Hacker News Reader

Comment by grievances | Hacker News Reader

Many brave people have fought and died for their countries and rights. Its easy to forget that minorities and “unlucky” people fight too; knowing that you’re safe expressing your points of view is something that many have earned, not all have received. That very much sounds like privilege to me.

View on HN

We need to avoid getting lost in minor internal debates. I agree some classes of people in America have had more difficulty exercising their rights, but they always had those rights and the courts enforced them usually. What we are talking about with China and Russia is totalitarian dictatorships that come and take you from your home and beat you and murder you for making a comment on the internet they didn't like or even sharing a Winnie the Poo meme.

We need to all band together to fight this or we will lose all of our privileges and rights.

You, uh, you could own people a few generations ago. There are women alive today who remember not being able to vote. To call that “some difficulty expressing their rights” is remarkably tone-deaf. And no, the courts usually sided with the majority (c.f. Plessy v. Ferguson, etc.)

Name a country that's never done it. Because I think taking criticism from them would be appropriate. Or at least someone who hasn't had an asshole ancestor in the last, oh... I don't know... 3 generations?

Let's just discuss what your ancestors did to my ancestors! Because holy crap! That'll definitely fix our current day problems! No better cure for the present than to yell at each other about things that happened a few hundred years ago! Maybe if we turn it into a card game, we can have tournaments and see who's the most oppressed every year. As a Polish-Jew, I wonder where I'm going to be in the rankings in historical oppression. Oh wait, it doesn't matter. I'm going to focus on today instead.

I’ll be sure to remind the millions of Muslims in Chinese concentration camps that they can rest easy knowing that other countries also sometimes commit atrocities.

Hey, hey, homie. I've been discussing that it's been going on here on HN and arguing against some apologists for the communist regime in China. Shove it.

The point to that statement, instead of trying to use this as a situation where America is to blame, because it always is, let's stick to the discussion at hand with China and their CURRENT atrocities. Because no country is innocent, no country is heaven sent. We're all trying to live in a world where this shit doesn't happen anymore. If we just look around and go "Well you're ancestors did this!" "And your ancestors did that first!", we're going to get no where.

Right, so I’m really curious as to why you’ve done exactly that, and then were exceedingly rude about it.

We fight to make this country what it is so that we can all stand together as one people, not so we can whine like little babies about who’s more privileged or marginalized than everyone else.

Acknowledging that rights are more readily and equally given to some people than others is not whining.

Which marginalized group, when fighting "to make this country what it is", hasn't been opposed and mocked (e.g. "whiny little babies) by the status quo at the time of their fight?

There is more to be done to protect, secure, and expand the rights of everyone. But they are still rights.

Privileges are things granted to you, often conditionally, by someone else. Using the word often sounds quasi-religious to me: "Thank Privilege for this meal we are about to eat, and our safe home, ...".

>Privileges are things granted to you, often conditionally, by someone else. Using the word often sounds quasi-religious to me: "Thank Privilege for this meal we are about to eat, and our safe home, ...".

most people didn't do anything do get whatever rights they are enjoying - they were just born into these rights while many other people don't have those rights. Pretty much definition of privilege.

> Calling our rights "privilege" is throwing out the struggle and sacrifice of everyone that fought for those rights.

That argument works for the Lords Privileges in England too - the ancestors of those Lords were brutal knights who fought bloodily to become the Lords and to get and enjoy the Privileges themselves and by their descendants.

I think you're conflating the exercise of rights with the existence of those rights.

"Being born "into" these rights" is close to accurate, but misses the point. You (and everyone else) are born with a basic set of natural rights which exist regardless of how much or how little you can/do exercise them. People have been struggling for hundreds of years to avoid having those rights infringed upon, not to "create" them.

Privileges on the other hand, derive their authority from a secondary source. Driving, public education, etc are good examples of "Privileges" where society builds/pays for something, and members of that society are granted the privilege of its use. Compared with your right to free speech, which doesn't disappear because someone/something infringes upon it.

> are born with a basic set of natural rights which exist regardless of how much or how little you can/do exercise them

There is no such thing as the "natural rights" except may be for the right to die (and even that is contested by many governments (and super-government-powerful organizations of the past like the Church was for example)). Any rights are created as a result of an [usually temporary] equilibrium between various participating forces established and supported by violence or a credible threat of a such.

Rights can, in theory, be had by everyone. Privileges are inherently for a select few.

Wouldn't the world be wonderful if all 7 billion people had free speech?

>Rights can, in theory, be had by everyone. Privileges are inherently for a select few.

when it is had by everyone then it is a right. Until that it is a privilege. For example voting in US was in the past a privilege of white male property owners, and today it is pretty much a right (if one discounts voter suppression state laws, etc).

Another example - free speech can, in theory, be had by everyone in Russia or China, yet it is really far from everybody having it there. Thus it isn't a right there despite that "can, in theory".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com