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3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2010–2015
9:16 · 9.6M views · Mar 13, 2008
A George Carlin stand-up routine arguing that rights are really temporary privileges that can be taken away. The uploader frames it with conspiracy-leaning tags.
HN quotes it in threads about civil liberties and government overreach for its line about rights being privileges.
3 comments from Hacker News
To quote George Carlin (RIP): Now, if you think you do have rights, I have one last assignment for ya. Next time you’re at the computer get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, i want to type in, “Japanese-Americans 1942″ and you’ll find out all about your precious fucking rights. Alright. You know about it. In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was…right this way! Into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most…their government took them away. and rights aren’t rights if someone can take em away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY privileges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list gets shorter, and shorter, and shorter. Yep, sooner or later the people in this country are going to realize the government doesn’t give a fuck about them. the government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. it simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in it’s own power. That’s the only thing…keeping it, and expanding wherever possible. The w
Please stop mincing words; you know as well as I do what the phrase "free and compulsory education" refers to. Yes, it's tax-funded. No, taxes do not constitute enslavement . (And before you mention that you said "payment or enslavement of others", let's both agree to admit that you included the word "enslavement" solely for dramatic effect.) I'm not going to play the "human rights" game, because you have no rights [1]. I'm going to say that providing education to everyone has been proven time and again to be good for society [2]. The attitude of "oh well it's not a right" is perhaps the greatest piece of sophistry I've been subjected to in some time, in that the definition of a "right" is entirely subjective and consequently useless. It is a right as much as the freedom of speech, in that it's provision helps to provide a basic framework that is necessary for a free society. An uneducated populace cannot perform simple democratic tasks, like, say, voting. Speaking of which, why is voting a right? Doesn't counting several million ballots require "significant effort"? I certainly couldn't do it in an afternoon! Are you "enslaved" by having to pay for people to count ballots? [1] this video [2] [LINK]
> What you describe is doing everything you can in order to try to avoid a situation in which you might be required to flex your rights. I like to think of it as maintaining a preemptive strategy. I don't like this, but the world we live in is unfair and full of assholes who don't play by their own rules. > How can you describe it as a strategy for "making sure your rights are respected"? A man who faces no wars carries no battle scars. > It is on its face an attempt to make the question of whether you have rights or not a no-impact detail. this video