[wat0n]

San Francisco is great. Have any of you actually been there?

I have, but not for too long to have an opinion. It seems it's gotten way worse since the pandemic, according to relatives who've been there more recently (2022).

[Truth To Power]

You are appear to be using a definition of rights based on Enlightenment notions of inalienable rights...

It's more natural rights. I don't hold with inalienable rights, as natural rights can only be for those who respect the rights of others. If you abrogate others' rights, you lose your own. This idea has a long practical history in human society.

It is worth remembering that the Enlightenment was the product of men. That the norms and laws it inspired were laid down by men. That they left open the ability to "make a more perfect Union". Which could have the effect of expanding rights.

Perhaps there is something I missed.

The Enlightenment idea of rights was that they were "natural" -- either God-given or implied by human nature -- and pre-dated and were independent of law or any particular ideology. That is my view: rights are implied by our biological identity as human beings.

But if there is, you need to write a detailed explanation as to why... I seriously doubt you have the chops, or an underlying basis for your position. But thanks for the entertainment, I don't get to use intellectual history as much as I'd like.

My view has nothing to do with intellectual history, as it is based on biology, not scholarship. Human beings have a specific biological identity that has given rise to rights via evolution: people with rights have survived and reproduced better than those without. This happens because of how we live in society: A respecting B's rights is in the (reproductive) interest of not only B but C, D, E, etc. -- i.e., everyone else in the community.

Of course evolution is a stochastic process with lots of random variation; and it is not over, so we can't say that the current biological form of human being is in any sense a perfect one. But IMO there are good reasons to think that the basic individual rights that tend to be respected in almost all societies -- life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor -- exist because societies where people have those rights tend to outcompete societies where they don't.

[Truth To Power]

San Francisco is great. Have any of you actually been there?

SF was great the first time I visited, in 1969. It was nice but not as great the next time, in 1988. Since then, it has gone far downhill, like most of CA since Proposition 13.

[Tainari88]

San Francisco is great. Have any of you actually been there?

Yes. I lived there for a while. My father lived in San Francisco for seventeen years.

He could not afford to buy a home there or retire on a retired person's income there. It is way too expensive. So he moved to Denver to be with me and have me help him out and take care of him. He bought half a duplex in Denver. He liked San Francisco.

San Juan is pretty too. A city by a bay as well. Much better weather.

The problem is the cost of living in SF is very difficult.

[late]

It's more natural rights. I don't hold with inalienable rights, as natural rights can only be for those who respect the rights of others. If you abrogate others' rights, you lose your own. This idea has a long practical history in human society.

The Enlightenment idea of rights was that they were "natural" -- either God-given or implied by human nature -- and pre-dated and were independent of law or any particular ideology. That is my view: rights are implied by our biological identity as human beings.

My view has nothing to do with intellectual history, as it is based on biology, not scholarship. Human beings have a specific biological identity that has given rise to rights via evolution: people with rights have survived and reproduced better than those without. This happens because of how we live in society: A respecting B's rights is in the (reproductive) interest of not only B but C, D, E, etc. -- i.e., everyone else in the community.

Of course evolution is a stochastic process with lots of random variation; and it is not over, so we can't say that the current biological form of human being is in any sense a perfect one. But IMO there are good reasons to think that the basic individual rights that tend to be respected in almost all societies -- life, liberty, and property in the fruits of one's labor -- exist because societies where people have those rights tend to outcompete societies where they don't.

There were a number of differing ideas about rights that came out of the Enlightenment.

This was part of what you might call the evolution of Western thinking. The idea that they are somehow independent of human agency is charming, but silly.

"While belief in the sanctity of human life has ancient precedents in many religions of the world, the foundations of modern human rights began during the era of renaissance humanism in the early modern period. The European wars of religion and the civil wars of seventeenth-century Kingdom of England gave rise to the philosophy of liberalism and belief in natural rights became a central concern of European intellectual culture during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. Ideas of natural rights, which had a basis in natural law, lay at the core of the American and French Revolutions which occurred toward the end of that century, but the idea of human rights came about later."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_rights

[Rancid]

The problem is the cost of living in SF is very difficult.

This is a problem globally. That aside, was San Francisco a shithole in your estimation?

[Tainari88]

This is a problem globally. That aside, was San Francisco a shithole in your estimation?

San Francisco is a very diverse city with a lot of different ethnic groups living there.

[Tainari88]

This is a problem globally. That aside, was San Francisco a shithole in your estimation?

My father lived near Chinatown for a while. His first room that he rented was in one of those big old San Francisco homes with basements, first floor and second floors. Victorian looking houses. We rented a room there because an entire apartment or home was too expensive for our budgets. Other renters shared the bathrooms and kitchen and communal living spaces with us. The owner of the house inherited it from her grandmother who was the daughter of some business owner. It was in the Castro district Rancid.

At that time the Castro district was almost mostly gay men. One time when I was nineteen years old or so I was walking by a park nearby to go back home to that house in the Castro district when I saw two men having sex in the park. I was shocked that they did not bother to go to a hotel or something. It was not even behind a bush or in a car. It was pretty bad. Some old woman screamed at them and they finally left.

You see all kinds of things in that city.

The Mission district was a really interesting place and mostly Latinos at the time. There was the tenderloin, San Francisco always had a seedy redlight district too.

You had the Embarcadero, and other parts of San Francisco, Pacific Heights, Nob Hill, North Beach, and we lived in a part called Portola. We had rented an apartment there for a while. In a basement apartment. I remember I really liked that apartment in Portola.

The Castro district room that we rented, on Tuesdays like today is a Tuesday, I would be the one who cooked for the entire house. We were supposed to take turns cooking once a week for the whole house and that way it was less chaotic with a lot of families needing to use the kitchen at the same time. But, I noticed Rancid that somehow Tuesdays started getting more and more attendees and the days when the Anglo American couple and the German couple were cooking the main meal for the day? No one showed up and they would bow out of cooking duties. I noticed the problem. Tainari is cooking on Tuesdays and she worked her ass off for the entire house to eat well....and everyone shows up to eat. German and Anglo people cooking that SUCKED badly the food? No one shows up and they bow out of cooking for the week. I get fed up with it. So once a week we had a weekly meeting about who was responsible for what meal prep that week....hee hee.

We talked about the owners son never flushing the toilet after using it, and so on. Then I said to the group, hmmm. What the hell is going on with Tuesday nights. It used to be just the house eating there and then now you are inviting friends over and more people are showing up for Tuesday night meals. This is very strange. The German couple are supposed to be in charge of Friday night dinners for all and if you cook you cook really plain and boring stuff, really badly prepared and no one wants it. Then, you start canceling your Friday night dinners and people have to make do at the last minute. I never cancel my responsibilities. But, I can't be cooking for extra people and planning for extra guests....they reply but you always have leftovers Tainari. I said, yes I do....I am Puerto Rican. Leaving people hungry is not culturally part of my value system. Or cooking shitty food either in my family. My grandmother and mother would have scolded me severely if I cooked badly for guests. Where are your values German couple and Anglo couple?

Lol. I remember those days fondly. Lol. Hee hee.

People get creative in expensive cities for housing.

[QatzelOk]

There were a number of differing ideas about rights that came out of the Enlightenment.

This was part of what you might call the evolution of Western thinking. The idea that they are somehow independent of human agency is charming, but silly...

What Goya calls "the Sleep of Reason" - the Englightened strategy of ignoring harm to other humans or the ecosystem in the name of self-interestTM - creates monsters, according to the painter.

The shit-map of San Francisco is an example of the kind of monster (medieval hygienic conditions) that self-interest (the Enlightenment) can and does produce.

The slow genocide of Palestine over the last 60 years is another monster.

Climate change. Overpopulation.

All of these were driven by "enlightened" self-interest. And the inequality and colonialism that mark the END of the Western century are also excellent examples of monsters, and Cuba has been on the receiving end of a lot of very rich and very enlightened monsters.

Aside from buying pot from a homeless dude. The rest doesn't match up with my experience.

We were visiting from very different places.

[Tainari88]

All of these were driven by "enlightened" self-interest. And the inequality and colonialism that mark the END of the Western century are also excellent examples of monsters, and Cuba has been on the receiving end of a lot of very rich and very enlightened monsters.


We were visiting from very different places.

Q, I really liked this bolded part.

Cuba, angered the Masters of the Caribbean. They still view our little islands like slave colonies from the past. Where the slaves do not have voting rights, where they have to obey the ones calling the shots.

They have to be sanctioned. They have to be punished commercially.

The Mexicans go to Cuba all the time Q. All the time.

Mexico is capitalist. They are not paranoid about Cubans being an example to the rest of Latin America of defiance of the Masters of the Caribbean.

The government of Cuba is limping along. It is very hard to create a working economy with such a powerful actor in the UN working against Cuban interests. Basically the US and Israel are the only two nations who think the embargo against Cuba is justified in 2023. It has not worked to get rid of the government and replace it with some American liberal or conservative version of what the right government should look like in Cuba.

People do not like poverty. They have ideas that the Western states that are developed tell them all the time...this is the lifestyle you should have. This is the life you should be living. It is incredibly interesting how people are always somehow told that unless they have a certain lifestyle and consume a lot of material things their lives are worthless.


Why can't the US government let other governments and other cultures and people decide on their own what they think having a worthwhile life for their citizens is about?

Just stop trying to fucking control other societies.

Puerto Rico has way too many malls, parking lots, car dealerships, department stores, banks, pawn shops, and ugly abandoned buildings accumulating trash, roaches, and mice. All in the name of development.

You got these real estate developers from the USA who swoop in buy the deteriorated property and promise to remodel it and bring the abandoned downtown areas of these rural cities and towns in Puerto Rico back from their abandoned states...and they lie. They flip the properties for a quick profit and take advantage of poverty conditions.

https://youtube.com/shorts/u1mQfGHRYR8? ... 02vrumyyOt

What example are they setting? The Cuban and Puerto Rican governments have a lot of cultural exchanges. They talk to each other all the time. Doesn't the US government realize that the Cubans are noticing how the US government treats the American colony of theirs in the Caribbean? They think? Do we want to lose our independence for the USA to make us a land of no power allowed over our own society, and then have American rich people flipping properties and over-developing everything in order for short-term capitalism to be the only model out there?

The Caribbean has seen the worst exploitation in human history.

Cuba is the biggest island of all of us. And thinking about going back to a time of being controlled by another big power...whether it is Spain or the USA? Is just not going to happen. When will the US government realize this and stop trying to mold Cuban society to suit their selfish purposes? I have no idea.

[wat0n]

If Cuba wants to end the embargo, it just needs to commit to pay for the nationalized property. That would end the issue, basically.

[Tainari88]

If Cuba wants to end the embargo, it just needs to commit to pay for the nationalized property. That would end the issue, basically.

Do not be naive Wat0n. The USA will want to control Cuba. It controls every move Puerto Rico makes.

The USA has horrible human rights violators as their associates all the time. With full trade relationships no less.

No, they want to dictate terms to the Cubans. The US needs to give Native American land back. They will lose a whole lot of land...but they can do it right? Just do what Cuba says and they can normalize relations.

You think like an imperialist and Chile is not an Empire Wat0n. Lol. That makes me laugh.

No, you just want to be on the side of Empire and powerful actors on the stage.

You remind me of the Puerto Rican sellout statehooders who if the US government traded us off for Greenland like Trump wanted or suggested he would do with us...and the Puerto Rican ass-kissing assholes on the island would be like you are...Greenland, they are a great country, do they need me to be their lapdog locally so I can make some money? We were Greenlanders all along, we just did not know it yet. Now we know it.

Never occurs to them. Become sovereign, and gain control over your land, history, resources, labor, and decision-making abilities. Implement your own path in life. And forget about these old and tired COLONIAL dysfunctional shit-filled one-way street relationships.

They are like wife-beating husbands. They threaten the most when their wife is leaving them. And once the woman leaves and feels a little freedom she never wants to go back to know about that fucking bastard man for the rest of her life. She already knows that he is not going to change his shit behavior. He was a bastard abuser and with her he will always be so.

[wat0n]

If the US really wanted to control Cuba, it would have already liberated them from the yoke of communism. In reality, the US doesn't really care all that much about Cuba.

But it does care about compensating American citizens.

[late]

If Cuba wants to end the embargo, it just needs to commit to pay for the nationalized property. That would end the issue, basically.

Before the revolution, the government was brutal and thoroughly corrupt. The reason those corrupt Cubans had Congress pass that bill was because they didn't have a leg to stand on in an international court.

That Congress passed such a bill is telling, and not in a good way.

[Tainari88]

If the US really wanted to control Cuba, it would have already liberated them from the yoke of communism. In reality, the US doesn't really care all that much about Cuba.

But it does care about compensating American citizens.

It does not care about Cuba? That is why they have Guantamo Bay there. That is why they tried to off Fidel Castro 600 plus times. That is why they interfered in a bunch of islands in the Caribbean. That is why they made the Panama Canal zone. That is why, they have that policy in place since the 1960s because they do not care. Obama wanted to normalize relations. Because they gave him an intelligence brief on Cuba and it was not a real threat for normalizing relationships. But they can't. Because they have to obey certain policies. Like....we have to control these places in Latin America. All of them if we can. It is the way we keep our place and position in the world.

Democracy is not a consideration.

They care about American citizens rights to vote too. Like the Puerto Ricans they love our rights.

Citation of why they do not give us the right to vote. because they care. About us.

Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901), was a case in which the US Supreme Court decided whether US territories were subject to the provisions and protections of the US Constitution. The issue is sometimes stated as whether the Constitution follows the flag.

If you read the whole file which you will not but I have wat0n it is basically relying on old racist codes from the end of the Manifest Destiny stage to continue to deny votes.

So why should Cuba obey the USA and let them back in to their internal political life? So they can lie again and take over and put in some puppet man like Fulgencio Batista?

Fidel Castro was approached many times by the US government with a similar deal to Batista. Could have saved himself a lot of threats and assassination attempts. Got rich. Got power. Just say yes to control of US of Cuba. Say yes to control from afar. That is it. Give control of Cuba to the USA government.

Why not? You can make money. Live well. And be powerful locally.

But if you are a nationalist revolutionary? You will turn them down. And you either wind up in prison or dead or if you are a hardass....you survive for many decades through many US presidencies and then die of fairly old age at age 90 in 2016 and in a couple of years it will be one decade since you croaked and the American government is still accusing the Old Ghost of the Bearded One as the reason why they can't normalize relations with Cuba. because.....they do not give money back. Do not give property back.

Why don't they give back the fucking money they took from my great grandparents in Barranquitas Puerto Rico that there was a hurricane in 1899 San Ciriaco and the US sugar industry and banks from the USA wanted to buy up cheap land from distressed Puerto Rican farmers so they could make record profits off of misery?

why do you not defend them now again Wat0n?

Ave Maria chico, eres bien mentiroso.

[Tainari88]

Before the revolution, the government was brutal and thoroughly corrupt. The reason those corrupt Cubans had Congress pass that bill was because they didn't have a leg to stand on in an international court.

That Congress passed such a bill is telling, and not in a good way.

All you got to do is pull up Guantanamo Bay and the issue they had with Castro about it.

The US tries to avoid international court cases like the plague with Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Native American territories, and Guam, and American Samoa.

Palau in 1993-4 was problematic for them. The island voted for independence but the US wanted to keep nukes on the island and the natives did not want them there.

It was incredibly embarrassing if they had to open that whole scene up to the international court.

Wat0n does not know shit about those cases because he just talks a lot of trash and does not do some research. Even Blackjack21 Mr. Right Wing dude and racist he was too, said that entire thing was shady and made the US look really bad.

Lol.

[Truth To Power]

There were a number of differing ideas about rights that came out of the Enlightenment.

This was part of what you might call the evolution of Western thinking. The idea that they are somehow independent of human agency is charming, but silly.

I doubt that you have any clear idea of what "independent of human agency" might mean, if anything. The facts of human biology are certainly independent of any ideology, and were just as true before the Enlightenment as after.

Rights are a social phenomenon, and an argument could be made that changes in societal circumstances can change the conditions of reproductive success, and therefore what specific rights people should enjoy. For example, in pre-agricultural economies, polygyny -- the right of men to have more than one wife at a time -- is effectively universal; this right has a positive effect on the reproductive success of the community because the most productive, healthiest, etc. males use their superior access to resources to have more offspring. But once the economy advances to settled agriculture with private landowning, all the resources surplus to survival are appropriated by landowners, who have no particular genetic merit and do not contribute to the community. If polygyny is retained, this leads to inbreeding and a reproductive advantage for landowning males who are less healthy and productive than the average. So evolution has arranged that polygyny is no longer a right in advanced economies.

"While belief in the sanctity of human life has ancient precedents in many religions of the world, the foundations of modern human rights began during the era of renaissance humanism in the early modern period. The European wars of religion and the civil wars of seventeenth-century Kingdom of England gave rise to the philosophy of liberalism and belief in natural rights became a central concern of European intellectual culture during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. Ideas of natural rights, which had a basis in natural law, lay at the core of the American and French Revolutions which occurred toward the end of that century, but the idea of human rights came about later."

I'm not sure what distinction you are drawing between natural and human rights. If human rights are those recognized in law, by international agreement, etc., that's not what I am talking about. Laws and international agreements can say anything some gang of crooks, toadies and demagogues want them to say. Natural rights are based on the facts of biology.

[Tainari88]

@wat0n read this scholarly article. Late is right about the US avoiding that shit from the international law court. It is a losing proposition legally.

If they did it with Cuba and Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.

It is just naked aggression Late. That it the problem.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3480717

I will highlight some critical pieces to this:
United States conduct toward the island territories of the Pacific has been replete with broken promises and self-dealing. On the island of Palau, the evolution toward sovereignty has stalled because the United States refuses to concede defeat on the provisions of the Palau Constitution that outlaw nuclear power, nuclear weaponry, and a foreign power's exercise of eminent domain in Palau. The United States has refused to continue negotiations on the Compact of Free Association, arguing that validating those provisions jeopardizes U.S. security interests in Palau to an intolerable degree. In this Comment, the author argues that U.S. intransigence in regard to the Compact violates multiple provisions of international law. The author argues that the United States has violated both the Trusteeship Agreement and the Palauans' right of self-determination under customary international law. Furthermore, even if the Compact is now approved according to Palau's constitutional processes, the author argues that the agreement would be invalid under the international law of treaties.

Journal Information

[wat0n]

Before the revolution, the government was brutal and thoroughly corrupt. The reason those corrupt Cubans had Congress pass that bill was because they didn't have a leg to stand on in an international court.

That Congress passed such a bill is telling, and not in a good way.

It's not like Cuba wanted to submit itself to property claims in an international court.

@Tainari88 Cuba is not Palau or Puerto Rico for that matter. The fact the US has Guantanamo there would make toppling the dictatorship even easier yet they don't. Why? Because the US doesn't care enough about Cuba to bother fighting a war to end communism there.

[Truth To Power]

If Cuba wants to end the embargo, it just needs to commit to pay for the nationalized property. That would end the issue, basically.

You mean sort of like France demanded Haiti pay French slave owners for the slaves it freed in the revolution...?

Disgraceful.

So, Cuba "needs to commit to pay" American financial interests for "nationalized property," but Saudi Arabia, Norway, Japan, Indonesia, and a hundred other capitalist US allies don't?

Somehow, I kinda figured it'd be something like that...