I had with what Chuck0 said was not that he said something, but that I didn't think states could be said to possess any rights in the first place, so that there was no point in an anarchist's saying that, say, the United States had no right to bomb Afghanistan.
I realize this seems very abstruse, but I am trying to reason my way into dealing with the current situation, and less radical approaches seem to end up in the same place, the ladder of force which goes only one way -- to the gallows, after which we dance on air. But maybe we are already in the grip of that tragic necessity and I should quit thinking about it.