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Comment by nsomaru | Hacker News Reader

Human rights are intimately woven into International Law and state sovereignty. The work of the TWAIL scholars is relevant, especially as regards how human rights are deployed to undermine the sovereignty of the global south following the rapid “decolonisation” of the mid 20th century.

I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.

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Politics are intertwined in every facet of the human experience, because they're effectively the net result of a social group

Some people however strive to "live above" politics, or to breathlessly demand things be "apolitical" based on their own biases. That bias in of itself being as "political" as anything else

First time I heard about TWAIL. Ok, now human rights are controversial? The one ideal, that whoever you are, wherever you are, you hold universal rights because you are a human. This are Western ideas and are not true for the global south? This belief is weaponized?

I cannot believe this. Simply outrageous. I never understood the religious people before - to me this is a sacrilege.

Universal human rights are the hill I will literally die on.

human rights in spirit are not. but in practice (see the the argument below) they are used more as a rhetorical shield. they are toothless paper tigers, they are extremely easy to co-opt and corrupt the spirit. (eg. see how Putin loves harping on about self-determination of people in the annexed regions; how proudly democratic North Korea is.)

I hope my extreme summarization is not completely useless.

https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-191-tran... // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiE5rBLrIgM

First: very nice podcast.

Second: the biggest straw man I have ever seen. Rage bait Philosophy.Just because human rights are violated does not mean, that they are useless or non existence.

It's a good word of caution specially the normalizing states of emergency and dehumanizing people.

Civil libertys and democracy are fragile achievements, that need to be protected by the citizens. Human rights are rights against an overbearing state.

All the examples given are valid points, that violate human rights. And for every issue there is a human right group, that fights against the violations.

I dont buy his conclusion about potential either... Another magical force.

Regarding organisations and corporations he should really read up on Luhmann.

So maybe I am a fanatic - none of his arguments strike true for me.

Thanks for exposing me to this ideas!

Yeah, I had the exact same sentiment. (As in "sure we don't live in a perfect world, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to set goals as a bare minimum baseline".)

Oh, here's one more video on human rights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q (by Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, a collectivist/Marxist?)

>I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.

It is, example?

Nord Korea signed it, the US and Canada just ratified it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...

> the US and Canada just ratified it

Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/, the US hasn't. Do you have a source?

https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Cha...

According to that document, the US _signed_ it in 1995, but has yet to _ratify_ it (notice the blank space in the third column).

Politics follow ethics in democratic societies. However, our understanding of ethics is always developing. We now understand that homosexuality is ethical. We understand that transgenderism is ethical. There will be more things in the future where politics has to bow to our improved understanding of ethics. Ethics is always a foundation for democratic politics, because politics needs to govern how we as a society live together in peace.

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