[klodolph]

> Nobody has 'rights'. It's an artificial construct.

Whether “rights” are an artificial construct is not germane. A twelve-month lease is an artificial construct, but I have one of those. So is a Twitter account, gender, and my favorite pancake recipe. I have all of these things. I also have rights.

[derefr]

In the context of a certain society, sure. But those are “rights within that society”, just like your lease is “a lease within that society.” (The pancake recipe is a pancake recipe anywhere; whether or not you can get the ingredients is a separate issue.) Having rights enforced by treaty across most of the world doesn’t mean you have rights if you e.g. crash-land your private plane into a North Korean military base. Or if you get hijacked by pirates in international waters.

In both cases, it’s not really some airy universal human rights that’ll protect you; instead, you have “being the subject of a powerful sovereign nation that has made a promise to its citizens to retrieve them from such peril, probably ultimately because of that nation’s perception of your granted rights as a citizen of that country.” (And, if you’re stateless, you don’t even have that—which is a big reason many nations don’t let you renounce citizenship without already being a citizen of somewhere-else.)

And, more to the GP poster’s point, your rights don’t exist if you wander into the wilderness, get chased by a bear, get backed into a corner, and want to convince the bear not to eat you. The bear will not stop because “you have rights”; those are, at their widest, a “human civil-society” thing. At that moment, you need something else. Something negotiated, probably. (Maybe you can throw him a sandwich and leave while he’s distracted? That’s a negotiation.)

[DrScientist]

And then can be revoked, cancelled, traded, stripped etc.

My point isn't they don't exist as some inalienable thing on their own, they are result of negotiations. Hence the argument that 'rights' are something that can't be debated or negotiated is a mistake.