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It seems to me that American hegemony has created such a prosperous peace in the remainder of the West that many non-American westerners have come to hold false beliefs about the nature of their prosperity and the quality of their societies, laws and governments. For example, I often hear and read comments from citizens of other western and Anglo nations which imply that their "rights" are fundamentally the same as those enjoyed in America, or the instance that the house of Windsor has only a "ceremonial" role and can exert no power over their domain.
Consider @johnfabian 's comment down thread on Canada's notwithstanding clause (no offense to @johnfabian intended):
...
I find both of the above claims to be obviously and plainly false. The intent of the notwithstanding clause was always to give the government(s) the ability to force people to do whatever the government wanted them to do, as the notwithstanding clause serves no other purpose. The people who wrote that clause were perfectly aware of its power, and were equally aware of the arguments against such power as made by the American founders (the American Constitution being the living embodiment and quintessential rejection of such power).
Similarly, to the extent that "turn[ing] the Charter into a piece of paper" means that the populace has no de facto or de jure recourse against the government's exercise of arbitrary power, the mere presence of the notwithstanding clause means that Charter was always a piece of paper. The Charter never recognized or provided "rights." The fact that the government did not exert arbitrary power against the populace in a manner they disliked was a happy accident; and no less an exercise of arbitrary power. The populace never had de facto or de jure recourse against the government's exercise of arbitrary power (at least not of the legal sort, baring a revision of the charter to remove the clause).
Not only is this conclusion plain on the face of the Charter (and its analogs in other nations), all western cultures are familiar with the concept that an "I can do whatever I want" exception invalidates any semblance of enforceable rights. A contract which ends with "and party X promises to promise to perform in the future and, in any event, can unilaterally decide to perform or not perform its promises at any time without penalty" is not a contract in America or Canada or the UK, etc.
I'm not sure why westerners don't see or acknowledge this obvious truth. My best guess is a combination of generalized cognitive dissonance and the mistaken belief that their "rights" must be as strong as those in America because of the apparent prosperity that those rights provided (when in fact, said prosperity was always the product of American power) and the happy accident of enjoying their governments' exercise of arbitrary power upon them.
As always, if anyone is aware of more comprehensive treatments of these issues, please link those sources below.
Edit: Including my reply to a comment below for completeness.
There is so much evidence to the contrary that I do not believe that anyone sincerely holds this position. Consider the right against self-incrimination, one of England's most cherished and hard-won "customary norms." The right against self-incrimination indeed proved to be practically "constitutional" when it was eliminated for the uppity Irish in 1988 and for the rest of the country in 1994.
"On paper," meaning according to the laws of the UK (and essentially the rest of the commonwealth), the monarch:
is the sovereign and literal source of all legal authority
has the sovereign right to declare war and peace
has the sovereign right over all foreign affairs (which is why the monarch needs no passport, because it is the monarch's authority which requires and issues passports)
has the sovereign right to call, dismiss, prorogue, and recall parliament
has the sovereign right to assent and consent to the passage of all laws
owns all the land
doesn't pay taxes
etc.
This is indeed "plenty" of things.
In my opinion, the belief that the monarch exerts no practical or effective political power is due chiefly to a combination of willful ignorance and propaganda. There are simply too many examples of power being exercised to believe otherwise.
For example, in 1975, the Australian parliament shut down over a budgetary impasse. The Queen, through her Governor General (a role commonly described as "merely ceremonial"), dismissed the Prime Minister, appointed a new one, passed a bill to fund the government, and then dismissed all of the other members of parliament, triggering new elections.
Consider also the power of Royal Assent, which is often trotted out as proof that the monarch is merely "ceremonial" and wields no political power. In order for a bill to become law, after it has passed through both houses, the monarch must give their Royal Assent. The glossary on the UK Parliament's website describes Royal Assent as "the Monarch's agreement that is required to make a Bill into an Act of Parliament. While the Monarch has the right to refuse Royal Assent, nowadays this does not happen; the last such occasion was in 1708, and Royal Assent is regarded today as a formality." Emphasis mine.
It is admitted that the monarch has the right to refuse Royal Assent, but that right is handwaived away as a mere formality. Does the claim that 'Royal Assent is a formality' hold up to any degree of credible scrutiny? No.
In 2021, the Guardian published a series of reports ( well summarized by this article ) about the separate and distinct power of the Queen's Consent (Monarch's Consent).
Before any bill is introduced to Parliament, it must receive the monarch's consent.
The bills must be sent to the monarch's personal solicitors at least two weeks in advance. The solicitors then negotiate changes to the bill in exchange for the monarch's consent. Also, this can be done directly by the monarch in their regular (and legally required) consultations with the Prime Minister, which are entirely private, and of which no records are made. Oh, and assuming that there were any records made, all documents "relat[ing] to" communications with the sovereign or their agents have an absolute exemption from UK's FOIA.
As the Guardian discovered, the Queen used this power repeatedly, including for the purpose of preventing a law from revealing the size of her wealth. And the Guardian was only able to find this out because the parties involved didn't care enough to avoid putting the dealings to paper, and the relevant functionary forgot to stamp the documents as exempt from UK-FOIA.
So the monarch hasn't refused Assent in a long time...because the monarch has no reason to withhold Assent from a bill they already had the opportunity to alter through their power of Consent.
How very "ceremonial" a monarch...
The one that always pops to mind for me as a refutation of this claim is the ease to which civilians can arm themselves in much of the United States. I know that people in other ostensibly free nations will disagree, but I regard this as an absolutely core freedom, integral to whether an individual is currently free and whether they're likely to remain so in the future. If you're required to justify why you need a firearm, no, your place of residence is not as free as mine.
You haven't provided an argument as to why civilians need easy access to guns for a society to be free. You are just asserting that this is the case.
Axiom: One of the fundamental rights of man is the right to effectively defend himself, innocent others, and his community from unjustified force levied against those targets.
The ability to effectively defend himself, etc. is very unevenly distributed in nature; an elderly woman, for example, will usually find herself on the losing end of a physical confrontation, while a young and strong man will be at an advantage most of the time.
Firearms have an extreme leveling effect in the context of effective self defense. Yes, there are degrees of skill, but the differences in terms of credible threat are trivial compared to the "no one has a gun" case. A young man with a gun poses somewhat more threat than without one, but an elderly woman with a gun is orders of magnitude better off than in the non-gun case. There are no other tools that provide anything close to this leveling effect.
Unjustified violence is commonly the province of the young and strong. If the government removes firearms from the equation, it denies the ability of the elderly and/or those physically weak to provide for their own defense effectively, thereby violating the initial axiom. I do not think it is much of a stretch to say that people whose government denies their fundamental rights are not free in that context.
The above is the summary of an argument. No doubt you can find points in either the axiom or the logic following where you disagree, but I believe it is sound.
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If they have access to guns, then they could form militias and wage an insurgency against the government if they wanted. That capacity reduces government power, increases the power of the population. The more power you have, the more free you are.
Imagine if nobody in Afghanistan or Iraq had any guns - I think we would have won those wars and imposed our will upon those countries!
And if they don't have access to guns, they import them, just as the IRA did (much easier now in the era of sophisticated drug trafficking networks). A legal right to guns seems helpful, but not necessary.
Do you think that it would be feasible to illegally import guns to the extent that people have them in the US today? Wouldn't the FBI and other agencies be up to doing something about that?
No, but I don't think you'd need as many guns as the US population has now.
A poorly armed but motivated and organized militia can bring a government to the brink. If Northern Ireland didn't have the support of the rest of the UK it would have collapsed in the early 70s, and if the US were to enter a similar civil war state you wouldn't have a relatively untouched region with >35x the population supporting one side.
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Nit sure I'd characterize what Afghans have under Taliban rule as more freedom.
Did they want western-style atomizing individualist freedom in the first place?
There is freedom in social obligation and in existing in a definite hierarchy. You are free to focus on things in life outside the culture war, freed from an obsession with the political that has seeped into every aspect of western life, even into the formerly sacrosanct household, poisoning the most fundamental human relations (man/woman, parent/child).
Likewise there is a sort of slavery in western "freedom." Slavery to vice born of anomie. Nothing matters, all choices and lifestyles are equal. Many people experience a sort of analysis paralysis and just choose the past of least resistance. Not to mention the nigh-mandatory participation in politics; as they say, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you, and it's not going to leave you alone (and some true degenerates engage in it willingly, even spending their free time furiously refreshing a certain CW thread...).
Consider that your definition of "freedom" is one among many.
The freedom to live any life, as long as it's the Taliban's life.
I think you've replaced 'freedom' with 'a good life.' It's probably possible to life a good life as a third world farmer, just as it's possible to live a bad life as a first world shitposter. But it's fair to note that if you want to go be Amish as a first worlder that option is available to you.
I'd rather have a good life than freedom, and I expect just about anyone who is not pathological in some way would want the same. I doubt that third world farmers who are already living good lives are pining for corrosive American-style freedom to be imposed on their families and communities.
Could you explain what this is supposed to mean? Why would someone need to do that? I live a modern house. I'm in a monogamous relationship with my wife and we both occupy traditional gender roles. We spend most of our time raising our three kids, doing chores, playing music, and doing active stuff outside. We attend weekly religion services. Etc etc. I guess this was some gotcha along the lines of "if you like the Taliban so much why don't you go live like them by giving up the trappings of modernity and living with the Amish," but I can live a traditional life without doing that.
If the argument is that modernity sucks, it's possible to live in the west and reject modernity.
I dunno, but gp was arguing that Afghans are more free, and I was pointing out that a similar lifestyle is available to anyone willing to try it in the west.
Indeed you can, and indeed you don't need to go amish to do it; amish are just an extreme example. This rather undermines the line:
Doesn't it?
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No. It's freedom to live any life that does not go against Taliban rules, not forced to live the Taliban life. It's a blacklist system, not a whitelist one. In return for the blacklisting of certain practices you get a strong social structure that over centuries has been tweaked and optimised to fit at least decently well with the human condition, I would say unless a person is at least IQ 120+ they would on average do better under it (assuming same economic situations etc. which is manifestly not the case in the real Afghanistan) than living under rootless modernity where "anything goes" and short term convenience without regard to long term social costs is the name of the game.
Also: from a western point of view from far away it looks like there is only one "way of life" of the people of Afghanistan or the Taliban, that is manifestly not true even amongst just the Pashtun people...
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But nobody in the West thinks or acts this way, and the laws are contrary to it. For example, pedophile lifestyles are not considered to be equal, and people very frequently act as though they think that things matter.
I don't know how much you know about Afghanistan, but it is also this way.
Even people in such a thoroughly politically apathetic and nihilistic country as Russia found that politics was interested in them once they found that they or their children were going off to be under fire in the cold mud of Ukraine.
Pedo lifestyles are outside of the Overton window but only for the time being. There's no magic principal limiting the endless expansion of rights and tolerance. It'll never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.
I think you know what I mean, but in case you don't:
"You do you"
"Speak your truth"
"lived experience"
Just a few popular phrases in the current zeitgeist that demonstrate our society's relativistic outlook. You can care about saving the whales, or global warming, or whatever, but if you claim that your cause is the _most important _ and that others must get on board, you're an asshole who needs to mind his own business. However I won't deny that recent progressivism seems to be bucking this trend.
What? This isn't what I'm talking about at all. This example stretches "political" to meaninglessness. People have suffered from war since people began living in cities, are you trying to claim that a 12th century German peasant lived in a world as politicized as that of a 21st century American?
There is no magic principle limiting pedophilia in trad societies, either. Isn't Afghanistan known for bacha bazi and the Muslim prophet known for marrying a 9 year old and consummating far before she was 18?
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(1) You can make predictions, but you can't use them as premises without evidence. If anything, Western societies seem more worried about pedophilia per se (rather than e.g. homosexuality) than in the past, and the age at which people are seen as being able to consent to sex seems to be rising pretty much everything. So the evidence seems to go in the opposite direction from your prediction.
(2) I don't think anyone claims that there is a magic principle. If you can't describe people who disagree with you without resorting to rhetoric, then maybe you would benefit more carefully and calmly about the controversy. You could read up more about contemporary sexual ethics and then come back to this debate, because at this point you're acting as though you don't know even the basics of contemporary conceptions of consent.
(3) The law of merited impossibility is a great point, but I am unconvinced that it applies in this case.
Modern societies certainly tend to be less prescriptive about some issues, but people seem to quite regularly preach. And it's not just the woke progressives: I hear liberals telling me that climate change is The Most Important Thing Ever and conservatives telling me that Defending Western Civilization is the Most Important Thing. Is there more relativism than I'd like? Yes, I'm sure we agree a lot about that. However, it's an exaggeration to say that it's ubiquitous. And as you suggest, wokeness has made society more moralistic in some areas than it was even within my lifetime.
Yes, it's a matter of historical record that politics didn't leave the peasants alone (Medieval soldiers didn't eat due to great logistic networks or large salaries) and that there were advantages in being a loyal vassal of your master if you were a serf during the frequent periods of violence. Garrison duty and labour responsibilities during wartime were a fact of life for peasants. Under some systems, they might have to travel far from their homes to fight.
I don't think that it's stretching the definition of "politics" to include being asked to fight for your lord or being pillaged by the soldiers of some king. Of course, it wasn't politics in the sense of petty regulations of people's lives - the Church and your parents would do enough of that. True, peasants couldn't vote, but they also weren't without say (it's a modern myth that there is no mass politics without mass voting) and I took "you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you, and it's not going to leave you alone" to include when politics infringed on the lives of ordinary people. As much as I dislike diversity statements or pronoun pronounciations, they pale in comparison to what a Medieval or Afghan peasant endure(d) as a consequence of political events.
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This is common right wing talking point for all of our living memory: "The libs want to mainstream pedophilia!"
While, in reality, "pedos" are people hated by everyone, the last people that are publicly acceptable to lynch, people that everyone loves to compare their political enemies to, and the definition of "pedo" gets wider and wider every year - from actual rape of pre pubescent children to any sex under 18 year line to relationship with "age gap".
No "expansion of rights and tolerance" to pedophiles is evident.
(if you want to reply: "wHY yOu dEFeNd pEdOS? dIe pEdO sCUm"!, thanks for proving my point)
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The Afghanis appear to disagree, as evidenced by the fact that the Taliban once more rule their country.
Or freedom isn't what they want.
@ActuallyATleilaxuGhola answered this objection pretty thoroughly just above, so I won't belabor the point beyond noting that what we offered the Afghanis does not seem to me to be worth a term as unqualified and valence-loaded as "freedom".
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When the threat is foreign governments - as it often happens to be in large stretches of the world - what you generally greatly would want is, in addition to guns, a strong goverment of your own to coordinate the use of those guns, ie. have an army. When it comes to the idea of Russians barreling to Finland Ukraine-style, I would much rather put my trust to the Finnish army than to civilians with guns to hinder the onslaught.
Civilian access to weapons increases defense against foreign adversaries in multiple ways. For example, the greater the level of access to, knowledge of, and experience with weapons among the populous, the more effective the military will be, as the military is composed of civilians.
Similarly, civilians with only partial training are themselves a substantial threat to an occupying force, foreign or domestic. As Russia is currently learning, occupying an area is accomplished by boots on the ground, not planes or tanks. Its hard to occupy a street corner or a field when every window or bush can hide an armed civilian. And as for the planes and tanks, the Russians are also learning that civilians armed with small arms and rockets can also perform rather effective defense with little if any training.
Indeed, as far as I am aware, Finland's entire military is constructed on the premise that, in the event of Russian invasion, rapid reaction forces composed of conscripts rush to the front, while the rest of the population is mobilized and molotov's are handed out to the babushkas.
I think a high degree of civilian weapons ownership would have obvious benefits here.
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I realize that as a Finnish person, you are confronting this reality far more closely than I, but my immediate reaction is por que no los dos? In your shoes, I would like to have an army, an armed populace, many allies, and space lasers if I could get them, or at least as many of those as possible!
Finland has comparatively high levels of small arms ownership, which is good for defense - precisely in the sense that people who would eventually, in a crisis situation, defend the country as conscripts in the army can use their guns for practice (and the Finnish government has explicitly defended an opt-out from EU gun legislation for this reason). However, in the event of an actual invasion, this wouldn't do much good, since the purpose and intent is to leave no civilians remaining in any potentially occupied territories, ie. evacuate them to other regions before Russian troops might get there.
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Which is faster in the event of hostile invasion:
the government must recognize the need to arm the populous, organize the logistics, and execute the distribution of arms to the populous amidst the invasion
the populous is already armed
Which of the following provides a greater degree of military efficacy:
after arming the general population, the people so armed must either be trained or use the arms without training
the populace already has some degree of training
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As it happens, Finland has the tenth most civilian guns per capita in the world. What we don’t have (and what nobody here wants) is US style unlicensed access to guns nor allowing guns for self defence.
”Arming the populace” is a non-issue anyway, since nothing prevents doing it once the war is in progress.
Never?
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Citation needed.
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Correct, it is a bald assertion of my values that free men may not be prevented from arming themselves by their governments. If my government forcibly disarmed me, I would no longer regard myself as free.
Edit - To be clear, I'm not trying to be snarky, I legitimately don't know how I could provide evidence for the proposition that being armed is both a signal and expression of personal freedom. This is a base value for me in the same fashion as my freedom of conscience, speech, and religion. I would feel the same about being denied my right to arms as any other fundamental right. People in other cultures do not seem to share this intuition or value and I think they are less free as a result; I do not expect that they will agree, given that they do not share that intuition or value.
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