The Case Against Human Rights

[Kadaeux]

"-The cultures that murder thousands for a difference in an old book are another issue. "

Our culture has murdered women just because they wanted access to medical procedures, contraception, basic human rights in abortion. Then that same culture denies refugee status to hundreds of Honduran children risking their lives to escape a war that we caused. And all of this within the last two years.

"And it's not about not understanding other cultures. It's about either forcing them to progress or, well, get out of the way there's things we need under your feet that you have no idea what to do with."

Yup, that reasoning worked just great with Native Americans.

Now that's how you do it. Bravo :p

 

[Windsong]

Gonna need some sources on those dead women.

I've no idea what's going on with Honduras. Except I work with a Honduran guy who praises his home to high heaven yet when asked why he doesn't go back acts like he suddenly forgot how to English.

And hey, we got modern America out of the natives!

 

[unanun]

Not mean. Pointless. And not "how you said it"

Windsongs comment was not a personal attack directed at someone. (Whether politically correct or not.)

Yours was.



And so I suggested you NOT do that in order to have a civilised discussion.

You've obviously elected otherwise.

It doesn't really matter, though. All you had to do, or Windsong had to do, was ignore her comment and focus on the point Tegan was making - that that is a monstrous point of view to hold, by most contemporary standards. You didn't have to spend all your time condemning it ...

 

[Brovo]

It doesn't really matter, though. All you had to do, or Windsong had to do, was ignore her comment and focus on the point Tegan was making - that that is a monstrous point of view to hold, by most contemporary standards. You didn't have to spend all your time condemning it ...

Alright, it's been resolved based on Kad's last response here, so lets stop focusing on that and lets focus on the real issue at hand.

Buttery, or salty, or both?

 

[Kadaeux]

@Tegan: A Better example for Windsong might actually have been the middle east. Who used to be the centre of culture and advancement in the world. However once large scale sailing became really viable the Silk Roads that made Arabia and the middle east so rich were, well, worthless.

The Middle East effectively (But not totally) devolved into the shitstorm it is today. This wasn't a failure of cultural assimilation. It was a cornerstone of the world being turned into punching bag by the rest of the world which now basically exists to shit on itself or be exploited for oil.

You see a lot of people wondering why the "Terrerizts" hate us so much, but when you look at history there's a fairly significant amount of reason for this prejudice. (As for why they hate their own people, that gets chalked down to religious differences and I don't get that at all.)

 

[unanun]

-That's saying progress is bad. Which it rarely is?
-That's an issue that is just people making a buck off others misery.
-The cultures that murder thousands for a difference in an old book are another issue.

- Arguing about the definition of 'progress' is a deep, dark rabbit hole I don't want to get into. Suffice to say, I would choose being a simple farmer over coming in contact with you. That's just my opinion.
- Well ... no. The first world is systematically exploiting underdeveloped countries. You should look up how many regimes the CIA had a hand in overthrowing / installing.
- No, what you're basically advocating is that any nation that has focus on war is the superior one, as it will eventually conquer and install its own culture and people as a replacement.

Yours is a point of view. I have argued about this before. It is not provably false and we can - and will - argue about this for pages upon pages.

I accept that you have a valid point of view. But I posit that it is a monstrous one based upon current social context.

All I ask is that you consider the very real possibility that you could have been born in any of the countries that we are exploiting right now, by "right of our might".

 

[Tegan]

Gonna need some sources on those dead women.

I've no idea what's going on with Honduras. Except I work with a Honduran guy who praises his home to high heaven yet when asked why he doesn't go back acts like he suddenly forgot how to English.

And hey, we got modern America out of the natives!

I've got BINDERS full of sources on dead women (and men).

And all I needed was to Google Anti-Abortion Violence. Because I remember reading about this stuff for the past twenty years or so and know that is easily accessible to anyone with WIFI and an index finger.

And you didn't hear what happened in Honduras? It was all over the news. I thought someone so well-voiced would be caught up on these current events. Perhaps you should ask your coworker for his opinion... and listen.


Gonna need some sources from you now, to you know, back up the hateful shit you've been saying.


I'll wait.

 

[Asmodeus]

Man, we got to 3 pages.... all because we couldn't unite to call someone a cunt and laugh them out of the thread.


A sad day.

 

[Kadaeux]

And you didn't hear what happened in Honduras? It was all over the news. I thought someone so well-voiced would be caught up on these current events. Perhaps you should ask your coworker for his opinion... and listen.

I can't speak for Windsong, but i'd never heard of that either. It certainly didn't hit the mainstream news here in Australia on any of the channels I watch. *Shrugs*

 

[Tegan]

Man, we got to 3 pages.... all because we couldn't unite to call someone a cunt and laugh them out of the thread.


A sad day.

THAT would have been progress.

 

[Tegan]

I can't speak for Windsong, but i'd never heard of that either. It certainly didn't hit the mainstream news here in Australia on any of the channels I watch. *Shrugs*

Hence, my very first comment made to Windsong was that they were very misinformed (and an asshole).

Because no one in their right, god-given reasoning would say something so equally hateful and ignorant if they were, in fact, in possession, of some very basic facts.



*Drops mic and leaves thread forever*

 

[Asmodeus]

Boom. Full circle.


Right, @unanun - please bring us back on track before anyone else escapes the asylum.



*leaves with Tegan*

 

[Brovo]

And nobody learns a thing. Tsk.

 

[Windsong]

Good lords, I leave to head home from work and get called all sorts of nastiness.

My aching ego.
@unanun :
-Living as a subsistence farmer would be splendid in terms of a simple yet hard work. But then you're dead or crippled by your thirties. I'll take my modern medicine and creature comforts like a/c though. Fuck weather. She's mean.

-That's what the CIA does, usually attempting it to overthrow a lesser evil or somesuch, right? Has that EVER worked out?

-War makes jobs and (usually) makes money. Not to mention spoils. But then we could argue all day about human culture.

@Kadaeux
Didn't you talk about lining up pedophiles and rapists and killing them? Then you advocate the old middle east where they worshiped a prophet that married a nine year old and consummated their marriage when she was like ten or something?

@Tegan
Yeah, people get violent when they think their in the right in regards to someone else's body.

I'd listen to the guy if he spoke enough English to get his point and opinion across. Drives me up the wall he refuses to use Spanish rather than broken English, at least I can understand that.

Didn't you leave? Oh, you came back.

AND agreed I was a cunt?! Here I was hoping for informative debate about why I'm wrong.

Edit: And sources for what? My opinion? Lemme finish wiping and I'll pass'em over.
(I can be witty too sometimes~)
:c

@Asmodeus
I love it when you come into threads.

 

[unanun]

-Living as a subsistence farmer would be splendid in terms of a simple yet hard work. But then you're dead or crippled by your thirties. I'll take my modern medicine and creature comforts like a/c though. Fuck weather. She's mean.

-That's what the CIA does, usually attempting it to overthrow a lesser evil or somesuch, right? Has that EVER worked out?

-War makes jobs and (usually) makes money. Not to mention spoils. But then we could argue all day about human culture.

- The life expectancy of 30 or so is a myth, heavily skewed by high infant mortality. If you get past that, chances are you will live to a decent age. Many problems we have medicines for now, like cancer and alzheimers, exist because we live long enough for genetic errors to surface - choosing either situation is a matter of preference. As for creature comforts, many cultures have evolved ways to deal with climate that don't involve thermodynamics o_o.

- Actually, you are very wrong here. The US has its fingers in everything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions

- OK. If you're going to argue war is good for the economy, we're going to need some numbers.

Your point of view is dangerous and fragile. It is fragile in the sense that if someone else came along and stomped you out, you would have to be fine with that. By extension to personal perspective, you are also OK with people dominating you so long as they can force you to. Someone could barge into your home right now and subject you to great personal suffering, and you are OK with that because might makes right. It is a way of thinking that is reptilian.

 

[Windsong]

- The life expectancy of 30 or so is a myth, heavily skewed by high infant mortality. If you get past that, chances are you will live to a decent age. Many problems we have medicines for now, like cancer and alzheimers, exist because we live long enough for genetic errors to surface - choosing either situation is a matter of preference. As for creature comforts, many cultures have evolved ways to deal with climate that don't involve thermodynamics o_o.

- Actually, you are very wrong here. The US has its fingers in everything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions

- OK. If you're going to argue war is good for the economy, we're going to need some numbers.

Your point of view is dangerous and fragile. It is fragile in the sense that if someone else came along and stomped you out, you would have to be fine with that. By extension to personal perspective, you are also OK with people dominating you so long as they can force you to. Someone could barge into your home right now and subject you to great personal suffering, and you are OK with that because might makes right. It is a way of thinking that is reptilian.

-Really? That could skew the numbers I suppose. Learn something new every day.
-As for the comforts; that's also partially from growing used to the environment they lived in. I'm sure English coming from England thought the Americas were dreadful in regards to their humidity.

-I don't doubt that. The Bay of Pig's and Osama v. Russia were just one's that I had in my mind.

-WW2 pulling the US out of the Great Depression comes to mind.
NUMBER ONE THING ON GOOGLE:
http://economics.about.com/od/warandtheeconomy/a/warsandeconomy.htm
Tell's me I'm wrong.

That's not how I view my life. All of that was in regards to ancestry and the like. Personally I would rather die biting the barrel then quietly go with a blindfold on.

And reptilian? Explain?

 

[Peter Feels]

-Living as a subsistence farmer would be splendid in terms of a simple yet hard work. But then you're dead or crippled by your thirties. I'll take my modern medicine and creature comforts like a/c though. Fuck weather. She's mean.

Not that I am really part of this debate, I think things have mostly been covered and whatnot, but I do have a thing to say about this. My father's side of the family are all farmers in Mexico. Our average life expectancy is roughly seventy to eighty years for them. My grandfather being a fair anomaly dying at 95. The only people in my dad's family who die early are those who have been injured. Usually it's something grievous like a car accident or being fucked in the guts by a bull.

Oh, and not many injuries, either. My dad didn't start getting bent and broken until well into his fifties and that was because he was showing off to some younger guys at an old job.

Now, I am well aware that I don't speak for every farmer in existence or that this is how all farmers are. Rather, it's how my family was and they did it without modern conveniences. I was in my late teens when they finally got electricity. My twenties when they got their first tv and flushing toilet (which didn't flush by itself). They plow their fields with a borrowed ox or they do it themselves. My cousin once saw a tractor when he came to the States and it blew his mind.

 

[Brovo]

- OK. If you're going to argue war is good for the economy, we're going to need some numbers.

Actually I can elaborate on why any numbers changes would be ultimately false via two arguments, further improving your counter-point.

#1: The Parable of the Broken Window fallacy. If Jimmy breaks a window, John has to buy a new window, thus glass manufacturers continue their work. If Jimmy does not break a window, John keeps his window and instead spends his money expanding his business.

No matter how you slice it, destruction of resources, property, and depletion of manpower (especially from skilled labour) is never healthy for the economy on the grand scale. As for the United States post-WW 2, you can chalk that up to the fact that they took near zero direct damage from the war, meaning that all the factories and other stuff they built to supply the war effort remained undamaged and easy to convert to other tasks. As for the sudden wealth increase...

#2: War eliminates competitors in an unhealthy manner, it doesn't out-compete them. The United States motor vehicle market is a perfect example of this. Back in the 1950's, the German and Japanese car markets were nonexistent in the face of still recovering from the second world war. When both of these countries recovered, the US car market took multiple steady hits until it equalized to the state that it is at now. Unless you literally commit to the complete extermination of your opposition--every man, woman, and child, every building, every piece of civilization--you will never completely eliminate the opposing competition from this area. Destruction of that magnitude is not only unethical, it's ludicrously expensive and draining on the nation attempting to perform it.

As for the argument of technological progress via war, it only improves tech progress for war-related activities. (In the same sense that mass producing vehicle factories for war results in incidental benefits to the economy afterwards should said factories survive and retain use for the common man, so too can the same argument be made to tech progress.) However, the exact same amount of effort could have been thrown at other, not-war-useful technology, such as cancer research.

War only prioritizes resources to itself, it doesn't magically poof them into existence. War also only has one purpose: To annihilate and destroy, thus setting back the progression of mankind. As is, imagine what the sheer level of money thrown at the Middle East over the past ten years could have done for the United States if they instead poured it onto their own people, or was used to start paying back some government debt.

I'd imagine it'd have done a lot more productive things then "look, we blew up some people in a land where the worst weapons they have are outdated soviet assault rifles, coarse language, and shoes."

 

[Kadaeux]

@Kadaeux
Didn't you talk about lining up pedophiles and rapists and killing them? Then you advocate the old middle east where they worshiped a prophet that married a nine year old and consummated their marriage when she was like ten or something?

Advocate? Where?

Though as for your reference there. Back in those days it not only wasn't uncommon for children to be married at those ages and consummate their marriages. It was flat our standard. By the reckoning of in excess of a thousand years ago, as soon as a girl began to menstruate they were considered adults fit for marriage.

It was no stranger for such a marriage back then than it is for adults to get married now.

But i'm still curious as to where you think i'm advocating anything? If you're referring to my pointing out the Middle East was literally the cradle of the civilised world and a scientifically advanced society, that isn't advocacy, it's stating historical fact.

 

[Brovo]

And reptilian? Explain?

He means cold blooded, heartless, et cetera. Reptiles have cold blood. "Might makes right" is a cold way of thinking.