Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have.

If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.

Plenty folks of didn't / don't change their minds about what rights they thought they had/have, even in the face of guns. Just look at what's currently going in Iran.

If you're in the US, and believe in your own Constitution, then people have "unalienable Rights" that are "endowed by their Creator", regardless of whether they are recognized by the government or not:

* https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...

It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.

Grow up, and at least have the guts to state you want rights, rather than insisting they are a given someone may deprive you of.

I would say you're wrong. The right to vote does exist because men rose up together and fought leaders that wouldn't let them vote. And, when leaders rise up that take our right to vote and we don't stop them they will prevail.

> it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now.

Correct. Start up a big disaster where food goes away for some reason and it comes back.

We have a stable world where we don't kill each other at the moment because in general we all have food, water, shelter, and I would say enough entertainment that fighting each other isn't worth the risk. There is no rule that says this will last forever. Quite often in history there have been stable times, that then fell apart because of greed and malice of leaders.

> If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.

I do not own a gun and I have no fighting skills, so I cannot defend myself against men with guns. Would you agree that I therefore have no rights?

I think that you and the original poster are seeing the situation "you are vulnerable to potentially losing rights in the future", which is true, but conflating that with "you have no rights". It's like telling a rich person "you actually don't have any money" because it's possible they might be robbed someday.

You have the right to vote, if you lose that right, and you don't have a gun after that you have whatever 'rights' that are provided to you by a dictator.

One of the things you're missing here is the idea of herd immunity. While you won't fight for your rights, theoretically someone else will making taking your rights dangerous. Once enough people won't fight for their rights, or enough of the population gathers together to take your rights, you lose your rights.

Or it's an attempt to reconcile the philosophical concept of rights with global politics and observed reality.

Does an Afghan girl have a right to education? A Uyghur Muslim a right to freedom of religion? A Palestinian a right to food? A Hong Kong resident a right to freedom of expression?

It would appear that in these cases, the politicians commanding the loyalty of the men with guns do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.

Of course, that's not the only reasonable line of thinking. Just because people in distant lands don't have certain rights in practice, I have those rights because I live in a great country with strong institutions and the rule of law.

It's not wrong because of physics or biology, but because civilization made it so.

Like so many cultural achievements, it's true when you can count on the person next to you expecting it to be true. (1)

Which in turn means you can make that culture collapse if you impress enough people with your edgelord attitude.

Cooperative culture is fragile and must be preserved by preserving shared values such as these. On the other hand, in the long run, the cultures that do this successfully prevail because cooperation is stronger than the law of the jungle.

Unfortunately that 'long run' may take a while.

(1) That's basically the definition of a cultural value. They're emergent phenomena based on Keynesian beauty contests.

Maduro would disagree.

You see that this view doesn't go very far.

Your rights are, by their nature inalienable. They are recognized (or not) by individual power structures, granting you freedoms.

Under an authoritarian regime, your freedoms maybe be limited, for example, your right to free speech may be curtailed by men with guns. Killing those men is illegal, but not unethical, exactly because they are infringing your rights.

This all may seem academic to the person with a boot on their throat, but it dictates how outsiders view one's actions.

My sister is wheelchair bound with MS. Half the time she can barely see. You can give her all the guns you want and she isn't going be to able to defend herself. I reject your nonsense assertion that because of this she has no rights.

this kind of logic will always lead to everyone losing in the long run. always. there will always be a more powerful bully that steps up to take over. history is very clear on this one.

Descriptively, powerful people have all the rights and weak people have none. This is what we observe in the world. No amount of philosophical thought outweighs actual observations. For example, Donald Trump has (retroactively!) the right to r**e ch*ldren. We know this because he is not suffering consequences for doing that. But Renee Good did not have a right to free speech. We know this because she was executed because of her speech.

You can prescribe whatever fancy academia language you want, but the facts in the real world don't seem to currently support any of it beyond "might makes rights".

Literally two thousand years of civilization were spent on combating the pockets in which people live by that principle.

So why would I use my guns again?

It doesn’t work like that though. The most authoritarian regime in the world has bits that seem benign, we don’t judge them on that.

We judge them based on the extremes. Things like masked men grabbing civilians off the street and shooting them in the face, with the full support of the regime.

You are falling into a trap where you can not recognize a true point because it is made by someone you disagree with. I don't condone Vance or the Trump admin. He is right about European governemnt's attacks on free speech.

They have consistently prosecuted, threatened, deported, withheld money from, and so on people who say things they do not like.

The judiciary and both houses are allowing some incredible things, far beyond anything from the last administration.

This year has been off to a wild start and it’s well into uncharted territory.

We're not discussing Pol Pot's views on cooking either, even though he might have had some valuable insight. Bringing up Vance and Musk in polite conversation to bolster your argument is - especially in the context of Europe, which both men seem to have declared to be enemy #1 before Russia and China - a little tone deaf.

I wonder how many Americans would prefer to live in the US that existed 12 years ago versus the US today.

Virtue signaling at its finest.

Compared to 20 years ago it’s so much cleaner, quicker, more efficient, friendlier.

You must be in a great place as it’s fantastic here.

No. I'm identifying this one statement as factual, regardless of the person saying it. Surely then, you would not deny the color of the sun to be yellow just because Pot might have observed it to be that way?

People focus on Vance in this issue because they hate him and hate is easy to come by. They ignore that popular Democrats and progressives said the same thing. Hell, even the Atlantic posted a piece about the issue.

If it was someone else, we'd all be cheering because the person is on a different team.

To you, yes. Which shows your biases.

there was zero reason to name drop vance and elon besides appealing to their rabid fans to bolster support.

it's just more hypocrisy.

If there was any sense that this ruling was just a temporary mistake that will be corrected by pending regulation/legislation, then a third option would be on the table: temporarily comply and wait it out. But all indications are that the EU is hell-bent on making things worse, not better, for the open internet.

People are locked up in the Germany and the UK because they criticize the government. I live in Germany.

[1]: https://evrimagaci.org/gpt/london-braces-for-free-speech-sho...

(1) If an insult (§ 185) is committed against a person involved in the political life of the people, either publicly, at a meeting or by disseminating content (§ 11 (3)), for reasons related to the position of the offended person in public life, and if the act is likely to significantly impede their public activities, the penalty shall be imprisonment for up to three years or a fine. The political life of the people extends to the local level.

(2) Under the same conditions, defamation (§ 186) shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years, and slander (§ 187) with imprisonment from six months to five years.

This law is commonly criticized by free speech activists in Germany, as well as liberal parties like Die Linke and FDP. It was updated to be even harsher by our last government. David Bendels received a sentence of 7 months for posting an edited insulting picture of Nancy Faeser, Germany's last minister for interior affairs. The case sparked an international outcry and got a lot of press coverage [2]. Note that ironically the doctored image showed Faeser holding a sign with the message "I hate freedom of speech".

[1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__188.html [2]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult...

It absolutely is. Being right (and more so, being righteous) is expensive. When you cannot afford to put your money where your mouth is, everyone knows that sooner or later you cannot or will not follow through on your words. Europe hast lost ~30% of power vs. the US in just ~12 years.

[citation needed] mostly because I'm curious what kind of metric one uses to measure this.

From an economic standpoint, Europe stagnated behind the US coming out of the pandemic, but now it seems to be the US markets that are lagging Europe in the past year.

Militarily, my perception is that Europe is ramping up, not falling off.

GDP EU ÷ GDP US in 2024: ~0.66

I will give you exact sources for the claim later once I'm back at my laptop, but rest assured: these numbers don't lie. And militarily... really? We're a joke. We cannot even defend our neighbor from being invaded without extensive US help.

Also, if you don't like GDP, you can just look at real wages – same picture.

If you're going to reference Popper go read his work he'd spit in your face for suggesting your current censorship and jailing of citizen is in anyway to fix his "paradox of tolerance".