Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute has a nice piece entitled “Wrong about Human Rights” re: the United States’s “first report on U.S. human-rights conditions to the U.N. Human Rights Council, submitted pursuant to a U.N. mandate that members conduct self-assessments every four years.”
Here’s a lil:
According to the State Department, we fall short on “fairness, equality, and dignity” in areas such as education, health, and housing, especially when it comes to women, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, American Indians, and gay people.On closer reading, however, the claimed “human rights” problems start to look dubious. Take the report’s contention that “work remains to meet our goal of ensuring equality before the law” — a human right, to be sure. The supposed evidence is that unemployment is higher among blacks and Hispanics; there are racial and ethnic disparities in home ownership rates; and “whites are twice as likely as Native Americans to have a college degree.” But those are socio-economic inequalities owing to many factors, not inequalities before the law.
Or consider this point: “Asian-American men suffer from stomach cancer 114 percent more often than non-Hispanic white men.” That’s a human-rights problem?
So what’s going on here? A little background will be useful. Founded on the ashes of the Second World War, the United Nations assumed as one of its gravest missions the protection of human rights. Toward that end, however, its declaration on the subject cobbled together both real and spurious “rights.”
Hence the United Nations’ two main rights covenants: one on civil and political rights — those any American would recognize — to which the United States is a party; and the other on economic, social, and cultural “rights” commonly recognized by European welfare states, which the United States signed but the U.S. Senate has never ratified.
…
With the end of the Cold War, however, the lines between the two kinds of rights grew blurry. What’s more, “human rights” became just another club to be wielded for political ends by human-rights abusers who sat on the commission, often targeting Israel and America.
When it got so bad that Sudan, deep into its ethnic cleansing of Darfur, was elected unanimously to the Commission on Human Rights in 2004, the U.S. ambassador walked out. But things got even worse, and the commission was abolished two years later — only to be reconstituted as the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose members today include such human-rights exemplars as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Cuba.
Just last year, however, the United States joined the council as part of President Obama’s outreach to the world…
Oh, man, I pretty much published Pilon’s entire article. Apologies. Please go to the site to read the whole thing in its original form.
Back in June I attended the Porcupine Festival in Lancaster, New Hampshire. Porc Fest is a part of the Free State Project. I’m planning on writing something feature-length about my experience there. I met a lot of nice people. I met a lot of nutcases. I met a lot of annoying nutcases.
I appreciate Penn’s nuanced take on the subject of videotaping police:
And what a great observation: Cops in movies are way too fucking old!
Sam Harris’s new book, The Moral Landscape, drops October 5, 2010. The book’s thesis is that science “in principle” can answer questions of what’s right and wrong, or, as the book’s cover puts it, “How Science Can Determine Human Values.”
Koerner seems swept up in the mythology of AA (75 years of existence = it must work!). But in the end, he only manages to back up Penn & Teller’s conclusion that AA—whose “failures vastly outnumber its success stories… [and]…upwards of 70 percent of people who pass through AA will never make it to their one-year anniversary, and relapse is common even among regular attendees”—is a load of bullshit.
In response to Koerner’s question “Are there ways to improve Wilson’s aging system?”, I ask: What if AA is so unsuccessful because 1) it insists that people are powerless to change their behavior and 2) it mandates that people embrace God or any old Higher Power to get the job done?
I’d be interested to hear about the success rates of substance abuse programs that don’t proselytize. Maybe Koerner can write a follow-up piece about one of those.
John McWhorter’s call to “Free the Black Looney Tunes!” reminds me of a short film my college sketch group, The Wicked Wicked Hammerkatz, shot around seven or more years ago. I hadn’t watched it in a long time—until today. I think the comedy still holds up.
