Hive is a space like any other, which, like any other, is not free of control.
To portray it otherwise would be to fail to recognise the reality in which there are in fact no spheres that are beyond any control.
Accordingly, there are limits to free speech and free action everywhere. Neither, therefore, is there a natural right, but what there is is a spontaneous situation in which the individual allows himself to obey himself. "Right" and "nature" are mutually exclusive.
Where "law" is explicitly formulated, it challenges contradiction and therefore reflects the contradictory nature of all law. There is such a thing as an implicit, unspoken order, but where it wants to be expressed and explicitly lived out, it becomes a permanent topic, an endless debating about states of affairs that one desires to fix ("fixate"), and must therefore be described as fruitless. It is therefore not a natural right, but a natural ability, of which I can decide whether I want to make use of it or not.
Those who want to arm themselves do not need to invoke a right, since this right can always be contested. Those who seek to defend themselves with a weapon can do so and will experience one or another consequence as a result. Dying, for example, would be one. But someone who wants to wield a weapon, but is not prepared to die in the act, might ask himself why not? In the same way, one can ask oneself whether one is willing to kill another.
As long as I do not have an addressee who has actively violated my freedom - that is, there is no act of violation of my physical integrity and my social affiliation - I cannot find anyone to "do something against". I can only do so in the very concrete case where I am accused of a violation of some legal provision and charged with having been insubordinate. On the other hand, I myself would have to become the accuser of another individual in order to be able to declare a violation of my rights in a lawsuit. And win the result I hope for.
But if I want to spare myself such a thing - since there is always a risk that I will not be successful with an official lawsuit - I consider alternatives. These alternatives are potentially always available as long as I am not directly threatened with life and limb.
"Unfortunately", this case must first occur before I resort to the extreme of self-defence, which means that it is always the worst case that actually occurs that requires my action - then spontaneously.
(non aggressive) Disobedience is therefore, in my eyes, the strongest means against any taking of control by controlling forces. But since disobedience requires a knowledge of what I actually intend to disobey, we do not have a man-to-man fight today, but a fight for "information" (even if there are still military fights on a battlefield).
I think preserving one's dignity and integrity may mean losing everything, even one's life (and not seeing it as being a victim but a victor). Not that many are willing to do that (I myself have my limits).
A more elegant way would probably be to train inner composure to all conceivable and unthinkable life circumstances.
I try to live by the motto that there are problems without solutions.
I'm not even sure where to begin dissecting this. It looks like word salad. base don your name, I'll assume English is not your native language, and something may be lost in translation.
"Natural rights" are the sphere of our actions which do not infringe upon others as defined by life, liberty, and property acquired by homesteading of voluntary exchange. It is not opposed to nature, but rather is discovered by applying our natural faculty of reason. It is a concept of "negative rights," that is, reciprocal and universal definitions of trespass. Neither of us has authority to rob, murder, or otherwise initiate violence or coercion upon the other. Each of us has the natural authority to use proportionate self-defense against aggression.
It is precisely the point where violation occurs that a right must be invoked. The idea that rights are inviolable makes no sense.
Here is where the concept of "law" come into play. Legislation is either in accord with such concepts to protect life, liberty, and property; or it establishes a political class who claim the authority to violate those same rights as though they have some greater mystical right based on "divine right of kings," "popular mandates from the voter," or some other such myth.
Does that make sense?
Where you feel encroaching injustice, you have the option of disobedience, do you not? But that does not necessarily mean that your disobedience will be tolerated or accepted. There is no guarantee of that and that is why I tried to say that invoking natural rights can be completely ineffective. But it can also be effective, I can only know if I try it concretely. That is, I have an address to which I bring my concrete case. This can be a person, but also a court.
Neither the terms "life", nor "freedom", nor "property" are so clearly and universally defined that there would always be agreement on their definitions.
"Life" is something inexplicable, no one knows how and when it came into being and why. "Freedom" is such a difficult concept that countless people have tried definitions and concepts on it and always come up with different explanations, and "property" is a bottomless pit. None of these three terms can be totally grasped or is indisputable. Because these terms are contested, there is a lot of contention around them. Consider that the core of my comment.
It is like "time". I know what it is, but if you ask me, I don't know anymore. Means, I know that I live, I experience the passing of time (I age) and I can describe to you personal situations of freedom as well as lack of freedom.
If you don't want to argue, for example, the worst you will do is try to force something on other people, kill them or otherwise do violence to them. Or ignore, that is also a widespread means.
("There is no 'conflict'!" - Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker (Episode VI - Return of the Jedi Knights, Chapter 39) - the one who claims that there is no conflict will not see the opportunities that arise from discord and doubt with each other.
So that person will not feel any obligation towards this "natural right", as you put it. And indeed, this is a reality that we experience whenever there is war or crises arise or something is perceived as being in crisis. Acceptance towards such a natural right is not guaranteed. It is always something that you have to renegotiate and clarify with people over and over again. If this were not the case, all the rules that have already been established would always and everywhere be respected or would never change. We know that this is not the case.
Now, you can insist that you have a "natural right", but it can still happen (and has happened at all times and everywhere) that it is disregarded.
How else can you confront this circumstance, if it interests and concerns you, other than by
... reach an agreement in a concrete case
... go to court if no agreement has been reached...
or, because you think there is no sense or no likelihood of success in reaching agreement
... disobey (and gamble on whether your disobedience will have (uncertain) consequences)?
You seem to be arguing against something I never asserted. Nothing in the philosophy of natural rights guarantees rights will be accepted or respected by others, and the entire concept exists because they can be, and often are, violated.
rudence in exercising rights is always necessary, and disagreements are inevitable because humans are not perfectly rational even when they strive for rationality and morality. There is never a guarantee rights will be respected.
The very history of philosophy is filled with disagreements, doubt, and dead end debates, but the pursuit of knowledge and virtue is worthwhile even if it means being accused of crime by the political class whose career is organized crime.
I argued mostly because of what you said in your posting
I doubt that it is difficult for those you have in mind to suppress subversive information in their eyes. Rather, I would say that a platform like Hive is either too unimportant or too small to expend energy on at the time. Those who aim to keep this or similar environments small or make it impossible to operate need only change the laws, as we have recently read here, and in one fell swoop they have undermined the attractiveness of posting here or the possibility of trading crypto. Natural rights don't help you there, because you don't get into the position to apply them in the first place. Because you lack the counterpart to whom you can address your disagreement. You would have to be able to prevent laws from being passed that impede the scope of free trade and interaction, for example.
If you can't do that, the question is what else can you do? While I share your annoyance that it seems that the dissemination of material that can lead to criminal acts is already considered a criminal act itself, it just makes it clear that political representatives seem to do whatever they want.
If the dealmakers networked with Hive do not want to make themselves liable to prosecution and seek to act within the framework of the law, not even your own disobedience will help you, because it would have to be the disobedience of those who pull the strings on Hive on which you depend.
As the two convicts from the case you described said, "laws only work if we follow them", the mass of lawbreakers must increase and people in large numbers must take the risk of disobeying and then being caught doing so in order to bring about a possible turnaround in the legal sense. For example, through clever lawyers. Since this is a high risk, it can be assumed that not many will follow this path.
So you can blog yourself and complain about this or that encroachment on your freedom, but I would then ask, what does that change? It may upset you that I say this because it implies that I might think that whether you publish this content of your posting or not makes no difference - it actually may even spread pessimism (so, valuable information would be for me, for instance, the opposite, where you can name a source where people legally won their cases). What you are achieving is agreement about these deplorable conditions and maybe that is what you are after.
How do you know if it's worth it, since I assume that you yourself have not been officially accused? In what way is it worth it for you personally?
Maybe, but then again, the resilience of an international decentralized blockchain where new frontends can be rolled out in no time at all, not to mention VPNs and TOR, exists specifically to challenge centralized censorship. And the point of crypto is the ability to circumvent regulators, not find ways to comply with government edicts and trade for government fiat. We don't win through permission.
Does anyone follow the law? No one even knows how many US laws, regulations, and policies exist in the first place, much less how to navigate life without breaking any of them. There's a book which estimates people could easily commit an average of three felonies a day. Never mind the fundamental principle of "no victim, no crime."
Which disproves the notions of representation and delegated authority which are the foundation of modern myths regarding democratic republics.
I can't prove it changes anything, but here I am talking with a stranger about the ideas of individual liberty, someone I would have never encountered otherwise. That's not nothing.
My own dealings with the State are another matter entirely, and irrelevant to the topic at hand. Value is always subjective, but the pursuit of virtue is the way we grow as individuals, and the individual is the foundation of society, so seeking personal growth is the best, and perhaps only, way I can effect real change in the world.
Do you believe government authority is legitimate, legality has any bearing on morality, or virtue is attained through obedience?
It seems to me that my own opinion of government is irrelevant in that it is a fact that all the nations of the world are governed by them and their regulations and actions. Morality is the distraction for the masses who get bogged down in moral debates. Morality has arguably never played a role in the political arena, it has been and is geopolitical interests that are being played on the world stage.
The moralistic statements of politicians have probably always been made for propaganda purposes and are currently being made for propaganda purposes as well. If the economy is doing badly at home, the politicians at the top fear that their economic and foreign policies could lead to unrest at home if the masses cannot be brought into line.
Here in our country, we can see this quite clearly at the moment, that the exaggeration of one's own importance in the world has led to the forces regrouping and the tightening that our government is imposing on its own people, which does not go unnoticed by those who do not want to abide by these rules.
The change in the law you describe on the possession of weapons or the distribution of instructions for weapon modifications should, like presumably many other regulations from the USA, make it clear to your people what they will face if they openly revolt.
Ultimately, it must be said that the individual can do absolutely nothing to prevent actual political decisions from being made.
For me, however, this does not mean that I have to despair or worry all the time. But I do realise that the way we have been living here in my country has never been a guaranteed standard and that former prosperity can turn into its opposite. When push comes to shove, people in a country eventually become lawbreakers because they have no other choice.
My family grew up in a foreign land and my father taught my brothers how to steal. As we were poor, they stole sacks of wheat and the like. People will learn to steal and to cover up their actions when it comes to survival. They will adapt to circumstances, a very valuable characteristic of man.
For me, virtue is not a value based on obedience. It is rather the achievement of serenity and not panicking in situations that are difficult to deal with, but remaining calm. It is easy to practise serenity in easy times, but it is naturally put to the test in those very times when the going gets rough.
I agree with that.
I would argue that every instance of government overstepping its alleged bounds is one more proof of its illegitimacy. The more we point it out, the less credibility they have in the public eye next time. It is the lack of morality in government which we must tirelessly point out to a people steeped in the religion of democracy.
What exactly does "the exaggeration of one's own importance in the world" mean? I agree that "Ultimately, it must be said that the individual can do absolutely nothing to prevent actual political decisions from being made." This does not contradict the principle of individual liberty. Trespass does not negate the concept.
The court system seems to have impeded the ATF's bump stock ban, and their regulatory overreach against forced reset triggers is likely to be overturned as well, not that I have a lot of faith in the "justice" system as a whole. Meanwhile, armed citizens have prevented mass shootings and government aggression. I suspect that is why they continue to push for our disarmament before enough people see through their facade of legitimacy.
Bad laws should be broken, and that was one of the principles of the founders who rebelled against England in the 1770s. Government cannot prevent "illegal" immigration or "illegal" drugs, and they can't stop "illegal" guns. HIVE is also a tool we can use to undermine any efforts to quash "illegal ideas."