What’s Wrong With Human Rights? (6-23-24)

01:00 Every major religion regards masturbation as a sin
02:40 The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqtFJZB27M8
06:00 What’s wrong with human rights? https://www.theamericanconservative.com/whats-wrong-with-human-rights/
14:00 Christopher Caldwell: Against Human Rights, https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-21/against-human-rights
18:00 Christopher Caldwell: The E.U. Is Revealing Its True Identity. Europeans Don’t Like It., https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/23/opinion/european-union-elections-nationalism.html
38:00 The Ethics of Violence: Recent Literature on the Creation of the Contemporary Regime of Law and War, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=155758
44:00 Mike joins the show for the first time
54:00 You can’t discriminate in hiring because of religion, https://www.commerce.gov/cr/reports-and-resources/discrimination-quick-facts/religious-discrimination
1:20:00 Griggs v. Duke Power Co., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
1:33:00 Sam joins from Haifa
1:38:00 Sam was driving a cab in NY on 9-11
1:46:00 Hezbollah’s threat to Haifa
2:13:10 Was revulsion to the Holocaust the origin of Human Rights?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGumg1zCfno
2:22:20 Claire Khaw joins
2:33:00 Does Claire get the Koranic kick?
2:34:00 Where do human rights come from? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFGu6T1Qe48

Speaker 0: Good mate 40 here. So haven’t had a lot of time to study human rights and international humanitarian laws because it’s just so much great sport going on. Did you catch Afghanistan stunning Australia in the world Cup Cricket t 20 edition last night? So now the United States takes on England. The Us must be fighting for its life in about, 2 hours then the United States men’s national soccer team, opens its Cop American campaign today, Wow.

So Australia must beat India to progress in the world cup and Afghanistan must not defeat Bangladesh by 2 dramatic e. Margin, so much to catch up on, but let’s begin with some thoughts here on masturbation from Dennis P.

Speaker 1: This is why religion. Turns people off. When you go around telling people masturbation is a sin and your committing evil, believe me you are not bringing people to God, you are alien people from God. This is what…

Speaker 0: Okay. But don’t don’t religion stand for things beyond just marketing effectiveness to the best of my knowledge, every Western religion or every mono religion condemns mass masturbation. Is there any major world religion that does not condemn mass masturbation. Is there any traditional approach to life in in the Western world that does not condemn mass masturbation. I I think this is just a universal.

Now, you can do it in an obnoxious way or you can do it in in a more sensible way. So I wonder what Cuomo has to say here. I’m the former case. New York, frankly, should have never been brought. And if his name was not Donald Trump, and wasn’t running for president, from the former Ag g in New York, it’s in telling you that case would have never been brought.

And that’s what is offensive to people. And it should be because if there’s anything left, Its belief in the justice case in New York frankly should have never been brought. And if his name was not Donald Trump, Okay. Main topic, the origin of human rights, the last you type you human history.

Speaker 2: This new. The history of human rights, I think, is typically thought about, also in public, discussion. According to what I wanna call a church history model. Now let me spell out that analogy it’s really important because it’s what I wanna argue against and replace. What do I mean when I say, it’s tempting to think about human rights because as a kind of, church history.

Well, in Christian church history which used to be written how do historians treat christianity? It’s not an accidental idea. And it’s not an idea that makes it way in the world on accident. Instead, they think about Christianity as the 1 true belief. And if it emerges, it does so because it’s true and valid.

And if it succeeds, it does so for the same reason. And I think roughly, I mean, that most… People think about the history of human rights, including professional historians in just this way. Now, of course, Christians knew that they were a new thing. Jesus was bringing good news, and there had been lots of people before them.

But how did they think about it? Well, history was in a sense on hold. You’ll remember in Dante’s inferno, there’s a whole part of hell. For people who just had the bad luck to be born before Jesus. Now, there’s also a path that church history does something different with and that’s the past of the Jews?

How did the the church historian think about Jews? Well, they were blindly anticipating something else. They may have thought they were trying to be Jewish. And perpetuate the Jewish religion. But in fact, their historical role was to bring about something later and be left behind by that something.

Then once Jesus comes about, the church historian proceeds by giving a tale of apostles, saints and marty. They may have to die for the 1 true faith, and we remember them for doing so, But if the religion succeeded, it’s because they they promoted the cause in a world of suffering and evil. Now, basically, human rights historians tend to tell the history of human rights this way, someone comes up with the idea, and then a very few people, a kind of early church, stick with it. Against enormous opposition.

Speaker 0: Okay. So this is Samuel Mo. He’s a quite left wing professor of history. At Harvard University and just an absolutely formidable intellect. I mean, just just look at pictures of him.

I mean, I would not wanna go up against this guy in a debate. I mean, he is done. I mean, he would span me if I I tried to debate this guy. Alright. There very few people who intimidated me, but samuel Mine.

Alright. I’d be absolutely intimidated to get… I mean, look at this. Look just imagine that face looking down at you. And and you would recognize that, like, he is the alpha male in the room.

He is the Uber, the alpha, the Omega, like, he is… He’s the man, just formidable intellect, completely different here system from my own, but a formidable body of work, my god. Look at that. Look at that face. Looking down at me.

I I I’m intimidated. I I gotta I gotta click click click click click. Click away. So try to get clarity on this topic of human rights, I look to Christopher cord and poor Godfrey there 2 of my favorite intellectual. And luckily, I found essays by both of them aren’t essentially, what’s wrong with human rights.

So poor gut wrote back in 20 13. It says some terms an issue from the media, which I have the mis fortune of hearing incessantly as an academic make me wins. And this is true I think for for most academics because unlike regular people and unlike people in the news media academics understand that they’re pretty much more content apps are contingent. Right, meaning that there was more than 1 factor into their coming into being. And they developed at a particular type in place as part of a a chain of the interactions over time and over place.

And so you have to understand everything in its situation in its particular time in place This is otherwise known as historic. And so when academics look to understand a topic, they they don’t generally turn to the news media, because the news media talks about democracy as though it has 1 eternal meaning, talks about human rights as though it has 1 eternal meaning. And Paul Godfrey says the term that’s been causing me the most visceral pain is human rights. And the pain became… Excruciating last week when I heard Fox News comment 1 Williams insist that gay a marriage is a human right.

And so if 1 Williams had his way, the Supreme Court would impose recognition of this arrangement on every hamlet in this country. That’s because he thinks it’s fair and it’s required by the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. So I have no idea how the fourteenth amendment can require the imposition of marital practice that differs from how marriage was understood since the beginning of human societies. Up until a few years ago in this country. It is possible to see why the fourteenth the amendment might be invoked, go hold the ride of every American taxpayer, whatever his color to use the public facilities he pays for.

But how can it require, except by an act judicial fiat that all Americans be forced to recognize, marriage, save sex marriage as a habitation arrangement between people of the same sex. Supposedly, this entails a human right that must be equally protected right to what? Presumably if anything that those involved decide to court marriage and then enlarge everyone else on pain of punishment to accept as such. So what happens if those 2 wish to experiment with new forms of marriage, decided to be a good idea to practice inc. This 2 become a right protected by the fourteenth amendment.

What about group marriage. Right? Is this too protected by our constitution. So the answer is that en and group marriage may be entitled to legal protection against if They are classified as human rights. So what the hell?

2 more rights at the list weren’t really model the term human rights or more than already been muddled. Right the term has been reduced to a rhetoric trope. Is meant to impress the list with the moral seriousness of the person who pronounce it, So that’s what Samuel Mine. Means when he says that human rights tends to be studied by scholars of human rights. As though, they they were church historian studying the 1 true church.

Speaker 2: But just like the early church, this idea is destined to go far. So this is this tends to be the way, I’ve suggest even professional historians. Think about where human rights came from. The story is tele illogical, it’s going somewhere. It’s leading to us, and it’s triumph.

It’s about the coming of good news to the world. Now what’s wrong with that way of thinking about history in general. And the history of human rights in particular. Well, I think a few things. First of all, it leaves a lot out what doesn’t fit the story.

Let me just give 1 small example for now.

Speaker 0: Okay. So what the heck is teal. Tele. Right? It’s a branch of causality.

It gives the reason or explanation for something as a function of its end, its purpose or its goal, as opposed to a a function of its cause. So you look at the end goal such as salvation, redemption.

Speaker 2: International is an idea, as a movement even is considerably older than human rights. It really comes about in the nineteenth century. And that’s the moment when international law professional becomes something that people do for a living. The principal early journals are founded then. And eventually, even Americans found a journal in the early part of the twentieth century.

But international law and international more generally doesn’t understand itself to be given the mission of prop rights. Something else has to happen.

Speaker 0: Right. They’re they’re discovering rights that are already inherent. So here’s where I’m coming from. My greatest wish is to build the world at home, and and fur it with love to grow apple trees and honey beans and snow white turtle dove. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

I’d like to hold it in my arms and keep a company. Like to see the world for once or standing hand in hand. And hear them echo through the hills for peace throughout the land Okay. You want an example of perfect harmony. There was there was perfect harmony.

So Poor Godfrey says my objection to human rights is not based on moral re. But I don’t pretend to be morally agnostic. Right, I think of 1 right, at least that all people should be entitled to and which government should provide and it is Thomas Hobbes single example of a natural right, which is to be protected by the government against violent death. So to protect oneself from the state of nature where life is nazi British and short, At Thomas Hobbes says, people make a compact with the government and the government protects their life and in exchange the people owe the government loyalty. So what Paul God is arguing against here is the use of human rights whenever some individual institutional state wishes to express a political preference.

Why not just make your arguments let the listener decide? I I don’t object listing moral arguments against? Horrible things. Right? Mention what the leaders of some society do, leave it to others is then to decide whether your indictment is correct.

Alright? So if the taliban stones women to death if they’re seen talking to young men to whom they’re not married. Right? Just make your argument there that that’s horrible. Right?

You’re not strengthening your case by adding that the Taliban violates human rights. So how do we agree on what are human rights. Alright? Human rights either come from human reason? Or from guard, or they are socially constructed out of the genetic pool of particular society acting within a certain environment.

So I would expect that say, Ash Jews and West Africans and northeast Asians even if they’re all living in the same environment such as the United States Of America would have tendencies to regard, different, things as human rights. Right? So what what are considered human rights it depends on particular people particular times and places depending on what are the cultural and political wins, and it’s kinda silly to believe that 1 can break down human rights and find some kind of universal ethic. Right? They’re shopping and growing differences in United States about fundamental human rights, and appeals to supposedly human rights language will not likely to heal these divisions.

So human rights are left wing priorities is translated into universal mandates. Right? That there aren’t any major right wing thinkers is in human rights, because human rights depends upon believing in progress, and it depends upon believing as the the individual is the ultimate, unit of of measurement that we we best understand the world by looking primarily at individuals and his ina rights no matter what situation he finds himself in. And Christopher Accord wrote about human rights in the lab. It’s a Catholic journal of literature science and the fine arts right about in the 02/02/2004 issue.

And So he talks about human rights, the secular version. So even if human rights are not given to us by God. So he believe that human rights have bestowed upon us by god. That’s a statement of faith, and I’m not gonna argue with with statements of faith. I I guess I believe that.

I believe that human rights are be bestowed by God. But I recognize that as a statement of cry of of faith. So was initially a rallying cry that was advanced stride by people on the left, but received critically by other people. So in 19 48, Eleanor Roosevelt played a committee to draft for that newly established United Nations, a universal or declaration of human rights. And he humphrey ups upsets the Democratic convention by urging his party to get out of the shadow of estates rights, and walk forthright me into the bright sunshine of human rights.

Oh my god. That is so stirring. Mate get out of the shadow of state rights and walk, fourth brightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. That’s beautiful. Though he was talking about equal rights with blacks in the segregated south rights that became known as civil rights.

Now the Un declaration on human rights got bogged down in distinctions. So the rights at the num numerator were of 2 types. There are a bunch of rights familiar from the constitution of well run states in the Enlightened west such as freedom of speech freedom of movement, no slavery no torture. Then there are other rights that were contingent aspirations, the right to join a trade union. The right to adequate medical care, the right to periodic holidays with pay.

Right? So what’s the exact meaning of these human rights in a society where people work in rice bodies. So the Soviet Union did not vote for the declaration, but it received a propaganda bona from Eleanor Roosevelt sure. People could now argue soviet Union doesn’t have Bourgeois freedoms like freedom of speech, but the West doesn’t have constitutional guarantees of cheap medical care and paid holidays. So nobody’s perfect.

And it created a confusion of what exactly the United Nations was pushing was this a set of laws or a set of values. And over the decades, United Nations established a long list of bodies and boys to refine some rights and discover others. Right? There was the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination in 19 69. The convention against torture in 19 84, the convention on the rights of migrant workers in 19 90.

So the problem with all these visions of rights became clearer when in 19 51, the Un passed its convention on refugees. So this was a solemn response to the massive human rights abuses World war 2. But by 19 51, they’re only a few dozen refugees. Now these international bodies could demand a high degree solicit and pun accountability from countries with regard to refugees. The problem is then as now You’ve got tens of millions of people on the move, seeking a better life, a better standard of living.

And more prosperous countries are constrained by democrat is to send those job seekers home ex. So every citizen of an ecuador equator country wishes to wash dishes in Germany, a trim loans in Canada has an interest in presenting himself as a special case, not as a job seeker, but as a political refugee. Chris Code well has a terrific essay in the New York Times today. To which I commend you. Oh, that sounds such lofty lofty language.

So it says, Europeans are mostly not aware that they have been enlisted in a project that has as its endpoint, the extinction, of France Germany, Italy in the rest of Europe, Historic nations as meaningful political units. Talking about the European Union. Brussels, the headquarters the European Union has been able to win a ascent to its project only by conceal its nature. And so that’s why there’s so much double talk in public life. For example, the news media doesn’t wanna focus much on the issues, the 20 24 campaign because they all break against Joe Biden.

But the issue is the mess in the Middle East, the mess in Ukraine, the growing mess around Taiwan, high inflation. Alright. What whatever the issue is, growing tensions with China. It does not work in Joe Biden favor but go, the news media doesn’t pay prominent attention to the issues driving the 20 24 campaign instead, it it prefers to focus on the peculiar of Donald Trump.

Speaker 2: And that tends to get left out of the story where, international laws is seen as having a kind of role eventually in the history of human rights. It might have been pointing in different directions. Now the larger point you might draw a might criticism of of this church history model it is I think more important. It really comes down to this. The history of the values, and ideal in modern times that people might have reason to back.

And to try to advance was 1 of very deep competition. Human rights didn’t exist for the longest time. There were other games in town, including, when it came to ids, ideas that might have a a kind of international or global, a kind of bearing. And so if we think about human rights that way, we start to think not in terms of church history, a kind of struggle upward for an idea to that’s old and whose validity is confirmed in advance. But instead is a kind of big competition between rival ideology?

And our question is then why are we left at the end of the story with human rights as the thing in which we invest our hopes, in the name of which we might professional as international lawyers and try to advance in our own way. So that’s basically how I wanna proceed. And I’ve been led to the conclusion in thinking about human rights in this way that Human rights really only become a widespread cause and a moving 1 for both a broad public and American international lawyers. In the mid 19 seventies. They weren’t the sole ideal that inspired people in the course of either human events or modern history, and they emerged historically not because they were utopian or promised a better world because lots of ideology.

She’s do that. Instead, they became to be attractive in the words of the title of that book with which I’m coming out because they were in a sense the last Utopia. They emerged powerfully in the 19 seventies because that was an era in which other things were collapsing. Other Utopia that had won out so far we’re losing their pla as ideas that could draw support and meaningfully better people around

Speaker 0: And the chat says Youtube’s cro extreme music copyright enforcement algorithm suppress a human right of expression. But Youtube is a business that has to live in the real world and now get sued if they’re not, absolutely rigorous about protecting copyright. Okay. Christopher a caldwell wells got a whole essay here on what’s wrong with human rights. So says European Union has always had human rights at its core.

And it’s not a social contract, Europe. Alright? It’s a community of values. Alright? And the main value is human rights, but There are a couple of problems with this.

1 is that European values aren’t really universal and the job of prom them has already been claimed by a body with more plausible claims to universal the United Nations. So the job of defending human rights has already been claimed by a western country with more cohesion more military and economic power the United States. So from 19 48 onward, human rights. It was seen would be pursued more easily within states. Right?

That’s how rights have normally been understood something that a state affords its citizens. But the human rights crusade after the 19 sixties was primarily pursued on an international level, which is jurisdiction or No man’s land. In domestic politics, you wanna pursue human rights then you infringe on the prerogative of politicians. So the more human rights you have the less democracy, you’re limiting democracy. Because you’re saying the can’t vote away certain rights.

So for example, you could impose same sex marriage, even if 90 percent of the population was opposed to it. You could impose it right by a judicial fiat if you list same sex marriage as a human right So the more human rights you have, right, the less democracy you have and the less sovereignty you have. So Sovereignty has traditionally been understood as the prerogative of the state, which is traditionally been understood to have a monopoly on violence. But when you say that there are all these universal human rights, you’re limiting and reducing the sovereignty of the state and the ability of citizens to vote for the type of society and politics that they want. So human rights tend to advance alongside American capitalism.

Most energetically in foreign countries, largely behind tax exempt, non profits, Ngos, National non governmental organization set up by Western Billionaires, so you’ve got George So open society foundations. You got foundation. You’ve got bill Melinda Gates foundation. Right. And for the state, Department, and this is evidence of free markets build free societies.

But to anyone interested in protecting his country sovereignty is evidence that human rights, is a stalking horse for American power. So primarily the western nations that have come up with and promoted the course of human rights So human rights provides ample pre pretext for military self assertion, particularly on behalf of the strongest military in the world America. So There was there’s a human rights doctrine of responsibility to protect. Right? It was devised by Canadian diplomats.

At the turn of the century, and as brought about the Catastrophic anglo, Franco, American attack on Libya in 20 11, which over through Mo Over the past 13 years has produced nonstop migrant crises in the Mediterranean as millions of people have moved from Africa and the Middle East through. Libya into Europe, which is exactly what Ka said would happen if you take me out. And the United States is not reluctant to use its economic power, and it almost always Sites, human rights violations when it impose sanctions as it now does in 2 dozen countries, and those sanctions have killed hundreds of thousands of people, including just in Iraq. Sites or at least with the 19 91 gulf war when the United States took out electrical grid, you’ve got studies, suggesting that hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of that. So those who make foreign policy in the name of human rights, remember president Jimmy Carter said he’d make human rights the centerpiece of American foreign policy.

They they believe this means United States will always be on the side of right rather than might. The human rights is as liable to serve as a pre pretext for conquest as religion used to be and surely will be again. So most of the problems from the universal arise from the universal that is the essence of human rights. So universal is a corruption of objectivity. Warns the French conservative alain Benoit in his book on human rights.

So to be objective is a start from particulars, universal defines the particular by starting from an abstract notion. So to impose universal rights requires universal power. Right? There are fewer checks on an army, the proceeding for human rights and not an army proceeding for the glory of God. Right the religious crusader if he is in good faith, his judgment under the law of god that he claims, the human rights Crusader is the creator and the prom gator and the discover of the very law that he pro claims and conquer, but If you’re making your arguments in the name of humanity, then anyone who doesn’t agree with you is an enemy of humanity to be treated accordingly.

So Is very different from the car schmidt notion of the enemy. The enemy is he who threatens your life. Threatens the life of your people. Doesn’t it make him bad. Just means that he threatens your life.

And so the traditional understanding of the ethical use of violence is that whichever is necessary to protect yourself and your family, your extended family, your people, your nation. And, if your nation needs to wage violence to protect itself, then this is nominally considered appropriate. We have another French political theorist Julian F, used to wonder where people got the idea that a universal state would be a peaceful 1, who had put an end to war. Imagine a global society like our own ordered by a global state. Politics would still be politics because human nature would still be human nature although a changes the vocabulary wars would become court civil wars, and ami would be called harris.

Right. And human rights, alright. They reduced democracy and they reduce sovereignty, and thereby they crude given political systems. So we have intellectual story myself Gu show, Long activists and france socialist parties in the party end he says democracy itself has been transformed by these increasingly frequent implications of human rights, and this is paradox self destructive because classic democracy involves the sovereignty is the people who are empowered to rule. But now you have a new sovereign that is the idea of human rights.

It’s a new liberal left wing version of democracy that involves the sovereignty of the individual person who’s entitled all sorts of human rights that the state cannot diminish. So securing those rights for the person means that people’s right to rule must be suspended. Right? You can have human rights and limited democracy or you can have democracy and limited rights. Right?

Democracy and liberal wisdom have attention between them. Liberal is all about, We have ina rights and the individuals individual’s the center of all things. But if you have a democracy then in You understand that the people have a right to establish rights for the type of society that they want to develop. And usually, it’s the courts that affect this transformation. Right?

Securing ever more rights, meaning that the people’s right to rule, must increasingly be suspended. So in California, you had a referendum, crop position when 87 was it 19 90 96 and California vote for proposition 1 87 to deny some forms of welfare benefits to people in the state illegally. And California supreme court ruled it illegal, so the people’s right to rule had to be suspended. So human rights space liberal democracy turns into a weapon against democracy. So usually human communities are focused on punctuation and survival and cultural continuity through religion and biological continuity through sex, and human rights crusade, want to undermine these arrangements that secured such continuity.

So you’ve got a lifting of the taboo that used to weigh on homosexuality is the anti pro, practice par excellence. Their marriage who once served the deadly serious purpose of protecting the offspring of love, On the f of love, now serves the frivolous purpose of equal dignity among citizens. Right? So it cuts cut and against traditional… Culture, but also against modern culture as it was understood until recently.

Right and so the more we move away from the state of nature? The more necessary we think it is to signal special roles for men and women. Human rights activists, right seem to be moving from the efficiencies of the liberal prem market economy, which is supposed to work optimally when guided only by the invisible hand, Human rights ideology promises that will all be more productive more, orderly and more happy once all social institutions are destroyed, nor traditional values are reno. So we’ve got these utopian schemes, the enlightenment that have steadily eroded society’s traditions. Let’s get more here from samuel your mine.

Speaker 2: Around the world. You could put it differently. They succeed because they avoided the failure. That be other powerful ideologies, whether those ideologies involve the nation state, or other kinds of international. And here you might think of lots of sub altered international like say Pan African would be an example or communism, most obviously, which was just as international as as human rights, but pointed in in a very different direction.

It emerged then human rights as I think, alternative to bankrupt political utopia. And that’s how we should think at least of its moment of breakthrough in the 19 seventies. Now let me pursue my model by laying out 3 stages in the history of human rights. And for this to be intel, you’ll have to look at my chart, which I hope at least some of you have. It lays out a kind of story of the public prominence or sal of human rights as measured by its citation in newspapers.

When did it begin to appear in Anglo American news since that’s what the chart shows over time. And the key points is that it’s a flat line until basically the forties when there’s a bit of a blip. But then, and this is what left out of all histories of human rights that I know about. There’s something that happens in the seventies. It’s and that’s really the kind of moment that creates us, and that’s what I wanna talk about.

So let me…

Speaker 0: Okay. So I just read a new… Essay by Amanda, Alexander. So she’s a professor. She she’s a senior lecture in law.

In Australia at the Thomas Moore Law school at Australian Catholic University, and I’ve got a new essay of hers that I’ve just been working my way through. And it’s called the ethics of violence recent literature on the creation of the contemporary regime of law and war, says she reviews recent literature that inter the development and deployment of the contemporary regime of political violence, from This is diverse literature, but it traverse the creation of legal categories the cultural values and the ethical concerns that shape the current regime shows how these laws and values are created through political and cultural negotiations and how they become political mechanisms that erase or legit violence. These works revealed the contingency and dangers of the current paradigm… Of ethical violence. They also show how difficult it is to escape from the paradigm.

Well, it’s not difficult to escape from this paradigm if you don’t belong to the left wing paradigm to begin with. So if you believe that the primary unit is not the individual, but the nation you’ve already escaped the paradigm. If you don’t believe in moral progress, you’ve already escape the paradigm. So if you’re an international relations realist, you recognize that there’s no such thing as progress because we all effectively live in an iron cage together, no one’s coming to rescue us and hence, great power politics is inherently tragic. And I found a great definition of the word contingent, and it came from…

Contingent magazine. So contingent simply means it’s say a fancy word that academic absolutely love how any given event is dependent on many inter related factors. So no event has a single cause. So to argue that history is contingent, is the claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions that each of these prior conditions depends upon other conditions and so on. So the core inside of contingency is the world is a magnificent interconnected place, change a single prior condition and any historical outcome.

But turn out differently.

Speaker 2: Let me go through my 3 stages, if you will. And if I have time, I’ll then come back. Talk about American international lawyers and their relationship to these stages. So let me start. I mean, a lot of you must be confused before my first stage.

Because, of course, the idea of rights is really old. All legal systems, including the Roman legal system provide rights And later, there are things like rights that hear in nature. What French revolutionaries called the rights of man. And you might ask, well, isn’t that the real origin of human rights. And indeed, the most famous book in this field by Lynn Hunt is called inventing human rights.

Speaker 0: So there’s an insight from milton friedman and economics that I think is a applicable to the topic of human rights, That is there’s no free lunch. Right? The the boar rights, you have less democracy and sovereignty you have the more democracy and sovereignty you have, meaning that people can vote for the type of society, politics that they want, than the fewer rights you have. So there’s a trade between rights and democracy. Alright.

So where do rights come from. Right? Luckily answers from God. Right? If you believe that rights come from God, it’s the statement of faith, It’s not worth trying to argue against it.

You can argue that the rights come from the use of human reason, are or this is what I would side with rights socially constructed, it’s ringing from the combination of particular genes with a particular environment. Before we had a concept of universal human rights that every individual should be guaranteed without regard to where he lives. Was taken for granted that the ethical use of violence was whatever violence was necessary to keep your people safe. Your nation was your extended family, the enemy, was he who threatens the the very lives of your family. So before we had human rights, universal human rights, Israel’s war and gaza would not have been considered genocidal.

Right? This term was barely used prior to the 19 seventies. People on the right don’t tend to talk about human rights nearly as much as people. On the left, that’s why to the best of my knowledge, there are no major right wing thinkers in the realm of human rights or international humanitarian law. On So people on the right are much more likely to talk about human responsibilities, leases as often as human rights.

And, Samuel Moines, the bloke I was just playing. He knows that the humanitarian immunization of human rights. So this idea that they are universal. Comes at the cost of local strong and expensive solidarity with these distant weak and cheap solidarity. And so wasn’t it necessary for solidarity with our fellow citizens to with a solidarity with our fellow humans gains ground.

So you’ll notice the people who most strongly believe universal human rights, tend to be the least concerned at building solidarity with their neighbors and their fellow citizens. In So conservatives believe in concentric or adjacent rung of solidarity. Right? That your first obligation is to yourself. To your family, your extended family to your friends, your community and to your nation.

Liberals people on the left tend to believe in a leap pro solidarity that jumps around from, say, an individual in California to say oppressed Lesbian in Uganda. So conservatives typically define their group loyal, concentric moving from their families to their communities to their class to their religions and nation. Modern Liberals defining trait is making a public, spectacle of how their loyal leap frog, over some un unwavering folks close to home in favor of people what they barely know. Christopher Caldwell wrote a terrific book in 20 20 called the age of entitlement, America since the 19 sixties. And 1 of his favorite politicians is Victor Or.

Who in July 20 14 lament the results of human rights based liberal democracy that the United States has been pushing since the end of the cold war. So under the communism, late 19 eighties, Viktor Ob was the fearless defender of what he thought were Anglo American ideas of Liberty but now he sees they are subject to a terrible paradox. The Victor Or complains that the liberal organization of society is based on the idea, but we have the right to do anything that does not infringe on the freedom of the other party. But out of the foundational principles that act years to understand the world is that everything the individual does affects other people. You spend your spare tie looking at sports or looking at porn, I or looking at works of Christian theology.

That’s gonna have an effect on other people. So Although this idea of universal human rights is extremely attractive, it is unclear who was going to decide the limits of these rights beyond which someone is in infringing on our freedom, this this is not a given somebody must decided it since we’ve not import appointed anyone to decide the limits of human rights. Since what we experienced continuously in everyday life is that the strong decide. Right? And the week are tram over, So conflicts on the acceptance of mutual freedoms and not decided according to some abstract principle justice, what happens instead is that the stronger party is always rights.

Right. And Samuel Moines, who Been playing excerpts from 1 of his speeches, notes the positive of evidence that the human universal human rights Crusade, has made any difference. Right? The change in sensitivities, though, he he thinks is enormously important. So back to mind.

Speaker 2: And it’s about the year of the American and French revolutions. So what what do we say about this period? Well, I think it’s quite misleading Basically to see that old history as the immediate source of the contemporary understanding of human rights, Now actually, people try to push the story much further back.

Speaker 0: So I just murdered Mike, and you said says, hey, what the hell you doing? You don’t even know me. That was fast. You sure you wanna make me a mod. I’m a free speech American so I will not block anyone.

Yeah. You make coherent cog comments, and I will moderate you. In case we get, , a swarm of anti social people in the chat, and then you can use your good judgment.

Speaker 2: Act to think about Greeks Jews. Christians and many others. But clearly with the creation of the idea of the rights of man of angle

Speaker 0: So I I’m a big believer in vouch nationalism. Right? I I think you should have to have a number of… Adults who have clean criminal records effectively vouch for you. So when I mod you, I vouch for you as as being a person of discerning judgment.

Right? I I make a quick quick judgment. And then if I think someone’s abusing their privileges, I remove their moderate status. From when comes one’s right to party from relatively affluent indulge parents are from the welfare state. Yeah.

Loyalty and love to those closest to us could be most difficult whereas grand absurd brought professions of loyalty and love. To people that we don’t really know are quite easy.

Speaker 2: American and then French revolution. We do have something that sounds a lot like human rights. But here’s the thing. Rights from their origin. As natural rights with thinkers like Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century.

And then in the revolutionary era, were about the construction of the state. If you claimed rice, hey.

Speaker 0: Let’s get out 1 of the show mike because just just getting to know you, so tell me what’s what’s your worldview?

Speaker 3: Hey. How’s it going?

Speaker 0: Good, man. Great to great to have you on the show.

Speaker 3: Oh, thanks for having me. I guess my first question is… Do you have a issue with human rights? I mean, I I know, obviously, it’s interesting where they came from where they drive from? You said is a God?

Is it , social consensus or whatever. I I think the world has improved under under human rights to some degree since, , what the Un, you 19 54 declaration on human rights was signed by most countries, I think. It’s so where where

Speaker 0: would you concrete see that improvement?

Speaker 3: Well, you look at, like, the elimination of Jim Crow laws here in America. I’m I’m an America, so I might be a little American centric. , blacks were were were held down, until the seventies. Right? Until certainly the civil rights movement and in 65 and And, of course, there’s some negative effects from that if you.

I don’t know if you’re a fan of Thomas Soul.

Speaker 0: Yeah. I’m a I’m a fan of Tom Sow. So we had an explosion. Of violence after you got civil rights legislation, and we had a steady decline of social trust, so I’m not sure that the removal of jim crow, cultural and and legal processes in the south. Was just clearly an evidently a a good thing.

You’ve had a dramatic decline in the black family since the ending of Jim Crow. So You used to have in in the black family, used to be far more solid, black children would grow up in a 2 parent household, and that was trashed. By civil rights, legislation and social welfare legislation. So I see the decline of the black family as a bad thing. I see the explosion in criminal violence, particularly, yeah, after the first civil rights legislation as a bad thing.

And I see the steady decline in social trust and social cohesion is a bad thing, and I see the loss of rights to private property and to freedom of association, as bad things. So I’m not at all. Sure that the civil rights legislation was a good thing.

Speaker 3: Well I disagree, and I I think you were correct in saying it was the social welfare programs. That had this unintended consequence of, breaking up the black family. I I used to say that myself sometimes, , that African American men did not react well to form more freedoms, because they obviously then many abandoned their children and their families. But I do think that was more on the on the social welfare programs, I’m sorry. Who who’s this senator?

What’s what was his last name?

Speaker 0: Senator, you you talking about a He humphrey saying that we need to step away from the shadow of states rights into the glorious Sunshine of human rights.

Speaker 3: No. No. The the guy you’ve you’ve are having clips of.

Speaker 0: Oh, that’s Samuel Mine. So he is a harvard historian.

Speaker 3: Okay. Because I thought I heard Mona hand. No. No. I’m sure the the famous Yes.

No, writing of mo hand in 68 or something about how the black family is gonna be, , wiped out or we we need to do something about black men of manning their families.

Speaker 0: Yeah. He he he wrote a famous paper in in the 19 sixties. So what whatever perspective, I think you take on any… 1 part of human rights. I think there’s something that we can both agree on and that is that all things come with trade offs.

There there’s no free lunch. And so has you have an expansion of human rights, you simultaneously have a decline in the right of citizens to vote for the type of society and politics that they that you want. And so even if 1 has considerable sympathy for human rights, when when recognized that it comes at a cost of sovereignty and democracy.

Speaker 3: Sure. Sure. If if you… Or talking on an… International scale, , I see what was it Nam, just their Supreme Court struck down a log against homosexuality.

So, the liberals are definitely winning in many parts of the world with with their arguments of of what human rec should be, whereas I’m big on Muslim, Youtube channels seen with the Islam, what is envoy says, and they’re very anti Lgbt, and they’re they’re holding to their sovereignty on that. To some degree. So…

Speaker 0: So do do you think a a Muslim Nation should have the right to decide for itself? What if any rights it wants to accord to homosexual?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I I mean, I think we have to maintain sovereignty. If we’re gonna maintain nation states as… I mean, that seems to be the way the world has shook out, , the fall of empires, of course. , as as a as an American who believes in a lot of freedoms, it’s it’s it’s kinda, a quan.

But yeah. Yeah. I mean, states have to be sovereign. They have to, , like like, at the Taliban. , they kicked all the girls out of school.

, the liberals are very upset with that. But , that’s that’s to some degree Islamic way. I don’t know if you ever heard of Daniel H you. He has a channel called the Muslim Skeptic. Yeah, he’s a Iranian.

Of iranian descent, but he’s he’s in Houston, and he did a whole thing on why female education is bad, , you see a lot of stuff on people saying feminism has destroyed much of much of the world or certainly, the gender roles and all sorts of things. But Again, I’m I’m kind of a libertarian more or less. So…

Speaker 0: So if if a Muslim nation wants to rule that goals and are not allowed to go to school, do you think that they should have that right or should there be some kind of intervention or armed, , attack on on the country to overthrow it if they don’t accord goals at the right to get a school.

Speaker 3: I would say they have the right, certainly to do that. I would not be in favor of armament invention. I think we need to get away from all this armed intervention. It hasn’t served as well. You, look at Afghanistan.

20 years of arm intervention. They just They went underground and just waited us out. But I would have no problem with, , liberal democracies. , making them a par cry or, , boycott them economically, ,

Speaker 0: Oh, what about closer to the home? Let let’s say you’ve got a black entrepreneur. He starts a business, and he he only wants to hire of black people. Would you like to see him prosecuted for violating the the civil rights of non black people who might want the opportunity to work for him?

Speaker 3: Yes. III used to be, like I said, I guess more libertarian. I remember in college several made the arguments if, , if a diner doesn’t wanna serve blacks, they shouldn’t have to. That’s, , business, but I when you’re conducting business, , we see this whole thing with the the bakery in Colorado and forests in Oregon or something not wanting to. Be at day weddings.

It’s it’s a hard hard balance with, , religious rights, in, some not religious at all, but I do support freedom of religion. But when you’re in business, you you’re in the public sphere sphere. You’re, , you you have to abide by laws on against discrimination. I’m I I think you could, unfortunately, , 1 1 of the things about America and Yeah. We’re a democracy while we’re representative a Republic technically.

But you have to have some… Bull work against the tyranny of the majority. You can’t just let things rule by , the masses. So, yeah, If if you were a black business owner, and you only wanted it to hire black people, and that could be proven, Yeah. The equal rights commission guys would have to come down on you.

Speaker 0: Do you think America is a better nation? That, entrepreneurs are not allowed to just hire who they want to hire.

Speaker 3: Well, if it… Yeah, if it’s based on on race, again, , the problem is Yeah. You might have some black guys. Who only hire black guys and that’d be good for the black guys, but the majority of people are still white and the majority of racism is… Against blacks or Indians or whoever.

And you would you would you could ultimately have some serious economic depression certainly in the south.

Speaker 0: And what if An employer can refuse to hire someone if they don’t like his re. Right? That’s being being religious is not necessarily a protected categories. So there are protected categories such as as race, But what which categories do you think should be protected so that we need government intervention to disrupt hiring practices. So clearly, you believe that the racial category should be protected, what about sexual orientation So should employers be forced to hire people of any sexual orientation?

Speaker 3: No. I’d I would not. Considered a protective class. But, here in America re… Religion is a protected class.

You you can’t discriminate against someone based on their religion.

Speaker 0: Well you can choose not to hire someone because you don’t like their. That’s

Speaker 3: that’s you can if if if they can prove. That… That’s the reason you didn’t hire them, , you can sue them. You can take them to court.

Speaker 0: I don’t believe that’s true, but 1 of us is is wrong. So I went went

Speaker 4: favorite it.

Speaker 3: I I knew this. There was a, a pretty famous case. Of I don’t think it was Mormons, but some some girls who work for burger King, and Burger King said, well, here’s your uniform. You wear Slacks in a shirt, and they’re they’re like, no, no. We’re girls.

We don’t wear Slacks. We we were skirts. They may been Jehovah jehovah’s witnesses. I’m not sure. But I.

Speaker 0: Wait. I just… Yeah. I just checked it out and you’re right. You can’t discriminate against someone because religion.

My my bag. Go ahead.

Speaker 3: That’s alright. So anyway, there was a whole case case on… You had to let them dress the way they want it. Be based on the religion. If it’s…

You you you gotta deter… You gotta prove. It’s a, , a true re religious belief, , sincerely held, I think is the term important.

Speaker 0: And is there anything…

Speaker 3: I don’t

Speaker 0: go ahead.

Speaker 3: Okay. I don’t think behavior can be a protected class. And homosexuality is clearly a behavior.

Speaker 0: Okay. And is there anywhere that you think the… Development of rights has gone too far, particularly in America and imposed an overly onerous burden on the majority and remove the democratic rights. So for example, Californian passed proposition 1 87, I believe in 19 96, They didn’t want to give certain welfare benefits to people in the state. People in the country illegally and California Supreme court ruled that it was illegal.

Bore for this to go into effect. So the people of California did not have sovereignty to decide to abs obtained from giving welfare benefits to illegal aliens.

Speaker 3: Yeah. That’s judicial over reach certainly. There there’s no reason that illegal aliens should be… I I don’t think rights of nations extend to illegal aliens. Apparently, that I think the court may disagree with me.

But to me, our constitution shouldn’t cover illegal aliens.

Speaker 0: Right. And so what what political issues get you the most… Excited these days. What what what gets you up in arms.

Speaker 3: Oh, I’m I’m not that passionate to get up in arms about… Almost anything. I’m a pretty easy going person. Never never been to a protest, never been shouting in the streets or anything, I I think the whole transitioning thing is is interesting. I was just actually…

Somebody recommended your channel to me when Was on a different channel. And the guy was talking about, , what is a woman and white. , when Cad Cad Jackson Brown couldn’t answer what a woman was is and she gave him Supreme court justice that was… You certainly embarrassing. I don’t I don’t know how…

And I don’t know if you saw that clip.

Speaker 0: Yeah. III would think I’m aware of it.

Speaker 3: A lot of.

Speaker 0: A lot of people on the laugh kinda asked what a woman is?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I think senator Blackburn, maybe or something female senator asked her, , can you define a woman and she said… In what context? I don’t know why the senator didn’t say in a legal context, but could he Jackson Brown said, well, Not a biologist. Like, Okay.

So what? You don’t know what a woman is. You can’t define a woman, but you’re a lawyer, , so, again, that was sad to see. So I I think, , we always have the the pendulum noise swings too far 1 way and then hopefully gets corrected it. , there’s…

I don’t know when this huge rush to do gender, , transitions and Puberty blockers and all this nonsense. , the Nih has come out with a study that says 80 percent of of, gender d teens is transit. , you get you gotta let puberty run its course. Kids get confused sometimes. Let’s not start pumping them full of drugs that have great effects on, their bodies and stuff.

And… So I think I think that’s kind of the big issue of our time right now.

Speaker 0: And do you think that children under the age of 18 should have the right to transition their their sex and to have their their sexual organs mutilated?

Speaker 5: No.

Speaker 0: What about same sex marriage? Do you think that should be imposed upon states, for example, that might oppose it?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I I thought there was a a decent compromise with the whole, , civil unions thing. I know the religious people get upset over term marriage, but that that doesn’t bother me any. I… If the guy wanna marriage each other, let them let them be turn I I would think the the way we should move forward is more the government get out of marriage altogether.

, obviously, there’s all sorts of laws that come around actual marriages. I think Marriage just kinda dying down as even an institution. I think we’d be better served if people actually wrote out contracts. I remember years ago. It’s probably 10:15 years ago.

There’s was a guy and I think 60 minutes or something him and his wife and he had literally literally rid out a wrote out a contract, , like, she has to have sex with him 3 times a week or whatever, blah blah blah, it was very detailed and stuff, But I think that would be a better better system if people were wanting to join themselves together, if be done contractually.

Speaker 0: Right. So how how would you describe your your world? Or your hero system, Your your notion of what’s heroic good and what is coward and, bad.

Speaker 3: I’ve I’ve never heard of a heroic system. I I think moral behavior towards your fellow man is good and being an asshole bad. I mean, , treat people properly and with respect and they should do the same.

Speaker 0: So do you believe that different people have different gifts that’s so the the gifts of Japanese Americans are different from the gifts of… Say West Africans, different from the gifts of people in Northern Europe, different from the gifts of, indigenous people in Central America, or do you believe that all groups have identical gifts?

Speaker 3: If by gifts, you mean, like skills or…

Speaker 0: Yeah. The. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. No. Of course, I mean, culture is a very powerful thing. In fact, I was just watching Thomas Soul and and he talked about the… , like, the Swiss walk watchmaker.

They were actually immigrants from, I think, I don’t know the Habsburg or somebody. And in and in the Uk that, some people were driven out of where they were, and they went went to England and and they brought their skills with them and , different cultural groups, how those skills can come with them in you see them through generations even though they’re in a different land. But, yeah, the the Japanese are gonna bring a whole different skill set than West Africans. , I remember, you can’t you buchanan when he was running for president once so he gotten a lot of trouble because he said, , who’s who’s gonna assimilate quicker into American culture, , a a British guy somebody from England or, , Az zulu from South Africa. And, , oh, that’s racist.

That’s racist. I mean, it’s a fact. I mean, there’s they’re are different cultures where our cultures, Obviously, we we came from the British. So we we align more with the Brits than we would with Africans.

Speaker 0: So what do you think is the basis for morality? Obviously, you don’t leave that morality comes from God. And do you believe that morality is each individual’s choice? Or do you believe morality primarily comes from society? 80, what do you see is the basis for morality?

Speaker 3: Yeah. There has to be a social consensus on morality?

Speaker 0: Eddie And would it help help to have that consensus if there’s more homo in the community as opposed to diversity.

Speaker 3: Sure. But Right. It also has to be homo j of… Of thought, not just of… But, yeah, Of of culture.

You have to have a… Everybody has to agree, , , we’re we’re constantly, , I’m all for the in the marketplace of ideas, and people battling it out, , that way, , what what what is freedom of speech? , I I guess you’re a Canadian or… Australian. Oh, you’re Australian.

Okay. So you’re not Luke ford. Oh, Yeah.

Speaker 0: I am look Forward. I’m. Yeah. I have in Los Angeles now.

Speaker 3: Oh, okay. So, like, Australia even. Right? You guys. Have hate speech laws and things like that.

In America, we don’t have hate speech laws. , the clan can still run around saying what they want about jews. , Obviously, in Germany, they don’t allow sw stickers to be displayed. , I think it was it last year. We had some nazis outside of Disney Road in Orlando everybody got upset that the Santos didn’t, , denounce it right away or something.

Oh, , ignore him. Is is the better thing to do. But yeah, You have to have some homo jd of of thought and culture to to create a nation nation state. Obviously, America’s is it’s a big nation. So there’s some diversity of thought through, , You’re in la.

I’m sure it’s gonna be a little different if you go to Birmingham, Alabama.

Speaker 0: So do you do you accept the theory of evolution?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I think that’s the best theory at the at this point.

Speaker 0: So would you expect that, evolution would, develop differently? Depending on where you evolve. So for much of the last 10000 years, there wasn’t a lot of travel say between Africa and Australia who Africa and the Americas. And so 1 would expect if 1 holds by evolution, that different peoples evolving in different environments would evolve to have different gifts.

Speaker 3: Absolutely.

Speaker 0: Yeah. So the evolutionary pressures in equator Africa are quite different than the evolutionary pressures. In northern East Asia or, Northern Europe or in Central America. So I would expect surviving and reproducing in completely different environments would produce people who are particularly skilled at different things.

Speaker 3: Absolutely. I’m my my big theory is snow. I think, , if you talk about the global… The north versus the south and how the the north is more industrialized and developed. I think a lot of that has to do with when winter came you better be ready.

So, , seal grasshopper up in the ant in parable. So in the north, people had to, , make, hay well, the sun is shining and store up food, and so they created a lot of technologies that the global south didn’t need. , you can go hunting all year around in equator electoral, Africa or even the Americas, I guess, my theory kinda falls apart with the North American Indians weren’t very advanced. I mean, the Had, like, long houses and stuff. But, anyway, absolutely, the your environment gonna, dictate your evolution to some degree.

Obviously, like, Australia has a bunch of weird animals compared to the rest of the world as an island. We have key deer here in Florida that are tiny little deer are out on the keys. They’re on little islands, so they don’t become as big.

Speaker 0: Let me ask you a question that’s completely out of left field, but see if you wanna entertain it anyway, because I think it’s an important question and I’ll take a minute on you. So to set it up, I had a a beautiful girlfriend, and I asked her… She was 41 at the time. So she was not a spring chicken. I asked her what percentage of your self esteem comes from being beautiful, and she said 100 percent.

And so I’ve developed a theory lately that you can pretty much detect the sources of our self esteem by how we spend our spare time. So if you spend, Have 1 majority of your spare tight with your family, then your your family in all likelihood is the primary source of your self esteem. I spend the majority of my spare time reading books, writing essays and doing live stream, so these activities are probably a large part of of my self esteem. If I was spending the majority of my spent time working out, then my my physical fitness would probably be a primary source of my self esteem. If I spent the majority of my spent time practicing my religion, which is orthodox judaism, then my practice of orthodox judaism in all likelihood, counselor for the majority of my self esteem.

So how well for you? How do you spend the majority of your spare time? And does that accord with your primary source of self esteem.

Speaker 3: Well, these days, I spend most of my time watching television and and Youtube. Just joined Youtube about a year ago. There’s a lot of content on it. I am reading 1 book that my communist cousin gave me. It’s called evil geniuses about how big business is ruined America, but, yeah.

I’m, I mean, I’m 55. I’m a old man. I just sit around. Don’t do much. I I think my self esteem was mostly forged, , in my formative years by my family, and , I played sports all through high school, and we won a couple state championships.

So…

Speaker 0: Wow. In which sports?

Speaker 3: I played football basketball in Baseball.

Speaker 0: Wow. And which sports did you win national state championships in?

Speaker 3: Basketball. And 86 and 87. Were… In Florida back then, there was 4. We were a 2 school small catholic school.

Speaker 0: And what what position I presume you a regard?

Speaker 3: I was I was a point guard. Yep.

Speaker 0: Okay.

Speaker 3: Yeah I’m only 05:10. So…

Speaker 0: What did you take away… Like, what did you take away from that into adulthood when you were no longer playing sports. But what what part of that experience has stayed with you?

Speaker 3: Well, obviously, the competitive nature of sports and also understanding you. You don’t win every game, but you should strive to. You, I think sports are a good good teaching tool for children and for young adults if you can continue. I did go to the University of ford and I walked on for the football team. Made the team, but I have bad shoulders.

They tend to pop out of the sockets, So that didn’t last long.

Speaker 0: So my experience and observation is that men tend to love competition and women not so much. But y’all thoughts true.

Speaker 3: That’s true. But I I think we are teaching girls to become. More competitive. Obviously, it depends on the girl. , I have a buddy.

He’s got 2 small girls, , I don’t know. 8 and 10 or something. And he does Brazilian Ji with him. I was quite surprised I didn’t realize, like, girl’s wrestle in high school now. There was that 1…

There was that 1 trans kid in Texas or something who wrestling with the girls and, , was undefeated or something, but like I didn’t realize they had… In if you watch Youtube, If you go on it, there’s there’s girls who wrestle boys now. Apparently, they have leagues where where the girls wrestle of the boys. Matter of fact, when I was in high school, there was 1 girl who was on a wrestling team, but a different school. And , the nuns made us forfeit to her.

They wouldn’t let the boy wrestle the girl. But I, , obviously, title 9, and we’ve we’ve integrated women in the sports. Too to a pretty good be great. I I think there has been some negative, consequences from that. Unfortunately, we have some girls now who act more, like boys, like, in the criminal realm, then then we should, , you got female gangs now that wouldn’t exist at pre 19 seventies, I would say.

But for the most part, I think it’s been a good thing for for the women and the girls.

Speaker 0: And what was your major in college?

Speaker 3: Electrical engineering.

Speaker 0: Oh, interesting. And was that your profession?

Speaker 3: No. I never… I’ve never… Well, I did data center design for a while that and integrated some of that a little bit, But the No. I ended up dropping out of college.

I bought a house and just went to work full time. I own owned some apartment buildings, and had I’ve had different jobs, but none of them really obviously, I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. I ended up getting now. Aa in accounting, actually, but I’ve never been an accountant either. So…

Speaker 0: So did you… Primarily work in in real estate or every every profession comes with a certain perspective on life. So so how how your your jobs affected your perspective on life?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, owning an apartment building certainly has probably affected my perspective of… Certainly reinforced my more conservative leaning, again, like, the idea of welfare, I think is is is a bad idea. We… I had low income rentals.

So I dealt a lot with section 8 I don’t know if you’re familiar with section. Yes. It’s, , government subsidize. Right. So for instance, I…

This this 1 woman. I remember well. This is, like, 19 94 or something. Her name was missus Coleman. She was 19.

You, she black woman. She had a 5 year old daughter, She’s renting a 2 bedroom from me. I think it was, like, 450 bucks back then. She paid 7 dollars. The government paid the rest.

So summer comes and her 7 dollar check stop showing up. Yeah. I don’t really care That much. Said bucks the government. By that time, the government had figured out.

To send the money to the landlords when my dad owned these buildings, actually I bought bought them from him. And when he first bought that building in 81, they the government would send the money to the people. Right? So a lot of them would try not to pay the rent for, like, 2, 3 months and know, give a Sa story and then just move out on you or make they you should making in victim, which can take a month or 2. You So they’re…

They build up the money. Well you’re working on getting them evicted. But anyways, this woman worked as a teacher’s assistant. So I’m down there doing work. And I saw her and I said hey miss Coleman, I I see your checks have stop coming.

She goes, well do ? I don’t work during the summer I’m like, okay. Not really, but anyway, I’m, like, well, maybe when you go back to work next time, save up 21 dollars or 28 dollars. So when summer comes, you have your rent money or pay in advance if you’re like, ? She…

And she goes, well, I I don’t think I’m going back to work. I can make more money on welfare. Like, oh, okay. So, of course, ultimately, she ended up losing her section 8 housing because part of part of the deal is that she had a job. Oh, 1 of the things I said to her I said, well, don’t don’t she think you should build a resume.

Of course, she says, well, what’s a resume? So I explained to her a work history. , your a teacher’s assistant now. But if you stay at that for a couple years, maybe you can get a better job. And she’s like, well, I can make more money on welfare.

So sure enough she quit her job or didn’t go back to her job and sat around until I had to do victor because then she lost her section 8 housing. , I remember, like, some charity, some nuns called me. Oh, was she a good person. Well, she’s obviously lazy because she didn’t wanna go back to work. So, , her electric was paid for her.

I remember 1 time I was down there and said Like I, I feel his cold air coming out of our window. I’m like, man, this window doesn’t feel very well I look at it. It’s open, like, 4 inches. She’s sitting on the step talking to 1 of the neighbors. I’m like miss Coleman, , this window up.

Your ears on? She said, oh, that’s so If I can hear the phone ring. Like, first of all, why are you sitting on the steps when you’re… Got an air conditioned house here. Why don’t you sit in the house and talk?

, I’m in Florida, hot outside. But anyways, if you don’t pay your electric bill, I guess you don’t care that. You got air conditioners coming up the window. But my other job was like I said, I did data data center design for, about 15 years, a friend of mine actually owned the company. And that was interesting work, but

Speaker 0: Yeah. We. Let let’s go back to being a landlord. Did you notice that different ethnicities make better or worse tenants?

Speaker 3: No. Not really. It is interesting, the the the biggest building, a 9 unit building. That my dad bought in 81. And then they had A4P bought in 79, and they’re they’re both in S saint.

Pete, and they’re just on the north side. They’re both one’s on third avenue North one’s on second second Avenue North. And so, like, an 81, the 9 unit building was was all white. In fact, my grandfather came down from Wisconsin for a winter and when they were retired, and they they stayed in in 1 of the apartments. By by the nineties, it it it was all black.

But but the poor whites don’t make much better tenants than than the poor blacks.

Speaker 0: What about Asian females? I would expect that they would be the group least likely to get into trouble with the law, and therefore, also the most likely to pay their bills, and to be good tenants, meaning northeast Asian females. Alright. Females also Korean Chinese or Japanese,

Speaker 3: Yeah Never had any asian done.

Speaker 0: Well, we know that they’re very low crime rates. So wouldn’t wouldn’t that tip you’re off that they probably be, more responsible and respectful tenants?

Speaker 3: Sure. I mean, but none of them ever applied to to live in those buildings. So not much I I can do about that. Sure. There’s…

And there’s Youtube guys who have, , show people in Japan and South Korea, , they have stores where there’s no 1 in the store. You just go in and you buy your stuff. You pay for it, you leave. And ironically to me, it was like, this woman… It was like, a candy store or an ice cream shop.

Like, you would think the teams would be in there, stealing. Stuff. But, yeah, other their culture is so, , shame centric and , you would shame the family if you got caught stealing and whatnot, so stuff nobody steals. Yeah, which is ironic because I remember 1 time being and a friend, I think we were more city or something, but it this big black women’s going down the street to scream and something, and my buddy looks at me He’s just like, they they have no shame. Like it?

So I’m not a religious person, and I’m not big on, , religious shaming, but culturally, you have to have some… Yeah. So Mean, Japanese… And, , like, I I don’t behave that way. I…

There’s some rock song where the guy’s like, , yeah. I I could do drugs every night, but what if they found me in a ditch, , like some cheesy high school kit, , in a, weird ironic way. There, , it was like, a punk band to 2. I don’t… I forgot forget who was, but derek kinda say, , at some point, you gotta grow up and you gotta feel, , some responsibility to society and and feel shame if you fail in that responsibility.

Speaker 0: So in 19 71, there was a Us supreme Court, decision court G versus do power company. And it was about employment discrimination, and it

Speaker 3: developed black.

Speaker 0: Right. So this this theory developed desperate disparate impact, So you could not employ any kind of, test for employment applicants that would have a disparate impact on different groups. So for example, you can’t, use an Iq test or it’s equivalent because different groups tend to score differently on Iq test. Are you a fan or not a fan of desperate disparate impact theory?

Speaker 3: Not a fan. I mean, III think I read on that case 1 time, Duke Energy. Right? When… To do normally the the tobacco guys, But…

And it was something about after the civil rights. Right? Like, they didn’t hire blacks that it in North Carolina or something, 1 of the Carolina. And so then they started adding, , well, you have to have a high school diploma. And and a lot of blacks didn’t have high school degrees at that point.

I I can’t remember if that’s what the… The whole thing. Yeah. Turns. Right?

Speaker 0: Well, they were using the equivalent of an Iq test and it had, a desperate impact on different groups.

Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah. I mean, if if you come up with a with a test that you say on all applicants must pass to become part of it to be… To be employed, there shouldn’t be a problem with that. Yeah.

Even if it’s the Sat, I know that, , I know some people always claimed. All the Sat are racially biased. And the… The only thing I’ve ever heard was somebody used the word Reg as an example.

Speaker 4: Like, Right.

Speaker 3: I would a black kid know what a reg got is. Like, okay. I don’t know. You gotta come across the word. If, , if you’re not in the yacht club, you might not know it either if you’re white.

So what? Yeah.

Speaker 0: So life has a way of teaching us what we’re good at? What what have you learned from life about? Your particular skills that stand out from other people.

Speaker 3: I don’t know. Well, I’ve been told I have very good follow through and attention to detail. My last job actually, a friend of mine started a company. I relocated to New Smyrna Beach from the other coast of Florida to help him start this importing flooring, so I… Like, Ran his warehouse and whatnot.

It I always found it funny I mean, I’d call people back in the they’re, oh, well, thanks for calling me back. I’m like, well, yeah. I’m… We’re trying to sell you something. Why wouldn’t I call you back?

But the industry is, like, kinda known for people not following through on things. It it seem very bizarre to me. People are, like, just… Thrilled when I would call call them back to give them the information they want it. I’ve always been confident in my ability to make money in America.

So I don’t know if I have any great skills, but, you, as they say showing up is 90 percent of it sometimes.

Speaker 0: Right.

Speaker 3: I’m I’m very mutual being in of German descent. We’re we’re very pun functional. Right.

Speaker 0: Okay. Mike Gonna let you go for now, but feel free to come back later on in the show if you hear some things that you wanna comment on. So make a note to yourself if you can to about things you wanna comment on and and free feel free to pop back in at any point later on in the show.

Speaker 3: Alright. Sounds good.

Speaker 0: Okay. Man. Take care. Okay. So say, get myself together here when to catch up and return to the topic of human rights.

Speaker 2: You argued that your state had failed. To protect your rights. And because of those natural rights, you had a permission from nature to replace your state with a new 1. That used to be called revolution. And we did that in this country And of course, in different ways, the French who really are those who began speaking about the rights of man did.

And so you could put this another way. Rights in their early versions were about the construction of citizenship spaces. Which were necessarily bounded. Now that seems to me…

Speaker 0: In other words, so we used to think of of rights it’s something that primarily came from the state and and rights was something that the state gave to its citizens. Alright. I wanna return to this essay by Amanda Alexander on what constitutes ethical violence. So she begins war is a cultural out artifact. What constitutes war, who is allowed to wage war which forms of violence are accepted, glorified or aboard, or shaped within particular societies, though I agree with all of this.

The rules governing, war reflect and reinforce cultural concepts of war. Contemporary ideal of acceptable war is a carefully regulated humanitarian war. So a good war should be carried out in a way that is clean, precise spa of civilians and even combat. And yes, this is the current human rights focus. Idea of what a good war is it’s clean.

Purpose of war should be to protect the weak to control the violent, genocide and crimes against humanity are the ultimate transcript russians in this paradigm of war, humanitarian and the protection of civilians are the best justification. So I would add to this definition of war being a cultural fresh out of artifact. It’s also a biological thing. Right? Different forms of life, struggle for survival.

You don’t find in nature multiple subs species living in harmony with each other. 1 thing that you do find in nature is niche construction, right? Organisms changing their environment to make it more suited their thriving. So the best interest of 1 organism, for example, often clash with the best interest of other organisms. Right, eucalyptus, for example, emit chemicals that make it difficult for other plants to grow underneath its branches.

Lemon ants use form acid, which is a herbicide. Right? So they eliminate other plant life and tree life that’s un for their lemon ant colonies. Lemon ants produce distinctive habitats known as known as devil gardens and they do this by producing an herbicide. So cultures that don’t wage more effectively die out.

Right? Most forms of life die out. And so I would expect that the primary concern for any people is to survive. The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry on pessimism notes The absolute ideal of is nearly impossible to achieve because we must harm other beings to survive. For example, we must kill to eat.

If you don’t eat animals, alright, you’re very likely to be at cognitive, social and a series of health deficits. I know I raised of vegetarian being a vegetarian in my whole life and there’s only about 3 years ago when I started taking b organ capsules that I managed to regain my health. Our closest relatives or about the closest, the chimps. Right, they also wage war. Netflix has a great documentary series called Chimp Empire, which at released in 20 23, and then it published a note about what happened since the end of filming.

So we have a new central No go alpha chimp Right, Jackson, leader of the central group died at the end of the final episode as a result of injuries he summit fighting enemies in the Western group of chimps. He left behind a void. So we saw Abrams, the younger cocky would be alpha at least tentatively assumed Jackson’s place, but Abrams position is anything but secure. His hold on the top spot is tenuous because he’s been unable to form strong ties to other males who support him, right, friendships and alliances can change in an instant between humans and between chimps. This is as true in other primates as it is in humans.

Chimpanzee, social relations change today’s friend can easily become tomorrow’s foe. And not or budding relationships come to fruition. So among a certain crowd, the contemporary ideal of acceptable warfare as a camp carefully regulated humanitarian war, that is the ideal in a certain group, but when a group fights for its survival, these ideals tend to drop away. Right? Wars tend to escalate and when wars escalate, they tend to overwhelm ideals.

And every individual has a hero system usually gets it from his community, and it is this hero system that determines which forms of violence are accepted, glorified or abroad. And often insults to your particular hero system will be experienced as kin as assaults to your body. So the contemporary ideal of war bears almost no relationship to reality when you are fighting a war of survival. But this lack of connection is no obstacle to enthusiasm for international humanitarian law to or human rights. In fact, is what makes human rights so exciting.

You’ve gotta crusade that produces amazing feelings and these amazing feelings need, make absolutely no difference to suffering in the real world. So the founder of Amnesty International said, we don’t need to make any real world difference. We just need to provide a space for those with left wing utopian ideals to get excited and and feel great. So like human rights activist, you’ve got evangelical Christian to also have a utopian ideal. They dream of the world coming to Christ.

So the ideals of both human rights activists and evangelical Christians don’t receive much support in reality, but that does not diminish their emotional and cultural power. I I too have a vision. I’d like to build a world a home and fur it with love to grow apple trees and honey bees and snow turtle dove. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I’d like to hold it in my arms and keep a calm company.

I’d like to see the world for once or standing hand in hand. And hear them echo through the hills for peace throughout the land. Right I I I’ve also occasionally had vision of Sex with unlimited numbers of new bio women You might call me a dream, but I’m not the only 1? Though, why do visions of unlimited sex and the whole world coming to Christ. Receive no respect from our ruling elite, provisions of clean wars command respect.

Well, because of the particular hero systems held by a dominant elite. Comes down to Hero Systems, my Dear boy Hero Systems. Right back to Amanda Alexander’s essay There was a moment of optimism about this humanitarian ideal, and its apparent translation into reality at the turn of the century yet this optimism was soon tense with the deep on unease ease after 09:11, hope for peace and civilized interventions were followed by decades of endless war, violence persisted both in more fantastical and more subtle forms Torture headings, human shield drone warfare surgical strikes and global policing. So international relations realist such as myself don’t believe in moral progress. So this moment of optimism was a moment of optimism only among those possessing a certain left wing hero system.

Right? 1 focused on. International human rights outside of this Hero system, I think there was such optimism for the complete disappearance of violence, realist. For example, don’t believe in progress in international relations, you don’t believe in progress, you don’t believe in human rights. And if you don’t put the individual first.

You don’t believe in human rights. Let’s get a little bit more here from 7.

Speaker 2: Very different from the sense that human rights now has. Now the rights of man may have involved an appeal to nature, , like Jefferson, nature and nature’s God. But they didn’t involve an appeal to any kind of robust international law. In fact, the idea of the international wasn’t even available. At the time of the American revolution.

And in terms of their political outcome, rights were about creating sovereignty. That’s would be the the crucial point to take away.

Speaker 0: Okay. Let Sam back on the show, Sam, Anything you heard that you wanna talk about?

Speaker 5: Hey, Luke, yeah. Certainly, it was a lot very interesting discussion you had there with Mike in Florida. III, genuinely enjoyed it. It was enlighten that , he he’s a he set his families from Wisconsin, he’s a libertarian and he he’s an atheist, but he’s libertarian conservative beliefs and and he was a landlord and he’s still… He’s a landlord so it…

, the the thing is that that, when I was living in America in New York and Brooklyn, New York, it I was exposed to everyone and everything, but, Atheist liberal, progressive Jews in New York. A were were the ones that I took a a great job d to. I I saw them as being overly compromising and allowing for d to take hold in America, and this came from irr religious people politically, I driven people, ideological types of people that, intellectual and everything that, leftist just atheist jews latched themselves onto, and they created, 1 huge front in America. Of white guilt ridden , Wasp types of whites together with these leftist Jews and they became over bearing, and they’ve really run the country into the ground with with and ob… Ob about over with human rights, over with the supposed to Down and the, minority groups that they have to constantly virtue signal towards and suck up to, it ruined the country.

I left America because of it. I I… , I was in the Us military. I was in the Us Army with all the different types of ethnic groups Hispanics, Africa… In Americans whites…

I got to know everybody. This was in the late nineties into the 2 thousands, in And that’s what… , you still felt a sense a sense of cohesion, and America, American identity, and American and all that. When I came back and after 09:11, it all started going downhill. Everybody walked started going into their little clicks, and they they became extreme in their positions with especially Lgbtq.

When I got, , exposed to Lgbtq, and then the the African American started becoming over bearing with their b nonsense, and then antifa final America is becoming what’s the word for a balkan. It’s it’s it’s becoming balkan, it’s it’s fracturing very visibly. And it’s just not an appealing place to be anymore because there there is no real American cohesion in America. It’s been totaled. It’s been ruined.

And part of it is this obsession with rights and human rights and you they cast they threw away all of their religious values. They threw away conservative values, and they gave in. They gave into the guilt tripping, they gave into the brow beating, the the white guilt, also, especially, a with that, that that it made it possible for every devi and degenerate to get his way in America. And and and and Ama, A, , Middle Eastern Jew, born in Israel raised in America, I I am by nature conservative. Although I grew up in a liberal city.

And I indulged in that, and I learned the hard way on, , on my skin by interacting with these people and trying to emulate them steady how stupid and sick it is, how it it evolves really quickly. It degenerate and and it and I saw it d generating, and I had to get away from it.

Speaker 0: To what city? What city did you grow up in?

Speaker 5: In New York City in Poland and in New York? I mean, los Angeles is probably worse. Los Angeles has work. Los Angeles is is a is a is a hell. Los Angeles is a Were they say about Los Angeles?

Lost. Lost. Lost Angeles, the the lost, the city of the lost.

Speaker 0: And and how long did you serve in the American armed forces? Because not many Jews do?

Speaker 5: No. I’m… There are a lot of Americans jews that I ran in to. The, but they were Midwestern or they were, like, a small town there, multi generational jews. I was in for 3 years from 19 98 till 2001.

I was stationed in Germany in N and outside of N On spa. Hey, and I got deployed it till to Turkey. I got deployed to Israel. It it… I had a good time, and luckily, , for me, I almost got deployed into a, a war zone in A what’s, the name of that place in the Balkans.

Speaker 0: Kosovo.

Speaker 5: Kosovo, Kosovo, Kosovo. Yeah. Kosovo. Thank god. That didn’t happen.

I didn’t approach… I didn’t appreciate being shot up with a a million in 1 vaccines that… And then they shot me up with the anthrax, and that’s the that’s what sealed the deal for me that that killed my desire to wanna continue with the military

Speaker 0: When when did you… When did your enlist end before or after 09:11?

Speaker 5: The 4 09:11, I arrived in back in New York about 6 7 months prior to 09:11. And then that’s, , that’s when all hell broke loose in that.

Speaker 0: Do you remember? 09:11? Like, where you were that? Day when you. Tell me tell me about their experience of 09:11.

Speaker 5: Oh, believe it or not. I I was driving a cab. Not a yellow cab. It was more like a call… A car service cab in Brooklyn.

It was like this tacky, it was an old police car, a it was a tacky kind of, like, a… Like real tacky collar. Like lime, whatever in blew. It was fun. It was a fun script in an until 09:11 happened I was working the night shift, and I was actually driving around Brooklyn and and Manhattan all night.

And I I came back home, and it was, like, around 5 or 06:00 in the morning, and I was sharing an apartment with my younger brother. In Brooklyn. And he was at work. And believe it or not, he was working at a Morgan Stanley, he at in a building in downtown, and he was working at a firm, he was a stock broker. Time.

He was working… He worked at a firm in the twin towers in the World Trade center, but 2 months before he changed a tab he he moved to another, firm Morgan Stanley. And guess what? So I I come home. I fall asleep, I was a beat I was exhausted I fell asleep.

And he calls me at 09:00 in the morning, and I, , I’m I’m kinda of, like s it to answer the phone. Like, yeah. You gotta open the tv. You gotta open the Tv. Open the watch the Tv.

It’s, like, I I just saw it with my own eyes. He was there in the in the in the in a building right near the world trade center with a view. You saw the the planes crashing into the towers. He saw the the people jumping to their deaths. Because , everything was burning around them, and they he saw the most terrific things.

And then when he were… He he he was… They told them they told them not to evacuate the office. Building. Not until, , they knew nobody knew it.

They didn’t know what they were doing but the… For the longest, they told him not to evacuate, and then everybody decided on their own to evacuate. And he started , making his way uptown and towards the Brooklyn Bridge. And that’s when the buildings collapsed. And he ran away.

He was 1 of those people that ran away from the… From the debris from the cloud of , dust, the dust from the concrete and all the app, y ashes and the, the the, , horror. And we thought he was dead. ? So he…

And back then, there were no cell phone and that that many cell phone. So we waited until the end of the day, and he finally came back home. He walked all the way home. Cell from downtown and Manhattan all the way to our apartment in in Brooklyn, which was, like, , about a 2 hour walk down to, like, Madison, the Madison area, like, matt… Where Madison high school is, Madison that that part of Brooklyn.

Anyway, so we will… We’re glad that he was alive… what I saw. It’s like, I gave him a big bear hug fight I thought he was dead. And, then, , just once everything calmed down, I, , and people were allowed to go back to the downtown area, I drove there, with the cab.

And and, also, III took a the subway there to see the the wreckage I I saw with my own eyes. It was surreal. It was other otherworldly to see that kind of wreckage. The steel the bed steel I saw. I was like, I had my job fell down to the floor.

I… When I I saw it with my own eyes, and the and the the of the the skeleton. The skeleton of the world trade center was still kind of like, standing. It it was… Unreal.

It was like surreal. It was like a movie.

Speaker 0: And did… Was there a smell? Was there a particular smell?

Speaker 5: Audio? Oh yeah. Forget about it for, like, a, a month or 2, all the whole burr… All all 5 borough, they got a whiff of the of the of the debris of the fire of the there was the the glass or, like, a the ass asbestos… Oh my god.

Everybody got a taste of that for, like, 2 months. I went to the gym. I couldn’t… I was hacking my lungs out, and the… Because the whole city was…

And all the surrounding barrels got, , works exposed to toxic fibers and and the smells. It’s… It it it was horrific. It was horrifying.

Speaker 0: And the dust, the dust would have contained human remains.

Speaker 5: Yeah. That’s true. That… The the very morbid, yeah. Very morbid We we knew that.

We understood that. Yeah.

Speaker 0: And anything that you you learned from your time serving overseas in Germany did that affect you?

Speaker 5: Yeah. I wanted to learn a lot about history, and I was living it there. I searched out history everywhere I went I went to the battlefield. I went to Normandy. I went to where the battle of the bulge was.

I went to, What’s the name of that, the Best stone, Best stone. I went to World war 1, , the mar. I I went to all the Battlefield. I will… I that stuff interested me a lot, inter interested me a lot.

And where it was in Ba. There were a lot of a old Nazi, bay, , buildings and structures that even we we had field exercises. And I saw them and it’s, like, even know, it was very interesting at to learn all this stuff a firsthand. And I felt patriotic. I felt very American and as an American soldier in Germany, I’ve felt the the energy and the spirit of it and everything.

And I was very much into being a New Yorker and very much into being an American. But it what ruined it for me, honestly is the subject you’re discussing now. When they started ob about human rights, they started ob about writes for these freaks and writes for those freaks and it’s like, at the expense of who, at the expense of my right, the expense of the heterosexual. At the expense of the conservative, not necessarily just white, all a, like, regular, a heterosexual to people were tram on in in the name of human rights in America, and it made American degenerate and unbearable Yeah.

Speaker 0: Like, III… For example, I believe that marriage is only between a man and a woman. And so it physically visceral hurts me. The have as the law of the land that 2 members of the same sex can can marry each other. I I find that repel.

And also, I believe that the military should be a heterosexual institution. And The the idea that, Anyone of any sexual orientation is welcome is again, repulsive to me because I have a hero a system that that values the military is as a heterosexual. Institution. So I think we have the the same kind of visceral response.

Speaker 5: Yeah. Absolutely. The Russians and the Chinese, they don’t have don’t tell in their military. There’s no such thing. And and and their military is far more aggressive, far more serious than the American military.

That’s that I know for fat.

Speaker 0: And hezbollah released a video last week that showed drone footage over Hai. And Yeah. I believe that you’re quite intimately aware of of P… What what was reaction? Yeah.

What was your reaction?

Speaker 5: I live in Cafe. what the… I I think kind of like, In in a a sort of, like a sinister way thinking that not necessarily trusting the media. This was allowed to be, released, and that drone was not shut down for a reason. It’s basically, the hezbollah had their reasons to try to menace us, threaten us with this footage.

But Israeli, defenses and Israeli politicians probably wanted this footage to come out. You can guess why if you think a little more, a sinister, , con, and sort of, like, dia. Because the war has to happen. So that footage was allowed to be released in order to create more cohesion amongst the Israeli public and Israeli, people. In order to basically, get us to to, create unite in in in, unite in a in a combined United fraud to say, look, this is a real threat.

We need to get to deal with it. We can have this threat hanging over us a, , permanently or it has to be dealt with to So for that reason, I believe this footage was released, not by the Hezbollah, but it was it was allowed to be done. It could’ve have been even Arab locals in Israel in Hai with drones that transferred the footage to the Hezbollah. The… It’s not it’s very easy to get this kind of footage satellite imagery.

The Iranians have this, the satellite imagery all everything is exposed to everything it is visible to everyone. We can see them. They can see us. But the footage being released from Hezbollah men sort of psychological warfare tool actually works to our benefit. It works to our benefit to get everybody on board and sort of, in a state of unity and cohesion in dealing with the Hezbollah.

Because even believe it or not, our gay Lgbtq piece type don’t like being threatened with death.

Speaker 0: Yeah.

Speaker 5: From she radical terrorists. So it it quiet them down. And there was a a gate parade here. It was very low key in Hai just this past Friday. It it it came and went and they didn’t make a big deal about it.

But they they they scheduled that, I guess they had at whatever. But , I don’t believe but that we will have Lgbtq rights very… Soon soon, there won’t be, any such state. Not in Israel, and not even in the west that the world is on the verge of a, a total nuclear apocalypse. Everybody is not is that has any…

A sense of what’s happening and knows the urgency of what’s developing. And all of these, decade , indulge is the west part took for the sake of virtue signaling and feeling good and feeling good, And let’s get rid of the pay patriarchy. And all this d generously, all this the the whole downward spiral is gonna end up very very badly. And Americans, especially in the conservative states arrest states should speak up should speak out and should feel una a shame in saying, this is where it stops. A dead stop, dead halt here.

, no Lgbtq anymore in in in where we live. That’s it. It’s over. No more.

Speaker 0: You Yeah. Do do you feel particularly vulnerable in Hai compared to other parts of Israel to Hezbollah?

Speaker 5: No. No. We’re very heavily defended… We have multi layered air defense, and I was in the air defense in Germany. I was a sting gunner.

A sting missile against low low altitude helicopters and jets, low flying, and I I fired to a few of them, and I hit my targets. But in Israel, we have very well developed air defenses, and, even if we get hit, and our infrastructure gets hit, and we might have electricity go down for a while. When this happens the rage the rage. We’re we’re not your typical leftist liberal American jew types that need defending or that need the police or that need the what you mc call at the… What what is that organization southern popping center?

Yeah. But the other 1 wants the problem it. And and what’s the other 1 called?

Speaker 0: 1 them. Yeah.

Speaker 5: And the the the the are 2 main ones, The the in America. Yeah but they they

Speaker 0: always defamation league.

Speaker 5: Anti defamation league and all this crap. Okay. Yeah. Listen. In Israel, when we get threatened, and when our lives are threatened, we fight back.

We don’t wait for somebody to fight for us. We don’t wait for somebody to defend us. I mean, we we appreciate the help from the United States, and America’s Israel’s military, patron. And there’s an alliance there. There’s a, , strategic partnership in alliance.

But nobody has been fighting our wars for us, I’m sorry, the Americans can, we think that or say that can go fuck themselves. All the wars America fought in the Middle East war for American economic and geopolitical interest. They were not for this… In the name of defending protecting Israel. It was all the name of the Pet dollar.

It was all the name of He. It was all the name of a, , keeping other powers at Bay or blocking them. It was B , Big new B a great game were the British great game. The Americans that assume that all these Middle East wars were fought for us to protect us. You’re dumb, you’re ignorant.

You’re naive. Alright? Israel fought all of its wars on its own. We’ve bled and fought for this country. We’ve died for this and how dare you say that a America fought for Israel.

You didn’t fight for Israel. You fight that if for yourselves, free for your longevity from your, military and economic supremacy. All that can go flying out the window as far as the American Jews, and Israeli Jews are concerned, it it wasn’t Americans that died in Israel’s as independence, more more of independents, 6 day war, the O award, this recent war that we’re going through. We don’t have American boots on the ground, and we don’t want American boots in on the ground. We don’t need the this a , a nanny kind of attitude that they on Americans have about protecting Israel.

Oh, the good Christians, oh, they’re fighting god’s fight for the jews. And for Jesus maybe. Yeah. Onward Christian soldier by ass. It’s all about the money.

It’s all about the the world reserve currency, which America has now lost.

Speaker 0: Okay. Let me let me let me interrupt you here. There’s a question in the chat. Did you listen too much New York City talk radio such as Bob Grant when you live there.

Speaker 5: Believe it or not. I grew up on degenerate a radio. I grew up on Howard Stern.

Speaker 0: Okay. And Why did you listen to Howard stern? What did he you do for you?

Speaker 5: Because he he’s a big jew that I, related to that I identified with. It was funny. It was humorous. I connected and identified with a Jews in New York.

Speaker 0: And when did you stop listening to H?

Speaker 5: When he became degenerate d deprived ad devi. When it… It’s when it turned point of graphic, it stopped being funny.

Speaker 0: Okay. And what about Bob Grant? Did you ever a listen to Bob Grant?

Speaker 5: Not familiar with that guy.

Speaker 0: Okay. Okay. So I grew up on…

Speaker 5: I up on comedy. I’m a New York comedy. I like Conan and O’brien. I liked the the late night to , variety shows. That’s what I…

That’s my time in New York in the nineties. That’s when I had my the the best time that was a fun time in New York.

Speaker 0: And did you go through a Shiva when you were growing up? Or did you go to a public score?

Speaker 5: No. I did half and half. For actually, I was exposed to both. Half of my, a schooling in public school. Most of my grade schools was a Shiva.

It was a regular grade school then, junior high was Shiva, and then high school… What I went to a Brooklyn high school that was, like, considered a like, 1 of the top ranking schools it was, like, it it it it ranked tie in the in the quality of education. Went to Edward Mu high school. And it was no school.

Speaker 0: What why why were you sent to a public school normally, orthodox parents or send their kids to a orthodox jewish school?

Speaker 5: Because it was actually a a good, a place to go as far as other or Toshiba students that I went to to school with and we’re competing to get into that school. It’s like Stu. It’s like, it’s like AAA high brow elite a public schools in In New York or at least in my day, they were considered, like, top notch, and you

Speaker 0: don’t did you like it? Did you respect it?

Speaker 5: I did. It was a great school. I had great teachers. And I, , And, , And I didn’t… And and I got to a mix with everybody, Jews and non Jews, blacks, whites, Hispanics and that these were , considered, , you had you had to apply to get into this high school.

Everybody that went there, was it was a bit more quality than your typical public school students. You understand? So Yeah.

Speaker 0: They’re at standards. So… It’s

Speaker 5: a outstanding. That’s a good way of saying, yeah. The head.

Speaker 0: And how did it affect your Yi cut?

Speaker 5: It made… It it it it diminished it because I I started becoming more secular. I started becoming more , into popular culture. III took up the arts, photography and music. And then 1 thing led to another, and I was influenced by my friends and I went to an art school, in in mid midtown Manhattan, the school of visual arts.

So I… I started… That’s when I started turning a a more, liberal more, like a it’s a sexually prom to. That’s what

Speaker 0: it did do. Did you have a homosexual stage?

Speaker 5: God forbid. Thank thank you. Thank you now. Thank god. My now my first girlfriend was a German girl blonde blue eyed from Berlin.

Believe it or not. And there’s a lot of a elevation there. She was from Pots outside of Berlin. So…

Speaker 0: And how you when you lost your of virgin?

Speaker 5: Want… I I started late. I I didn’t actually get into it in high school. There was the aids scare. I was talking to to Von and John.

, it was a fauci and the aids, a, , , craze or or or Paranoia or fear or whatever. I was afraid of aids. , all my friends were screwing around already. And I kept it in a park until I got to college, and it was actually… It was at my sophomore not even my freshman year.

I was 20. I was 20 years old,

Speaker 0: I was was 20. Yeah. I was 22. So how did it affect you having that that sexual experience.

Speaker 5: But the German girl?

Speaker 0: Yeah.

Speaker 5: I… Yeah. I turned to… Yeah. It became prom meniscus.

Yeah?

Speaker 0: And how did sexual prom affect you?

Speaker 5: It delayed marriage, it I I believe it contributed to my not succeeding in marriage. And yeah. That’s a it’s it’s sad. But , I had a a Jewish shop upbringing. I had the Jewish foundations and that’s what saved me.

, I think I, I when I came back to to my… Just to some sort of level of sanity, and And I… I became very resent of America’s popular culture. Although I indulged in it, and III was very affected by it. I was very and, I was very impression.

I I absorbed it. And and then I decided no. It’s horrible. It’s so…

Speaker 0: For for what years were you prom from 22 until what age approximately.

Speaker 5: I was 20. I started at

Speaker 0: 20 20. When he was until what age.

Speaker 5: 20 and until 38, that’s when I got married.

Speaker 0: But but promised security would impose its own discipline I’m sure you had to inhibit many parts of your normal masculine self to be out to sleep with with women. Did you find any? Any kind of inhibition or any way that you had to changes. So

Speaker 5: I was in Europe. Don’t forget I was in Europe in the Us Army, European women were very easy. And you don’t, as a soldier, you go to the nightclubs clubs and everything It’s a it’s far easier with them than it is with American girls. ?

Speaker 0: What about? Is that Jewish women as opposed to Jewish women. Where many of these women that you weren’t Jewish?

Speaker 5: No no. None of them no.

Speaker 0: So what’s the difference between say dating and having a relationship with a non Jewish woman as opposed to dating and relating to a Jewish woman?

Speaker 5: It’s more honest, I think with a non Jewish woman, It’s just if it’s gonna be sex. It’s just sex. That’s it. And the these German girls are, like, they were looking for soldiers. That’s a that’s when I was most prom when I was in Europe when I was in Germany.

Speaker 0: And do European women? You noticed that they have a different kind of attitude towards sex?

Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah. They’re far more easy going about it. They’re not tight about it. And they’re…

It’s not just that they’re not tight. They don’t demand. Is they don’t think it’s some sort of, like, payment or something. They’re in… They enjoy it for what it is.

Speaker 0: And what with what was, like, the longest relationship that you had between age 20 and until you got married.

Speaker 5: I don’t know, like, 3, 4 months, not that long.

Speaker 0: Wow. Why do you think you want forming long, long, more serious relationship.

Speaker 5: My… Because I I’m not gonna blame. I’m not gonna get neuro about it, but my my family, my parents a Bar is that, , they didn’t divorce, but they’re… They weren’t a happily, Yeah. , married couple lately these.

So I I… , the personal example I had in from home, that kind of, like made me a bit hesitant to get married. And also Jewish, , Jewish women are Yeah. I just didn’t have bottom line. I didn’t have enough money for them for the Jewish women.

I came back from the I came back from a from Germany from the from a the the military and it’s just like, yeah. New York is very materialistic. New York is all about money.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Jewish life in particular is… And It requires a very, , great amount of income, Jewish weapon, they’re not going to be attracted to a soldier or a cab driver.

Speaker 5: No. No. Exactly. Yeah. So I I mean, I thought like I’m dumb or anything.

I’m, , but I… I was never ambitious in wanting to make money in America. And I never wanted, , deep way back in the in the back of my mind, I never wanted to plant deep roots in America and actually raise a family there. I wanted to be ready. To pick up and leave whenever I felt it was necessary.

I didn’t wanna invest myself in America. I mean, after a while, I realized Americans to , is gonna fall apart. America’s degenerate. America’s devi, and I was proven right?

Speaker 0: How Yeah. Yeah. I get. How can Sp as a jew were you while serving in Europe? Like, how many of the European women that you went to bed with knew that you were Jewish?

Speaker 5: All of them. They wanted the jewish guy. Whichever girls are into the Jewish guys.

Speaker 0: Third did you encounter much anti antisemitism in Europe?

Speaker 5: Not while I was there. No. There was just, like old, , sometimes, , like, a pitching and complaining it, , in a bar maybe, at sort a late night restaurant, and there’s a a germ an old German person sitting in the corner, like, yelling to himself or herself. That’s the most I ran into. But now an I’m a…

I’m I’m… I’m assuming that it’s getting getting legitimately, a retro retro, nationalist. The Germans are are valid legitimately becoming more nationalist and anti immigrant or anti foreign or and I I’m like, even with the history of what happened there A I can understand that. And I can understand it happening in America now too. I mean, it’s…

Oh, the this crap has gone on for too long.

Speaker 0: How do you assure? Yeah. I I get it. How do you account for the desire on the part of these European women to sleep with a jew? How how do you understand that?

Speaker 5: When I was there, and it I… It it’s like, there was a a French girl who was bisexual. She had a German girlfriend. And, , she we we exchanged the numbers and we met at soldiers night nightclub, dance pub or whatever. And so I, , III arranged the date with her.

And I got to meet, and and she brings her girlfriend along. And what she tells me is that she like… She wants to piss off her dad.

Speaker 0: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And is as if so she would had a black guy. And in order to piss off her Catholic French father, and she said if I have a Jewish guy piss it off even more. So That’s what they… I think they were being rebellious also in in what in going with the Jewish guys.

Speaker 0: Oh, interesting. Okay. So Great. Great talk. I’m gonna move on.

So thanks for stopping By.

Speaker 5: Bye.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Take care. Alright. I wanna play a little bit more here from samuel your mo.

Speaker 2: Great and it always involved exclusion.

Speaker 0: So Right. You can’t have rights, normally understood. And not rights accord by a nation to its citizens, unless you exclude non citizens. Alright? If you have generous rights for your citizens, then foreigners will want to move to your country to take advantage of those rights, and you’re not gonna be able to afford them if anyone can just move to your country.

So to have any kind of civilization, and generosity, you have to be have to exclude people.

Speaker 2: That’s I like to put it to try to be most provocative about it. Before there was a human rights movement, there was a rights of man movement, and it was powerful in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth and even in the twentieth century. But its chief form was liberal nationalism. That is to say people living under Empire who just like the

Speaker 0: So liberal ism, no state can be fully liberal because liberal is all about according rights. So liberal works best when it’s paired with something else such as nationalism.

Speaker 2: The Americans did wanted their own state. A state that coincided with their national people. Now let me just to reinforce this 0.1 last time site you a a passage from a contemporary philosopher. I think makes the point about the distinction between the rights of man and human rights. Which might seem to be just, , word play, actually very important.

The rights of man, he says that once made sense as the pre of the rights of the citizen are now progressively separated from and used outside the context of citizenship for the sake of the representation and protection of life that’s more and more driven to the margins of the nation state.

Speaker 0: Alright. Let me get back to the work here of Amanda Alexander, senior lecturer in law at Australian. Catholic University. And she writes an impressive body of literature has emerged over the past couple years that inter The development and deployment of the contemporary regime of war. So 1 word that academics love is problematic, another word they love is contingent in another word they love, is inter.

So this is an impressive body of literature. I would assume haven’t read this literature or most of it. For those who share it’s left wing hero system. Right? For for those who don’t, I would expect that they’d find much of this literature silly.

So I think Samuel your moines. I believe believes that war should be illegal. Like, good luck with that. I’d like to teach the word to sing in perfect harmony. So Amanda Alexander writes.

This literature covers the creation of the legal categories, the cultural values and the ethical concerns that shape the current regime. Shows how these laws and values are created through political and cultural negotiations and how they become political mechanisms that erase or legit certain forms of violence. These works reveal the contingency and the dangers of the current paradigm of ethical violence, and they show the difficulty of trying to escape from this paradigm. Well, easy to escape from this paradigm. If you don’t belong to it, you’re not gonna belong to it if you don’t believe moral progress if you don’t believe that it’s the individual is the center of all things.

So if you reject the left wing here system, you’re not part of the the paradigm to begin with. Now, it’s hard to escape this paradigm if your job, your income in your social standing depends upon ce to this paradigm. You can never expect anybody to understand something if their income and their social status, and their social circle depends upon not understanding something such as an obvious principle of reality and that is different people have different gifts. And when Amanda Alexander here uses the word regime, I presume that she means the delusional human rights regime. Right?

This… Regime has Almost nothing to do with the way states operate in the real world with regard to violence. When states struggle to survive, They’re not terribly handicapped by the legal categories, the cultural values and the ethical concerns that shape the human rights regime. When you fight for your life, Right? You don’t give a damn about utopia.

Right back to amanda Alexander’s analysis. While the works covered in this review unsettled, There’s another word that academics love unsettled. The current paradigm of ethic violence by examining the construction of its various components. Right Some Scholars do it by using extensive archive research, reveal the negotiations and compromises that shape some of the pivotal legal categories and rules of the contemporary regime of violence, Then we’ve got Hers Soviet Judgment at N. He shows the influence of Soviet thoughts and soviet Soviet J, what is often depicted as the most fundamental movement in the Liberal paradigm of international humanitarian and law, international criminal law and the whole modern ethics of violence.

So should be easy to unsettled paradigm at bear no relationship to real. Right? You don’t need extraordinary intellectual effort to point out that Kim Kardashian is naked in her sex state. So 2, you don’t have to bully burn many calories thinking about the current paradigm of ethical violence if you understand that paradigm is absurd and un uncomfortable. You do need to burn a few calories.

However, to point out that the un underworld nature of human rights is precisely the source of it. Appeal to certain people with a left wing Utopian agenda. Right? By being un, you reduce the odds of getting embarrassed and getting disillusioned. Is why it happened to those who pursued other left wing utopia.

And here’s an analogy for the… Full pursuit of human rights as an occupation. Right? Many upper middle class husbands, I know fund their wives businesses that lose money. So why would they fund a wife’s losing business?

Because a happy wife means a happy life, so you give her money to do her jewelry design to do her yoga teaching her novel writing her thought leading. Her Alexander technique teaching her and environmental rental consulting and the like so that she feels happy and she’s more pleasant to ours as a wife. Alright? You give her money, so that she can get the feels that she needs to keep up her wife duties. Right some husbands pay their spouses for blow jobs.

Right, that her business doesn’t make money. Doesn’t matter because the point of her jewelry design and her thought leading. It’s not to make a difference in the room or the the point is to… Allow her to experience certain feelings that she’s this independent actor making a difference in the way to world. Similarly, the point of international humanitarian law and human rights in general is to stimulate delicious feelings among its adherence, so they doing something exciting and prestigious, and it doesn’t matter if it has null effect in the real world.

There reminds me of the lead character, Dorothy Brooke in the George Elliott nineteenth century Novel Middle march, So Dorothy Brooke is obsessed with designing cottage for poor tenants. Right? She’s at a pious young woman and her hobby is the renovation of buildings belonging to the tenant farmers. And she’s quoted by this man so James Chat plus her own age, and he pretends to be interested in her cottage as a way to Romance, sir. So so James Chat is absolutely happy to indulge Dorothy Brooks passion for cottage in exchange for Romance just as heterosexual, Men today usually happen, happy to listen to a beautiful woman pratt on about human rights and social justice if it means they increase their chances of getting her into bed.

Now, these women enough and become furious when they learn the score so instead, they usually prefer to avoid paying for reality, they think he really cares. For insights into social justice when he’s just primarily interested in fond her breasts. Though human rights is a Utopian scheme that keeps thousands of left wing, women, and woman league men. In the delicious feelings that they need to feel happy and fulfilled. It’s a passion, they removes them from the real world where they might make mischief.

It’s an indulge. Right? Some people play video games, other people Consume marijuana, other people do human rights. These are all just different ways of checking out from painful reality. So back to Amanda Alexander, humanitarian warfare is an idea that has been toy with since the nineteenth century.

That took precedence as the dominant ethical paradigm among this particular crowd in the late twentieth century. And the other academics in this Survey unethical violence focus on particular aspects of this particular paradigm of violence. They look at the function and problem of human shields, the ways democracies create hi of death, that legit the use of force against civilians. You have an examination of genes genocide, which is the arch type crime in the current paradigm of violence. So prior to World war 2 There’s was no such concept and no such crime as genocide.

At genocide was created in a particular era in response to the holocaust. And then renegotiate and renegotiate it as a concept. So let me find a little bit more here from Samuel your mind. Where do the human rights come from?

Speaker 2: Believe that human rights were a direct response to the genocide of European jewelry. Their intent was to set high ideals, which would remind people not to let such a tragedy recur. The universal declaration of human rights was ratified by the United Nations general assembly in 19 48, just a few years after the em of horror cooled in How could it not have been a reaction to the holocaust? If you Google human rights and the holocaust together. You will get over 12000000 pages.

Here’s a citation from Harvard professor, Canadian x politician, and human rights. Expert, Michael Ig. The holocaust laid bare, what the world looks like when pure tyranny, is given free reign to exploit natural human cruelty. Without the holocaust, no declaration. Now this is not just an academic matter.

I think the link between human rights and the holocaust also matters politically. So some months ago, my country nearly intervene mil, in Syria, and explaining why in a very dramatic address before the American people Bar barack Obama to whom you gave the Nobel prize, raised memories, very specific memories of World war 2. Gas was used to kill the jews. And now Bashar bashar A assad had crossed a line, a red line, by using a similar weapon. The security council might be deadlock locked, but protection of human rights demands a response anyway, shouldn’t the Us congress authorize 1 in the face of the rule never again.

Well, I don’t know. I’m just a historian. I don’t know what ought to happen in the face of the Syrian tragedy now that so many are dead and Isis has arise. But I want to investigate the origins of this commonplace. Our commonplace that…

Speaker 0: So this speech was delivered to the Nobel prize community in in no way, I believe in 9 years ago, so that would have been 20 15.

Speaker 2: Idea of human rights is deeply related to the immediate memory after World war 2 of the holocaust cost because I haven’t found any evidence for this proposition. And so I wanna look further into post history and see when these 2 things did get be entangled? What were the circumstances? For our immediate ancestor in remembering the holocaust and thinking of human rights as what our ideals are going to be in response to its memory. So I’m gonna give a typo of 3 stages.

In, let’s say, the conceptual evolution of human rights since the forties. Brutally simplify to do so and, label those 3 stages, the welfare stage, the anti colonial stage and the humanitarian stage. Human rights were sometimes invoked already in the forties. The U ehr makes that clear, but originally, it was in a welfare paradigm, which gave arise later to an anti colonial paradigm before the humanitarian paradigm emerged. Start with

Speaker 0: So another word that academics love is destabilize. Right? Amanda Alexander, Right? The aim effect of these works ethical violence is to destabilize what is various described as a cosmopolitan liberal or progressive account of the contemporary paradigm of violence Right? That is an account it regards the current legal structures as enlightened, humanitarian and progressive.

And the account that sees genocide and crimes against humanity as a historical universal crimes that warrant intervention. The new literature disturb, that’s another word that academics love disturb. Alright right. So if you wanna succeed with any crowd, you have to learn the code, And so academics love these words you wanna fit in with academics and succeed with academics you have to take on their code. So the new letter chart disturb this image.

By demonstrating the contingency, meaning that there are many factors here of the current rules and concepts it shows that these rules were created by particular actors, movements and discourse and they expose the politics that inform the ethics of violence. So historic industrialization means that you understand things in their time and place. So The historic of the laws and values of the contemporary humanitarian paradigm is an effective way of showing their contingency and their political nature. So Hush history, the N burke trials. Decent dissent.

There’s another word that academics love decent dissent, the liberal triumphant, Western account simply by demonstrating the importance of Soviet J and Soviet thought in shaping the N principles chief the anti colonial thought of Lennon. Soviet judgment at N replaces the traditional western fix vacation on Robert Jackson is the main protagonist the N trials with a detailed account of various Soviets motivations and contributions. The n principles were political as well as humanitarian. They were created They were negotiated. They were deployed for particular political ends, The full story of N confronts us with 2 awkward truce, 1.

Ill liberal authoritarian states have at times positively shaped international law. 2 international justice isn’t an inherently political process. So these awkward truths are only awkward if you have this left wing humanitarian utopian paradigm. A positively shaped is just a fancy phrase for saying more aligned with my particular left wing hero system. Right?

There’s no strong evidence that democracies are a distinctive and powerful force for peace and for human flourishing in the world. Ram I’m wrote a great book in 20 18, the great delusion, liberal dreams and international realities. So this is some commentary here from Jam Mir sc in his great book, the great delusion. There, notes. The public and Scholar discourse about liberal since World war 2.

Please enormous emphasis on wanna commonly court human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the west. Human rights Samuel your wine notes. I’ve been playing excerpts from Samuel Mine have come to define the most elevated aspirations of the social movements. And political entities state and interstate, they evo hope and they provoke action.

Since there is no world state, There is no higher authority in the international system to which countries can turn when another state threatens them, that’s a simple fact of life. Coupled with the fact that liberal democracies are not always tolerant respectful and peaceful toward each other, meaning they must worry about their survival, even when dealing with other liberal democracies. Once this logic is at play, even the most liberal of estates have no choice but to engage in balance of power politics with each other. So if both states have an accurate understanding of their own and the others military capability, alright, they’re not gonna go to war. Right?

War depends upon a discrepancy in states in their understanding of their own and other’s military capability. United States has a rich history of toppling democratic elected governments, especially during the cold war. Most prominent cases include Iran in 19 53. Guatemala in 19 54, Brazil in 19 64 in Chile in 19 73, following the January 2006 Palestinian elections in which Hamas, defeated the Us supported Fat in Gaza, the Us and Israel moved to be stabilized new government and to marginalized from hamas. They treated Bat as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people even though Fat had lost the election.

United States played a role in toppling the democratic elected Bat Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 20 13. So overall, the record of American intervention. Right, it’s not exactly a pious 1. Right? It suggests that democratic trust and respect has often been subordinate to security and economic interests.

Let’s get Claire cor back on the show, Claire. Anything you’ve heard that you wanna comment on?

Speaker 6: Yes. Thank you. I’m so out that you are like, god on well with each other. We know each other from college channel. Mike has been talking about my encounter with a Da channel 2 days ago.

And, it it was a question on, what chapter 17 of verse a hundred and 4 meant in the quran, and I was saying, it it would appear that, Is a zion. And I I wonder if you might like to consider the question as and orthodox do. And and maybe I’ll play the the 10 minute exchange that I had with the, Da boys before they kicked me off without answering my question. I think it might amaze your viewers

Speaker 0: Okay. Why don’t you just give me AAAA1 minute synopsis of what happened?

Speaker 6: So chapter 17 verse, a hundred and 4 the says that god command commanded Moses and his people to dwell in the promised land, and also says that in the end, God will in gather, Jews and gentile in a coming ming crowd. Into Israel. And, I I was saying that it would appear that Is a zion and and they went 8 at me. And and I guess, if you did watch the… The, the the the short 10 minute clip, you you will see how they didn’t answer the question.

Denied my right to even ask the question, question my motives, and and then removed me without answering the question,

Speaker 0: Okay. And and anything else that you’ve heard on today’s show that you wanted to question or… Challenge or inter or destabilize.

Speaker 6: I’m grateful grateful to you for mentioning Sam Sam Mo, who who who apparently is a historian and I am very much interested in history. I trying to make a point of, attributing, sound terrible, historical tragedy to failure here to follow, chronic principles of governance in in both Muslim and non Muslim countries. And, I think it’s quite easy to do I hadn’t heard of Sam, Mo before. So I… I’m grateful to her purchase name, But I don’t quite know why you…

Admire end so much.

Speaker 0: Oh, because the depth and breadth of it his intellect. He keeps coming up with the… New perspectives that I hadn’t thought. For example, I never really thought about human rights until I saw John Mis quote sir Mine. And then after that, I went red Sam book on human rights called the last Utopia.

I didn’t realize that human rights was the a refuge for left winger who found other left wing Utopia un. So he he keeps coming up with insights that I’d I’d never even thought of, never considered, and so that’s why I admire him.

Speaker 6: But but don’t you think that the Bible and the Already give us certain human rights? I mean, human rights are are basically legal rights, but somehow, , day into, some, , religious system, and obviously, if if you believe in god, you’d you’d have a different idea of human rights to, the liberal idea of human rights, right.

Speaker 0: III do believe in God and I I do believe that you can you can ground human rights in God, but in in practical communal living, that would depend on the rest of your community essentially agreeing with you And so it’s easier if you’ve got a community that’s united by the same religion and the same understanding of these rights that have been granted by God, But are there any particular human rights that you see as granted by God? In

Speaker 6: the Ko, there there is. Chapter 2 verse 256, that I would say supports the first amendment because it says, there is no comp compulsory and belief, truth stands clear from error, and and there’s, also other rights that, suggests that muslim police are not allowed to to just enter anyone’s home. So there’s is this idea of, the right to property. And the the the right not not to be sla because there is of of a verse about back biting. But but you do, sign know have have the, concept of Lush Har, which is rather stricter than I’m just telling lies and def defending somebody.

Speaker 0: And do you think a society is stronger or weaker when it has a multitude of religions within it?

Speaker 6: Well, I suppose what what what imperial religions do is is tolerate other… After exacting tribute from these different religious groups. But but obviously, in any society, there needs to be a political orthodox that all acknowledged to be the political orthodox. And currently in the west of, it appears to be liberal, but it is now collapsing. Sam is is a liberal historian is he not, Yeah.

Speaker 0: I I think he’s he’s more left than liberal. I think he’s full on socialist.

Speaker 6: Yes. And and and I suppose the the the the the clear blue water between left and right. It’s is the idea of free love because… At the moment, we we regard it as a sacred right to to have sex with another consenting adult. Well, if you are the, then you would have to obey god’s some prohibition against what we might like to have sex with, and it’s basically sex with spouse and no 1 else.

And our spouse can only be a member of the opposite sex, not within the forbidden, a degrees of cons and about, I think is is the P water.

Speaker 0: I remember when We came to the United States when I was 11. My dad told me that religion in America is a mile wide and an inch thick, and I didn’t really understand what He was saying, because most of the people in our social circle had a highly intense seventh day advent, and it was taken for granted within… Our our social circle that sex would be delayed for marriage. Then I go to a public school, and I find so many of my classmates are having sex and going to church on Sunday, and I didn’t quite get this. But then I guess I realized that my dad was right when he said religion in America a mile wide and an inch thick that their their christianity did not prevent them from having sex because they did not have a high intensity style of religion it was it was more a communal affiliation and that they didn’t allow it to get in the way of what their general is wanted them to do.

And I found that surprising because in Australia, if you are religious and in England, if you are religious you lead a life that’s quite distinct from that of the people around you. But in America where large portion of the population affiliates with the religion it it’s hard to find distinctions between the lives of, most mainstream religious people… And secular people because mainstream religion in the United States is so low intensity, and it it rarely inhibits what people wanna do. Any thoughts, claire?

Speaker 6: Yes, indeed, I mean, that this Christmas greeting happy holidays holidays days actually came from America, there more recently, British people have been complaining about, , what happened to Christmas. We are a Christian country. But happy holidays, is is an American creation, because there is no official religion. Therefore, we, Americans switch each other a happy holiday. Which put me Hanukkah or Christmas.

And, III think the problem with America is that it doesn’t have an official religion, this meets everybody, does, , do what they like and and and therefore, America is a land of cults. Suffering from something called, Sheila is. I don’t know if you heard that expression.

Speaker 0: Well, I know what as Sheila means in Australian slang. It means an attractive woman. So Sheila would be the… Sexual pursuit of new bio babe.

Speaker 6: Yes. It it… It’s it’s actually the name of an a nurse so I think her enables. Was Sheila, and and she had all kinds of bizarre beliefs that what a mixture of, of, , new wage and christianity and all kinds of stuff And and and and because America doesn’t have an official religion, and, it it it becomes a land up cults with with people expecting social validation even though their their beliefs are, are, , the opposite of orthodox. And and then they can’t understand why people are so angry with them.

Speaker 0: So how many people would do in your real life as opposed to your Internet life, who practice high intensity religion.

Speaker 6: I’m afraid I don’t know anybody It just been. But But I mean, , all all practice must stem from theory, and , I’m just saying, Europeans just do what America wants. And if if the fish at the, , rot from the from the head down, then then or all western agents are in trouble because America is currently on principal, a nih atheist atheist and doesn’t appear to have any plan other than to q to next elections, it would appear.

Speaker 0: Yeah. I I think that’s a a key point that you made that you don’t know anyone. Who is intensely religious because I I think that might account for what I see is your naive k with regarding religion. I don’t believe that practice, for example, has to spring from from theory that there is, , often a a complete disconnect between practice and theory, most people are not philosophical, Most people are not illogical, and most people are not theological. And so you can have all the theories in the world, but people with 100 Iq are not going to be intellectual enough to be particularly directed by various theories.

Speaker 6: Which is why I propose shu for non muslims because, obviously, if it’s optional, people will opt not to ab obey it.

Speaker 0: Okay. Yeah, Claire, I’m gonna move on, but throw throw any comments 1 in the chat, and now I’ll I’ll bring you back if but I find some of them particularly provoking.

Speaker 6: Thank you, Luke.

Speaker 0: Yep. Yep. You’re you’re welcome. Alright. I’m gonna get back to, Samuel Mine.

Talking about the origins of human rights.

Speaker 4: I mean, this concept of of human rights, , where did it start? You you talk there’s a couple breaking points. You talk about the 19 forties with the Un declaration, but then you I think you really hone in on kind of the 19 seventies as being sort of a… There’s there’s a disco where the the way in which we currently think about human rights was really kind of… Birth.

So so, , what is the relationship between these older concepts of natural rights, which we all think started in , around the time of the French and American revolutions and this newer concept of of human rights.

Speaker 7: So, it, , it’s so common that even in our own lives, we engage in what, , since I published that book all those years ago has been termed re calming. Retroactive continuity. Right. And, , you you’ve…

Speaker 0: So this interview was recorded 10 months ago and Sam Mo as he ages, he just looks much more intimidating.

Speaker 7: You’ve ended up some place in somewhere in some person and… You kinda think you… It was always meant to be. And, of course, , the that’s not true. , a lot of act.

Speaker 0: So the opposite of Rec cunning is contingent. Right? Contingent means depending on certain time play certain factors.

Speaker 7: Accidents happen, and you made big recent choices, then you wanna see yourself as consistent. I think all…

Speaker 0: And it sounds like the whole pitch of Sad Mo voice has changed and deepened maybe it’s his microphone here.

Speaker 7: Let’s do even kind of at a collective level. So when it comes to human rights. Show I mean, there’s no doubt that the… The kind of very abstract concept is old. No 1 could deny that.

Even going back maybe to the middle ages. So maybe there was a a theologian or 2 who said, every human being has a right based on just being human. But my big theory was kinda that in the age of the American revolution, and the French revolution, 1 based on, natural rights language and the other 1 based on, , something close to human rights language, the the the agenda was different. Let’s call that human rights 1, like these were people who engaged in revolution. They were for out for their own good locally.

They they said, , they’re

Speaker 0: So Friend notes that you can watch on x and still keep browsing, but you can’t do that when you’re on Twitter unless you’ve you’ve purchased a a membership. So I I pay, I know, a hundred and 30 dollars a year for access to Youtube without ads and to be after listen while scrolling around on my phone.

Speaker 7: These abstract principles that justify what we’re doing. Of course, the other side said they were terrorists. And tried to put them down. And so, , what’s what what struck me is that this is different because these people are for their own good. They’re building a state, they’re using violence if push comes to shove and that’s just a world away from what many people at least have begun to mean by human rights.

Let’s call that human rights 2, more recently, which is more about people far away. States are the problem, not the solution, and we wanna somehow disciplined states. And then, , we we might support, , a non nonviolent revolution now and again, but we really think hope , is to be found in, like, naming and shaming, and filing lawsuits and sending monies to Ngos. And that’s just it’s just a different thing. So the concept could be the same but there were some big system update and I emphasize that that…

I felt that…

Speaker 0: So press 1 if you also find samuel Moines, here. In this particular presentation, this particular tone of voice intimidating or is it just me?

Speaker 7: It happened in the 19 seventies. So not that long ago.

Speaker 0: I mean, I would shut it to think this man’s about to exam, grade my my paper.

Speaker 4: Well, the title of your book the last utopia. I mean, it’s it’s a bit tongue and cheek because I think part of your argument is that the human rights the way we you understand it. I mean, it’s it it it kind of lacks right, something. It it’s missing some element that most other visions of the the, , the just world have. Right?

It’s it’s sort of it’s sort of an… It’s almost like an anti Utopia. It’s based on

Speaker 7: Yes.

Speaker 4: On morality rather than on some political project. Yeah. And and and so, I mean, can human rights serve as the foundation for some new type of Utopian project? I mean, do we wanna have a Utopian project? I mean, I think, part of the reason why it emerged is because these other Utopian projects as you argue, like communism And so forth, like nationalism.

I mean, they, , they were found wanting. , they were they were they were found to have problems. So I mean, do… Is there something about, a Utopian project that’s necessary in order to… Kinda get us the kind of society that we’re looking for?

We’re we’re Right is it sufficient to simply have this morality based

Speaker 7: ideology. Yeah. I mean, I think people can agree to disagree on that. I I think I look out at the world, and, , it seems like we have either Utopia or D dystopian, and, , in all our fictions. We have nightmare and, , post apocalyptic scenarios, which, , maybe those are old, but they’re just so ubiquitous now, and climate change and , through what people call threats to democracy, and it seems like we we…

I would prefer to think that we need to kinda go big in the direction of calling for a better world beyond these nightmares. I wanna clarify that when I used the the notion of kind of, like, , human rights is just appealing to morality. That was like what they said in the 19 seventies for various understandable strategic reasons. Like, they were scared of Utopia, which were supposed to themselves bring nightmare in their wake or if they were in Eastern Europe or Latin America where there were new dis associated with human rights. They they didn’t have any card to play other than saying, they were for morality, not for kinda changing their regimes, which they thought could never work.

So it was like, a political strategy that denied that it was utopian and or even political. And so maybe we can’t really kinda get out of laying out some kind of controversial vision for the future locally globally. And , my guess, my trouble with human rights is that they become really popular in this world where we’ve been more hesitant to do so. And, , we’ve claimed not to do so while trying to advance our agendas even so, and it’s it’s somehow, not working out too well or not.

Speaker 0: Okay. Let’s get back to John Mia shi, is terrific 20 18 book the great delusion. He writes, the perhaps the most damning evidence against the case for liberal democratic norms is found in Christopher Lanes careful examination of 4 cases where a pair of liberal democracies marched up to the brink of war. Once I pull back and enter the crisis. Is So he carefully examine the decision making process in both Britain and the United States during the 18 61 trent affair.

The Venezuelan crisis of 18 95 96, the showed crisis between Britain France and 18 98 and the 19 23 rural. Crisis involving France and Germany. Yeah, Convincing argues that Liberal norms had little to do with settling. He’s crises. There was substantial nationalist further on each side, and all 4 outcomes were primarily determined by strategic calculations involving the balance of power.

A final indirect reason to doubt that Liberal norms carry much weight in international politics is that there’s is little evidence that liberal democracies fight wars in virtuous ways. So given the emphasis that liberal places aren’t ina rights, meaning human rights, 1 would expect liberal democracies to go to some lengths to avoid killing civilians. And leads to do better than authoritarian states. Alright? That’s under the central tenets of just war theory, which is a quintessential liberal theory that has individual rights at its core.

But when Alexander Downs did his groundbreaking study of civilian victim optimization war found that democracies are more then non democracies to target civilians. John Tier shows in his detailed analysis of how the United States fights its wars, likely that the United States has killed millions of civilians many of them on purpose. But their Jeffrey Wallace shows auto democracies are more likely then democracies to abuse prisoners of war provides plenty of evidence that miss democracies mist their prisoners. Widespread use of torture by the United States in the wake of 09:11 is just 1 example. But downs and waller show that when states get desperate in wartime, they quickly forget the enemy’s humanity and begin to value rights, far less than effective fighting.

So liberal democracies are no exception. So in liberal, there is a universal strand, and it springs from liberal deep seated commitment to individual rights. So there are no boundaries or borders when it comes to human rights. In this perspective they apply to every person on the planet. The claim is not that individuals should have certain rights, but rather, it’s in All people axiom have them.

On what basis, the basis of faith, Secular faith. There are no meaningful limits to our ability to reason, When it comes to comprehend handing new rights. So political elites in the United States, Regis Smith, Roger Smith argues require a population to lead that imagine itself to be a nation to be a concrete people. Right? He emphasizes that conception of people, which are particular at their core.

Are at odds with Liberal emphasis on universal equal human rights. So liberal Germany provides the foreign policy elite with many attractive career opportunities since trying to dominate the globe. It’s a labor intensive enterprise. So 2, social construction provides the elite with many job opportunities. Right?

There are a lot more jobs. Where you get to engage in social construction and d construction, then say jobs that emphasize the power of genetics, And, this dominant liberal elite is likely to think it has the know how to interfere effectively in the politics of other countries. So that’s our foreign policy establishment. You wanna get into the foreign policy establishment in the United States. Right?

There are a lot of jobs. Of intervening in the politics of other countries. So this combination to perceived benefits of faith in the ability to realize them invariably leads powerful liberal states such as the United States to pursue liberal longevity. And the prominence that liberal course the notion of ina or universal rights means that a foreign policy based on liberal principles requires careful monitoring of other countries human rights performance. And when the rights of foreigners are threatened a powerful state pursuing liberal longevity will feel compelled to intervene to protect the rights of those individuals.

So that state is apt to conclude that the best way to even eliminate the threat to individual rights such as the ability of, the right of girls to go to school in Afghanistan. Is to make sure that as many people as possible live in a liberal democracy where respect for individual rights of great importance, so this logic then leads straight to an active. Policy regime change aimed at toppling auto democracies and replacing them with liberal democracies. The class of its. Karl clash has a famous system that war is extension of politics by other means, but this does not apply in a liberal world.

His liberal states do not consider war a legitimate way of settling disagreements. Yet war remains an accepted instrument for protecting human rights abroad for spreading liberal democracy around the world. So liberal democracies are quite inclined to wage wars against non democracies with imp vi. The liberals war is either a crime or a crusade. There is no halfway house.

Though Americans are extremely sensitive to American casualties. But they are remarkably insensitive to casualties suffered by non Americans, including by civilians, Right 1 of the more remarkable aspects of American wars it’s how little we discuss the victims who are not Americans. This thinking is not peculiar to the United States. All nations think this way, and this cuts directly against Liberal universal dimensions. So I grew up in Australia, there’s a broad consensus that if you weren’t Australian, you really didn’t matter much.

And that’s the broad consensus in France for the French versus non French in in Japan, etcetera. Liberals emphasize that rights apply equally to people everywhere. They love to talk about human rights, not about national rights it’s a liberal universal human rights. Trump the latter. So man liberal has a relaxed attitude toward sovereignty, much more relaxed than either nationalism or realism because rights are more important, than national sovereignty.

So in the liberal story, state borders are soft and permeable because national rights transcend these petty boundaries, meaning not only that people living in different countries of deep ties and common interests but also that liberal states have the right and the responsibility to intervene in other countries affairs, they violate their citizens rights. So norms about individual rights, overs overshadowed the norm of sovereignty in a world of liberal states. If 1 of liberal core missions is to protect people whose rights are being violated. So the urge to intervene in other countries is powerful. And large numbers of those foreigners are being killed.

And so you got this responsibility to protect doctrine. And there was a norm that grew out of the failure of the So called international community to prevent the rwanda genocide in 19 94, in this Sri lanka Massacre at 19 95. So the responsibility to protect mandates the states have responsibility not only to protect their own populations from serious human rights violations like ethnic cleansing and Mass murder, but also to protect people in other countries from these crimes, that’s why the United States England France. Intervened in the Libya Civil war removing And then creating a pathway to Europe for millions of migrants since overthrow Ka regime in what was it 20 11:20 12. The nations are told to be on the lookout for major human rights abuses around the globe, the When they arise to move quickly to stop them.

So a powerful liberal state with the military wherewithal with or to intervene is strongly encouraged to go to war to protect these victims. So the task of defending individual rights easily morph into the more ambitious strategy of removing the source of the problem by actively promoting the raw democracy in other countries, So a liberal uni, meaning 1 powerful liberal he is likely to use military power to protect individual rights. Or foster regime change in a rival major power because the cost are too high, but it will likely interfere in that country’s politics in other ways. No tactics might include relying on Ngos non governmental organizations to support certain institutions and politicians inside the target state. Link aid membership in international institutions and trade with the major powers human rights, records, so we’re talking here in particular about Us policy towards Russia and China, And into shame the target state by publicly reporting on its human rights violations.

Oh, my gosh, what the Chinese are doing to the w is ada terrible. This approach is unlikely to work because the major powers invariably view the liberal powers behavior is illegitimate interference in its eternal affairs. So it will think its sovereignty is being violated, causing the policy to backfire and to poison relations between the 2 countries, which is exactly what has happened. With the United States and with our relations with China and Russia.

Speaker 7: Not well enough. So… But there could be debate. I mean, I think there are a lot of people who see the coming of nightmare scenarios and say, that’s the last time, to start calling for people to get rowdy again as they were in the American and French revolution or in the Europe d colonization and that’s understandable. But, , usually, it means they’re privileged and, , routing this would more threaten them and give a lot of other people.

, better chances than they have now.

Speaker 4: No. And I think in in our in our memory, our historical memory, I think most people would take the notion of human rights and point to the immediate post war period as the place where this concept really took root. Right? In reaction to Yeah. The holocaust and also, , because of anti colonial movements, and civil rights movements in the United States.

Right. So, , why why is it, I guess, only partially accurate to point to that period as the Yep. Wells spring of this new notion of human rights.

Speaker 7: I mean, that’s what I thought too. , the forties were where, , not just the bodies were buried, but the kinda big response. In the form of human rights ideology and politics game. And because that was the kinda dominant narrative when I was in , young in the 19 nineties. And then I kinda looked into it and and something didn’t add.

So for 1 thing, you I I kinda dismissed immediately that the universal declaration or human rights discourse could have been a… Spots to the holocaust, which was, like a very widespread idea in the nineties because it didn’t seem as if there was much evidence to support that idea. Actually, , most historians think that holocaust consciousness and concern took an incredibly long time decades to arise, And so, like, once you get to the 19 seventies with these dis and so forth, maybe be the holocaust memory matters then. But I think the forties is too early to think that there was, like, an immediate response to the most horrible things. Nazis did.

Certainly, people, , after the Nazis beaten all said we should never let that happen again, but they meant a lot of different things. , Hitler’s Hen were trident at N mainly for starting aggressive war, not for their atrocities. And so, a lot of people were against having another world war, and there were a lot of non jewish victims of totalitarian regimes obviously, and they they were more likely to survive. So they have their visions of the future. I guess, , what struck me overwhelmingly is that when we look back at the forties, , people had experienced the great depression and and the world war, and they wanted, , a fair society and kind of abundance without war.

And maybe for some people, the universal declaration was about that. But I think, , other…

Speaker 0: Yeah, I guess, Sam Moines, who’s a historian, but he’s now on the faculty of Yale Law school? So he’s a historian who specializes in the history of human rights. Let’s return to… Amanda, Alexander’s work her essay on, the ethical use of violence. So Soviet the Union played a critical role in introducing article 3 in the 19 49 Geneva conventions, which provides bit a more protection in non international arm conflicts.

Now regarded as an essential element of the structure of modern international humanitarian law. So most western states that this conference want to limit any recognition for Colonial. Civil wars. Soviets pressed for their inclusion in the Geneva convention, but the Soviets, of course, had no interest in this applying to those who wish to get rid of communism in Eastern Europe or wherever it’s found. A citizens who wanted to rebel against the Communist state, Right, the Soviets didn’t didn’t intend for this protection to apply to them.

So the Soviets roll into the principles of national self determination and d colonization, except when it would apply to the nations under Soviet sub. The west went along with This article 3, hoping that it would encourage communist uprisings. So some people would think that backward is a bad thing Right? If you’re progressive, then you think backward is a bad thing. But from a traditional perspective, backward is often a good thing.

So it’s not just the international justice that is or political or justice is political. Right? Justice depends upon one’s hero system. What is just depends upon where you regard as right and wrong. So that justice is political is awkward only for those whose worldview is far removed from reality.

If you respect reality being removed from reality is awkward. So that protecting gorillas at War where the state is a good thing, depends upon 1 circumstance and one’s hero system. Right the Soviets wanted to incentivize revolution against states that weren’t allied with the Soviet Union. At their no interest in promoting revolutionaries, fighting Soviet communism. So the contingent nature of Soviet support for non state fighters is, I think an obvious point, not sufficiently noted in Amanda Alexander’s essay.

So Amanda writes about the messi of these negotiations. It was not a reflective scholar process. The drafting process resembled less an ivory tower, which blueprints are conceived in splendid isolation than a political arena, which act as contemplate and struggle of a different proposals and the stakes are often impossibly high. Well, the stakes are impossibly high in the fantasy lives of these utopian ski. Alright?

I may have once or twice dreamed about quoting Swimsuit model Kate Upton. But I don’t think many academics would publish that the stakes in my… Romantic dreams are impossibly high. Right? I have as much chance that dating kate Upton.

God forbid she’s married to a big former baseball player. As a human rights activists have of achieving their dreams, but my dreams get that respect. While the dream of international humanitarian and law, they get money jobs and prestige for their dreams. Had I have had as much success, stopping Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as all the human rights activists in the world combined. Why aren’t we recorded equal respect this all I want bro equal respect.

We have identical records of achievement. At single handedly over the past decade, I have been as effective at stopping human rights violations, as all human rights activists, and yet I’m just of vlogger, and human rights activists published in the New York review of books. Why? Does they have a worldview that is aligned with power in the halls of cultural production and I do not. So back to Amanda Alexander.

International law is a product of politics in a historical context, Alright. Politics are not just the interest of states. I’d states are often persuaded to adopt rules that do not appear to be in their interest. Why? Because of naming and shaming strategies of transnational advocacy networks, social pressure and social.

So the shame created by diplomatic isolation increases the chances that those put under pressure, polar changes in the law. Albeit gru and strategically. So when has international law ever stopped the United States from doing what it wants. Right? You can probably come out with a few isolated examples of low importance.

When people play the board game risk. I remember, I was a kid, and I I play that, and my feelings would get hurt when my my friends would invade my country and the board game of risk. So when those playing the board games and video games. Right? Sometimes confront shaming networks, discourage actors from certain actions.

Right? Board games and international humanitarian law create wonderful opportunities for certain personalities to play the big shot. But in the end, the strong take what they want. And the week endure what they must, an international humanitarian law doesn’t really matter very much when compared to this law of nature. Back to Amanda Alexander.

She says these details scholar the excavation of the archive emphasized the role of individual actors compared by personal philosophical and political motivations. Creating the provisions of international law. Other works in this body of literature, effective in showing that the concepts of ethical and criminal violence in the current paradigm are contingent and political. They do so using different methods and sources, many of these works, emphasize the influence of philosophical, social and cultural, Discourse as well as the contributions of individuals. In other the words, their dreams are affected by what they do during their waking hours.

My dreams are also affected by what I do during my waking hours. So if you want to str on the stage of human rights international law, Right You may want to consider which narratives are winners and which narratives are losers. Back to amanda Alexander. She says the Term universal crime makes explicit the concept of genocide as the arch type crime in the current paradigm. It is a particular Historically situated understanding of criminal violence, their alternative understanding of universal crime, You have the language of trans that used to capture much wider range of activities, including economic and political oppression.

So all these ideas are tied to particular time and place and ideas of crime and ethical behavior do not translate well across historical. Periods. So John Lock employed an idea of universal crime to justify English ownership a property in America, while other philosophers justify popular population exchanges. On the basis of prevailing ideas of rights. So remember when I used to hear the words rape and genocide, think through the 19 eighties, and they were very solemn terms to me, but studying in the 19 nineties, and most of the time when I hear the words rape and genocide, I I wonder who’s trying to pick my pocket?

Like, what kind of What kind of scam Are you trying to run on me but?

Speaker 7: Things were too? Like the new deal or the welfare state or in England, the National health service or, , other places like communist countries, building socialism or the post colonial world building socialism, which very often, even when they weren’t communist, post colonial leaders said they were for. So I began to see that actually the universal declaration in 19 48, which certainly the Un pass. It’s not nothing. Was kind of a dud, and especially once the cold started, which was, like, right before the universal declaration, most people in the world understood that, like, they couldn’t rest content with, like, ga morality, like, in the universal declaration.

The world was at in in a war again over which which he to back or to try to be neutral. And there just wasn’t a lot of, mobilization around human rights. So it was kinda like neither nor, there wasn’t revolutions in the name of rights, like in the, , American and French revolution. And there wasn’t the new human rights 2, kind of ordinary people, lighting candles, , writing letters, filing lawsuits in the name of human rights. And so it’s like a a period in between.

So on d colonization, I think it’s it’s it, , allows us to make this point pretty neatly because it seems like the d around the world are like the last gasp of the American and French revolutionary model. Human rights 1, if you wanna call it that. What I mean by that is that, , they they want their own freedom they are trying to throw off what they see as des ism, and Empire just like America did in 17 76. And they pick up guns if they need to. And so it…

It’s kind of the last gas, , a lot of colonial power.

Speaker 0: Alright. Let’s get back to this essay by Amanda Alexander. She talks about the adventure of the crime of genocide. And then what exactly constitute genocide. So people who study genocide for a living, alright?

They have fallen out over competing definitions of genocide. So I think as Rafael A Le who came up with the banter of the crime of of Genocide after world war 2. He saw as. Actions leading to the destruction of the national pattern of a group. Right, the group was described as the people bound together by imagined relations and sharing a national spirit.

Though not an objective status. So the translation of his crime genocide into the United Nations genocide convention was the result of contingent, constellation of events and political maneuvering. Restrictions placed on crimes against humanity at the N trials meant that a coalition of religious organizations, Thinkers and smaller state sought to find a way to criminal such acts. Creation the United Nations provided a forum for this. The great powers were ambivalent about criminal genocide, but they did not want to be seen to t the United Nations consensus embody international conscience.

Well, there is no international conscience because different peoples, have different hero systems. So the great powers is engaged in negotiations who ensure that the convention would not inhibit or d, military and colonial practices. So the cod of the Genocide convention was dependent on political considerations. And these political considerations resulted in a much more limited cod qualification of genocide. So the crime genocide was narrowed down to a ban on killing.

And Which groups could be victims of genocide. This was limited to religious national, racial and ethnic groups. So le, conception of peoples was discounted in linguistic cultural and political groups are excluded. So given that most forms of life go extinct, you would hope that people would place a high priority on their own survival. And if wiping out and opposing, type of life is necessary for your type of life to be safe.

Right this happens all the time in nature, and among people. Right? Without regard to international law, and it will keep happening in the future without regard to international law, most powerful state actors intervene presumably to pursue their own interests. Now due to human rights, agitation, the term genocide is now primarily deployed as a rhetoric tour to attack your opponents. The more open and subjective, the definition of genocide, the easier it is to enlist in your particular cause.

Right? There’s no business like show business. Simply there’s no business like Genocide business. Right? It provides jobs and prestige and Exquisite feelings for thousands of people.

Great article in foreign policy, Magazine 05/07/2024 by Michael Hi. Why so many observers putting the worst possible face on the conflict between the United States and China. Right? So after the end of the Cold war in 19 92 international security studies were fizz fast, now they’re hot again. So promoting the idea of Cold War 2, definitely promotes the careers of people in international security.

Just as international security scholars, incentivized to heighten the dangers that require their expertise. So to genocide scholars or incentivized to hype genocide, to create more jobs for themselves, more income, more prestige for their group. Now great thing about amanda Alexander’s Scholarship is she does not take the claims of human rights activists at face value, said she examine the situations and the narratives that produce particular claims. For example, the contemporary idea that Genocide is the greatest of All Evils is the product of particular contingency. Rafael Le, achieved great fame by inventing the crime of genocide, but it is easy to invent.

Crimes. Plus tough is to enforce punishment of crimes, and that is essentially only done by states. Not by international human rights organizations. But human rights have great fantasy value, but little real world meaning outside of the rights enforced by a particular state. I can draft the greatest players in the Nfl for my fantasy.

Football team, but that will not get me a general manager position for an Nfl team. Right? Fantasy football and real football have almost nothing to do with each other. And so the invention of the crime of genocide, The creation of the term genocide did nothing to reduce genocide, but it did create exquisite feelings and thousands of jobs for people who wanted to po authenticate about genocide. Invention of international human rights and international with humanitarian law did nothing to increase such rights and diminish human cro, it did create jobs for thousands of people to po about these rights.

So many men are obsessed with fantasy sports, but And many women are obsessed with human rights. Some people get off to fantasies about Kate Upton, other people get after fantasies about the end of war. At whatever the direction of your love map, I salute you for keeping a grip on things. There’s no international conscience because people do not agree right wrong. Nations support human rights and international law, only when that it kept courts with their interest in their particular hero system, just as individuals obey the law when they feel like it when it occurs with their interests or when the internal dislocation that they would feel from violating the law would be too much.

I mean, how much exactly has the genocide conventions ban on killing reduced killing. Right? The Stiff prick has no conscience? Vital national security interests have no conscience either in a state of emergency, rights go out the window.

Speaker 7: R is in 19 48. Were among the, , 50 odd states that voted through the universal declaration. But within 2 decades, there were close to 200 states, and that wasn’t caused by human rights. It was caused by revolutionary nationalism, and that’s what kinda of disappeared and human rights has taken its place in the meantime.

Speaker 4: Now, the human rights movement, the modern human rights movement seems to have been birthed in in the ashes of. Right? And I think you you point to 68. Right? And the Prague spring as sort of a a defining moment.

Right? Which really forced a lot of people to rethink their their previous political commitments. So can you kinda walk us through that that process and some of the seminal figures there and how they recon their their political activism?

Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean, , I think we’ve got so many actors, but…

Speaker 0: Yeah. How many corporate ceos are listening to Greta thorn burke. Inquiring minds wanna know.

Speaker 7: There are some some kind of really important ones. I’d go back slightly first because you have the founding of Amnesty International in the early sixties, but it doesn’t become famous. Really until the seventies when job, the organization wins the Nobel peace prize in 19 77. And yet, even in its origins, the founder sort of say that, well, we we we see people becoming disillusioned with all the post war Utopia, and the founder, the main founder named Peter Ben actually straight out says Amnesty International is for dis dissolution socialists. Now meanwhile, behind the iron curtain.

, socialists have been disappointed with communism since, , the Russian revolution. So for 5 decades by that point, but they have always called for, kinda doing better with communism, reform communism or what many calls, socialism with a human face. So they’re not disillusioned yet. They’re they’re trying to update socialism. And yet, the Pro spring, I think, socialism when the Soviets sent tanks in to crush a kind of attempt to have a better socialism, convince people that it’s not gonna happen The soviets won’t tolerate it.

And so many of the earliest dis behind iron curtain sort of have learned that lesson, and they… Turn to morality because they don’t see a way of beating communist regimes except by claiming not to oppose them, and they say, look, you you yourself ratified, this human rights treaty. You published it and proud to how can you not live up to it and it’s sap legit… Their goal was to

Speaker 0: So there was a great essay published in Yale law review in 20 10. Called constitutional dictatorship, it’s danger and designs. Right? If here are some highlights on that essay. If Americans know.

1 thing about their system of government is that they live in a democracy is and that other less fortunate of people live in dictatorship. Dictatorship are what democracies are not. Very opposite of representative government under constitution, The opposition between democracy and dictatorship is, however, greatly overstated. Right? Dictatorship, the power of government officials to act on important matters free of accountability or timely legal checks is not the opposite of democracy.

But it’s an institutional feature within every single working democracy. The can and should be employed to perform valuable civic functions. Think about during an unprecedented influenza epidemic like Covid, all sorts of basic rights were just taken away like this. So dictatorship is a description rather than a term of a program. At it refers institutions are powers of emergency, government, the constitution makers established to serve the public interest, right?

Out democracy contains considerable elements of dictatorship. Think about that famous golfer who was arrested about 6 weeks ago. When he was driving to play on the second day of a major golf tournament and out of control policeman, but for no good reason with his camera off illegally, goes ahead and arrest him and essentially assaults the guy and, , almost cost him, 10 20000000 dollars of prize money. When when a policeman has you under his power. Right?

He’s effectively a dictator dictator. So Ka Schmidt has a great analysis here. Right? He recognizes the possibility of dictatorship. Where the ultimate goal of that dictatorship is restoring the status quo, but he assumes that elements of the sovereign dictator always look in the background, just waiting to emerge and to transform any existing political order.

So no matter how well designed a constitutional system might be, The true sovereign will always be able to escape the con confined of that design and make exceptions. So emergency or at least claims of emergency, the standard cores and the standard justification for creating dictatorship. Machiavelli argued Republic should plan for emergency allocation of power in advance. And that’s what the American constitution does. Since Right?

Whenever you have an emergency, like terrorist attack or tsunami or hurricanes or earthquakes or dangerous viruses, you have governments reacting by taking away rights. Now Latin America, in particular as a long history of states using emergency as poised to return to dictator rule. Nikita K paid for his commend commendable caution regarding the Cuban missile crisis with his job, which suggests a degree of accountability that made the Soviet leader significantly left, of a full gay dictator the most Americans assumed, John Yu, the author of the notorious torture memo, memo of the Bush administration Now on the bo school at University of California at Berkeley argues that the president United States enjoys all the powers possessed by the English Monarch the time of the American revolution with regard to foreign policy. So parliament retain the powers of the purse at with regard to King George the third, but the king still possessed un unbalanced discretion of the use of military force, according to ka schmidt, the sovereign is the person who can successfully define something as a crisis, then basically do whatever he thinks necessary. To meet that crisis.

Speaker 7: Sap legitimacy intimacy from a regime, they didn’t think they could overthrow or reform. Then you get, , another group of people… Let’s say in Latin America, about the same time, take Chile, Salvador And day. Basically attempting the same thing, socialism with a human face, democratic socialism. In this case, the Americans won’t allow it, and, , essentially can To overthrow that project.

It’s like a mirroring thing. And I think a lot of Latin American activists say, well, we we can’t we can’t win in this hemisphere, especially once America starts backing authority carrying right wing regimes. Unless we appeal the some seemingly neutral carrying moral principles. And so they begin to found human rights movements. Also Roman Catholics are involved.

So those are big events. And then I think you get a lot of other forces. I mean, I think Americans are really interesting in this story because they’ve they’ve supported Vietnam, , the Democrats started the Cold war, Harry Truman. And the Democrats started Vietnam, a Jfk and Lyndon Johnson. And they’re just embarrassed after 19 73, 5, and they elect Jimmy Carter who says we need to a tone, we need to kinda wash ourselves of our sins.

And the way we’re gonna do it is by having a a foreign policy based on human rights. Really first kind of leading statesman ever said so, , the universal declaration didn’t cause people to do it, Jimmy Carter did. And so you get a lot of people like in across the North Atlantic, who , don’t believe in socialism don’t, , themselves, , never did. Don’t any longer, , they’re cutting their hair after the sixties. They’re growing up, and they they join human rights as a kind of more modest cause or they support , politicians like Jimmy Carter who say our states, the wealthy and powerful states will export human rights rather than, , war.

And so all of these things come together in a kind of, like, incredible, I think, big explosion and human rights. Begins to be talked about really way way more than anyone had ever talked about human rights ever

Speaker 4: No, I think there was sort of a Christian strand throughout this. I think some of the folks involved in Amnesty International were Quaker. Right? And you talk a lot about it. The the Catholic church, and and I’m I’m guessing that the A lot of the Catholic church and involved is Right

Speaker 0: There are strong universal tendencies in Christianity. They’re also a strong nationalist. Tendencies in Christianity. But, overall, Christianity certainly has a more, universal tendency, then Judaism. Alright.

That’ll don’t do it for me. Take care of, bye bye.