Showing posts with label society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label society. Show all posts

Saturday, 23 December 2023

Factuality

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24-2-19 Dan Schueftan on the Palestine-Israel Conflict - Quillette > .
24-10-7 Konstantin Kisin Off the Fence About Israel’s War - Triggernometry > .
24-10-6 Israel Wants to Make This the Last War - Melanie Phillips | Trigger > .
24-10-2 Douglas Murray: A Time of War - Free Press > .
24-8-31 Ex-Muslim Speaks Out Against Radical Islam | Rawan Osman | TBN > .
24-8-21 [Hamas, NOT Israel, committing war crimes & threatening g-cide] - U > .

Monday, 11 December 2023

Response to the Three Hypocrites

~ Bari Weiss: Why DEI Must End For Good - Free Press > .
24-6-15 Not all Cultures are Equal (and you know it) - traveling > .
24-2-15 Real DEI (PRA) Program [Divisive Extremist Ideology] - New Discources > .
24-1-23 “Treason of the Intellectuals,” with Niall Ferguson | Uncommon Knowledge > .
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24-1-4 Douglas Murray ROASTS Disgraced Harvard President Claudine Gay - TT > .

Wednesday, 6 December 2023

Why Israel Must Win

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23-11-16 Melanie Phillips: Why Israel must win | Brendan O'Neill podcast | Spiked > .
24-10-7 Konstantin Kisin Off the Fence About Israel’s War - Triggernometry > .
24-10-2 Douglas Murray: A Time of War - Free Press > .
24-8-31 Ex-Muslim Speaks Out Against Radical Islam | Rawan Osman | TBN > .
24-8-21 [Hamas, NOT Israel, committing war crimes & threatening g-cide] - U > .
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23-5-17 Melanie Phillips | Reflections on the Revolution in the West | NatCon > .
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Monday, 23 October 2023

Exhaust Alternatives

If at first you don't succeed, try try again ..........

"The question is whether there is any reason to believe that such a new era may yet come to pass. If I am sanguine on this point, it is because of a conviction that men and nations do behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Surely the other alternatives of war and belligerency have now been exhausted." ~ Abba Eban*

And indeed, we often know how to do things by the philosophy that was expounded by another Irishman I know. He said that you can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility. ~ U.S. Congressional Hearing in 1970

*1967 June 16, Canadian Jewish Chronicle Review, Abba Eban at the United Nations: Not Backward to Belligerence But Forward to Peace, [UN address by Abba Eban on June 6, 1967], Page 9, Montreal, Canada. (Google News Archive)

Friday, 6 October 2023

Wasted Talent

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -- Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

Wednesday, 20 September 2023

"R" is for Ridiculous Arguments

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Jeremy Bentham's Attack on Natural Rights > .

Action on climate would be good for most, if not all, inhabitants of the globe, BUT ... the young are increasingly insufferable. Where, in what nation's constitution is "action on climate change" entrenched as a "human right"?

Easy. 

Nowhere.

Six entitled narcissists are suing 32 EU-member-state governments because the precious snowflakes identify themselves as the victims of trampling of what they assume to be their "human rights".

Clearly, not only do they appear to be unaware:
a) of the technical and economic obstacles to rapidly cutting CO2 emissions, or
b) that, (iirc), China (2020) is responsible for ~31% of global emissions of CO2, and the USA (2020) for ~13%,
but c) they clearly have no notion of the necessarily-legislated underpinnings of the "rights" that civilians actually can call upon.

Still, if declaring that I have a human right suffices, then I'll soon be claiming that some entity or organization owes me a billion dollars so that I might live the life of luxury to which, as a human right, I suddenly feel entitled.

The English utilitarian political philosopher and lawyer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) dismissed the notion of “natural” rights as nonsense and argued the all rights were the creation of the state:
Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law. Before the existence of laws there may be reasons for wishing that there were laws—and doubtless such reasons cannot be wanting, and those of the strongest kind;—but a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, does not constitute a right. To confound the existence of a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, with the existence of the right itself, is to confound the existence of a want with the means of relieving it. It is the same as if one should say, everybody is subject to hunger, therefore everybody has something to eat.
Jeremy Bentham famously regarded natural rights as “simple nonsense” and imprescriptible natural rights as “nonsense on stilts” (see his attack on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in Anarchical Fallacies (1796)). Thirty five years later he was still railing against the idea. In an unpublished work on Pannomial Fragments (c. 1831) he gave the clearest statement of his position: that rights were nothing but the creation of “the functionaries of government in the supreme grade” who granted them to citizens and which rights were guaranteed by “the functionaries of judicature” and enforced by “the functionaries belonging to the army”. Bentham thought that the idea of “natural rights” was a “fiction” which had been invented by revolutionaries in order to show “the nullity of real laws” which were “the fruits of the law, and of the law alone”. If the believers in natural rights had their way, he argued, it would lead to “anarchy.” The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 3.