AR&IO: Brunei vs. Gay Rights vs. George Clooney?
29 March 2019 [link youtube]
Brunei revealed that they will now treat homosexuality as a death-penalty offense (execution by stoning), and the western media briefly (BRIEFLY!) showed some interest in the issue today… but headlines fade fast, and the struggle for gay rights is long-term. If the United Nations has no agenda AGAINST Sharia Law, who does, exactly? Aside from George Clooney, who else is a player in this game?
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Youtube Automatic Transcription
this is a tiny tiny nation in Southeast
Asia and they finally pass legislation that will not just discourage homosexuality but that will discourage it with the death penalty at the end of World War two when most of the fundamental assumptions governing the United Nations were created and to some extent codified in laws policies charters and what-have-you at the end of World War two there was no nation state in the world that felt it was their business or their responsibility to boss around the other nation-states to get them to protect gay rights to prevent homosexuals from being persecuted and now in 2019 it's a very fundamental very important assumption that we don't know what to do with they all just sit there with their mouths open apoplectic as the decades go by and they do nothing about the fact that there are 70 nations 77 0 70 different countries that are members of the UN right now make homosexuality illegal the Sultan is publicly enforcing harsh Islamic law but privately he leads a life of opulence and decadence in his small oil-rich nation it is a great pleasure to welcome my good friend His Majesty the Sultan of Brunei our militaries that are extraordinarily capable and the bilateral military relationship between the United States and Brunei has the capacity to help people in times of need and to try to help avoid conflict rather than start problems he has according to reports at least 150 homes he owns almost 20 aircraft he has something like seven to nine thousand cars hundreds of thousands of suits and millions of dollars in in artwork he is a key leader in the Southeast Asian region but also widely respected around the world it's hypocritical because he's talking about living humbly by the tenets of Islam and yet he is of course one of the most fabulously probably the most fabulously wealthy person on earth and certainly the most materialistic person on earth my understand is tomorrow he's going to have an opportunity to take his family up to New York where we're going to encourage him to do some shopping because we want to continue to strengthen the US economy the human rights paradigm raises more questions than answers but that makes it all the more important that we do with due diligence ask those questions and come to new conclusions both in a reference to particular controversies that may arise in the news and in reference to the changing cultural assumptions of our generation at the end of World War two when most of the fundamental assumptions governing the United Nations were created and to some extent codified in laws policies charters and what-have-you at the end of World War two there was no nation state in the world that felt it was their business or their responsibility to boss around the other nation states to get them to protect gay rights to prevent homosexuals from being persecuted and now in 2019 it's a very fundamental very important assumption that we don't know what to do with it's pathetic politicians celebrity activists national governments and United Nations agencies they all just sit there with their mouths open apoplectic as the decades go by and they do nothing about the fact that there are 70 nations 77 0 70 different countries that are members of the UN right now make homosexuality illegal and the particular example we are discussing today the particular example that today is the most important controversy for the newspapers to talk about and that sadly will disappear from the newspapers in two weeks the important example today is the bad news from Brunei for an eye however you want to pronounce it this is a tiny tiny nation in Southeast Asia and they finally pass legislation that will not just discourage homosexuality but that will discourage it with the death penalty homosexuality will be treated as a death-penalty offense henceforth in Brunei now who do you expect to do something about this do you expect there to be sanctions imposed by a neighboring state like um Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines do you think that those countries are going to impose sanctions on Brunei equivalent to the type of sanctions that are imposed against North Korea Iran sanctions that are imposed around the world to encourage political change encourage policy reform or encourage regime change whatever the objectives of those those policies may be um the types of sanctions that of course are taken for granted with a tiny powerless nation like Cuba Cuba's face sanctions were so long and they failed to bring about political change but nevertheless nevertheless there's no real risk for foreign powers in demonstrating their moral superiority over our country like brunei and there's a certain pragmatic school of thought that says hey even if we wouldn't stand up on a moral and ethical issue when the powerful nation we're standing up to is russia or china at the united states america even if we don't have the luxury of standing up for human rights when the risks are too great when the consequences are too grave that it nevertheless is important and meaningful for the united nations and national governments in the world to take that stand to impose negative consequences for negative policy choices when they can to make an example out of brunei even if you're not going to consistently enforce this human rights standard or policy around the world equally but but nobody's even gonna do that are they there is no whisper of a possibility that the United Nations will stand up and and change the world right so the question we have to start to ask is why does the United Nations even exist when did our expectations of the United Nations get so low that we don't expect them to stand up and make a decisive difference in any conflict anywhere around the world on any human rights issue anywhere in the world and I understand there's a great fear amongst governments that if the United Nations actually starts carrying out the Human Rights mandate that it was created to pursue it's gonna result in a kind of tyranny of objective standards being imposed where local subjective cultural standards don't match up with those objective expectations if today you impose on a Muslim nation the expectation that they should treat homosexuals as equals that homosexuality should be a protected normal form of sexual behavior well what about circumcision what about circumcision in Christian countries in Jewish countries don't we know as a scientific fact that circumcision is an injury inflicted on a child don't we know that this is a barbaric religious tradition that really harms people in an objectively real way when you take away the cultural accretions of centuries and you look at it objectively and scientifically isn't this something that ought to be illegal to protect the rights of the child or something that if it is legal you should only be allowed to do once you turn 18 once you can make the legal decision yourself to have a surgeon cut off part of your penis or cut off party or vagina isn't that a kind of self-evident legal and political challenge that somebody should be responsible to referee music referee is a verb here if not the United Nations then who right you can't expect Malaysia to scrutinize beyond this you can't expect Indonesia you can't expect the Philippines who's the referee here who is standing up to draw these lines and these questions and push the whole world forward toward some kind of progress whether you define that in terms of human rights or not I've lived through an incredibly bleak and depressing time in terms of international politics I lived through the worldwide disappointment about humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia Yugoslavia Kosovo that whole mess I lived through the disaster of United Nations intervention well the very end of it in Cambodia completely it's long story anyone else here old enough to remember United Nations intervention in in East Timor how about Haiti how many how many United Nations interventions in Haiti and how many went horribly wrong did I did I mention Rwanda Rwandan massacres Rwanda genocide no no when I was a kid in the the Bill Clinton era there was this doctrine that was really popular in the press and amongst career politicians and they they called it r2p so capital letter are the number two and then the letter P and they called it responsibility to protect and it was this idea that anywhere in the world that there was a serious violation of human rights that there were war crimes going on that basically United Nations military that's what we're typing about should intervene there was a responsibility to protect human lives and now of that were taken seriously every country in the world that has the death penalty for homosexuality you should have some kind of interventions and if you're not going to have a military intervention of course you should have trade sanctions you should have some kind of at least symbolic punishment from the United Nations whether its economic or whether you just lower their flag why not have the flag at half-mast for all the countries that are fundamentally violating all these human rights all the time would that require so much heroism on the part of our our politicians my point is here on the one hand the United Nations was created with a set of expectations that really people in power would be afraid to pursue in an honest overt thoroughgoing manner the human rights doctrine none of them really want to try to rigorously enforce or even really talk about what would human rights mean if we applied it seriously to the current situation in Ukraine what would any of the United Nations principles mean no just you know yeah Syria these are really tough conflicts right so it's been agreed especially after a long series of Fiasco's and disasters again whichever one stand out your mind whether it's Rwanda kam what happened in Yugoslavia it's been agreed upon as a kind of silent consensus that the United Nations should do as little as possible all of the time what hasn't been agreed upon is the budget for doing as little as possible currently expenditures by the United Nations are at 50 billion per annum that's a real number you understand five zero fifty billion US dollars fifty billion u.s. dollars per annum peacekeeping operations those are military interventions don't kid yourself peacekeeping operations I have approximately eight point nine billion dollar dollar budget okay those guys don't just talk um I don't know World Food Program 5.3 billion United Nations Development Program four point seven billion goes on and on and adds up to over fifty billion u.s. dollars so are you telling me that this organization with a budget that is so big it cannot be fathomed and really no democratic accountability no transparency none zero completely elitist top-down organization created to pursue the ideals of that period at the end of World War two had the the four freedoms doctrine for the United States where everyone said hey hey hey all these terrible things that happened during World War two never again we're going to create this doctrine of human rights and this very well-funded agency it's gonna force it are you telling me that the united nations of the fifty billion dollar budget is powerless against the tiny nation of brunei population four hundred thousand and if they're not powerless why is it that nobody I mean sorry I looked at the New York Times coverage o de Tocqueville I looked at several different articles covering this nobody is even discussing the remote possibility that anything is going to happen and again if if that impetus for change if that power of suasion is not put upon brunei by the united nations who do you think is going to do it all of these people are paid more than the highest-paid staff at any national agency the United Nations was founded with that mandate by definition if you're if you work in economics within the United Nations you will be paid more than someone in any government in the world in the highest paid government world who has a comparable position in terms of responsibilities or research that's the way salaries are set in a nation they were founded with this mandate that they would pay all of their staff more than any national government with him they obeyed huge amounts of money there is no possibility that nobody even even in reporting on this nobody even conceives of the possibility that one the United Nations will solve the problem or two that the United Nations will make some kind of decision to change the situation fundamentally they are not risking their own reputation their fate their their political careers are not in any way attached to the success or failure of outcomes whether those are human rights outcomes or democratic outcomes or I don't know just a project to make the world a better place there's no sense in which their career or their reputation there's no sense in which there can be positive or negative consequences for them linked to these projects the United Nations in parks month and maybe that's why again and again the outcomes of UN projects are so underwhelming right they're not answerable to a public democratically they're not even answerable to a set of objective standards like human rights that would say hey guess what guys it might be politically convenient to get along with Russia it might be politically meaning to get along with China might even be politically convenient to get along with Brunei this tiny country that just made homosexuality death-penalty offense but political convenience isn't what we're answerable to we have this objective list of facts that define what's democracy and what's not what's human rights and what's not what's acceptable what's an acceptable and then we have to enforce those standards then they'd be more like a law enforcement agency and less like a pseudo democratic government with a Council of people debating what policy should be right our expectations of the UN have been lowered to such an unfathomable extent that we neither expect them to do anything decisive in relation to a more abstract matter of principle like gay rights in muslim-majority countries nor do we expect anything to change anything decisive to happen in a situation where it's incredibly ethically simple children are starving and you the United Nations have been handing out sacks of rice with the World Food Programme logo for decades and you haven't been achieving your goals you failed and sure it's not all your fault it's also the fault of the communist government of Laos but who then is going to put pressure on the government of house to reform and change is it going to be Vietnam is it gonna be Cambodia is it gonna be Communist China next door are they gonna say hey we're gonna put sanctions on you we're gonna put your flag at half-mast we're gonna log E and pressure you to come into the 21st century and start living up to these human rights standards and start doing a better job providing opportunities or even just food for your own people No the impetus for change positive change whether you call it human rights or call it something else has to come from somewhere I'd love it if it came from the grassroots but the pathetic reality in 2019 is it's coming from celebrity activists like George Clooney and nowhere else nowhere else no one else there's a better chance that two months from now George Clooney and his little movement for gay rights is going to be making a big difference in the world it's a better chance of that then there was a chance of anything coming from the United Nations or any other federal international institution [Music]
Asia and they finally pass legislation that will not just discourage homosexuality but that will discourage it with the death penalty at the end of World War two when most of the fundamental assumptions governing the United Nations were created and to some extent codified in laws policies charters and what-have-you at the end of World War two there was no nation state in the world that felt it was their business or their responsibility to boss around the other nation-states to get them to protect gay rights to prevent homosexuals from being persecuted and now in 2019 it's a very fundamental very important assumption that we don't know what to do with they all just sit there with their mouths open apoplectic as the decades go by and they do nothing about the fact that there are 70 nations 77 0 70 different countries that are members of the UN right now make homosexuality illegal the Sultan is publicly enforcing harsh Islamic law but privately he leads a life of opulence and decadence in his small oil-rich nation it is a great pleasure to welcome my good friend His Majesty the Sultan of Brunei our militaries that are extraordinarily capable and the bilateral military relationship between the United States and Brunei has the capacity to help people in times of need and to try to help avoid conflict rather than start problems he has according to reports at least 150 homes he owns almost 20 aircraft he has something like seven to nine thousand cars hundreds of thousands of suits and millions of dollars in in artwork he is a key leader in the Southeast Asian region but also widely respected around the world it's hypocritical because he's talking about living humbly by the tenets of Islam and yet he is of course one of the most fabulously probably the most fabulously wealthy person on earth and certainly the most materialistic person on earth my understand is tomorrow he's going to have an opportunity to take his family up to New York where we're going to encourage him to do some shopping because we want to continue to strengthen the US economy the human rights paradigm raises more questions than answers but that makes it all the more important that we do with due diligence ask those questions and come to new conclusions both in a reference to particular controversies that may arise in the news and in reference to the changing cultural assumptions of our generation at the end of World War two when most of the fundamental assumptions governing the United Nations were created and to some extent codified in laws policies charters and what-have-you at the end of World War two there was no nation state in the world that felt it was their business or their responsibility to boss around the other nation states to get them to protect gay rights to prevent homosexuals from being persecuted and now in 2019 it's a very fundamental very important assumption that we don't know what to do with it's pathetic politicians celebrity activists national governments and United Nations agencies they all just sit there with their mouths open apoplectic as the decades go by and they do nothing about the fact that there are 70 nations 77 0 70 different countries that are members of the UN right now make homosexuality illegal and the particular example we are discussing today the particular example that today is the most important controversy for the newspapers to talk about and that sadly will disappear from the newspapers in two weeks the important example today is the bad news from Brunei for an eye however you want to pronounce it this is a tiny tiny nation in Southeast Asia and they finally pass legislation that will not just discourage homosexuality but that will discourage it with the death penalty homosexuality will be treated as a death-penalty offense henceforth in Brunei now who do you expect to do something about this do you expect there to be sanctions imposed by a neighboring state like um Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines do you think that those countries are going to impose sanctions on Brunei equivalent to the type of sanctions that are imposed against North Korea Iran sanctions that are imposed around the world to encourage political change encourage policy reform or encourage regime change whatever the objectives of those those policies may be um the types of sanctions that of course are taken for granted with a tiny powerless nation like Cuba Cuba's face sanctions were so long and they failed to bring about political change but nevertheless nevertheless there's no real risk for foreign powers in demonstrating their moral superiority over our country like brunei and there's a certain pragmatic school of thought that says hey even if we wouldn't stand up on a moral and ethical issue when the powerful nation we're standing up to is russia or china at the united states america even if we don't have the luxury of standing up for human rights when the risks are too great when the consequences are too grave that it nevertheless is important and meaningful for the united nations and national governments in the world to take that stand to impose negative consequences for negative policy choices when they can to make an example out of brunei even if you're not going to consistently enforce this human rights standard or policy around the world equally but but nobody's even gonna do that are they there is no whisper of a possibility that the United Nations will stand up and and change the world right so the question we have to start to ask is why does the United Nations even exist when did our expectations of the United Nations get so low that we don't expect them to stand up and make a decisive difference in any conflict anywhere around the world on any human rights issue anywhere in the world and I understand there's a great fear amongst governments that if the United Nations actually starts carrying out the Human Rights mandate that it was created to pursue it's gonna result in a kind of tyranny of objective standards being imposed where local subjective cultural standards don't match up with those objective expectations if today you impose on a Muslim nation the expectation that they should treat homosexuals as equals that homosexuality should be a protected normal form of sexual behavior well what about circumcision what about circumcision in Christian countries in Jewish countries don't we know as a scientific fact that circumcision is an injury inflicted on a child don't we know that this is a barbaric religious tradition that really harms people in an objectively real way when you take away the cultural accretions of centuries and you look at it objectively and scientifically isn't this something that ought to be illegal to protect the rights of the child or something that if it is legal you should only be allowed to do once you turn 18 once you can make the legal decision yourself to have a surgeon cut off part of your penis or cut off party or vagina isn't that a kind of self-evident legal and political challenge that somebody should be responsible to referee music referee is a verb here if not the United Nations then who right you can't expect Malaysia to scrutinize beyond this you can't expect Indonesia you can't expect the Philippines who's the referee here who is standing up to draw these lines and these questions and push the whole world forward toward some kind of progress whether you define that in terms of human rights or not I've lived through an incredibly bleak and depressing time in terms of international politics I lived through the worldwide disappointment about humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia Yugoslavia Kosovo that whole mess I lived through the disaster of United Nations intervention well the very end of it in Cambodia completely it's long story anyone else here old enough to remember United Nations intervention in in East Timor how about Haiti how many how many United Nations interventions in Haiti and how many went horribly wrong did I did I mention Rwanda Rwandan massacres Rwanda genocide no no when I was a kid in the the Bill Clinton era there was this doctrine that was really popular in the press and amongst career politicians and they they called it r2p so capital letter are the number two and then the letter P and they called it responsibility to protect and it was this idea that anywhere in the world that there was a serious violation of human rights that there were war crimes going on that basically United Nations military that's what we're typing about should intervene there was a responsibility to protect human lives and now of that were taken seriously every country in the world that has the death penalty for homosexuality you should have some kind of interventions and if you're not going to have a military intervention of course you should have trade sanctions you should have some kind of at least symbolic punishment from the United Nations whether its economic or whether you just lower their flag why not have the flag at half-mast for all the countries that are fundamentally violating all these human rights all the time would that require so much heroism on the part of our our politicians my point is here on the one hand the United Nations was created with a set of expectations that really people in power would be afraid to pursue in an honest overt thoroughgoing manner the human rights doctrine none of them really want to try to rigorously enforce or even really talk about what would human rights mean if we applied it seriously to the current situation in Ukraine what would any of the United Nations principles mean no just you know yeah Syria these are really tough conflicts right so it's been agreed especially after a long series of Fiasco's and disasters again whichever one stand out your mind whether it's Rwanda kam what happened in Yugoslavia it's been agreed upon as a kind of silent consensus that the United Nations should do as little as possible all of the time what hasn't been agreed upon is the budget for doing as little as possible currently expenditures by the United Nations are at 50 billion per annum that's a real number you understand five zero fifty billion US dollars fifty billion u.s. dollars per annum peacekeeping operations those are military interventions don't kid yourself peacekeeping operations I have approximately eight point nine billion dollar dollar budget okay those guys don't just talk um I don't know World Food Program 5.3 billion United Nations Development Program four point seven billion goes on and on and adds up to over fifty billion u.s. dollars so are you telling me that this organization with a budget that is so big it cannot be fathomed and really no democratic accountability no transparency none zero completely elitist top-down organization created to pursue the ideals of that period at the end of World War two had the the four freedoms doctrine for the United States where everyone said hey hey hey all these terrible things that happened during World War two never again we're going to create this doctrine of human rights and this very well-funded agency it's gonna force it are you telling me that the united nations of the fifty billion dollar budget is powerless against the tiny nation of brunei population four hundred thousand and if they're not powerless why is it that nobody I mean sorry I looked at the New York Times coverage o de Tocqueville I looked at several different articles covering this nobody is even discussing the remote possibility that anything is going to happen and again if if that impetus for change if that power of suasion is not put upon brunei by the united nations who do you think is going to do it all of these people are paid more than the highest-paid staff at any national agency the United Nations was founded with that mandate by definition if you're if you work in economics within the United Nations you will be paid more than someone in any government in the world in the highest paid government world who has a comparable position in terms of responsibilities or research that's the way salaries are set in a nation they were founded with this mandate that they would pay all of their staff more than any national government with him they obeyed huge amounts of money there is no possibility that nobody even even in reporting on this nobody even conceives of the possibility that one the United Nations will solve the problem or two that the United Nations will make some kind of decision to change the situation fundamentally they are not risking their own reputation their fate their their political careers are not in any way attached to the success or failure of outcomes whether those are human rights outcomes or democratic outcomes or I don't know just a project to make the world a better place there's no sense in which their career or their reputation there's no sense in which there can be positive or negative consequences for them linked to these projects the United Nations in parks month and maybe that's why again and again the outcomes of UN projects are so underwhelming right they're not answerable to a public democratically they're not even answerable to a set of objective standards like human rights that would say hey guess what guys it might be politically convenient to get along with Russia it might be politically meaning to get along with China might even be politically convenient to get along with Brunei this tiny country that just made homosexuality death-penalty offense but political convenience isn't what we're answerable to we have this objective list of facts that define what's democracy and what's not what's human rights and what's not what's acceptable what's an acceptable and then we have to enforce those standards then they'd be more like a law enforcement agency and less like a pseudo democratic government with a Council of people debating what policy should be right our expectations of the UN have been lowered to such an unfathomable extent that we neither expect them to do anything decisive in relation to a more abstract matter of principle like gay rights in muslim-majority countries nor do we expect anything to change anything decisive to happen in a situation where it's incredibly ethically simple children are starving and you the United Nations have been handing out sacks of rice with the World Food Programme logo for decades and you haven't been achieving your goals you failed and sure it's not all your fault it's also the fault of the communist government of Laos but who then is going to put pressure on the government of house to reform and change is it going to be Vietnam is it gonna be Cambodia is it gonna be Communist China next door are they gonna say hey we're gonna put sanctions on you we're gonna put your flag at half-mast we're gonna log E and pressure you to come into the 21st century and start living up to these human rights standards and start doing a better job providing opportunities or even just food for your own people No the impetus for change positive change whether you call it human rights or call it something else has to come from somewhere I'd love it if it came from the grassroots but the pathetic reality in 2019 is it's coming from celebrity activists like George Clooney and nowhere else nowhere else no one else there's a better chance that two months from now George Clooney and his little movement for gay rights is going to be making a big difference in the world it's a better chance of that then there was a chance of anything coming from the United Nations or any other federal international institution [Music]