Nonsense, it can impose a gag order when needed, revoke your right to vote or own a gun, restrict your movement, or any number of things. Recent rulings about divulging passwords put into question how absolute your right not to self-incriminate is.
first answer - the fact that i CAN kill you doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to life
second answer - earlier arguments in another thread as to whether we live in a democracy or a republic were stupid because we live in a totalitarian state where we have NO RIGHTS. We all live at the pleasure of the government. You make a compelling argument for the anarchists.
You’re not making much of an argument for anything. Since this is General Questions there’s much else to say.
Instead of ignoring my whole post, why don’t you take a stab at it then? Explain the difference between a “right” and a “privilege”.
Rights are held to a higher standard before being regulated than privileges. Basically rights are privileges that are recognized as constitutionally granted. They can be modified or regulated for a variety of reasons as long as those regulations pass constitutional muster. Since that is determined by the courts and changes over time, it would be foolish to consider any of them absolute.
If there is a distinction, in the strictest legal sense, a right would be a default position whereas a privilege must be obtained (like being allowed to legally operate a motor vehicle on public roadways). Though, in XIV, the phrase “privileges and immunities” is used in a way the blurs the line.
What we tend to forget is that rights are not absolute and immutable. There are practical limits on freedom of speech (e.g., libel), for example. The constitution is meant as a basic guide, it is justifiably lean on the specifics.
Even without juries, there’s also “judicial notice,” which means that judges can simply know and use facts that are obvious and not in dispute (e.g. the sun does not shine at 3 a.m. in New York at any time of year, or Main Street and State Street intersect in downtown Podunk – or even facts that have to be looked up but are not subject to debate, such as whether the moon was full or new on a given night, or what day of the week a particular date fell on).
So, in your opinion, men create governments which then tell the men who created them what they may do?
The whole idea of public servants is a foreign concept in your world?
Men do not create governments to serve the needs of themselves, but rather to grant them the privilege of acting in certain ways, which of course they could have done without creating the government in the first place?
From http://www.fff.org/freedom/0696e.asp
The axiom of socialism is that the individual has no inherent rights. The privileges and prerogatives that the individual enjoys are grants from society, acting through its management committee, the government. That is the condition the individual must accept for the benefit of being a member of society. Hence, the socialists (including many who do not so name themselves) reject the statement of rights in the Declaration of Independence, calling it a fiction of the eighteenth century.
This sounds strikingly similar to…uh…YOUR philosophy. Your in the plural sense. I now understand the hostility I have met with all my posts about individual rights, freedom in general, gold as money; in general, all ideas that are opposed to the ones advocated in the holy book, the communist manifesto.
It explains why, when someone posts “the government dispenses privileges, aka rights, to people (with personal axes to grind)”, he is not blasted for doing so, as opposed to when someone posts anything regarding individual rights, the thread goes scrolling by like a ticker tape with yells and shouts. (this wild idea of freedom must be suppressed for the good of the majority) (except let em make lots of money so we can confiscate it ((doesn’t really belong to him anyway)) finance our old deal that has failed miserably)
No wonder we’re losing our freedoms.
New slogan, Land of the used to be free, home of the slave
How “it would be nice how things should work”, and how things work in the real world are two different things.
How pie-in-the-sky theorists (such as Jesus and Karl Marx) ***think ***people should behave, and how human nature really works, are two different things. In the ideal world, people all pull together to help the less fortunate, and everyone gets a share of the pie. In the real world, people look out for number one; whereas in the ideal world, someone helps carry your cross, in the real world it’s more like Life of Brian, where if you help carry someone’s cross, they’ll bugger off and leave you holding the cross.
So in this mess, have some respect for the American system (and the British, to some extent) which in this messy world have survived and in fact gotten much better while other theories and their implementations have crashed and burned all over.
So in the real world, absent a “system”, you have no rights that you and your tribe cannot enforce. The American “system” has defined two tiers, rights and privileges. How your dogma defines these is irrelevant - they are basically legalistic matters. Your “rights” are established by the constitution or established in common law, and so to negate them suggests the court (or the authorities must prove to the court) that a higher degree of necessity applies than a simple privilege. But - they can and have been limited by courts.
This is General Questions, not Great Debates. You’re welcome to start a new thread or request that this thread be moved.
Wiki has a decent article on the right to remain silent: Right to silence - Wikipedia
The English and Welsh police warning is a bit different from the U.S. Miranda warning: “You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
Judges there also have broader latitude than here to instruct juries and to comment upon the evidence. The judge’s remarks in the second Jeffrey Archer trial (when the author declined to testify) were masterful; wish I could find them online.
Are you talking about this?
'Cause if so it’s always where you least expect it. 
No, that was the first trial, in which he sued the Daily Star for libel, in 1987. I specifically referred to the second trial, in 2000, when he was prosecuted for perjury in the first trial, and convicted.
Ah, found it. Mr. Justice Potts sums up the case: Warning to Archer jury | UK news | The Guardian
As I understand it, the British wording says if you suddenly remember just before the trial that you were with your mates at your flat when the alleged crime happened, the prosecution can rightfully point out that in the preceding year and interrogations you never mentioned this alibi; they can imply after the fact fabrication if it was not mentioned sooner.
The argument above about the distinction between rights and privileges oversimplifies things considerably, and is at risk of generating more heat than light. As you would imagine, legal scholars and philosophers have given enormous thought to these issues, without unanimous resolution. To barely scratch the surface of complexity, look here:
Other influential writers include Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls.
Their theses are far too complex to include in a post, but the taste URLd above should be sufficient to indicate that simple assertions advanced with great conviction about the distinction between rights and privileges will not do justice to the depth of thought required to even approach this subject.
The rule is the same in the US, provided you testify at trial. That’s the impeachment exception.