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.
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.