Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) [pdf]

ohchr.org

18 pointsjeena6 comments

It is a lovely document, and one we should better adopt in practice.

Unfortunately, this document is ignored at will by major powers of the world. And thanks to the current political climate and the Internet which made news and information widely available, propagandists can freely exploit the facts, and push a "human rights is hypocrisy/irrelevant" narrative. Now I see more and more people from various countries genuinely believe "human rights are bullsh*t, the act of becoming a superpower is more important than human rights, and I don't care if some people suffer". The most worrying part is, many are not indoctrinated, but are middle-class people who convinced themselves to be self-interested to the point of ignoring human rights, as long as it can make their life better.

It's definitely something terrible for the world, recognized "universal" values only came to existence by pure coincidence. The beliefs that the system of representative democracy is just, universal and progressive is only an illusion created by a short period of technological and economic boom. Just like the lack of consciousness in the biosphere, the norm of the human history is empires and authoritarianism, returning back to that state is entirely possible if people stop to believe.

In my darkest moments, I also think the most high-minded improvements to human well-being and governance of the last 200 years are fleeting and and will soon be lost. Of course, there is hardly a better mission one could have but to preserve those things.

My personal impression is, after the continuum of War on Terror, Arab Spring, Syria, and deglobalization, this line of events have already destroyed the moral authorities and credibility of major Western powers (which are established post-Coldwar) in the world for your average Joe, these facts are frequently used by propagandists, the rise of popularity of Sputnik and RT is a obvious manifestation of that.

I'm not claiming that the post-Coldwar world order and globalization was just, of course it was not. But the total collapse of the previous system is not something without serious consequences. I could only hope that the current failures are "only" a temporary stagnation with limited conflicts and damages, that this situation is merely a transitional period, and could be soon solved peacefully by the next technological innovations. On the other hand, if it's not true, I can only hope it's not a repetition of pre-World War I history.

Saying we should explore Mars doesn't explore Mars, building rockets does.

Adopting a document doesn't improve human rights, that's mostly up to the economy and government.

It used to be that what's said and done are in tandem with each other. Today there're way too many sayers and not enough doers.

Counterpoint: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze10.htm

Quote:

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Desire is not putting something up on a pedestal and saying, hey, I desire this. We don't desire liberty and so forth, for example; that doesn't mean anything. We find ourselves in situations.

Take today's Armenia, a recent example. What is the situation there? If I understand correctly -- please let me know if I don't, though that's not the point either -- there's an Armenian enclave in another Soviet republic. So there's an Armenian republic, and then an enclave. Well, that's a situation. First, there's the massacre that the Turks, or the Turkic people, I'm not sure, massacre the Armenians once again, in their enclave. The Armenians take refuge in their republic -- I think, and again, please correct my errors -- and then, there, an earthquake hits. It's as if they were in the Marquis de Sade. These poor people went through the worst ordeals that they could face, and they've only just escaped into shelter when Mother Nature starts it all up again.

I mean, we say "human rights", but in the end, that's a party line for intellectuals, and for odious intellectuals, and for intellectuals without any ideas of their own. Right off the bat, I've noticed that these declarations of human rights are never done by way of the people that are primarily concerned, the Armenian associations and communities, and so on. Their problem isn't human rights. What is it?

The Armenian problem is typical of what one might call a problem of jurisprudence. It is extraordinarily complex. What can be done to save the Armenians, and to enable the Armenians to extricate themselves from this situation? And then, on top of things, the earthquake kicks in. An earthquake whose unfolding also had its reasons, buildings which weren't well built, which weren't put together as they should have been. All of these things are jurisprudence cases. To act for liberty, to become a revolutionary, this is to act on the plane of jurisprudence. To call out to justice -- justice does not exist, and human rights do not exist. What counts is jurisprudence: that is the invention of rights, invention of the law. So those who are content to remind us of human rights, and recite lists of human rights -- they are idiots. It's not a question of applying human rights. It is one of inventing jurisprudences where, in each case, this or that will no longer be possible. And that's something quite different.

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