The Glade 4.0

I disagree. Rights come from man. Sometimes many men get together and collaborate on rights and codify them. See the Constitution for a great example. That wasn't the government, that was many very educated and forward thinking men CREATING a government. A subtle, but important difference. Similarly there are people who have their own sets of rights that they believe in and follow. Sometimes those are outside of the laws of the land, sometimes they are a subset.

You are correct that the rest of the world didn't fight in WW2 expressly for the purpose of putting an end to Jewish oppression. However, that oppression was certainly a factor in the rest of the world seeing Nazi Germany for the evil that it was and then acting accordingly.

Kinda, for a limited time. Once the Allied forces defeated Germany, they became wrong again. But that also happened via might.

Exactly.

Rights are mutable, obviously. The mightiest of mights make the rightest of rights, and it flows downhill from there.

_________________
In time, this too shall pass.

Aizle:

Umm... no. The oppresion of the Jewish people, and the existance of the camps weren't known until after the Allies had taken Germany. They played no role at all in how Germany was viewed.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

The world's response to that horror stands in strong support of my position. We came together and created a body of international law. That body continues to evolve and change, but one thing it has done is lay out a universal list of human rights. Again, rights established by man.

_________________


It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

So, you were lying before when you said that you weren't a UN, world government whakado?

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Certainly not. One can support the United Nations without being a one-world government whakado. Generally, the wackiness comes from people who think the UN is taking over the world.

_________________


It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I find that hard to believe. We perhaps didn't know the magnitude of what was happening (partially because they still in the process of happening), but I highly doubt that we had no information until we had taken Germany.

Why is it hard to believe? Germany was on the offensive, and Europe was in shambles, and esponage was limited by the technology of the times. When the first camps were uncovered, the Allies had no idea what they were.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Rynar - That argument assumes the only available criterion for assessing the morality of an action is whether or not it violates a person's rights (however such rights arise). However, it's quite possible to judge morality based on other factors. For example, whereas a rights-based moral code focuses on the person acted upon - asking questions like what entitlements (i.e. rights) that person has and whether the action in question deprived him/her of any such entitlements - a virtue-based moral code shifts the focus to the actor - asking what character traits are virtuous and whether the action in question reflects such traits in the actor. Someone with a moral code based on the four Cardinal Virtues (prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude) or the three Theological Virtues (faith, hope, and charity/love) would certainly conclude that the Nazis were immoral, and that conclusion would not be at all dependent on whether the Jews had rights or how such rights arose.

When the UN can limit the sovereignty of other nations through global law and the power of taxation, then they are taking over. Independent law and taxation is the definition of a national sovereignty.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

RD, those other moral codes depend on a view of right and wrong that is established against a pre-existing backdrop of the acknowledgement of rights; they do not exist independently of them.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Certainly all that is true, but there were also scores of people fleeing Germany and the various undergrounds. It's hard to cart up millions of people without someone noticing.

Then why has all written history surrounding the most written about event in human history failed to document it?

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that it's hard to believe. So you're saying that you've read all written history surrounding WW2?

Heh, certainly not, but I have read a ton of it. Everything I have read indicates that the attrocities of the Nazi regime were unknown until nearly the end of the war.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

The concept of universal/intrinsic rights is a relatively recent innovation, but virtue-based moral systems go back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks and probably much farther. And even if we were to posit that some sort of unrefined, instinctive sense of intrinsic rights underlies virtues like justice, that sense would still be irrelevant to virtues like faith, hope, fortitude/courage, etc.

Maybe we're stuck on symantics. So I know that the depth to which Nazi's had sunk was not widely known. But wasn't the information about the fact that they were rounding up the Jews and shipping them off somewhere for some purpose known earlier? Or did everyone just think that was some normal prison camp?

WWII was from 1939 to 1945...


http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocau ... aq_27.html


http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/date ... 547151.stm

_________________
In time, this too shall pass.

Thanks Taskiss. I was thinking that something on that scale just couldn't have been hidden like that.

Warning: The below was written after reading page one, and then discovering a zillion other pages added.

The groupthink thing is actually one reason I think state aid is necessary. In an institutional context (which hospitals are), it's pretty well established folks will follow their orders - even if that's "no pay, no entrance". Plenty of psych experiements around that, as well as the phenomenon you described of bystanders getting more apathetic the more folks are around.

At some point society does become about compromise of personal liberty; civilisation becomes about moderating simply the survival of the fittest.

Now, that can be seen as a detriment; it weakens incentive to excel, removes consequence for failure, and as a whole, over a sustained period, could indeed make society less productive.

It's surely a negative for the strong.

The counterpoint is a society with no regulation or control of the strong at all, where we get warlordism and feudalism.

The debate seems to be over where the productive line for civlisation is drawn; how do we ensure liberty for the pike, without allowing him to eat all the minnows? How do we ensure liberty for the minnows, without completely obviating their desire, or even ,their need, to become stronger and quicker to survive?

I have to say, as a higher rate tax payer who sees a frightening proportion go every year to government I rarely agree with, to be spent on things I am sure are ineptly administered, I still view common education and healthcare as the basic hallmarks of a civilised society; those things that provide the ability for everyone to make something of themselves, even if not to achieve their full potential.

I do take the point on personal responsibility though. I think, possibly, the cultural gap is we both believe the alternative solutions "don't work", so fall back to what we understand and are comfortable with.

I guess if there was a slam dunk obvious perfect solution there wouldn't be an argument

As for conceptions of rights, they clearly flow from more than *just* might, although that often becomes the deciding factor in implementation and their eventual success. There are moral frameworks that propogate through discussion, agitation, acceptance and implementation without violence though.

I guess, at the end of the day, might becomes a determiner in defending against enforced external moral frameworks, but right now we live in a pretty permeable society where ideas can gain supremacy without significant requirement for brute force imposition.

There are all kinds of history on all sides of it ranging from "no one had a clue" to "we ignored it on purpose because we hated the Jews too."

The reality, from looking at the actual military histories, seems to be that it was known that A) Hitler was oppressing Jews and various other groups to an unknown degree, but regardless, rather badly B) that there were camps of some sort spread around the Reich (Here is an ariel reconaissance photo of Auschwitz II taken 25 AUG 1944) and C) That some sort of extermination was most likely taking place.

However, there is little reason to think that the Western allies truely understood the scope of what was happening. For one thing, as Rynar correctly points out, the technical means of collecting intelligence were far more limited at the time. For another thing, concentration and death camps weren't really important targets for intellegence or attack because they didn't shoot back and didn't really contribute to making more of stuff that did shoot back. Finally, the stories seemed too outrageous to be believed, which was compounded by the fact that in WWI, stories of German atrocities had turned out to be mainly war hysteria.

The general policy was that whatever might be going on, it would be dealt with in the due course of defeating Germany. While there were some pleas to destroy the concentration camps by bombing, they were poor targets for such a type of attack because they consisted of many buildings, and a lot of that of unsophisticated construction that could be easily repaired. It was felt that bombing would simply kill prisoners while doing little to slow whatever killing was taking palce, and truthfully, knocking out a barracks meant little because the Nazis didn't care if the prisoners had proper accomadations. A direct hit on a gas chamber might put it out of buisness but really there were plenty of other ways to kill. Large air raids would have expended immense amounts of ordnance, fuel, parts, and aircraft losses with uncertain results at best. The only really sure way of knocking the camps out would have been either using atomic bombs on them, or on the rail yards servicing them, and no atomic bombs were to be had at that point. There was, however, a fear that Hitler might get to it first, as his lack of progress on the atomic bomb was not known until after the war either.

Defeating Germany and liberating the camps by overruning them on the ground was probably the best the Allies could really do. In the midst of everything else that was going on it is no stretch to say that they had little knowledge of what was truely happening, and little that was productive could ahve been achieved anyhow.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Then your personal viewpoint on the Holocaust is dissonant from your stated viewpoint on rights.



Yes, it is. There are only two types of rights: non-mutable, inherent rights which do not change over time, or "man created" fluid rights which may change. You have stated that it is a "fact" that rights are created by man. I can quote the post if you'd like.



Actually, it is the entire point of the discussion.



No, we obviously don't, since you're arguing for one particular definition of rights that is heavily disputed, dissonant with the founding principles of the country, and to many individuals morally reprehensible for its feasible justification of tyranny.



Which is a discussion as to the nature of rights themselves.

_________________
“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I think you're assuming that Aizle stating rights are the product of man, not innate (with which I agree) somehow equates to the idea that any given set of rights are morally equivalent, an extreme form of relativism which he doesn't appear to be positing.

Stating the (self evident ) fact that rights, their social pervasiveness, and their enforcement & implementation, are dependant on man and the social more of the times is not to say that therefore one thinks torture, bigotry, etc are "ok".

In fact, my personal position is that this is one reason they are so important - that civilisation is precisely about overcoming the hobbsian natural state of barbarism and survival of the strongest and replacing it with a more just, even, and generous structure.

Just a note that in the UK general practitioners (family doctors) still make 6 figures and are among the highest paid in the country.

there clearly are problems with the UK system too, but I dont believe incentivisation is one of them.