Not voting (in your election)

Hell even when the "good president" takes power he doesn't actually give back any rights, he just stops actively taking them away. Or he just "lets the states decide" wither or not people should have rights.

Lol. People complain they don't have a likeable candidate and use it as an excuse to sit out the elections, then act surprised at the result.

Exactly how can we magically make a system in which all rights are guaranteed, when they're all literally an opinion in the first place?

Something something monopoly on violence

With everything except the third paragraph, which instead of "We don't have / we have" I would write as "this doesn't describes a system of / it describes", followed by an emphasis that human rights exist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office and we need to start organizing if we want those rights respected.

But I appreciate that the original was shooting for punchiness and brevity, and also that it hits that mark.

Wasn't this basically a George Carlin bit, like, 10 to 20 years ago?

Anyway, yes, obviously agree.

We do not have rights, in an absolute or fully real way.

We have attempts to construct societies with the goal of making rights as absolute and real as possible... or, well, maybe not.

What we do actually, absolutely, really have, are owners, who grant us some privileges, with hundreds of asterisks, untill they don't want to do that anymore.

Rights are fought for and won, never given away. Rights are power. If you don’t have power, you don’t have rights.

"Rights" only make sense within an individualistic context. Rights can be asserted with violence alone, it is thus that only those with the capacity to express violence, or who can convince others to express violence on their behalf, have "rights." We should, then, abandon the concept of "rights" entirely. We have, instead, obligations. We are obliged to defend the freedom of others that they may defend ours. We are obliged to support the community that has grown us. Our obligations build over time, and we fulfill them to the degree to which we have the ability to do so. We have obligations to our ancestors, and to those who come after us. Then we can't simply walk away from others who are suffering and say, "I have my rights, and you have to fight for yours."

This is simply more true to our reality than the concept of "rights" which itself comes from Roman laws about how men may control the slaves and women they "own."

I'm sure Simone Weil said it better, but I only have a passing knowledge of her framework.

Rights as a political concept are essentially a form of social and cultural pressure that make it harder to oppress and abuse the populace. The idea that we have rights due to the passage of laws may not make it impossible for those rights to be violated, but it gives us a way to talk about it that lends legitimacy to pushing back against injustice.

Normalizing the idea that no one has any rights is extremely counterproductive to defending from tyranny. Frankly, trying to push the perception of rights from something we're owed to a convenient fiction is straight out of the fascist playbook.

Anyone pushing this line of thinking should not be trusted. Whether it's on purpose or not, they make themselves a tool of authoritarians by alienating people from the idea that they deserve to have their rights protected.

Yes. This is a big problem and has to be repaired with congressional actions. Laws are going to have to be made clear and we may have to add consequences down the line. Like heads of departments for the department breaking the constitution and not rectifying the situation within some timeline like a week. Citizens united has to be rectified. Patriot act and any other "laws" that provide exceptions to consitutional rights have to go. A "good" president is just a reprieve not a fix.

Uhhh exactly what "rights" were allegedly in question here, I think that absolutely plays a part here