Ion

I gave you the basis of the UN Code of Human Rights before:

.) it is inspired from the intention of the Declaration des Droits de l'Homme, from France's 18th. century;

.) it started to be designed as a social construct, in 1945, from the ground up, with inputs -many scientific inputs- from past and the present, in order to become an international platform for human rights towards peace, propsperity and justice.

dk

DMB: FYI I haven't mentioned slavery genocide or divorce in this thread and your answer has apparently nothing to do with Darwin or the alleged "long and bloody partnership between science and racism". Which planet are you on?
I did ask the following
dk: Today Hitler and fascism remain political, social and intellectual taboos, nonetheless in 1933-37 NAZI Germany was in vogue, in a rational international political, intellectual, and social dialogue with Stalin’s USSR and communist parties throughout Europe and the US.

DMB:
Where are the modern social elites who allegedly believe all this hogwash, and what does that have to do with the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights?
dk: Most recently we have the CEOs, CFO, Corporate boards, Financial Analyst and accounting firms like Author Anderson that trashed ENRON, Quest, WorldCom, etc... Going back a little further and we have the Olympic scandals. Going back a little farther we have the Hedge Funds bailout. Going back a little farther we have the financial crisis of the Pacific Rim, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Going back a little farther we have the Savings and Loan bailout. Going back a little farther and we have the Dalkon Shield fiasco. The breadcrumb trail leads to political, social and intellectual elites that live above the Law ravaged by corruption at the highest levels. Nobody says boo, because these people live with impunity above the Law and are happy, happy, happy to do business with human smugglers, sweat shops, forced labor, Drug Cartels, despots, pornographers, terrorists and the scum of the world.

dk: I don’t see how the 10 Commandments can be blamed for genocide, and for that matter Jews under the Law have been a blessing to all the nations on the planet. I think modern secular education indoctrinates students to blame the Bible and religion for the shortcomings of modern and post-modern positive and non-judgmental laws. Whatever the carnage and frequency of war before the pre-Renaissance pales in contrast to modern warfare (see note below). There is something prophetic about the Noble Peace Prize being the legacy of the greatest arms dealer in the history of the World. Noble justified developing and selling modern weaponry on the rationalization that sufficiently maniacal weapon systems would make war unthinkable, sounds good, hey, and I’m sure we are all sorry Noble was wrong! My point is that while progress is important, people that live above the law understand the law to be a weapon and war, famine and petulance a logical necessity to cull human populations, and this is what Malthus’s Population Principle became under Positive and Non-judgmental Rights. The rational philosophers were are wrong about 3rd Age of Human Knowledge, as history clearly indicates. The basis of Universal Human Rights by logical necessity is deontological, not positive or non-judgmental laws. The source of the UN DoHR was the Nuremberg Trials that held NAZI ghouls accountable to international law. Lenin, Stalin and Mao were never held accountable to the law, and the UN’s remains non-judgment, they are often praised by social elites and their atrocities rationalized by intellectual elites as necessary and unavoidable. The result is a world ruled by powerful corrupt people that live above the Law, who use the Law as weapon to the chagrin of all law abiding good people. This is why the UN has become irrelevant, the UN DoHR has become meaningless, even a corruption.
note: (The much vilified Spanish Inquisition put to death somewhere between 2,000-11,000 people over 22 years, while the French Terror rationalized on the basis of liberty executed about 260,000 in 2 years. The vilified Crusades that lasted on and off again for 4 Centuries killed about a 1,000,000 people. At the battles of Waterloo, Gettysburg, Verdun and Stalingrad the casualties alone were 82,000, 51,000, 306,000and 647,000, respectively. I don’t need to mention the 100 million or so lives destroyed under Communist regimes, or petty dictators propped up during the Cold War. )

DMB

dk: I don’t have time to reply in detail to your blunderbuss posts.

I reiterate my objection to your trying to give the impression that various 19th-Century thinkers were simply applying Malthus. Of course they read Malthus and thought he had some good ideas, but IMO it is a travesty simply to say that Darwin applied Malthus to biology to perfect evolution. That’s why this reply:
misses the point.
What I had meant was that it is simplistic to think that A writes a book and then B reads it and directly applies it. I think it is true to say of most academic disciplines that there are many influences on a particular practitioner, and in the case of scientists experimental or observational evidence is likely to play a strong role.

Quoting from Malthus does nothing to strengthen your case. It would be more to the point if you could show that either Malthus, or, more importantly, science was the underlying driving force of various megalomaniacs and dictators of the 20th Century in order to justify your statement:
I note that you do not justify your clear statement:
You merely excuse it (?) by saying I quoted it out of context. If you didn’t mean it, you ought not to have written it. Whatever uses or misuses of people’s ideas that may occur, nothing justifies using language of this kind about the originators of the ideas. It isn’t even correct to claim that scientific theories become something different if non-scientists misunderstand them or try to misuse them.

You must explain to me where I am “trying to underwrite metaphysics with science”. I have not attempted to answer the question:
since others have been doing so in this thread and I have left it to them. You must also explain where I have made an ad hominem attack. You may remember that in a previous post you clearly got confused about who had posted what and wrote to me:
and I had to point out that I had made no mention of slavery, genocide and divorce.

I would agree that the basis for the concept of human rights is deontological. I would not claim that the concept is solely grounded in science either, although the understanding that science gives us may influence the conclusions we draw about human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an attempt to draw up just principles that can apply to all humanity. (Incidentally, it is not the UN Declaration of Human Rights and should not therefore be abbreviated to UN DoHR.) It is obviously difficult for peoples of many different cultures to reach consensus on this matter. I would maintain, however, that the Universal Declaration has had a considerable influence in the post-war world and is likely to be more effective than the Ten Commandments that are limited to believers in a certain religion. The TC don’t look much like a human rights document to me.

I’m not clear on how one distinguishes easily between the fate of elite intellectuals who do believe in god and those who don’t. They seem to me to suffer the common fate of humanity.

You seem to subscribe to a sort of trahison des clercs but I’m afraid it comes across as ranting.

As a European I am interested in the picture you draw of Europe. It is unnecessarily melodramatic. Are you so anti-Malthusian that you think populations can continue increasing without limit?

As I understand it, the purpose of this thread was to look at the Universal Declaration of Human Right as a basis for morality. The performance of the UN is surely irrelevant to that question. After all, if we consider the TC as a basis for morality, we should look at them in their own right rather than bother about whether Jews or xians really subscribe to them or whether countries like America or Israel stick to them. I would imagine that most of the time countries practise realpolitik and ethical standards are on the back burner.

dk

Its circular to provide a UN as the basis for UN DoHR. A circular definition is a special case of a Failure to Elucidate, a logical fallacy. Unacceptable.

Ion

It is circular in your dreams only, dk:

anything that doesn't raise from a divinity giving inalienable human rights, is proclaimed by dk "Its circular..." (and should read "It's circular..." not "Its circular...").

The UN Code of Human Rights is made as a social construct from the ground up, without divinity but with scientific input.

Stating this by me, automatically brings dk's "It's circular..." since I don't state a divine input like dk likes it, but I state a 100% human input.

However, it is no more circular than the origin of cars, because there is no divinity in designing a Ford, it is 100% designed by humans.

Also, it is no more circular than the road laws for driving cars, because there is no divinity giving inalienable human rights for driving cars:
the road laws are 100% a social construct for driving cars.

For a divinity to have any input in the UN Code of Human Rights, first off, the divinity's existence has to be proved without any religious input.

dk, you have no proof of a divinity in this world.

lpetrich

dk:
And if you recall I answered the issue by providing a link to a Catholic Theologian that explained the basis of Leviticus and Deuteronomy in terms of God?s Covenants with the Patriarchs.

Very ingenious. Except that such a "basis" is entirely after-the-fact.

dk:
As I explained earlier, Leviticus and Deuteronomy were written in response to Israel breaking God?s Covenants (Golden Calf, Sin of Baal Peor) to estrange themselves from God?s plan. ...

An after-the-fact "justification"; the YHWH-is-the-only-god faction wanted to discredit the worship of other deities, and invented these stories to put them down.

In the case of UN DoHR, Article 18, China, India, Pakistan, most of Sub-Saharan Africa, etc.. grievously violate Article 18 (and the UN not really doing anything about it...).

Except that the UN is breaking its own laws here, not following them to the letter.

I was asked to illustrate how intellectual elites become the handmaidens of powerful political factions, and provide evidence.

Who are the "intellectual elites"?

(dk on Europe allegedly becoming underpopulated...)

Falling birthrates is certainly a curious demographic trend, but where are all those European Malthus groupies?


Today Hitler and fascism remain political, social and intellectual taboos, nonetheless in 1933-37 NAZI Germany was in vogue, in a rational international political, intellectual, and social dialogue with Stalin?s USSR and communist parties throughout Europe and the US.

I have no idea of what dk is talking about here.

DMB:
Where are the modern social elites who allegedly believe all this hogwash, and what does that have to do with the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights?
dk:
Most recently we have the CEOs, CFO, Corporate boards, Financial Analyst and accounting firms like Author Anderson that trashed ENRON, Quest, WorldCom, etc... (lots of other recent crookedness...)

I notice that dk left out pedophile priests.

(dk on absolute numbers of victims being much lower in centuries past than over the most recent century...)

DK, it seems, has chosen the wrong career. He ought to have been an accountant. In fact, I know a company that could make great use of his accounting talents.

Arthur Andersen.

I make that comment because dk stubbornly keeps ignoring the fact that there were fewer people to kill in previous centuries.

Finally, it's significant that dk calls the Inquisition and the Crusades "vilified" and sneers at the French Revolution as having been done for the sake of "liberty".

And I notice that some right-wing Catholics continue to have a grudge against the French Revolution.

dk

DMB: dk: I don’t have time to reply in detail to your blunderbuss posts.
dk: Sorry, I'll try to break up posts more
=====
DMB: I reiterate my objection to your trying to give the impression that various 19th-Century thinkers were simply applying Malthus. Of course they read Malthus and thought he had some good ideas, but IMO it is a travesty simply to say that Darwin applied Malthus to biology to perfect evolution. That’s why this reply:
dk: Darwin said in Origin of Species, “this is the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.". I merely quoted him. But it’s my experience that the most far reaching scientific principles are simple, and offer Ockham razor in defense.

DMB: misses the point.
What I had meant was that it is simplistic to think that A writes a book and then B reads it and directly applies it. I think it is true to say of most academic disciplines that there are many influences on a particular practitioner, and in the case of scientists experimental or observational evidence is likely to play a strong role.
Quoting from Malthus does nothing to strengthen your case. It would be more to the point if you could show that either Malthus, or, more importantly, science was the underlying driving force of various megalomaniacs and dictators of the 20th Century in order to justify your statement:
dk: But I don’t think science is the driving force, and I don’t think scientific racism passes for science at all. Nations can only avail themselves of the technology and science that exists, and its a sad fact that the social sciences have been unreliable, overstated, misinterpreted and were applied with mind numbing heinous bloody consequences in the 20th Century. The underlying driving force of all successful megalomaniacs is... 1) supple mind, 2) charisma 3) a corrupt sense of justice and 4) an insatiable appetite for power.

Originally posted by dk
This seems to me, to constitute strong irrefutable empirical evidence that science and racism have a long and bloody partnership
DMB:
I note that you do not justify your clear statement:
dk: I submit Scientific Racism exists as both an obstacle to science and a historical fact.
-----
Herbert Spencer (1820_1903) was thinking about ideas of evolution and progress before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859). Nonetheless, his ideas received a major boost from Darwin's theories and the general application of ideas such as "adaptation" and "survival of the fittest" to social thought is known as "Social Darwinism". It would be possible to argue that human evolution showed the benefits of cooperation and community. Spencer, and Social Darwinists after him took another view. He believed that society was evolving toward increasing freedom for individuals; and so held that government intervention, ought to be minimal in social and political life.
----- Modern History Sourcebook: ; Herbert Spencer: Social Darwinism, 1857
.
The case for scientific racism was made in the 20th Century by Gandhi, Mandela, Dubois, and Martin Luther King amongst many others. I’m not sure what you want from me?

dk

Originally posted by dk
Spenser, Darwin, Galton, Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx became intellectual fascists independent of their personal opinions and intentions.
DMB:
You merely excuse it (?) by saying I quoted it out of context. If you didn’t mean it, you ought not to have written it. Whatever uses or misuses of people’s ideas that may occur, nothing justifies using language of this kind about the originators of the ideas. It isn’t even correct to claim that scientific theories become something different if non-scientists misunderstand them or try to misuse them.
dk: My response was meant to be sarcastic. But in good conscience, some ideas are very dangerous.

Originally posted by dk
You’re the one trying to underwrite metaphysics with science. That’s why the simple question, “What is the basis for UN DoHR” sends you fallaciously into ad hominem attacks.
DMB:
You must explain to me where I am “trying to underwrite metaphysics with science”. I have not attempted to answer the question:
dk: You’re right and I apologize. When I attack scientism as a basis for universal human rights it unavoidably raises metaphysical questions. Speaking for myself, I find a rational basis for human rights wanting. This leads me to believe the basis of human rights must be deduced from the human family (collectively and nuclear) as opposed to synthesized, reduced or inferred from the individual,. That being the case scientific methods of reduction and inference are irrelevant and unsuited to the inquiry. This is a very fundamental question for me personally, but I’ll grant you many write it off as trivial.

DMB:
since others have been doing so in this thread and I have left it to them. You must also explain where I have made an ad hominem attack. You may remember that in a previous post you clearly got confused about who had posted what and wrote to me:
dk:
I apologize again, I seem to be taking gas here, I have clearly confused trains of thought on this thread. .

DMB: (snip):
I’m not clear on how one distinguishes easily between the fate of elite intellectuals who do believe in god and those who don’t. They seem to me to suffer the common fate of humanity.
-You seem to subscribe to a sort of trahison des clercs but I’m afraid it comes across as ranting.
As a European I am interested in the picture you draw of Europe. It is unnecessarily melodramatic. Are you so anti-Malthusian that you think populations can continue increasing without limit?
As I understand it, the purpose of this thread was to look at the Universal Declaration of Human Right as a basis for morality. The performance of the UN is surely irrelevant to that question. After all, if we consider the TC as a basis for morality, we should look at them in their own right rather than bother about whether Jews or xians really subscribe to them or whether countries like America or Israel stick to them. I would imagine that most of the time countries practise realpolitik and ethical standards are on the back burner.
dk: I’m not sure I understand, but I’ll pretend I do. Assuming everyone’s human rights can be equitably protected under the Law (big assumption), then class, religion, ethnicity, and race become a strength. People able to understand themselves/family/community/job/government through the laws that govern them percieve the law as a tutor first and a terror second. In this light, as the basis of law human rights become a catalyst to energize new perspectives from which people in a diverse multicultural society learn a better way of life. That’s great because a catalyst isn’t used up in the process. I submit only in this fashion can people find justice an authoritative expression of good will even love, as opposed to a weapon wielded by the powerful and entitled to control and destroy the weak and vulnerable. This has nothing to do with Malthus or the Population Principle, in my opinion.
- I don’t have an issue with Malthus or the Population Principle per say, but its application by bureaucrats, social engineers and opinion makers that pour vast irreplaceable resources down a sink hole to resolve the ill defined problem of overpopulation. I have a very serious problem when the Population Principle puts into play death as a solution to social problems.. Societies/nations that solve problems efficiently with life affirming solutions grow and prosper to become a more perfect union. Free market societies that market “control and death” as a means to “manage and eliminate” problems cut their own throats, and whether it be quick or spry don’t remain free.
- Nonetheless, Civilizations/cultures/nations that fail to solve the problems that rise up to challenge them deplete themselves of vitality as they pour vast resources down a sink hole without tangible results. Schools that graduate literate productive students with good problem solving skills becomes a great asset, but schools that graduate semi-literate moral morons becomes a great problem. Societies in decline or under stress sometimes confuse a problems with scapegoats, and once confused employ systematic schemes of death, control and totalitarianism as a solution so insufferable war becomes a blessing.

dk

[QUOTE]Originally posted by lpetrich
(snip)
Very ingenious. Except that such a "basis" is entirely after-the-fact.
(snip)
An after-the-fact "justification";
(snip)
Except that the UN is breaking its own laws here, not following them to the letter.
dk When a ruling body like the UN breaks its own laws they set themsleves above the law to set the law against the Law forcing people to live lawlessly.

The UN DoHR thus becomes an obstacle to its own purpose.
(snip)

Ion

Well, comparing the UN Code of Human Rights with the Bible, still gives an edge to the UN Code of Human Rights:

.) the UN Code of Human Rights doesn't have the pretense to be divine, it's only human;

.) the Bible does have the pretense to be divine, even after its defined divinity is disproven by internal inconsistencies within the Bible, and by external inconsistencies between the Bible and the reality;

.) the UN Code of Human Rights has some flaws in implementations, and has many achievements in implementations like the Conventions of Geneva and Helsinki, like the Nuremberg trial, like the World Court in Haague;

.) the Bible, based on its external inconsistencies with the reality, did historical harm in holding back and torturing the scientific knowledge during the Inquisition, in spreading out religious blind fanaticism during the Crusades and during missionary preaching in colonial conquests of America and Africa, and is hypocritical right now in sex scandals that went covered up from the law.