Question for general debate:

Can a right be rescinded?

Obviously, it doesn't happen often, but, in theory, does government have that ability? If so, under what circumstances? Examples? Are rights absolute and God-given, or are they purely human constructs and what can be granted can be taken away?

Just curious to see how others view what rights mean, and what they are to us.

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An employee gets trampled to death by a frenzied, greedy mob at a Walmart sale, and customers actually complained when the store closed. Yet, I'm the bad guy for suggesting policies that assume people act like retarded herd animals that need government nannying and control....

Well, yeah. There is nothing that naturally belongs to us. The government can take away any right it so chooses, our right to free speech, right to a fair trial, right to vote, right to bare arms. But we have the ability to stand against the government if they try to pull something like that. They can try it if they wish, but they choose not to because either they don't really want to or they know that they'd never succede.

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Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

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Defeating market theocrats since 2001.

They can take away my freedom but they can't take away my mind.

Rights are given and taken away all the time but there are certain rights that no one cay take away. Like the right to make up your own mind.

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Walt Whitman
"I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences."

It depends (#3) and this is a perfect example.

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May your paradise always be green, you liberties always be full, and may the ignorance of you enemies not drive you to be pro-nuke.

"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself
into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and
trying to lift himself up by the handle."-Winston Churchill

Define "right."

Because "rights" are not intrinsic to human beings, any right can be taken away at any time.

Rights are something we completely made up.

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"Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states...Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."



~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yes, of course they can. I shoot you, there I took away your right to life.

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Trust me, I'm a socialist!

There's power in a factory,power in the land, power in the hand of the worker. But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand, there is power in a union.
The union forever defending our rights, down with the blackleg, workers unite. To our brothers and our sisters in many far off lands, there is power in a union.
Money speaks for money, the devil for his own. - Billy Bragg

No, you took away the life, not the right to it.

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Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

Ah yes, I see, but as you say if government says you have no right to life, or more appropriately "you have no right to free speech" the right is gone.

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Trust me, I'm a socialist!

There's power in a factory,power in the land, power in the hand of the worker. But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand, there is power in a union.
The union forever defending our rights, down with the blackleg, workers unite. To our brothers and our sisters in many far off lands, there is power in a union.
Money speaks for money, the devil for his own. - Billy Bragg