That’s interesting you say that because I initially had the opposite impression because this would imply that the Earth has experienced major temperature swings much beyond what we’re seeing now and life carried on.
Then I reread and saw the part about increased greenhouse gas effects… I hope those calculations at least are inaccurate.
Its not just about life carrying on though. It wont carry on as usual for humans, and these findings show that we can expect a more rapid and greater increase in temperature than initially expected. This will disrupt food and water supplies, cause inhospitable deserts to grow, and displace a lot of people and animals that were once in tune with their ecosystem before the rapid changes began.
Not to mention we are already halfway to more than doubling pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels, the nightmare scenario with 4+ degree warming of the planet seems more likely. These findings mean its going to happen even faster than we thought.
Not OP, but for anyone who’s curious I believe they may be referencing George Bernard Shaw’s infamous quote [0] (which FWIW I think expresses a morally abhorrent way of going about things)
Ahhh you are correct, thanks for pointing that out. I'll update the title. They do refer specifically to "trusted digital agency" but, as you pointed out, it's "agency" as in "ability to choose" not "agency" as in "an organization."
A lot can be said about Israel, and this NSO stuff is extremely alarming. However, they also should get some credit as (one of?) the only countries in the Middle East where the laws don’t dictate that people be persecuted and/or killed for being homosexual.
Is there a distinct name for this form or relative of whataboutism where some supposed superiority over some other group on some axis irrelevant to the issue at hand is raised to derail criticism of a regime or other group’s abuses?
Someone asked why Israel is considered a "beacon of democracy" in the region. That opens the conversation to why liberal democracies elevate it over the region's autocracies. The tolerance it shares with other liberal documents is germane.
This tactic of dipping your true intentions in the aesthetics of progress is new and designed to trick people with a north-star cause to sympathize with the oppressor.
Unfortunately it only takes a few brain cycles for even the simplest of persons to realise that upholding apartheid because #girlpower is a sad stretch and a half.
It's relevant because the goal is to delegitimize criticism of apartheid and it's export of oppression to its neighbours.
There is no other point of relevance to my original comment and, in all honesty, it amounts to blatant propogandising. I'll just leave it at that.
> It's relevant because the goal is to delegitimize criticism of apartheid and it's export of oppression to its neighbours
It's equally reductive to ignore those progressive elements on account of certain elements of repression.
It doesn't make them less murderous. And it doesn't de-legitimize criticism. But reality doesn't offer perfect choices. Every government is flawed; most have redeeming values. We must balance the former against the latter. Armchair enthusiasts can imagine perfect options, but reality isn't that forgiving to decision makers.
Israel's unregulated spyware, bordering on terrorism, is an international issue. Its apartheid state is an international issue. But the freedoms it affords a large number of its citizens stands in sharp contrast to its neighbors. That, too, is of international interest. Acknowledging that is not a diversion and does not de-legitimize the criticism--it contextualists it.
It is not equally reductive because one reduction serves to perpetuate oppression, apartheid and empowers regimes that are the architects of roadblocks to progress. And the other reduction aims to remove the obstacles to dismantling all the above.
The only way the contextualisation is relevent to the original comment is if there's some value in appending this racist myth that "if those Arabs had their say then women would be on leashes and gays would be made into smoothies on-sight". Ironically, the contextualisation is the status quo. The contextualisation is a direct result of, among other things, Israel and it's complicit export of cyber oppression weapons.
And before someone claims that this is separate from the state, just consider that the export license would not be granted for a sale which would be detrimental to Israel's interests as a state. The base deduction is that it's in the interest of the state to keep its neighbours citizens in-check and for Israel to be known worldwide to be an exporter of these exact tools.
I think you may be missing the point of the essay. I don’t think it meant to say that Christianity is perfect nor that Christianity is the supreme religion. Of course Christianity has been used to justify hateful conduct (just like most other religions at some point) but regardless it more than anything else is responsible for how “Western Civilization” developed, and by extension our understanding of human rights. Yes Christianity was used to defend slavery, but it was also used to condemn it. Regardless, the point was that Christianity is a driving force behind Western thought/morality and ignoring that is dangerous.
Are there other religions that teach the same values of human rights? Of course! But how many of them directly influenced Western life and the Western definition of those same rights, specifically in the founding of the US (which became the blueprint for so many other countries after it)?
Also, I feel like Judaism is implicitly included to some degree in this because Jesus was a Jew and the author specifically mentions he (the author) was Jewish.
Greece and Rome's civic and philosophical development was the source of how Western Civilization developed. Christianity was then transplanted on top of Western Civilization; it wasn't the source. The author is either mistaken or arguing in bad faith, and makes numerous factually incorrect statements. He argues the Locke "assumed" God given rights, and states that there are no other legitimate sources, despite there being a large body of work in the 3rd century BCE that made logical arguments for treating all of humanity equally. Similarly, in his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius argues that gods or atoms, your first responsibility is to the human race.
The author would have us forget that much of the Enlightenment came from the rediscovery of Greek and Roman knowledge.
The whole article reads as an attempt to convince atheists that they're not really atheist, that all their ideas came from religion and are worthless without religion, completely ignoring the role philosophy had in creating those ideas, long before Christianity was on the scene.
At least in the context of this essay this point seems moot to me. Whether the author argues that only Christianity provided such theories or not, the vast majority of the US founders cite the Christian God as the source of a lot of things, human rights among them. They don’t cite some Greek philosopher because that’s not what they pulled that aspect of their argument from.
Maybe this is just more cut snd dry for me because I’ve studied US history for years and I’m imposing a lot of that into the essay, but I don’t think the author is being disingenuous at all for rightly pointing out the reaching effect of Christianity on our modern understanding of human rights (see Locke’s “Reasonableness of Christianity” for some fun reading).
Many writings of the founders were absolutely rife with references to antiquity and classical authors, it was a common practice of the time to write under a Roman republic era pseudonym, and off the top of my head, Jefferson and Adams knew Latin, Madison knew Greek and Latin, and they all were definitely well versed in the classics.
Maybe we're talking past each other, but the essay seemed to be arguing that Christianity was both the source and only legitimate basis for modern human rights, and I don't think the historical record supports that argument at all.
Isn't that kind of lumping a great number of people with very different mindsets into a big group of Idiots Because They Don't Think Like Me?
I won't spend the time to go through and contradict every single one of your points, but let's not forget that Tipper Gore (Al Gore's wife at the time) was the main push behind the parental advisory labels, freedom fries is a joke to 100% of the people I've talked to about it, and just because not everyone agrees at what point (or whether) an abortion becomes synonymous with a murder does not mean that everyone on the right wants to rule over women (unlike some cultures that do exist to this day in other countries).
I don’t support all of those proposed changes, but I’m legitimately curious as to why, if the election process is so important and sacred, it is also too much to ask for some sort of proof that the person voting absentee is actually allowed to vote.
I don’t like the witness signature requirement for absentees, but saying that people of a certain race can’t provide a driver’s license or some other state id because they have a certain skin color seems a little racist (?). That might just be me though.
It’s basically a consequence of us not having any national ID card.
Many people don’t have driver’s licenses (whose requirements vary by state), most people don’t have valid passports, etc.
If we had an ID card that every citizen would be reasonably expected to have and there was a nationally standardized way of getting it, then of course it would make sense to require that ID to vote.
> saying that people of a certain race can’t provide a driver’s license or some other state id because they have a certain skin color seems a little racist (?)
Maybe easier to understand if we recall that "race" is sociological, not biological, and that skin color is a course-grained encoding society uses for mapping individuals to social identities?
From that perspective, what we're really saying is "our society has historically split people up into various sub groups, and some of those sub groups we've made it more difficult to access resources, and many common identifying documents are tied to access to these resources, so groups with less access are also less likely to have the accompanying documents."
Requiring documents that we know some groups of Americans, on average, are less likely to have, for something ALL Americans are entitled to, is problematic, no?
Voting is a right as an American citizen. ID's are not a right, and there's hundreds of years of precedent that government cannot require you to have a specific ID to uphold your basic rights. They only have to be able to reasonably determine who you are, so, name and address.
Governments get around this by having things like drivers licenses that most people then elect into because it's required to drive.
But governments could simply not issue you their specific ID, and therefore youre voided of your rights. It always comes back to government power vs individual rights.
Acquiring an ID is typically a very lengthy and tedious process in most states, which entails:
1) knowing enough about the process to find all the documents required to get an ID (usually includes birth certificate and SSN card if you don’t already have an ID, which not everyone is able to keep track of)
2) taking a day (or multiple days) off work to go to the DMV, depending on wait times and if you’ve brought enough documentation
3) paying $40+
4) waiting days or weeks for the ID to come
All for what? If you don’t have a car, and you don’t really interact with the government or banks in any meaningful way (you would be SHOCKED how many people are in this position) you basically don’t need an ID at all to function. So if the ONLY reason to get an ID is because it’s required to vote, this ends up being a MASSIVE hurdle. All that effort just to vote? And you need to do it many weeks before the election? Of course that will suppress turnout from populations who don’t already have IDs!
This isn’t even considering populations who have pretty deep-seated (and reasonable!) wariness of giving too much information to government institutions, when historically that information (especially demographic) has been used to oppress/discriminate in things like housing policy, policing policy, etc.
If America issued a federal government ID at birth for free that auto-renewed, maybe these laws wouldn’t be as insidious. But that almost certainly will never happen.
If we can justify expecting an impoverished single mother with a million other things demanding her time to jump through those same hoops to own a Glock in Massachusetts then we can expect her counterpart to do it to vote in Georgia. (Don't get me started on the judicial process series of amendments, they're ignored by the state(s) to an even worse extent.)
Frankly I think that level of restriction if bullcrap when applied to what is a plainly written right but this level of restriction is applied piecemeal to various rights by various states both at present and in the recent past. Legislatures does not see things as plainly as you or I do. They deal in these kinds of mental gymnastics as a routine part of their business. Just because something's obviously incompatible with the constitution doesn't mean it can't be the law of the land (especially at a state level) for a generation or three.
As an aside, an ID is typically required for all sorts of things that poor people do a hell of a lot more than rich people (change jobs, use a check cashing service, sell scrap metal, sign a lease on a new apartment, register a car, apply for .gov assistance, interact with the government in general, etc.) so they do tend to treat acquiring/renewing IDs with more urgency than the HN crowd because not doing so will cause them problems in shorter order.
I hear what you're saying, but I would push back a bit that the gun purchase vs. voting analogy needs a bit more nuance. There's ALSO a long tradition that individual rights enumerated in the Constitution+Amendments are not absolute, but are limited insofar as they infringe on others' individual rights and public safety.
The threshold where "public safety" is considered with respect to limiting individual rights is certainly up for debate in various cases - including gun ownership. That said, I think there are pretty clear differences between the public safety risk surface of "voting" and "owning a firearm", so I think it's not reasonable to assume that they should require the same standard of restriction (i.e. in the form of tracking/ID requirement).
"Must be a net tax payer" is the modern equivalent that gets thrown around. Obviously nobody on the left throws the idea around but I can't help but wonder if it would actually help them considering how many 16yos have jobs but are net tax payers because they have no dependents.
Honestly seeing the comments on here makes me feel a little better about life. Even if there are people out there who want to judge me literally by the color of my skin and not the content of my character, I’m happy there are still a lot of people here who don’t want to go back to the 1950s way of looking at race (or heaven forbid to the racially-focused social Darwinism that caused so much suffering in the early and mid-20th century in so many countries).
The average person isn’t racist, isn’t sexist, and mostly just wants a decent deal for everyone. Unfortunately, those don’t make for attention-grabbing news headlines.
Then I reread and saw the part about increased greenhouse gas effects… I hope those calculations at least are inaccurate.