I agree with you that some people in the US are being deprived of freedoms without legal recourse because powerful people have declared them to have certain group affiliations, like “terrorist,” and that in many cases this is a mistake.
I also suspect that some people in the US are being mistakenly deprived of their freedoms in courts of law, despite nominal legal recourse, without any particular group affiliation being asserted, because powerful people desire it.
I’d say (90+% confidence) there’s at least an order of magnitude more people in the second group than the first.
At this point I think the discussion gets murky, because legal recourse is often intentionally biased and group affiliation is often implicit. The drug war comes to mind. I’d assert that there’s a lot of overlap and we could reduce the second group a great deal by strengthening popular support of universal rights.
I certainly agree that the group/individual distinction gets murky when you get into the specifics of how societies actually make the choice to grant and withhold freedoms… that’s why I was questioning the distinction in the first place.
I agree that if there were strong and pervasive support for a common understanding of what freedoms people are entitled to by default (which is more or less what I understand by “universal rights”), there would be fewer cases of people being deprived of those freedoms, all else being equal.
It’s not clear to me that all else can be equal, though.
It’s also not clear to me that encouraging everyone to support universal rights, without at the same time encouraging us to support a specific model of universal rights, is anywhere near as effective.
I agree with you that some people in the US are being deprived of freedoms without legal recourse because powerful people have declared them to have certain group affiliations, like “terrorist,” and that in many cases this is a mistake.
I also suspect that some people in the US are being mistakenly deprived of their freedoms in courts of law, despite nominal legal recourse, without any particular group affiliation being asserted, because powerful people desire it.
I’d say (90+% confidence) there’s at least an order of magnitude more people in the second group than the first.
At this point I think the discussion gets murky, because legal recourse is often intentionally biased and group affiliation is often implicit. The drug war comes to mind. I’d assert that there’s a lot of overlap and we could reduce the second group a great deal by strengthening popular support of universal rights.
I certainly agree that the group/individual distinction gets murky when you get into the specifics of how societies actually make the choice to grant and withhold freedoms… that’s why I was questioning the distinction in the first place.
I agree that if there were strong and pervasive support for a common understanding of what freedoms people are entitled to by default (which is more or less what I understand by “universal rights”), there would be fewer cases of people being deprived of those freedoms, all else being equal.
It’s not clear to me that all else can be equal, though.
It’s also not clear to me that encouraging everyone to support universal rights, without at the same time encouraging us to support a specific model of universal rights, is anywhere near as effective.