human-rights

Are human rights natural rights endowed simply by the virtue of being human?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora.

Human rights are essentially an agreement between humans to protect a characteristic or behaviour of all humans within their community.

Human rights exist only by virtue of the agreement itself and the degree of commitment by other humans to protect those rights.

This is a global issue, with human rights being violated all the time and everywhere on the planet. It’s a problem that demands our immediate attention and action. This is why human rights are violated all the time and everywhere on the earth.

We have far too many humans who view rights as scalable according to their essentially misanthropic perceptions of humanity — because we are suffering from a mental health pandemic affecting at least one in five among us. We are only now beginning to realize that we are a species that has been suffering for centuries from generational trauma from our barbaric origins.

The fight for universal human rights is a fundamental building block in a healing process that will require centuries to emerge from.

We are far better off today than we were one century ago simply because of our increased awareness of the issues we are dealing with and an emerging appropriate context from which we interpret our experiences.

Human rights are crucial to preserving the social contract and ensuring systemic stability.

Without human rights as a concept enshrined into law, we descend into barbarism.

After writing this answer and posting it, I realize I’m doing a disservice to the concept by providing such little context.

Human rights have a long and bloody history of development in which their inklings as concepts we should value as a species were responses to centuries of brutal violence characterizing human life.

The earliest examples of human rights enshrined in local laws date back to circa 2350 BC in Asia as the reforms of “Urukagina of Lagash,” which evolved into more well-known examples of legal documentation such as “The Code of Hammurabi” from circa 1780 BC.

Ancient Egypt also supported fundamental human rights through documents such as “The Edicts of Ashoka” (c. 268–232 BC). Other principles of human behaviour emerged during this period, while one such principle has been incorporated throughout most living religions today and is popularly known as “The Golden Rule.”

Fast forward to 622, and “The Constitution of Medina” functioned as a formal agreement between Muhammad and the tribes and families of Yathribe, which included Muslims, Jews, and pagans. This agreement was an early means of uniting all peoples of the land under a common identity referred to as “Ummah” and incorporated several changes to how slavery was defined and limited.

Early Islamic laws from this period incorporated principles of military conduct and the treatment of prisoners of war that became precursors to international humanitarian law.

Moving forward into the Middle Ages, the most influential document establishing the modern basis for human rights was the creation of the “Magna Carta,” itself heavily influenced by early Christian thinkers such as St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose, and St Augustine.

The Magna Carta of 1215 influenced the development of “common law” and several constitutional documents following, all related to human rights, including the (1689) “English Bill of Rights” and the (1789) United States Constitution.

Some may remember from the Iraq War and the establishment of Guantanamo that the Bush administration suspended the writ of “Habeas Corpus” — the right to know what one has been accused of — was a right established in the Magna Carta. This was a fundamental violation of a basic right that set the nation back in time to an era of barbarism — and they hypocritically leveraged that violation to commit war crimes for waterboarding that the U.S. itself forced Japan to face an international tribunal for war crimes over the same behaviour decades earlier.

This is a stain on the American people that will not wash off their conscience while they do nothing to own responsibility for their grotesque violation. This dark moral failing of the nation has become a slippery slope of moral failures permitting the monstrosity of immoral behaviour. We — as in the world- are now on the verge of potentially falling entirely into a pit of immorality because of their “leadership” in this area.

At any rate, I’ll avoid proselytizing further and get to the goods of reading material and a “pretty picture” at the end with a chart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Human rights — Wikipedia

History of human rights — Wikipedia

A Short History of Human Rights

A brief history of human rights — Amnesty International

Universal Declaration of Human Rights | United Nations

Can a Democrat define their go-to mime: “Threat to democracy”?

This post is a response to a question posed in its full format as follows: “We have to be impressed by the Democratic Party’s ability to ‘Fool some of the people ALL of the time.’ Could those in their pocket kindly define their go-to mime: ‘Threat to democracy?’”

After this question, the next question you posted on your profile qualifies as a “threat to democracy,” as does your ideological mindset in which you divide society into an “us versus them” dynamic.

Your understanding of a law intended to protect everyone equally is broken and favours the application of subjective biases that disenfranchise half of the population. Furthermore, you have no respect for that half of the population as you endorse stripping them of rights you take for granted for yourself.

You place all of the onus of responsibility onto that half of the population while perversely ignoring how demeaning the very concept of life is by elevating tissue in development beyond the degree of value you should be placing upon the life and lives affected by that process.

Women are not different in every state, with different needs or rights to protect according to the political whims of zealous religious hypocrites dehumanizing them as incubators for the production of children they can dispose of once they’re produced.

There exists no valid justification for the segregation of fundamental human rights by state because abortion is not a state issue but a human issue.

States’ rights, in this case, erode democracy and reduce critical functions within human lives to commodities serving the vapid whims of political ideologues rather than the universal values of human life in a uniform fashion.

It would be best if you were far more concerned with how “states rights” are intended to address issues affecting localized areas, not universal matters.

It would help if you protected the clear divisions between geographical and universal human concerns.

You don’t do that, though, because you have already indicated your primary concern is to pit citizens and neighbours against each other with your ideological division of society, and that, right there, is the greatest threat to democracy.

It would be best if you fought alongside your neighbours to protect all equally, not against your neighbours, to win an egotistically subjective degree of superiority over them.

While you are busy gloating over what you dismiss as a non-issue, the betrayal of women’s rights and democracy as a whole, you reveal a horrific degree of nation-destroying sociopathy.

The reality is that reversing Roe v. Wade has already had a devastating impact on the lives of fellow citizens you don’t seem to care in the least about.

This is not “nothing.”

It’s a horror show, and you show yourself to be a horrific monster by pretending this doesn’t matter.

In reality, states should stay out of people’s lives and let them live according to their universal right to self-determination.

It’s not a state’s right to overrule universal rights. It is a divide-and-conquer strategy that undermines an entire nation as a fundamental threat to its stability as a democracy.

The worlds of all these people have fallen apart. You have chosen to overlook the pain and suffering your attitude causes them in favour of banging your ideological drum while disparaging your neighbours in the process.

That makes YOU a threat to democracy. YOU are too full of yourself to realize how badly you betray it. YOU are more interested in achieving ideological dominion over your neighbours than in supporting the social contract and working together to resolve common problems.

Explaining “My Freedom Ends When the Freedom of Others Begins”

It means everyone is free to be who they are and to do what they choose as long as they do not infringe on the freedoms of others.

It means “freedom” is not a licence to abuse others or violate the freedoms of others.

It means religious people do not get to dictate how other people choose to live their lives, and that includes the freedom to seek a remedy to a medical condition without suffering from subjectively applied restraints or conditions by others.

It means freedom from religious persecution and the freedom to practice one’s religion without persecution for one’s personal choices.

It means the right to self-determination and bodily autonomy without restriction.

It does not mean the freedom to impose one’s views onto others because that violates their freedoms.

It does not mean the freedom to abuse others because that violates their freedoms.

It does not mean the institution of laws to dictate the personal choices of others because that violates their freedoms.

It means do whatever you want to do, think whatever you want, and believe whatever you want, but don’t be an asshole to others about it.

It means “The Golden Rule” — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

It means reciprocity — treat others as you want to be treated, but if you’re a masochist who wants to suffer, it does not mean that you have an excuse to indulge in sadistic behaviours toward others.

It means trying to be a decent human being toward other people. It means trying to respect their identical right to be who they are and to do what they want to do, think, and believe without having to endure your assaults.

It means learning to respect other people’s boundaries.

Freedom means developing empathy, compassion, and sensitivity toward others.

It means freedom isn’t free. Freedom comes with boundaries and at the cost of eternal vigilance.