[flagged]
nothing you say can be unsaid; therefore speak judiciously
https://uuliveoak.org/Story%20ideas%20-%20service%20or%20cla...
> “Now Yankel,” the Rabbi began “go back through the town and collect all of the feathers. Put them back into the pillow and bring the fully stuffed pillow back to me.”
> “But Rabbi!!!” Yankel burst out. “That will be impossible. Even as I was walking away from the feathers, I saw that they were being blown from the doorsteps. How will I be able to find and gather up all of the feathers again?!?!?!”
> “Ah...” the Rabbi began his explanation. “And the same is true for lashon hara, for once you let it pass from your lips, you can never collect it back again. It floats and flutters away in whatever direction the wind carries it. That is why you must always watch your words carefully and avoid all talk of others. You will never be able to repair the damage you have caused, but I am hoping that you have learned a lesson...”
> Yankel nodded with deep understanding. From that day forward, not only was he no longer the town storyteller, but he did everything he could to spread the word about the pitfalls of lashon hara.
if you regret the damage done by what you have said, you cannot unsay it, but perhaps you can take responsibility, apologize, and make amends by some other means
Feel free to Geoblock the entire market if you disagree. Many small news sites in the states do this.
If I’m an EU citizen accessing a site from outside the EU, don’t I still have the right to be forgotten?
> The right to erasure is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
of course clever demagogues and rhetoricians can write such things into legislation, just as they can write legislation that claims you have no right to speak freely, but that just makes the legislation incorrect, like the famous legislation declaring pi to be exactly 3
Of course Google lobbyists are paid to argue that such a right exist and is higher up in the hierarchy than anything else, but there's no reason to listen to this arguments. I have no love for legislative bodies inventing artificial rights (like intellectual property rights), but corporations inventing artificial right is legitimately even worse.
This time fortunately the legislators took the side of the people and created a “right to be forgotten” instead of a “right to hoard private data”.
— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
(https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip... the US Declaration of Independence, expressing the motivation for independence from Europe)
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law, (...)
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
Natural law theories base human rights on a "natural" moral, religious or even biological order which is independent of transitory human laws or traditions.
Socrates and his philosophic heirs, Plato and Aristotle, posited the existence of natural justice or natural right (dikaion physikon, δικαιον φυσικον, Latin ius naturale). Of these, Aristotle is often said to be the father of natural law, although evidence for this is due largely to the interpretations of his work by Thomas Aquinas.
The development of this tradition of natural justice into one of natural law is usually attributed to the Stoics.
Some of the early Church fathers sought to incorporate the until then pagan concept of natural law into Christianity. Natural law theories have featured greatly in the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suárez, Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, and John Locke.
In the Seventeenth Century Thomas Hobbes founded a contractualist theory of legal positivism on what all men could agree upon: what they sought (happiness) was subject to contention, but a broad consensus could form around what they feared (violent death at the hands of another). The natural law was how a rational human being, seeking to survive and prosper, would act. It was discovered by considering humankind's natural rights, whereas previously it could be said that natural rights were discovered by considering the natural law. In Hobbes' opinion, the only way natural law could prevail was for men to submit to the commands of the sovereign. In this lay the foundations of the theory of a social contract between the governed and the governor.
Hugo Grotius based his philosophy of international law on natural law. He wrote that "even the will of an omnipotent being cannot change or abrogate" natural law, which "would maintain its objective validity even if we should assume the impossible, that there is no God or that he does not care for human affairs." (De iure belli ac pacis, Prolegomeni XI). This is the famous argument etiamsi daremus (non-esse Deum), that made natural law no longer dependent on theology.
John Locke incorporated natural law into many of his theories and philosophy, especially in Two Treatises of Government. Locke turned Hobbes' prescription around, saying that if the ruler went against natural law and failed to protect "life, liberty, and property," people could justifiably overthrow the existing state and create a new one.
The Belgian philosopher of law Frank van Dun is one among those who are elaborating a secular conception of natural law in the liberal tradition. There are also emerging and secular forms of natural law theory that define human rights as derivative of the notion of universal human dignity.
The term "human rights" has replaced the term "natural rights" in popularity, because the rights are less and less frequently seen as requiring natural law for their existence.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights#Philosophies_of_h...
Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable (they cannot be repealed by human laws, though one can forfeit their enjoyment through one's actions, such as by violating someone else's rights). Natural law is the law of natural rights. (...)
Natural law first appeared in ancient Greek philosophy, and was referred to by Roman philosopher Cicero. It was subsequently alluded to in the Bible, and then developed in the Middle Ages by Catholic philosophers such as Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas. During the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of natural laws was used to challenge the divine right of kings, and became an alternative justification for the establishment of a social contract, positive law, and government – and thus legal rights – in the form of classical republicanism. Conversely, the concept of natural rights is used by others to challenge the legitimacy of all such establishments.
The idea of human rights derives from theories of natural rights. Those rejecting a distinction between human rights and natural rights view human rights as the successor that is not dependent on natural law, natural theology, or Christian theological doctrine. Natural rights, in particular, are considered beyond the authority of any government or international body to dismiss.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...
more generally, though, the idea that good and evil can exist independently of law is foundational to most philosophical systems; if you reject that, you necessarily reject that laws can be evil in ways that go beyond mere internal inconsistency
though they are not based on conceptions of individual rights, taoism, confucianism, and almost any kind of theism posit a moral authority that is higher than any human law and can therefore condemn it
A "right to be forgotten" seems to mean a conflict with the classic rights of others to remember what they know, and to tell each other what they know.
remember that the holocaust, the great leap forward, gulag, the imprisonment of galileo, daily human sacrifice to the aztec sun god, and witch-burnings in the spanish inquisition were not just legal but legally required
therefore, anyone who condemns one of them is appealing to a moral standard they consider superior to, at least, the legal systems of the countries in question at the time
"Under Article 17 of the UK GDPR individuals have the right to have personal data erased. This is also known as the 'right to be forgotten'." [1]
"The right to be forgotten appears in Recitals 65 and 66 and in Article 17 of the GDPR. It states, “The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay”" [2]
[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
[2] https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/
https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
This obviously varies depending on jurisdictions, but a great number of users (EU citizens, and people resident in the EU - but additionally, the UK) absolutely have a "right to be forgotten," and brazenly claiming "no such right exists" is ignorant and fallacious, and such unfounded arrogance is a distinctly USian trait. For someone who purportedly lives outside the US, you don't seem to grasp that there are laws in other countries than the US.
No, it's the same kind of thing as having your records "sealed", to not let a past deed haunt you.
Not even sure what kind of logic jumps one has to make to equate something like this to "robbing with inpunity". For starters the punishment to robbing isn't remembrance of your robbing, it's jail time or fine etc. And, fun fact, the aforementioned "records being sealed" can even be applied to someone who e.g. did a robbery or other crime as a juvenile.
Now, since a "right to be forgotten" does explicitly exist in EU and other jurisdictions, I'm not sure what denying its existance means.
If you mean "there's no such right" as a thing in itself, outside laws and treaties and jurisdictions, then the same is true for any right.
No right exists by itself, as if handed to us by nature, not even the right to not be murdered. All rights are based on people deciding some kind of assurances are good to have and putting them into laws and treaties and such.
And all rights are only granted and protected based on power relationships and agreement, not based on some (non-existent) natural truths existing independenty of them in the cosmos. We might call some "self-evident" and "natural" but those are just fancy words. In actual history almost all of our so-called "self-evident/natural" rights have been unrecognized (even in quite recent history), and societies considered this just fine. In fact in some cases, actually giving the rights would be considered the violation of the natural law.
>of course clever demagogues and rhetoricians can write such things into legislation
Demagogue is someone who "who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument". Rhetorician is a public speaker who is good in persuading people with words. Neither have much to do with such legislation being passed (nor was it the work of some demagogues).
It's simply about the internet making anything somebody does into a permanent record [1], and this being understood as not always necessarily being for the benefit of society.
E.g. what some edgy/troubled teenager wrote on his social media account in his teens shouldn't necessarily be part of his "permanent record" for employers and others to judge them by decades afterwards. And in the past, it wasn't, unless it made the press (and even then, it was easily lost due to it being in print and ephemeral), or was deemed necessary so by the state (e.g. to register as a sex offender). Just because technology now makes it being a permanent record trivial doesn't mean we should be OK with it. We should be masters of technology, not slaves to it.
[1] Doesn't matter if something like that could be accomplished in the past too - what matters is that it's far more prevalent, has several orders of magnitude more scale of the kind of stuff that can be kept, and is easier to achieve, and trivial to search with the advent of the internet. This changes the impact of this to society a lot.
(i think your comment would be higher-quality if you also deleted your repetition of that vacuous nonsense, though, because it makes it harder to discuss the substantial issues here; there would be no point in discussing ethical issues at all if moral relativism were correct. you wouldn't have bothered to post a comment at all if you were the nihilist you are posing as)
remember that lashon hara is by definition truthful; the point of the story is not that it is commendable to say everything that is truthful
This is wrong on several levels, including practical and philosophical (and those aspects of it have been covered a lot in moral philosophy).
For starters, whether morality is relative or objective has no bearing at all to whether it exists as a practical force in the human world - and thus whether it makes total practical sense to study it, shape it, apply it, benefit from it, use it to make things work smoother or more to your liking, and so on.
(Not to mention how it also makes sense to examine it, document it, and discuss it, from a curiosity or historical interest perspective, even if it doesn't concern one directly as a practical matter. People do study the morality of other historical periods or distant societies, for example, even if it has no impact on their life in their society).
Note that there are several other things for which exactly the same thing applies: religion, laws, taboos, and so on, even art and fashion.
>you wouldn't have bothered to post a comment at all if you were the nihilist you are posing as
Rejecting natural rights and understanding that rights are historical constructions doesn't mean one is disintered in rights.
I am very much interested in my right to my property, for example, and will vote, advocate, protest, demonstrate, etc, to maintain it.
I don't have to believe there's some inherent natural "right to property" for that. Just that I find the legal enforcement of one beneficial to me, and that I'd rather live in a society where it is enforced, as opposed to one where it's not.
in the former case, you don't seem to be offering to make any concessions (and in any case, how could you, in a public forum like this), and in the latter case, it seems like it would be in people's best interests to close their ears to you except when your arguments are factual (as opposed to normative); and possibly even then, if their interests are likely to run counter to yours, because selective reporting of facts can manipulate people to act against their own interests just as effectively as outright lies
that's what i mean by 'there would be no point in discussing ethical issues at all if moral relativism were correct'. there is certainly a point in negotiating agreements, or even evaluating who is likely to fulfill their negotiated commitments, but that isn't the same thing as discussing questions of ethics
attempting to return to the substantive questions, perhaps we would do well to promote pseudonymous and even anonymous online interaction (especially for media likely to be used by edgy and troubled teenagers) and not grant governments the ability to eliminate facts from the historical record piecemeal, like beria editing stalin's opponents out of photos
If you were familiar with the fallibility of human memory you wouldn't have made such a post
some of us practice sufficiently OK OPSEC to prevent this from becoming an issue but it doesn't mean that we don't have to look out for the greater good of society against unwarranted centralization of technological power.
feel free to breach such legislation if you deem it in your best interests
if anyone has the right to be forgotten, then nobody has the right to remember, and prohibiting people from remembering would be an appalling degree of totalitarianism (though not an unprecedented one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...)
that doesn't, of course, imply that it's praiseworthy to repeat everything true that you remember; that is lashon hara
with respect to which, there's an interesting halakhic discussion about whether portraying yourself in an accurate but very unfavorable light, as kitanata and 0ct4via have done in their comments, is also forbidden
https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/30372/lashon-har...
ובספר עלי תמר על הירושלמי שם הביא סיפור על בעל החפץ חיים ז"ל שנסע ברכבת ופגש יהודי שלא הכיר שהוא החפץ חיים וסיפר לו שהוא נוסע לבקר אצל החפץ חיים בראדין והפליג בשבחו והחפץ חיים אמר לו למה אתה הולך אליו כי אינו גדול כמו שאתה חושב אלא הוא יהודי פשוט ואותו יהודי התרגז על דבריו וחרפו וגדפו והגיע לידי הכאה ואחר כך כאשר בא לבקר את החפץ חיים בביתו השתומם לגלות שהוא האיש שאיתו רב ברכבת ובקש מחילה ואמר לו החפץ חיים שאדרבה הוא אסיר תודה לו היות וכתב ספר שלם על הלכות לשון הרע ולא עמד על ההלכה שאסור לדבר לשון הרע גם על עצמו עד שהעמידו הוא על הדבר עכ"ל הסיפור וכתב עליו בעלי תמר שיש סמוכין לזה מהירושלמי הנ"ל. ואולם אין פוסקים הלכה מתוך סיפורים וכבר כתבתי שאין ראיה מהירושלמי ומה שלא עמד על הלכה זו בספר חפץ חיים אותו נקבל כי אכן לא נמצא שם אבל מה שמשמע שחזר בו ודן דין חדש לאיסור לא נאמין לזה בלי ראיות מש"ס ופוסקים ובעיקר הסיפור בשלמא אם היה אומר לנוסע אני החפץ חיים ואיני כמו שאתה חושב אלא אני יהודי פשוט שפיר דמי ולא היתה יוצאת מזה שום תקלה אלא הנוסע היה מוסיף לו אהבה בעד ענוותנותו היתירה אבל במה שהסתיר זהותו וכאילו דיבר סרה על אחר יש בו מראית עין של לשון הרע ועוד שהכשיל את הנוסע באיסור דאורייתא של גידוף והכאה אלא בודאי אין הסיפור אמת
In the book Alei Tamar on the Yerushalmi there he brings a story about the Chofetz Chaim, that he was traveling on a train and a Jew who did not recognize that he was the Chofetz Chaim met him and told him that he was traveling to visit the Chofetz Chaim in Radin and he was effusive in his praise. And the Chofetz Chaim said to him, "why are you going to him? He is not as great as you think; he is just a simple Jew." And that Jew got angry over these words and he disgraced him and cursed him and ended up hitting him. Afterwards, when he came to visit the Chofetz Chaim in his house, he was astonished to discover that this was the man he had been with on the train, and he requested forgiveness. And the Chofetz Chaim said that on the contrary he is thankful to him, for he had written an entire book about the laws of lashon hara but had missed the law that one must not speak lashon hara about oneself, until this fellow set him straight on this. This is the end of the story, and the Alei Tamar writes on it that there is support for it from the Yerushalmi mentioned earlier. However, we do not decide halacha from stories, and I have already written that there is no proof from the Yerushalmi. And that which [was mentioned in the story] that the Chofetz Chaim missed this law in the book Chofetz Chaim, we can accept because indeed it is not to be found there. But that which it implies that he retracted and judged the law anew for prohibitiveness we will not believe without proofs from the Gemara and Poskim. And with regard to the actual story it would have been fine had he said to the traveler, "I am the Chofetz Chaim and I am not like what you think; I am just a simple Jew" and no problem would have resulted. In fact the traveler would have increased his love on account of his extra humility. But that which he hid his identity and appeared to speak badly about someone else would be maris ayin of lashon hara, plus he caused the traveler to violate the biblical prohibition of cursing and hitting. Instead, the story is certainly untrue.