Since when are drone strikes the legal way to handle criminals. I remember something with trials before you can kill people.

That's a luxury you get when your society has reached a certain level of stability.

Everything is that way.

Another example: Feminism? Only happened with women in the workforce. Women in the workforce? Only when the Industrial Revolution happened and the economy could support the roles. Industrial Revolution? Only happened when farming and trading got good enough that 90% of the population didn’t need to be farmers first. Very few moral enlightenments have ever actually happened absent economic preconditions, or would not be reversed if the conditions degraded.

> Feminism? Only happened with women in the workforce.

That is not how it was. First, women were actually working and producing the whole time - but with much more limited options. It is not like they would twiddle thumbs bored prior industrial revolution.

And second, the politically succesfull feminism happened mostly with women who were middle class, not allowed to work and wanted more ambitious jobs.

Natural rights do not exist. There is nothing natural about freedom. Every right we have we fought tirelessly for. If we forget the struggle we went through to obtain freedom we can easily abandon the cause and lose that freedom.

While I mostly agree, freedom as a universal right does exist; not everyone can exercise it, but that doesn't make it less of a right.

And it is 'natural' in the sense that it is valued ~~ universally. I can't establish objectively that it is valued everywhere, of course; I can establish that people en masse have valued it and fought for it all over the world, from Europe to South Asia to SE Asia to East Asia; in Africa, to all of the Americas.

Well the issue here is that value is a spectrum. Having rights involves trade offs, take a look at singapore. I do not think it is in any way self evident that all people value each of their rights the way that you do. In el salvador the people gladly gave up their rights to obtain order, and now they have one of the most popular governments in the world even though they do not have very much freedom at all. For you to carte blanche say the el salvandorans are wrong to be happy with that trade off is naive and incredibly paternalistic. The same is true of the situation in Haiti.

These are the same old argument that the dictators have made for generations. 'People here don't value freedom'; 'it's just your opinion'. They are called universal rights for a reason, and finding one popular dictator (in a world of fascist propaganda) while democracy and freedom have swept the world is not significant.

And if you say, who are you or am I to tell them what they value? Who are the dictators? If we can't morally, then you agree they have a right to self-determination, or freedom.

> you agree they have a right to self-determination, or freedom.

Certainly I think all people should have say over how they are governed. Whether they use that say to give themselves freedom is another question.

> 'People here don't value freedom'

No one is saying this. The claim is that some people are willing to sacrifice one thing they value a little (freedom) for something they value more (safety).

I havent spent much time looking into the popular opinion about that trade off in Haiti, but to claim that they should never make it as you claim takes away their self determination. If your claim was that Haitans are by and large unhappy with the drone program that would be a different story, but to just say handling criminals extrajudicially is unacceptable no matter what strikes me as naive

> The claim is that some people are willing to sacrifice one thing they value a little (freedom) for something they value more (safety).

You're assuming what they value more. Also, without freedom there is little safety. Without freedom of speech, etc., you can't have a free election where people can have self-determination.

And without universal rights, if some voters can take rights from other voters, nobody is safe or has self-determination.

> handling criminals extrajudicially is unacceptable no matter what strikes me as naive

You are naive to the age-old excuses of state murder and oppression. It's not only criminals (how do you even know who is a criminal?) and it's not going to stop. Do you think the mercenaries and others running the drones care? Do you think they won't murder people for their own benefit or through sheer recklessness and contempt for human life? There's a reason we have limited government and courts. That's why Haiti is in this current state - prior murderers who did the same. Murder is how they seized power and murder is how they kept it.

You'll notice that stable governments are not founded on extrajudicial state murder. That's not what Washington, Jefferson, etc. did.

In warfare, combatants are killed without trial but within the laws of warfare. Even there, extralegal killing is murder.

Are you at all aware of the hellscape that is Haiti...?

Yes, that's all the more reason they need a real government that protects people's rights.

The anti-freedom crowd always finds an excuse to disregard others' rights, liberty, and welfare, to impose what they want to do on others. They do it in the US too.

Plenty of places like Haiti just put civilians in the battleground between two equal and equally bad sides, the military and the insurgents. Both sides give the same excuse why they maim and murder civilians, which doesn't begin to address the damage to property and welfare.

In Iraq, for example, the US finally stabilized things when they adopted an effective and acceptable anti-insurgent strategy (led by David Petraeus): Protect the population.

That is naive. 'they need a real government that protects people's rights' and this government will magically materialize out of thin air and institute an island paradise, right? You can't even meaningfully discuss a real 'military' in Haiti, it is a failed state with minimal control of even their capital city.

This is a very common view among people who have grown up in the west. Some form of "people are inherently good, governments will spontaneously form and will be altruistic unless a bad minority does otherwise."

It's strange because the dominant religion in the west has as a fundamental tenet that people are inherently bad. But I digress...

Unless one is some form of deist who believes there is a top-tier authority who is active in bending the fate of the world, there is no reason to believe rights are natural or exist in any way absent the will of the powerful. It's a sad conclusion but the only one I can come up with after 50 trips around the sun.

This is an extraordinarily realistic take, I imagine you've traveled well to reach to that conclusion. The West is simply unwilling to concede that nothing is given in nature, as they have never truly dealt with the conniving spirit in the hearts of most men.

Yet universal rights have taken over the world, and are embraced by all the most free, most wealthy, most safe countries; it is the foundation of their governments. They are the most succesful governments in history with no others even close to competing, and have done that for many generations.

And now that universal rights have been weakened, the freedom, prosperity, and safety of those countries is weakening.

> Some form of "people are inherently good, governments will spontaneously form and will be altruistic unless a bad minority does otherwise."

That is a strawperson. Certainly nobody says 'spontaneously', and democratic goverments are constructed carefully to prevent abuses of power.

Naivete is swallowing the bait of fascists, hook, line and sinker: That freedom is somehow impossible, that people are only evil (instead of a mix of good and bad, either of which we can embrace and strengthen), and we must have a strongman. How convenient for the wannabe dictator.

> naive

Exactly the words used by the enemies of freedom: 'It's naive!' It's predictable.

Nobody said anything about easy. Murdering civilians is easy, I suppose, but not a route to a solution nor an acceptable means.

America has always been blessed with great geography, natural resources, an educated populace, and an inventive, optimistic spirit. That is to say, Americans have never suffered and as such, cannot comprehend suffering. Thus Americans are blind and naive to injustices they have never faced.

It's been embraced and is highly successful all over the world.

What government? Do you know anything about Haiti?