Human Rights Nonsense (40): Gun Owner Segregation

(source)

The University of Colorado caved to the gun lobby and created gun-friendly dorms. At the present, there are floors that are gun-friendly. A dorm for the armed is opening in 2014. But the school is disturbed that not a single person has actually expressed any interest in living in the gun zone. Is it because even students who own guns think it might not be an awesome idea to be around drunken armed college students? Nope. It’s liberal segregation:

David Burnett, a representative of Students for Concealed Carry on campus, told the Denver Post that students who met all legal requirements for concealed-carry shouldn’t have to move into segregated dorms. “You’ve proven you’re legally, responsibly and morally able to carry, then the college comes back and tells you you’ve got to move. What would you do?” (source)

More about gun rights, and more about (real) segregation. Someone else who thinks he’s the new Rosa Parks. More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (39): North Korea Goes For World Record in Chutzpah

A North Korean child suffering from malnutrition lays in a bed in a hospital in Haeju, the capital of the area damaged by summer floods and typhoons in South Hwanghae province. Photo by Reuters/Damir Sagolj

(source)

North Korea’s U.N. delegation declared on Friday that it was proud of Pyongyang’s social system and human rights record and rejected as baseless a U.N. monitor’s report that described appalling human rights abuses in the reclusive country. …

“We have nothing to hide,” [North Korean delegate Kim Song] said. “We have nothing to be afraid of. On the contrary, we are proud of our superior system of promoting and protecting human rights in our country, including free medical care and free education system.”

“We will further develop and strengthen our social system that guarantees promotion and protection of human rights,” he added. (source)

The real North Korean human rights record is, of course, this, this and this.

More human rights nonsense from North Korea is here. And more human rights nonsense in general is here.

Human Rights Nonsense (38): A Right Not to Rise in Court

(source)

I’ve written before about exemptions to the rule of law. Some religious or indigenous groups request that certain laws, which are normally equally applicable to all citizens, should not be applied to them. For example, Sikhs have been exempted from the obligation to wear crash helmets or from the prohibition to wear knives in public; certain indigenous peoples have been exempted from prohibitions to fish or hunt or have been allowed to slaughter animals in ways which are normally illegal. And so on.

My view is that such exemptions are sometimes justifiable, especially if the risk of harm created by the exemption is relatively small compared to the benefits for the groups enjoying the exemption.

However, these things can be taken too far, as is evident from the following example:

Amina Farah Ali [not in the image above], on trial in federal court for “allegedly funneling money to a terrorist group in Somalia” (AP), [was] found in contempt of court for refusing to stand for the judge and jury.” Ali claimed that she had a right to a religious exemption. (source)

Although one can argue that the standing rule is antiquated and somewhat stupid, I fail to see how it could possible offend one’s religious convictions. In the case of Sikhs cited above, rules going against their dress code substantially burden their exercise of religion and can therefore provoke a violation of the right to freedom of religion. However, I’m not aware of any religion making it a sin to stand up before a judge.

Believe it or not, but a Circuit Court actually came down on the side of Ali:

[A]n order requiring someone either to act affirmatively in violation of a sincerely held religious belief or face criminal penalties substantially burdens the free exercise of religion. (source)

Even if we accept that remaining seated is indeed part of a sincerely held religious belief – which we probably shouldn’t – there’s a problem with this opinion of the Circuit Court. Sincerely held religious beliefs don’t always allow you to act on them, and religious freedom does not and should not always allow you to act on them. The opinion of the Circuit Court, if followed, would imply allowing actions that are much more harmful than disrespecting a judge by remaining seated. If you sincerely believe that your religion requires the beheading of apostates, then your freedom of religion as interpreted by the Circuit Court would allow you to do so. There’s no other way to read the quote above. We have here another case of people taking rights too seriously.

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (37): Comparing Human Rights Violations to Natural Disasters

“The Tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11″

(source, click image to enlarge)

I think I can guess most people’s reaction to this infamous WWF advert comparing the death tolls of 9/11 to the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami:

How can you compare these two events? They are completely different in nature: one is a wanton act of cruelty inflicted by humans on other humans, while the other is an unfortunate natural disaster. A terrorist attack is a type of event that one can and should try to prevent – through force, violence, education, information and whatever else it takes – while a natural disaster is a type of event that is an inevitable feature of life on earth. If you equate the two types – which is in essence what you do when you compare the death tolls – then you ignore personal responsibility and agency, and you degrade humanity.

This is more or less correct, I think, but I would add one nuance. The two types of events are different and they shouldn’t be equated, but there’s one similarity: both are, after all, human rights violations. This may sound strange to many of you: how can nature violate human rights? Doesn’t a human rights violation require a responsible violator? I’ve argued in this older post that the cut-off point between rights violations and unfortunate harm is actually a rather large gray zone. For instance, the Boxing Day Tsunami would probably have had a much smaller death toll with a better warning system, better infrastructure, better houses, better rescue systems etc. And people are responsible for the lack of those things. If people and governments fail to provide those things, knowing full well the risks, then their omission is a rights violation, just like failing to rescue a drowning person is a rights violation. (For instance, low-income countries account for only 9% of the world’s disasters but 48% of the fatalities, source).

Hence, it is indeed nonsensical and even insulting to equate a natural disaster and a terrorist attack, and people are rightfully angry about adverts like the one above, but at the same time we shouldn’t let our anger blind us to the similarities between two types of events that are apparently incomparable.

Here are a few similar adverts:

“2,863 dead. 630 million homeless people in the world. The world united against terrorism. It should do the same against poverty.”

“2,863 dead. 40 million infected worldwide. The world united against terrorism. It should do the same against AIDS.”

(source)

terrorism-related deaths since 2001: 11 337 – tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30 000 000

(source)

(source)

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (36): Wasting Water is Bad, Isn’t It?

Water shortages are a human rights issue. If you don’t believe me read this, this and this, and then come back here. [Pause] Ok, now that this is cleared up, take a look at the following nonsensical and self-defeating advert promoting water conservation:

(source, click image to enlarge)

I outsource my commentary to Copyranter:

This was a World Water Day mailer from 2009, via Belgium. To read the message, you had to run it under water. The translated line: “Without water, knowledge cannot flow.” Just a reminder that the main message of World Water Day is conserving water. I’m pretty sure you could still read it if you pissed on it.

More human rights nonsense here.

Human Rights Nonsense (35): The Violence of a Name

(source)

Now, I’m the first to criticize the gun culture in the U.S. and to warn against the dangers of a supposed “right to own a gun” (as you can see here and here), but it seems that our own side can also misunderstand what human rights are all about:

A deaf child named Hunter is not allowed to use his name sign because the sign for “Hunter” (a dictionary word) uses the thumb and first two fingers in a gun shape and suggests a shooting motion. Here’s the story.

These school officials have lost their ability to reason if they believe stripping a child of his name is necessary for safety … Apparently the idea that a pre-schooler’s fingers are as dangerous as a real gun is not beyond belief to some school bureaucrats. (source)

Although it is not stated in those terms, this is a case of human rights hysteria, and as such it has its rightful place in our series here, previously featuring people who claim that parents should be banned from play areas in order to protect children and others who zealously protect us against Sharia rule.

Human Rights Nonsense (34): FGM

We don’t need the Kony2012 campaign to know that well-intentioned human rights activism can sometimes be misguided. Here’s another fine example:

“Every day over 6.000 women all over the world are condemned to feel nothing”

(source)

Female genital mutilation is indeed a horrific practise that robs women of their sexual pleasure, and of a lot more as well. But how exactly does it help to rid the world of FGM when you publish images that clearly dehumanize and objectify women? (I guess the woman here is supposed to be made of stone and hence “stone cold”…). Does it not confirm those who inflict FGM on women in their opinion that they’re not doing anything wrong? That women are lesser human beings? The most commonly advanced justification of FGM is precisely the need to temper the “animal sexuality” of women. This kind of activism is almost certainly self-defeating.

More human rights nonsense. More on dehumanization, objectification and FGM.

Human Rights Nonsense (33): A Very Dirty Pot Calls the Kettle Black

demonstrators holding an image of dissident Ai Weiwei

(source)

While complaints about respect for human rights in the U.S. are often well-founded, it’s weird when these complaints are issued by the Chinese government:

[T]he US released its annual human rights report last Thursday. And in response, China’s Information Office of the State Council released its own report specifically about human rights in the United States.

In fact, they’ve been issuing reports like this for more than a decade. It’s called “Human Rights Record of the United States.”

That report points out–without a hint of irony–the US government’s so-called “woeful human rights situation.”

For example, it berates the US for how police have arrested “Occupy Wall Street” protesters–with no mention of how in China, police can detain suspects for up to 37 days before formally arresting them, compared to about 2 days in the US.

The Chinese report cites the US government’s, quote, “strict censoring and control over the press … [and] restriction on the Internet”; but China has one of the most restricted and censored Internets in the world. Human Rights Watch puts China’s Internet Freedom ranking in the world’s worst 5%–along with Syria, Iran, and Belarus by the way. America, while not the best, is still in the top 12%. (source)

More here. And here‘s a similar case. More human rights nonsense is here.

Human Rights Nonsense (32): How Not to Fight World Hunger

"Donate courage in the fight against hunger"

I outsource my commentary to Mark Duffy:

Courage? How bout some rice? And a smaller fork? Because those novelty items from Great Big Stuff are doing shit-all for his predicament. (Don’t be fooled by his smile, he’s not happy.)

Wait—I guess he could try hunting big game with the big fork.

More on the right to food, and some data on world hunger. More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (31): Dalai Lama is Nazi, Says China

27 year old Tibetan exile setting himself on fire last Monday in New Delhi, in protest against a visit to India by Hu Jintao. The man died of his injuries last Wednesday.

(source)

I did hear about some similar cases before - for example, North Korea lecturing Japan on human rights, and the late Gaddafi lecturing Switzerland (!) on human rights - but this is the best:

A state-run Chinese website has launched a bitter attack on the Dalai Lama, accusing the exiled Buddhist leader of Nazi racial policies and inciting Tibetans to set themselves on fire.

The commentary on China Tibet Online, also carried by the official Xinhua News Agency on Saturday, is one of the strongest reactions from Beijing to a string of protests in ethnic Tibetan areas of the country.

About 30 Tibetan monks, nuns and lay people have set themselves on fire in the past year in protest at what they say are repressive government policies toward their religion and culture. Many seek the return of the Dalai Lama.

The commentary follows other attacks by government officials on the Dalai Lama, who has praised the courage of those who engage in self-immolation and has attributed the protests to what he calls China’s “cultural genocide” in Tibet. But he also says he does not encourage the protests, noting they could invite an even harsher crackdown. …

The Chinese website was critical of the Dalai Lama’s comments that government policies, including the increased use of the Chinese language in Tibetan schools and the migration of ethnic Han Chinese into Tibetan areas, were eroding Tibetan culture. … The commentary added that the Dalai Lama’s remark that a future autonomous Tibetan region should be allowed to regulate who lives in the region, was “a public declaration to expel non-Tibetan residents out of Tibet”. … The Chinese commentary called the Dalai Lama a “tricky liar skilled in double-dealing” who wants to build a “Berlin Wall” of ethnic segregation and confrontation. “The remarks of the Dalai Lama remind us of the uncontrolled and cruel Nazi during the second world war … How similar it is to the Holocaust committed by Hitler on the Jewish!” the commentary said in criticising the Dalai Lama’s call for high levels of autonomy for Tibetan areas. (source)

Someone should tell the Chinese government about Godwin’s Law. More on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. More on the so-called “racial policies” promoted by the Dalai Lama. More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (30): No Hugging Please

(source)

A school in Florida has a strict no-hugging policy, supposedly in an effort to fight sexual harassment:

A mother hopes to change policies at a Brevard County public school after her son was suspended for a hug. When Nick Martinez, 14, received his suspension for public display of affection at Southwest Middle School in Palm Bay, his mom wanted to know why.

“I wanted to know if he had touched her inappropriately? Did she report it? Did she say anything about it? It was a mutual hug,” said Nancy Crescente, the boy’s mother.

Nick said he quickly hugged the girl, whom he called his best friend, between classes. The principal saw it and hauled them off to the dean for an in-school suspension. The principal even told WKMG Local 6 that the hug was innocent. …

The school has a strict no-hugging policy and is the only school in the district where hugging is not allowed. Under the policy, there is no difference between an unwanted hug, like sexual harassment, and a hug between friends. (source, source)

Another example of someone taking his or her concern for human rights just that tiny bit too far. More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (29): The Link Between Porn and Terrorism

scene from The Good Old Naughty Days

(source)

Pornography is not a necessary cause of terrorism. The abolition of pornography would not lead to the cessation of terrorism in the world. Terrorism existed well before graphic pornography and its mass spread via the internet.

Likewise, pornography is not a sufficient cause for terrorism. There are pornography users, even addicts, who do not become terrorists. Given how widespread the viewing of pornography is today, if the direct result of each individual’s pornography use were terrorist violence, one could conceivably argue that pornography proliferation would pose a more widespread threat to human existence than nuclear proliferation.

Yet pornography now appears frequently in the possession of violent terrorists and their supporters, including Osama bin Laden. …

I wonder whether the pornography of today—now ubiquitous and increasingly grotesque—is one of the influences warping the mentality of those who aspire to or who actually go on to engage in ever more grotesque public violence. … Why, after all, would an al-Qaeda affiliate, as reported in 2009 from interrogations in Mauritania, select pornography to target new recruits? We need to know.

As terrorism researchers Daniel Bynum and Christine Fair point out in an article about the modern terrorists we have been pursuing, especially since 9/11, the fact of the matter is that “they get intimate with cows and donkeys. Our terrorist enemies trade on the perception that they’re well trained and religiously devout, but in fact, many are fools and perverts who are far less organized and sophisticated than we imagine. Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?” (source)

Yes, indeed, “we need to know”. Perhaps. Or perhaps there is nothing to know. Who knows? I have rarely seen a pile of insinuations so completely devoid of data and evidence. I do admit that the effects of porn consumption on people’s actions are a worthy subject of scientific investigation. Some forms of pornography can have a dehumanizing effect and may change men’s perceptions of women, perhaps to such an extent that porn can lead to violent acts such as rape. But the evidence available so far is mixed. And in the specific case of terrorism caused by porn, all we have are flimsy anecdotes and insinuations. I’m sure you can find just as many little stories about terrorists and violent games, terrorists and early child abuse, terrorists and poverty, terrorists and beards and so on.

The story above is just a free floating riff. “The U.S. government has had opportunity to observe, and in many cases, acquire, personal media from untold numbers of those involved in terrorism and the support of terrorism … [we] may be sitting on a massive data set for studying the intersection of pornography use and support for twisted violence such as terrorism” [my emphasis]. But then again, we may not be sitting on a massive data set. However, that’s no reason not to speculate, right? As I see it, there isn’t even a correlation, let alone evidence of causation. Just random anecdotes that are of no help at all explaining terrorism. You need to do better than that if you want to find the causes of some of today’s most horrific human rights violations.

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (28): China’s Human Rights Action Plan

I didn’t know China had a human rights action plan – more evidence of the normative universality of human rights I guess. Take a look at this Pravda-style article from China’s mouthpiece newspaper:

(source)

In view of this, what do you think happened?

1. China has made rapid progress in the field of human rights.
2. Maybe the Chinese government has been somewhat unambitious in its goal setting.
3. The Chinese government is just full of it.

More human rights nonsense here. More about human rights in China here.

Human Rights Nonsense (27): Applying Sunblock = Sexual Abuse

Sexual abuse of children is a serious human rights violations, but some people can take anything that’s serious and make it too serious:

Maryland health officials were making revisions … to a new policy that would have severely restricted who could apply sunscreen to children attending summer camps. … The new policy, which was issued last month, ordered summer camp operators to steer away from assisting kids with applying sunscreen and to get parents’ permission before letting any child use sunscreen at camp. …

[So]me Virginia camps prohibit counselors from applying sunscreen just to steer clear of any issues around improper touching. … [P]arents are instructed to send children to camp with sunscreen. (source, source)

All the more extreme given the fact that this is a reaction to basically nothing:

Mitchell said he did not know of any cases of inappropriate touching by counselors that might have led to the new regulations.

Reminds me of a similar case some time ago. More human rights nonsense here.

Human Rights Nonsense (26): Anti-White Bias Bigger Problem Than Anti-Black Bias?

White, it seems, is the new black:

Both white Americans and black Americans perceive significant progress in the fight against anti-black bias, but white Americans believe the progress has come at their expense, a new survey finds.

The researchers contacted a random national sample of 209 whites and 208 blacks, and asked them how much discrimination each group faced, on a scale of one to ten, for each decade since the 1950s.

Black Americans saw anti-black bias as declining steadily, from 9.7 in the ’50s to 6.1 in the ’00s. Over the same period, they perceived a small increase in anti-white bias, from 1.4 to 1.8.

White Americans saw an even steeper decline in anti-black bias: from 9.1, in the ’50s, to 3.6, in the ’00s. But more striking, according to the researchers, was the sharp increase in perceived anti-white bias: Among whites, it shot up from 1.8 to 4.7.

White Americans, in short, thought that anti-white bias was a greater societal problem by the ’00s than anti-black bias. (source, source)

(source)

So why bother with all those data indicating that anti-black discrimination is still a huge problem after decades of struggle?

More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (25): Reductio of Private Property Rights

Banksy, No Trespassing

(source)

In the case of Hinman vs. Pacific Air Transport, a landowner, Hinman, sued an airline (Pacific Air) for trespass. Hinman wanted Circuit Judge Haney’s court to affirm his right to stop airlines from flying over his property. … The judge … realized that giving every landowner a right to treat air traffic as a trespass would throttle air traffic, because the cost of an airline buying off every potential veto would be prohibitive.

The plaintiff’s unsuccessful suit relied heavily on the concept of ad coelum, an ancient Roman dictum that “he who owns the soil owns it to the heavens.” Was ad coelum relevant to questions about airplanes crossing over someone’s land at high altitude? Before the advent of air travel, there was no fact of the matter. No legal dispute had ever brought the issue to a head. (source)

Just to show that a lot of nonsensical talk about human rights stems from an erroneously absolutist understanding of those rights. More harmful examples of this kind of absolutism are here and here.

More about property rights is here; more posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Nonsense (24): Privacy Group Demands Public Disclosure of Private Data

(source)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) – a nonprofit group focused on civil rights and privacy interests – has brought a FOIA case to demand the public release of thousands of body-scan images of air travelers.

I realize that the goal of the public release of thousands of images is to influence public opinion on the use of body-scanners. I gather the idea is that by forcing the government to disclose the images, more people will get upset about them. In turn, that can help lead to a change in policy in which the body-scan images are less likely to be made in the first place. Still, this strikes me as a somewhat odd step for a privacy group. (source)

In the meantime, a judge has ruled that the government has no obligation under the Freedom of Information Act to produce the images to the plaintiffs.

More on airport security here. Something on the importance of the right to privacy is here. More human rights nonsense is here.

Related Articles

• Human Rights Nonsense (22): The Right to Exorcise (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• D.C. Judge Blocks Release of TSA Body Scan Images (legaltimes.typepad.com)

Human Rights Nonsense (23): Abortion = Anti-Black Genocide

In this photo made Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010, an anti-abortion billboard is shown in Atlanta. The eyebrow-raising ads featuring a young black child are an effort by the anti-abortion movement to use race to rally support within the black community. The reaction from black leaders has been mixed, but the "Too Many Aborted" campaign, which so far is unique to only Georgia, is drawing support from other anti-abortion groups across the country. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

(source)

Pro-life activists have propagated the narrative that the relatively free abortion rules in the U.S. are somehow a conspiracy to eliminate African-Americans. The organization that funded the billboard depicted above states that after the civil rights era, racists went “underground,” and that today “abortion is the tool they use to stealthily target blacks for extermination”; ” the black community is being targeted by abortionists for the purpose of ethnic cleansing” etc. (source).

In the U.S., black women do in fact have more abortions, but it’s a mighty leap to suggest that this should be explained by a genocidal conspiracy. And even if we would agree that there is a conspiracy at work, it’s an awfully unsuccessful one: fertility rates among black women remain higher than the national average and have inched up in recent years (source).

One piece of “evidence” for the conspiracy thesis is the location of abortion clinics: most are supposedly strategically located in black neighborhoods. However, that claim is incorrect.

It’s odd that those who are alleging racism are the ones being racist here: the conspiracy theory only holds if black women are either callous about their unborn children, or malleable tools in the hands of racist and coercive abortion doctors.

Also odd is the fact that most pro-lifers don’t seem all that worried about other, perhaps more real threats to black children – gun violence, incarceration rates and poverty – or about the general effects of racism on life prospects. If you want to worry about discrimination, racism or genocide, there’s lots of other places where you’ll have no difficulty finding it. And if you want to worry about abortion, maybe it’s good to focus on contraception, sex education, poverty and family stability instead of leaping to the most extreme and unlikely explanations. But perhaps you’re not interested in what you want to explain and only in how you explain it.

By the way, there’s a related and far more serious problem: sex-selective abortion, rather than race selective. But not in the US, fortunately. If you’re looking for the real abortion scandal, there you have it.

More on abortion. More human rights nonsense.

(image source)

Related Articles

• What A Horrible Doctor Can Teach Us About Abortion In America [Roe Vs. World] (jezebel.com)
• Anti-abortion push gains momentum (politico.com)
• Abortion foes upbeat; see chance for tougher curbs (sfgate.com)

Human Rights Nonsense (22): The Right to Exorcise

scene from The Exorcist

Tonight we have some disturbing news from the University of Texas at Arlington, where three employees are in trouble for staging a bizarre exorcism of a co-worker. … three employees who had personal conflicts with a co-worker agreed to pray together after work. They met outside the co-worker’s office when it was empty.

One member of the prayer vigil rubbed olive oil on the co-employee’s office door and chanted loudly, “I command you demons to leave (the co-worker’s name), you vicious evil dogs get the hell out of there in the name of Jesus, get the hell out of (the co-worker name).”

One of the three employees reported the incident to their supervisor. Following an investigation, the other two employees were terminated because they “displayed conduct unbecoming a UT Arlington staff member, harassment of a fellow co-worker and blatant disregard for the property of UT Arlington.” The terminated employees then requested religious accommodation. Their request was denied. The two ex-employees sued UTA alleging religious discrimination. (source)

I don’t believe these people should have been fired for what they did, but they didn’t need to invoke a presumed right to exorcise to resist their termination. We should try to avoid inflating the body of human rights. More on freedom of religion and the free exercise clause. More human rights nonsense.

Related Articles

• Human Rights Nonsense (20): Playing to the Gallery for Women’s Rights (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• You: For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived (nytimes.com)
• Roman Catholic Church Holds Conference On Exorcism! (purestrange.wordpress.com)

Human Rights Nonsense (21): Hypersensitivity to Racial Slurs Which Aren’t Really Slurs

The Nigger in the Woodpile - An anti-abolitionist parody of Republican efforts to play down the antislavery plank in their 1860 platform. Horace Greeley, the prominent New York publicist of the party, stands at left reassuring a man identified as "Young America." "I assure you my friend," he says, "that you can safely vote our ticket, for we have no connection with the Abolition party, but our Platform is composed entirely of rails, split by our Candidate." Young America, who represents progressive Democrats, points insistently toward the right, where candidate Abraham Lincoln sits atop a makeshift construction made of rails marked "Republican Platform," which imprisons a grinning black man. He tells Greeley, "It's no use old fellow! you can't pull that wool over my eyes for I can see 'the Nigger' peeping through the rails." Meanwhile, Lincoln reflects, "Little did I think when I split these rails that they would be the means of elevating me to my present position."

(source)

A very strange, and very American story:

[A] Washington D.C. official … wound up resigning his job over the outcry that his use of the word “niggardly” * provoked. … [T]he head of the Office of Public Advocate in Washington, DC used it in a discussion with a black colleague. He was reported as saying, “I will have to be niggardly with this fund because it’s not going to be a lot of money.” Despite a similarity in spelling, his word has no semantic or etymological tie to the slur it may invoke; mere phonetic and orthographic overlap caused as much a stir as standard offensive language. (source)

And if it was just one case, you could dismiss it as a nontroversy caused by a single hothead. But it isn’t:

Shortly after the Washington incident, another controversy erupted over the use of the word at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At a February meeting of the Faculty Senate, a junior English major and vice chairwoman of the Black Student Union told the group how a professor teaching Chaucer had used the word niggardly. The student later said she was unaware of the related Washington, D.C. controversy that came to light just the week before. She said the professor continued to use the word even after she told him that she was offended. “I was in tears, shaking,” she told the faculty. “It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid.” (source)

I’m sure they were very sympathetic. And the list goes on:

In late January or early February 2002, a white fourth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina was formally reprimanded for teaching the word and told to attend sensitivity training. The teacher, Stephanie Bell, said she used “niggardly” during a discussion about literary characters. Parent Akwana Walker, who is black, protested the use of the word, saying it offended her because it sounds similar to a racial slur. … [T]he school principal stat[ed] that the teacher used poor judgment and instruct[ed] her to send an apology to the parents of her students, which was done. The principal’s letter also criticized the teacher for lacking sensitivity. The daughter of the complaining parent was moved to another classroom. Norm Shearin, the deputy superintendent of schools for the district, said the teacher made a bad decision by teaching the word because it was inappropriate for that grade level. (source)

More on hate speech, insults, defamation and political correctness. More human rights nonsense.

* Niggardly: withholding for the sake of meanness; stingy, miserly.

Related Articles

• Dr. Laura to end radio talk show after racial slurs (omg.yahoo.com)
• NYC Pastor Says It’s Okay To Use Anti-Gay Slurs (perezhilton.com)

Human Rights Nonsense (20): Playing to the Gallery for Women’s Rights

(source)

On the same day the country’s [Bulgaria's] defense minister lifted its ban on women serving on submarines, the parliament voted to mothball the country’s only submarine. It’s the thought that counts, I guess. (source)

More human rights nonsense here. More serious stuff about gender discrimination is here.

Human Rights Nonsense (19): Ladies’ Night Discrimination

(source)

For nearly two decades, Minnesota native Steve Horner has crusaded against what he considers a monumental injustice: Ladies’ night.

The complaints he filed with Human Rights Departments in several states have earned him at least $6,000 in damages for being denied ladies’ special prices at bars…

[T]he white, balding, bespectacled Horner compared his quest to Rosa Parks’ refusal to go to the back of the bus…

“I believe that to be vigilantly in defense of the constitution, one needs to speak up about these issues,” Horner said in an interview. (source)

More on gender discrimination (the real stuff) and Rosa Parks (the real one, and another fake one). More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (18): Oklahoma Bans Sharia Law, Not a Minute Too Soon

You can never be too zealous when you have to protect the rights of women:

Oklahoma is poised to become the first state in the nation to ban state judges from relying on Islamic law known as Sharia when deciding cases.

The ban is a cornerstone of a “Save our State” amendment to the Oklahoma constitution that was recently approved by the Legislature. The amendment — which also would forbid judges from using international laws as a basis for decisions — will now be put before Oklahoma’s voters in November. Approval is expected.

Oklahoma has few Muslims – only 30,000 out of a population of 3.7 million. The prospect of sharia being applied there seems remote.

But a chief architect of the measure, Republican State Rep. Rex Duncan, calls the proposed ban a necessary “preemptive strike” against Islamic law coming to the state. (source)

By the way, those are the same Republicans who want US law to be based on the Ten Commandments and want to outlaw such women’s rights as abortion… More about Shari’a (which is of course an abomination, but an unlikely one in the West) and gender discrimination. More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (17): The Homeless as Tamagotchi

(source)

The homeless charity Depaul UK has launched an iPhone app called iHobo to raise awareness of youth homelessness and reach out to a new younger audience. The app downloads a young homeless person on to your phone and asks the user to support the young person over the course of three days… Right, why spend your time actually helping people when you can just as well waste it while pretending to help. I don’t deny the good intentions of the makers of this app, but really…

More on homelessness here. More human rights nonsense here.

Human Rights Nonsense (16): Muammar al-Gaddafi, Human Rights Activist

Gaddafi goes on a crusade against extrajudicial killings by – wait for it – the Swiss, based on their practice of assisted suicide:

SPIEGEL: Don’t Libyans also have secret accounts in Switzerland?

Gadhafi: Yes, there are also Libyans who have such accounts, and many of them have also died in unexplained ways. All around the world, the families of these people are going to sue Switzerland. And one more thing: Switzerland is the only country that allows euthanasia. Why does only Switzerland do that?

SPIEGEL: Medical euthanasia is also legal in the Netherlands. And, it cannot go unmentioned that Libya has previously had citizens killed abroad who were said to be disloyal.

Gadhafi: But we are talking now about Switzerland. It is possible that among the Libyans who you are asking about — and who died abroad — there were also some who died because they had secret accounts in Switzerland.

SPIEGEL: And you are seriously maintaining that Switzerland as a state ordered the killing of these people?

Gadhafi: The investigations will show this. And this brings me back once again to the phenomenon of assisted suicide. A large number of people have been deliberately eliminated under this pretext. Switzerland maintains that these individuals expressed the desire to take their lives. But in reality it was done to get at their money. More than 7,000 people have died like this. I am thus calling for Switzerland to be dissolved as a state. The French part should go to France, the Italian part to Italy and the German part to Germany. (source)

More on assisted suicide and targeted killing. More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (15): The Right to a Vacation

Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidised by the taxpayer.

Under the scheme, British pensioners could be given cut-price trips to Spain, while Greek teenagers could be taken around disused mills in Manchester to experience the cultural diversity of Europe.

The idea for the subsidised tours is the brainchild of Antonio Tajani, the European Union commissioner for enterprise and industry, who was appointed by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister…

Tajani, who unveiled his plan last week at a ministerial conference in Madrid, believes the days when holidays were a luxury have gone. “Travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life,” he said.

Tajani, who used to be transport commissioner, said he had been able to “affirm the rights of passengers” in his previous office and the next step was to ensure people’s “right to be tourists”.

Tajani’s programme will be piloted until 2013 and then put into full operation. It will be open to pensioners and anyone over 65, young people between 18 and 25, families facing “difficult social, financial or personal” circumstances and disabled people. The disabled and the elderly can be accompanied by one person.

In the initial phase, northern Europeans will be encouraged to visit southern Europe and vice versa. Details of how participants are chosen have not yet been finalised, but it is expected the EU will subsidise about 30% of the cost. (source)

This seems wildly extravagant to me, and a definite abuse of the term “rights”. Now, regular readers of this blog know I’m not a rights-minimalist (on the contrary) and that I believe the body of human rights should be able to grow, evolve and capture new or neglected “wrongs” (see here). Also, I’m all in favor of the existing right to leisure (see article 24 of the Universal Declaration), but I see this right as a bulwark against labor exploitation, not as an invitation to government subsidized travel. I’m often described as a leftist (and I did write a not entirely negative book about communism) but I’m not insensitive to the big state argument.

More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (14): Tanning Tax Discriminates Against Whites

Another fine example of frivolous use of the language of human rights:

Does New 10% Tanning Tax Discriminate Against Whites? … I [have] a question about the intersection of taxation and civil rights law. It strikes me that the health care bill which requires that indoor tanning salons will charge customers a 10% tax beginning in July will necessarily only impact tanning salon customers. I have never been to a tanning salon, but since their purpose is to turn light skin darker, I can only assume that the overwhelming majority, if not totality, of customers are white. Does Adarand apply to taxation decision as it does to spending decisions like the Section 8(a) program? (source)

Now, how can we expect people to get upset about discrimination if the word is used interchangeably for Jim Crow, apartheid, gender inequality and the suffering of the tanned? A somewhat less snarky and more serious discussion of taxation and equality is here. More human rights nonsense is here.

Human Rights Nonsense (13): Hate Crime Laws Undermine Religious Liberty

When traditional offenses such as murder, harassment, rape, violent assault, vandalism, arson etc. are motivated by the offenders’ bias towards the group to which their victims belong, so-called “hate crime laws” will impose punishments that are more severe than usual. This group may be a race, a religion, a sexual orientation, an ethnicity or national origin. Posts about the controversy over such laws and my conditional support for them are here. Posts about the importance of religious liberty are here.

RH Reality Check has a post about the concerns of some Christians in the U.S. They believe that hate crime laws are part of a larger secular conspiracy against Christianity.

Yes … that weak and long-suffering entity known as the Christian Right is claiming that efforts to outlaw targeted hate crimes against homosexual persons through legislation constitute “a guarded effort to ‘eradicate’ their beliefs.”

The Thomas More Law Center – which bills itself as the religious answer to the American Civil Liberties Union – … claims that protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people “is an effort to eradicate religious beliefs opposing the homosexual agenda from the marketplace of ideas by demonizing, vilifying, and criminalizing such beliefs as a matter of federal law and policy.”

“The sole purpose of this law is to criminalize the Bible and use the threat of federal prosecutions and long jail sentences to silence Christians from expressing their Biblically-based religious belief that homosexual conduct is a sin.”

This is a classical misconception: hate crime laws and hate speech laws are completely different things. It’s not because criminals get extra punishment when their crimes are motivated by hate that other people will no longer have the right to engage in hate speech. (Although there is a separate case to be made against hate speech as well, but that’s another issue; hate crime is the issue here).

But let’s assume, arguendo, that hate crime laws do in fact violate religious liberty rights, that – in other words – the only way to stop hate crime would be to silence some religious speech and to forbid certain religious practices. Why then should it be the case that religious rights automatically trump the physical security rights of the victims of hate crime? Conflicts between different rights are a common occurrence – although, I repeat, not in this case – and there is no general rule as to which right should have priority over which other right.

Nonsense indeed, in the sense that one human right – important though it is – is elevated to the rank of supreme right, and there’s no such thing in human rights theory, nor should there be. Nonsense also in the sense that these people fail to understand the way in which rights interact.

There’s another post here about the way in which religious liberty supposedly – and ironically after reading the current post – requires limits on freedom of speech.

Other posts in this series.

Human Rights Nonsense (12): Protecting Human Rights Against the Antichrist

From The Washington Post, a story about a bizarre reaction to an odd proposal:

The House of Delegates [of Virginia] is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a bill that would protect Virginians from attempts by employers or insurance companies to implant microchips in their bodies against their will. It might also save humanity from the antichrist, some supporters think.

Del. Mark L. Cole (R-Fredericksburg), the bill’s sponsor, said that privacy issues are the chief concern behind his attempt to criminalize the involuntary implantation of microchips. But he also said he shared concerns that the devices could someday be used as the “mark of the beast” described in the Book of Revelation.

“My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”

Cole said that the growing use of microchips could allow employers, insurers or the government to track people against their will and that implanting a foreign object into a human being could also have adverse health effects. “I just think you should have the right to control your own body,” Cole said.

Microchips, which use radio frequency identification, have been used in pets to identify and track them. Proponents suggest that such chips could be invaluable in making people’s medical records portable and secure and in helping to identify and find missing children. Others have urged they be used with Alzheimer’s disease patients.

But the growing use of microchips has collided with the Book of Revelation. The biblical passage in question is in Chapter 13 and describes the rise of a satanic figure known as “the Beast”: “He causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

David Neff, editor of the magazine Christianity Today, said that some fundamentalist Christians believe that bar codes and implanted microchips could be used by a totalitarian government to control commerce — a sign of the coming end of the world.

“This is part of a larger attempt to constantly read current history in the light of the symbolic language of the Book of Revelation,” he said.

While the chip story is indeed slightly odd and suspect – people should be in control over what happens to their bodies, and they shouldn’t have microchips implanted in them because these chips could potentially be used to track them and invade their privacy – it’s absolutely nonsensical to interpret it in the light of the Apocalypse. That will only serve to drown legitimate criticism of such proposals. It’s also weird that Christians suddenly start to worry about individual self-determination, when their opposition to euthanasia, assisted suicide, suicide in general, and abortion rests on complete disrespect for it. Human rights have enough enemies, no need to go and add the Beast.

(source for the x-ray image)

Other posts in this series.

Human Rights Nonsense (11): Male Prostitute Feels Like Rosa Parks

Another case in which the language of human rights is shockingly abused:

Markus [is] America’s first legal male prostitute. [He] is the newest hire at the Shady Lady Ranch brothel in Tonopah Nevada, a business that recently got the go-ahead to hire a few good men. He likened his decision to rise up and become a gigolo to the civil rights struggles of the ’60s. “It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.” (source)

Indeed, the struggle of African Americans against centuries of slavery, lynchings, racism, segregation and discrimination is very much like the problems of male prostitutes who can only now practice their trade in full respect of the law…

Other posts in this series.

Human Rights Nonsense (10): Protecting Children by Banning Parents From Play Areas

It seems some people take the rights of children a bit too seriously. From Henry Porter’s Blog:

[The city of] Watford [in the U.K.] has just banned parents from watching their own children at two council play areas. … “Sadly, in today’s climate, you can’t have adults walking around unchecked in a children’s playground.” Instead of parents being able to watch and play with their own and other people’s children at the Harwoods and Harebreaks recreation grounds, vetted council staff known as “play rangers” will be in charge. … The council spokeswoman was keen to point out that the policy meant that if no parents were allowed into the two play areas it reduced the risk of adults wandering into the playground. … It seems possible that the mayor and her appalling council may be in breach of article 8 of the [U.K.] Human Rights Act – the right to family life. (source)

More on children, pedophiles and playgrounds. More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (9): Forcing a Racist Political Party to Accept Black Members

The far-right British National Party opposes immigration, says it fights for “indigenous” Britons, and is anti-semitic, racist, islamophobic and homophobic.

The BNP has agreed to admit nonwhite members nearly three decades after its founding. A government-backed rights body took it to court, claiming the party’s constitution is discriminatory. At a court hearing, a lawyer for the party said leader Nick Griffin would ask members next month to change the constitution so it did not discriminate on the grounds of race or religion. In an order issued at the Central London County Court, the BNP agreed to use “all reasonable endeavors” to revise its constitution to comply with the Equality Bill, which bans discrimination on the grounds of race, gender or religious belief. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, which brought the case, said it would be watching to see whether the BNP complied. (source)

First of all: which black person would be willing to join? And forcing the BNP to accept black people only makes them appear less racist than they really are. Who will benefit from that? The BNP of course. They will be able to point to the those few blacks confused enough to join them as proof that they’re not racist after all, even though for decades they have proven their racism in various ways, including membership rules.

I understand that people want to enforce rules on discrimination, and generally this is a noble objective. But here it looks like it’s self-defeating, and – frankly – nonsense. Moreover, there’s also the freedom of association, a human right no less valuable than the right not to be discriminated against. Groups should have the right to organize themselves according to their own wishes (or prejudices in this case) and rules, as long as they don’t violate the rights of their members and allow people to exit. Forcing groups to change their entry-rules violates their freedom of association.

More on the BNP. More self-defeating human rights policies. More on discrimination. More on the freedom of association. More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Nonsense (8): Heightism or Height Discrimination

(Quick reminder about this blog series, so as to avoid misunderstandings: I don’t want to imply that human rights are nonsense; regular readers know that the purpose of this blog is quite the opposite. What I want to do with the posts in this series is to point to the ways in which the language of human rights is used to push nonsense. Burdening the system of human rights with frivolous demands, exaggerated problems, wrong priorities and silly talk only turns human rights into a less nobel cause, easily disparaged by those who have an interest in rights violations).

It’s a fact that taller people make more money than short people, with an additional inch of height adding about 2 percent to income in the U.S. (source, source). Even among female identical twins (whose heights can differ more than you might expect), the taller sister earns, on average, substantially more than the shorter (source).

(source)

Moreover, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions, like enjoyment and happiness (source). They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness and physical pain (source, source, source). From 1904 to 1984, the taller candidate won the U.S. presidential elections 80% of the time, and only two presidents in the entire history of the United States have been shorter than the nation’s average height at the time of their presidencies (currently that’s 5.9ft) (source).

height of U.S. presidents

(source)

Hence:

There is no denying that we place a high premium on height, be it social, sexual, or economic, and our preference for height pervades almost every aspect of our lives. Isaac B. Rosenberg (source)

The bias towards tallness and against shortness is one of society’s most blatant and forgiven prejudices. John Kenneth Galbraith, 6.8ft.

The term heightism was coined to describe discrimination based on people’s height, and some propose to include it in antidiscrimination legislation. Others go even further: a special “height tax“.

As in the case of ageism, I don’t claim that there cannot be height discrimination. Very short people are often treated badly simply because they are short. There are still some who believe - often without being fully aware of it – that short stature is an inferior trait and therefore undesirable, and as a result they view short people as inferior human beings, or perhaps even not fully human. This is despicable. If this view leads to discrimination against people on the basis of their height (or rather lack of it) then something must be done about it. Nor do I deny that some people suffer psychologically from their (perceived) lack of height, and sometimes engage in self-mutilation in order to do something about it.

What I do claim here – as in the case of ageism – is that things tend to get blown out of proportion. Is the income differential between people of normal height and slightly taller people really an instance of discrimination? Do we really believe that employers make a conscious choice to pay taller people more? Of course, discrimination doesn’t have to be conscious discrimination. But before you get all worked up about discrimination and launch proposals for legislation and government action, it’s good to consider the possibility that we are dealing with another case of the “omitted variable bias” here. Taller people don’t get paid more because they are taller, but because they (seem to) possess other valuable characteristics, such as self-esteem and positive self-image.

Tall men who were short in high school earn like short men, while short men who were tall in high school earn like tall men. That pretty much rules out discrimination. It’s hard to imagine how or why employers could discriminate in favor of past height. … Tall high-school kids learn to think of themselves as leaders, and that habit of thought persists even when the kids stop growing. (source, source)

Adolescence is a formative period for self-esteem, and when you’re tall in adolescence, you build up self-esteem and a positive self-image, something which will be rewarded in your adult professional life.

For the most part American employers probably aren’t discriminating based on height. They’re “discriminating” based on qualities that tallness seems to encourage. (source)

So it’s not heightism, yet it is discrimination none the less. But perhaps I could ask to focus our attention on other types of rights violations, many of which are much more common and harmful. Our planet is plagued by extreme poverty, famine, war, genocide, terrorism, torture and dictatorship. We can turn to heightism when we’re finished with that. But of course, I’m biased. I’m 6.3 ft, and I would certainly suffer from pro-short affirmative action if such a policy would ever be proposed. So I would dismiss it as “nonsense”, wouldn’t I?

More posts in this series.

Human Rights Nonsense (7): Peacekeepers Planting Trees

Italian peacekeepers arriving in Tyre, Lebanon (AP-Dimitri Messinis)

(source)

Via Chris Blattman:

United Nations peacekeepers are no strangers to working in some of the world’s most hazardous regions, and they are now helping out on a new battlefront: combating climate change.

“The care and protection of our environment is everybody’s concern,” said Lieutenant Colonel Um Bello, who heads the Alpha Company of the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL).

He is leading his troops in a new exercise: planting 1,000 trees in the country’s west this year, as part of the tree-planting campaign of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which seeks to plant 7 billion trees – or one for every person in the world – by the end of 2009.

Blue helmets have already planted nearly 30,000 saplings in 11 peacekeeping missions worldwide, in countries including Timor-Leste, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Georgia and Lebanon.

Richard Gowan at Global Dashboard has this to say:

“That’d be the Congo that’s teetering on the edge of chaos while the UN mission is still 3,000 troops short? The Georgia from which the UN was just expelled? And the Lebanon where 14 peacekeepers were wounded this month in rioting after two Hezbollah arms dumps blew up? Any other trouble-spots requiring landscaping?”

More on peacekeeping. Other posts in this series.

Human Rights Nonsense (6b): Taxing Headscarves

Geert Wilders

I mentioned Wilders in this series once before, but I promise not to make a habit of it. The target is just too easy. (For those of you who don’t know him yet, go here). This time, he earns my scorn for the following proposal: a tax on headscarves. I kid you not. Check it out here (original Dutch newspaper article; check here for the story in English). For the tiny sum of 1,000 euro a year, Muslim women would get permission to wear a scarf.

And as if this nonsense wasn’t ridiculous enough in itself, he justifies it using the following language: headscarves are “pollution of the public space”, and it’s time for “a clean up of our streets”.

All this is also draped in the language of human rights, women’s rights, equality, non-discrimination etc. I don’t ignore the real problems of many Muslim women (you can go back to some of my old posts, for example here, here, here, here or here), but I don’t believe that gender discrimination is a uniquely Muslim problem (as you can see from this story). The headscarf (or better, certain types of “scarves”) can indeed signal discrimination and oppression, but not necessarily. It can just be the free decision of a genuinely devout Muslim woman. An effort to protect human rights and fight perceived discrimination can then result in an attack on someone’s freedom of religion.

And anyway, even if headscarves should be discouraged, Wilders’ proposal is obviously not the right way to go about it. It doesn’t give human rights and the principles of equality and non-discrimination a good press in the eyes of Muslims.

More on the freedom of religion.

Human Rights Nonsense (6): A Duty to Preserve Cultural Values

satellite image of Africa

(source)

A citation from the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (also known as the Banjul Charter):

Article 29, par. 7: The individual shall also have the duty … to preserve and strengthen positive African cultural values in his relations with other members of the society.

Now, I have no problem with incorporating the language of duties in the field of human rights (all rights create duties, albeit not vice versa*), and neither with regional or local rights declarations or treaties. On the contrary, such regional documents may be able to “translate” some of the concepts of human rights that tend to have a typically western flavor into a language that’s more familiar to the people of those regions, which may make human rights more acceptable and better understood. However, such translation shouldn’t mean that we’re watering down human rights. And that is precisely what seems to be happening here.

The introduction of a duty to preserve a culture, particularly in Africa, is understandable given the experience of colonialism, but “understandable” doesn’t mean “OK”. People have a right to an identity, cultural or otherwise, and human rights do a great job protecting identity (there’s religious freedom, freedom of association, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of residence etc.). But there cannot be a duty to have and preserve an identity. It seems here that the language of human rights – this is after all a human rights declaration – is used to smuggle in the opinion that it is somehow OK that a cultural identity is forced on people, and that individual identities disappear into the collective.

How else should we interpret this quote? Say that there is an “African cultural value” that female children should be circumcised (which there isn’t, for the record). According to the quote given above, Africans have the duty to uphold this practice, whatever they think of it. Presumably, if they don’t uphold African cultural values, they will repeat and exacerbate the horror of colonialism. But if they do uphold, they cause suffering and violate human rights.

A group must be able to express and preserve its identity, but not at the expense of human rights. That a declaration of human rights states otherwise is scandalous nonsense.

More on the relationship between culture and human rights. More on human rights in Africa. More human rights nonsense (a short reminder about the “nonsense series” on this blog: as a passionate activist for human rights, I’m obliged to point to the ways in which the language of human rights is used to push nonsense; human rights nonsense devalues the whole system of human rights).

* For instance, the duty to drive on the right side of the road doesn’t create any rights for anyone else.

Human Rights Nonsense (5): Defending Freedom by Burning Books

Geert Wilders

(source)

Geert Wilders, chairman of the Dutch Party for Freedom and international role model for cartoon characters, is so anxious to defend western freedom against Islam, that he proposed to prohibit the Koran, a “fascist book” in his words (and, while we’re at it, stop Muslim immigration and “incite” those who are already in the Netherlands to gently leave ASAP, and take their Korans with them I guess).

Most likely he won’t have the courage to erect a huge pile of confiscated Korans on the central square in Amsterdam and set a light to it, but what he wants will amount to the same. And then you go and call your party “Party for Freedom“. Oh wait, didn’t Hitler call his party “socialist” while at the same time exterminating the “other” socialists? I see …

Human Rights Nonsense (4): North Korea Denounces Japan’s Human Rights Abuses

Kim Jong Il

(source)

From the Korean Central News Agency, the state news agency of North Korea (notice the quirky diction):

Some time ago, the second meeting of the UN Human Rights Council heard a report from the UN special rapporteur on racism and racial discrimination stripping bare Japan’s human rights abuses and discussed it. … It is a deserved treatment of Japan, a political dwarf which refuses even to honestly repent of its past crimes including extra-large crimes of human rights abuses. Japan can not evade greater disgrace, isolation and rejection in the international arena, unless it lends an ear to the demand of the times and makes an honest apology for its past crimes and settles them. (source)

“Extra-large crimes of human rights abuses…” That’s almost better than “The U.S. imperialist robbers have stretched their crooked tentacle of crime-woven aggression with wild ambition”. If you want to know where they learn their English, check here.

While no one would claim that Japan is a human rights paradise, it certainly looks like one compared to the other place. And regarding “isolation”, Korea sure knows what it’s talking about.

More on Korea.

Human Rights Nonsense (3): Disaster Pornography From Somalia

(source)

From Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal:

Anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the “right” image. Photogenic starving children are hard to find, even in Somalia.

Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her feeding a little girl – three times. This is disaster pornography.

Human Rights Nonsense (2): “Refugee Run” in Davos

A reminder what this series is about: the ways in which the language of human rights is used to push nonsense. Human rights nonsense devalues the whole system of human rights, and has to be ridiculed mercilessly if we want to preserve what is good about human rights.

This post is about the infamous “Refugee Run” earlier this year in Davos:

Refugee Run Davos

(source, click on the image to enlarge)

From the announcement:

During the coming World Economic Forum, we will co-host a very moving event in which people “step into the shoes” of the world’s 40 million refugees. For a moment in time, participants will be thrust into another environment where they face an attack from rebels, a “mine field”, border corruption, language incapacity, black-marketeering and refugee camp survival. Following the event, a debrief will invite the participants to discuss the refugee situation and explore ways to assist, should they wish so. … (Spoiler alert: no harm will come to you!)

In the words of Bill Easterly:

Can Davos man empathize with refugees when he or she is not in danger and is going back to a luxury banquet and hotel room afterwards? Isn’t this just a tad different from the life of an actual refugee, at risk of all too real rape, murder, hunger, and disease?

Did the words “insensitive”, “dehumanizing”, or “disrespectful” (not to mention “ludicrous”) ever come up in discussing the plans for “Refugee Run”?

This isn’t the best way to raise consciousness and awareness, to make the rich world sensitive to the problems of refugees, or to mobilize support for the activities of the UNHCR. It’s just stupid nonsense at best, and “disaster pornography” at worst, discrediting the activities of an organization that is more important than ever.

More on refugees, including some statistics.

Human Rights Nonsense (1): Ageism

anti-ageism campaign

(source)

A new blog series, this time about human rights nonsense. For new readers: I don’t believe human rights are nonsense; quite the contrary. But as a passionate activist for human rights, I’m obliged to point to the ways in which the language of human rights is used to push nonsense. Human rights nonsense devalues the whole system of human rights, and has to be ridiculed mercilessly if we want to preserve what is good about human rights.

So here we go. The first one: ageism. I don’t pretend that there can be no age discrimination, or that there isn’t any. What I object to is that this problem is often blown up to preposterous proportions. When the BBC sacks some older talking heads it’s because they are old, and not because perhaps it’s time to give some young people a chance.

When we are excessively courteous and address old people in a loud voice and with simple language, it’s not because we want to be nice and comprehensible, but it’s because we patronize them.

When we demand that older people retake the exams for their driver’s license, it’s not because their physical health has to be checked and their knowledge updated, but because we think old people are stupid and dangerous on the road, like for example 10 year olds who also aren’t allowed to drive a car.

When aging, “in our culture”, is equated with deterioration and impairment, we’re not stating a fact but we’re stigmatizing and stereotyping old people and engaging in “an adoration of youth”.

When we worry about the fiscal and healthcare consequences of a growing population of pensioners, we’re not discussing a real problem but looking for a scapegoat.

It seems that the concept of “ageism”, with its echoes of racism and sexism, puts old people on the same footing as African-Americans in 19th century America, or women in Islam. That’s not fair to slaves and women in burqas. We forget that most ”senior citizens” (a euphemism to protect us against accusations of ageism) benefit from a relatively early and generous retirement, grew up in the Golden Sixties, will have young people working for their pensions long past the age at which they retired, and don’t have financial burdens linked to mortgages, student loans and the education of children.