Cosmic Skeptic's Pious Defense of Human Rights Doctrine.

I work alone except when I work with
Ranallo which is all the time showed at the home star runner I have no contemporaries here on YouTube none there is nobody on YouTube connected to political philosophy political science history let alone veganism in specific let alone history and politics of China in specific there's nobody I'd want to collaborate with you could do video with these days I do not know anybody of intellectual substance and integrity on this whole channel and you know what a kid like cosmic skeptic it's the most tragic sort of YouTube content for me to behold of all because I know he means well and I know his audience means well and what they're doing is bad and dangerous and wrong and for me from my perspective it's also demoralizing because I've got to look at this and look at the audience and ask why is nobody in this room capable of thinking through this problem through more than a single stage of analysis in multiple stages of analysis through multiple angles like somebody presents you with a glittering abstraction you don't think okay well alright that's it it's a nice abstract ID you've got there but let's think about that in more than one historical context let's think about that with maybe some examples that aren't so flattering to your assumptions in this argument just a little bit of lower case our reasoning to tease out what the problems might be so this kid cosmic skeptic made a video has more than 100,000 views now 100,000 uncritical Adya lating views in which he says it's okay it's even wonderful and positive and good for all of us to behave as if we believe in a principle we know to be untrue if we think it is useful and necessary for the greater happiness of our nation of our society of some larger number some some unit of people and no apparently nobody in the audience thinks this through you more than once to sit there completely unanimous applause for this nobody stops and thinks wait wait a minute wait a minute this reminds me of centuries of human history this reminds me of thousands of years of political debates like you know there was a time when people thought it was it had this kind of social utility to make up stories that you know if you would fight and die for the Emperor then you would go to heaven after you died you'd be rewarded in heaven with virgins right and there were people Machiavellian people in positions of power who knew these things to be untrue but they propounded them anyway because they thought it's not true but it's useful and it's necessary for the strength of the government for the stability the peacefulness of the society as a whole it's necessary for that greater happiness of the greater you know what it wasn't just Muslim countries that is it wasn't just Christian countries you even see that in the history of Buddhist nations Buddhist nations were the religion in theory and principle sets down that you shouldn't even kill a mosquito you shouldn't kill another human being but they managed to come up with excuses they managed to reason their way through why it is that if you kill an enemy if you kill you know the country next door rather than citizens your own country in fact that's good karma and not bad karma and don't worry the Buddhist monks will sit down and explain it to you the Buddhist monks will even do a ceremony where they bless your saber or your spear before you go into battle and use a sacred relic of the but.uh to tell you that your side is gonna win and the other side is gonna lose the these deep hypocrisy exist throughout our history in terms of them social engineering in the pre-modern world it was all based on this premise there were people who told terrible lies about sexuality for example and they knew that these things were not medically real and makers they knew they weren't in any sense spiritually or religiously true or you said well we have to tell these lies because if we don't you know women are gonna be getting pregnant with other men's children and so on you know we have to tell these lies because if we don't restrict people's you know sexual freedom this was the basis of like every authoritarian Machiavellian regime in every country and culture all around the world but here we have this kid telling us with just a single stage of analysis the his defense of the doctrine of human rights is that he knows it to be untrue but that he wants people to behave as if it were true because he thinks it's useful and necessary for the greater good it says this is dragging us back to the the dark ages in more ways than one and what's more disturbing to me even acknowledging that this is a younger man than myself is the choice to really disregard and lie about the history of the last 100 years now I'm only talking about 100 years for a reason what we now call human rights is a doctrine that emerged after World War two if you don't believe me let me just briefly remind you there was a similar-sounding but profoundly different doctrine during the French Revolution and the American Revolution not in that order of the Rights of Man no they sound similar in the English language the rights of man and human rights and they're profoundly different people who participated in the American Revolution and that debates that ensued thereafter and right in the Constitution so on people who participate in the French Revolution and in the debates of the suit thereafter under Napoleon's dictatorship for example their concept for example of human equality in that period the rights of man fair when they said all men are born equal to them that only meant nobody is born a king as opposed to a commoner nobody is born entitled to wealth because of their name being an aristocrat what they meant when they said all men are born equal was only in exclusively for example that your promotion in the military should not be based on your bloodline in your connection to a noble household all right that these were major tensions in Europe in that time they were tensions in North America to a lesser extent their concepts of human equality under the rights of man had absolutely nothing to do with equal access to education completely foreign that's our concept now after World War Two had nothing to do with equal access to drinking water had nothing to do with equal access to health care and of course most shamefully the people who wrote the American Constitution and also by the way Napoleon himself and his government they saw no contradiction whatsoever in promoting their rights of man doctrine while promoting a society built on slavery yeah in case you didn't hear napoleon fought a war to bring back the slave trade in haiti didn't go very well for him but nevertheless napoleon also wanted to have a slave trade in global empire this is a contrast to him and other voices in the french revolution period okay that was that was the rights of man human rights after world war ii remarkably different in all these ways even though some of the jargon is similar and of course some younger people find this puzzling how was it possible for the authors of the american constitution to live with these conditions or participants in the french revolution so and so forth tell me something kid tell me something cosmic skeptic how did humans rights work out after World War two was it a success or a failure how did the human rights doctrine play out in Korea in what we call the Korean War or the Korean Civil War when the United States of America committed atrocities how did the human rights doctrine work out in China when more than 30 million people died 30 million is the minimum estimate in the Great Leap Forward how did how did human rights doctrine work out for Cambodia how did the human rights doctrine work out for apartheid in South Africa after World War two how did the human rights doctrine work out for Yugoslavia Kosovo I'm sorry the human rights doctrine is a proven failure and if you're really an insider with political science political philosophy you know this because there was a sort of sequel doctrine called the r2p doctrine a responsibility to protect there was actually recognition within elite levels of United Nations and international community to try to set up a new sort of Human Rights regime that would have some teeth and enforcement okay the human rights doctrine failed and failed and failed from the moment it was first designed and implemented which I guess it was during World War two oh yeah you know a little example you might have heard of kid have you heard about the creation of the State of Israel how did that work out in terms of in terms of Human Rights it was that was that not a human rights disaster from the day get started down to the present nobody has ever been able to square the pragmatic reality of Israel and Zionism and settlements and borders nothing about Israel has ever fit into the paradigm of international human rights law or human rights doctrine and the whole world just keeps on trundling ahead and yeah if you want to get real atheist about it take a good long look at the reality of Saudi Arabia in any period of history including today and ask yourself what human rights doctor has done about that in the past and what you think it's likely to do in the future and you know I may sound overly cynical here I'm actually very idealistic because when I look back at that history post-world war ii inclusive of Cold War history I'm aware there were counter examples I actually have a sophisticated view on this unlike this piece of mentally disabled poser cosmic skeptic okay when you have a sophisticated view of something you think through more than a single stage now so you think hey wait if this doctrine failed there must also be counter examples in the same period of history that will illustrate that failure will show us the mechanisms were viably distinguished actually successful political science policy and there are I encourage you to google the jackson-vanik amendment the jackson-vanik amendment was an economic trade mechanism legal principle how I'm gonna put this it was a form of economic incentive devised in the United States Congress and Senate that was more effective than all the threats of nuclear war it was more effective than all the grandiose speeches made about abstract principles of human rights in the United Nations it was more effective and just said hey look if you are not going to recognize in dictatorships like the Soviet Union that your people who maybe criticize your government and unhappy with the government that they want to leave if you're not gonna let those people leave than on a case-by-case basis we're gonna attract them we're gonna actually carry out surveillance on this issue and we are gonna hold you to account and we're gonna put an economic price on this so there was a price tag there was a push and pull mechanism there was enforcement there was mutual criticism and oversight and it worked okay it worked and it probably did more to transform the Soviet Union than as I say the stockpiles of nuclear arms and of course it also intervened and saved the lives of significant numbers of unique individual people who in this manner managed to escape the Soviet Union and of course they also escaped the Soviet Union with their criticism and their direct experience the Soviet and we were able to speak about what was wrong in that society and then within the Soviet Union the leaders who were not hearing that criticisms wrong people they'd hear that they'd see that play out in the Western press it really was a dynamite highly highly effective rights enforcement mechanism okay and again this has application today so you can imagine if you actually want to spur Saudi Arabia to transform as a culture as a you know as a regime you really could have a sequence of specific enforced resolutions for the jackson-vanik amendment that said hey look Saudi Arabia you like exporting oil well you know what we can actually have a global trade agreement that we are gonna put your oil at an economic disadvantage by so many points for so many violations of one or another very simple principle whether you call that human rights or not okay so human rights in the twentieth century I can't even say it rose and fell if you're familiar just with the timeline of what happened in South Korea the Korean War if you're familiar with the timeline of Israel if you're even familiar with the timeline of India after World War two okay the human rights doctrine was failing from the moment it was first graded and it continued failing through the whole Cold War period and it's still a failure today so the argument this kid cosmic skeptic is presenting it's wrong both in principle and in practice it's wrong fundamentally in principle to tell people that they should be willing to believe in an idea they should be willing to believe in really this is talking about a legal regime knowing it to be untrue knowing it to be false but believing it to be for the greater good of the nation down that path lies every evil of the dark ages in Europe and the dark ages in Asia and we all know it's not through some kind of democratic consensual system that we agree on what will be for the greatest good of the greatest number of people there will be oppressive conformist notions that you must serve the intro of the leader of the nation of that greater good of that greater whole it's not up to you to choose if not if you select this is going to be enforced on people on the contrary the spirit of the Enlightenment that railed against that old authoritarian attitude and again it's a more Machiavellian attitude was to instead say no profoundly and fundamentally it does matter if something is true or untrue it does matter if something exists or doesn't exist and that each individual ought to be free to inquire and to prove or disprove each principle and to reject those principles to say no I know that I owe the state nothing the fact that I'm a citizen of this country the fact that the government is sovereign against me that means nothing and I can go to court and I can prove that the government is wrong that was the the breath of fresh air that blew across Europe and even though the French Revolution was a disaster and even though the dictatorship of Napoleon was a disaster and even though what was going on in British politics at that time was a disaster also Jacobin ISM arose and fell across all of Europe and most of Europe became more anti jacket than anything else nevertheless fundamentally that commitment to reason that commitment to truth for the sake of truth and rejecting this kind of rationalization that something may be untrue but is useful and necessary for the greater good that was the step forward we had in the Enlightenment and people who claim to represent the highest île ideals of that enlightenment now will in the name of those ideals on YouTube for a crowd of 100,000 fans drag us all back to the dark ages