Comments | morsefan: Another comment I want to memorialize in the main text

morsefan

Another comment I want to memorialize in the main text

Dec 14, 2005 16:00

The thing about discussions about "human rights" (let us now bow down and worship at the altar!) is there actually is something called the law of human rights that has content. There are procedures for unpacking questions like "What is or should be recognized as a human right?" "Who has authority to enforce a human right and when?" "How do we know ( Read more... )

Comments 16

supedujour December 14 2005, 16:06:25 UTC

Do I really think the Chinese are going to care about our pithy Universal Declarations on Human Rights or the Russians some U.N. resolution when the Chechnyans come calling. Please. And no one in the Middle East, no terror group, no nothing will care.

^^This^^ is what frustrates me. What the heck do they think is going to become of Western Civilization without the USA and her Armed Services since they have none of their own to speak of? (outside of the UK)Do they really believe they can negotiate their safety and their continued independence? Do you suppose they are really buying the part about the infidels being in the Middle East? What could they possibly be thinking?

morsefan December 14 2005, 17:05:05 UTC

Oh, I actually think it's possible some have lost their marbles. Seriously ( ... )

burningblue December 14 2005, 20:40:25 UTC

You know, I have to say that you are one of my absolutely favorite people on LJ!

Your posts are a breath of fresh air in a world filled with stupidity!

morsefan December 14 2005, 23:17:42 UTC

I think that's a kind thing to say (LOL!)! I have been so glad to read so many of the interesting articles you had been posting recently. I'm back to getting a lot of my news from LJ, but I'm lucky that I have so many good sources.

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spacecowgirl December 15 2005, 00:31:10 UTC

Although I disagree with you on some of your beliefs, I always love reading what you have to say because I know you have real, intelligent reasons for what you believe and that you've done your reasearch and you actually think about it, unlike so many people who just say they "believe" things and don't even know why they do ( ... )

morsefan December 15 2005, 11:20:32 UTC

Let us take a lesson from this interchange about how the world has changed. The fascinating thing about religion and the left is that when I was growing up, it seemed as though (well if you were Catholic), you couldn't be religious and not leftist. Well, JPII made that a lot more sensible with many of his encyclicals, because religion is not held hostage to politics; it is much broader. Now, the assumption is that religiosity and the right go together. But honestly, I think the only difference is 20 years. So there's optimism or pessimism whichever side one is on.

I'll confess to a dirty little secret. supedujour and I were having a, "yanno, I think we might be winning," conversation the the other day and it struck me: "has it occurred to you that there are a lot of kooks in our part of the room?"

No one's pure on any of this.

spacecowgirl December 16 2005, 04:57:48 UTC

Absolutely! Religion is not held hostage to politics, I don't know why so many people think they are or that they should be! Once again, you are the voice of reason.

The thing is, the kooks in your part are much more organized and don't appear to be kooks. ;) And the ones in my part carry puppets and are dodgy on the bathing. It amazes me, lefties used to dress NICELY, in suits and dresses, to go to protests. People took them seriously. What happened to having some pride in one's appearance??? But you can't get that through to many of them nowadays. I should've been born in the 40's, I tell you.

morsefan December 16 2005, 19:18:11 UTC

And the ones in my part carry puppets and are dodgy on the bathing.

I laughed when I saw this and the parts following, less because of their truth (the lefties I see are the ones on college campuses, and they usually at least wear khakis for appearance sake -- wink!), but because it reminds me of some of the insanity that I see and am fascinated by over on commonreader's journal. I don't actually recommend it for a person with bipolar, because it's crazy, but she's difficult to define (libertarian, I guess), very used to San Francisco lifestyles, and her flist is just so all over the map that I get wide-eyed over them ( ... )

(The comment has been removed)

morsefan December 15 2005, 18:02:58 UTC

BTW -- the word "theist" is a pet peeve of mine. I just won't indulge the one-digit percent of those in the U.S. who deny any possibility of God in order to make the fact that they are atheism seem "equivalent" to believing in God. Moreover, to talk about Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and the myriad of others under one umbrella drains the word of any meaning anyway ( ... )

morsefan December 15 2005, 18:04:14 UTC

I have no idea what philosophers think positivism is. I thought what I meant was clear in context, but I come at this from a legal context, so I could be wrong. It is, bluntly, that might makes right; winner take all under the voting rule; that 6 may tell 5 what to do; that we justify the law by the process of creating it, not by its substantive content. In this I am thinking of a way of making some jurisprudential debates that go on before some of our Supreme Court justices accessible. Bluntly, majority rules, and if they protect the minorities, that's nice, but the only protection for minorities is if the majority feels like being a bunch of nice guys about it. There is no other principled reason for so doing other than utilitarianism.

If philosophers reject positivism, good! A lot of political entities supported by philosophers claim to, but in practice don't. In that sense, we are really discussing not what human rights should be, but what we are going to choose to protect in a world of scarce resources where people do not ( ... )

morsefan December 15 2005, 18:04:36 UTC

Why don't we do the "let the little jurisdictions pick what rights they will protect?" thing. Easy: human rights discourse for all too many people is not about actually protecting human rights (recall, we've got folks over there arguing the Holocaust didn't happen and you're awfully quick to assume unborn children don't deserve any protection even if it's possible they are fully human and when this post didn't really raise that -- sorry, but it does sound like you needed that for your argument, as in, that some people aren't really people, and it's OK to define them that way, which can lead to all sorts of stuff as I think you know). If it had anything to do with protecting human rights, those great thump-their-chest guys out there would have had the European armies in Darfur in a minute. Nope, human rights discourse is about being subtle (and sometimes not too subtle) in an attempt to control human beings. It's about tyranny. It's about saying "in the name of this thing I can't even define and has no basis called human rights, ( ... )

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