UN Human Rights Committee oversteps its authority

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toughluck,
no that means not that I admit I was wrong. I'd have no problem with doing that if it happens. It's that I have a limit of how much <edited out> I can take. <edited out>
I'm no social worker, that is: I don't have to talk with people as boneheaded <insult edited out> as a brick if I don't want to - fortunately, I'd be way too ill-tempered for that job.

Actually I'm happy I was so drunk yesterday night that I said how I feel about your preaching. And it felt better afterwards.

It may not have occured to you that we were talking past each others for quite a while then. That's why I actually started to dispute with Gnarrf who shows signs of being accessible to reason.

It certainly didn't occur to you that you argue like: Abortion is wrong, so anything even loosely resembling endorsing it is evil, rah-rah. Nevermind if it is something entirely different. Close enough to you I guess. All the time you're about as oblivious to the fact that all the blame you heap on the UN is moot.

Whenever I read your posts I get a deja-vu, I read it all before, in your last post, and the post before, and the post before. (People say that about me and America too, point taken but it isn't my fault the news don't get better ) But it's not that I have the feeling anything I said or could say could somehow impact on what you post.

I have actually not a single time in your posts found anything that even resembled in picking up an argument I made, or anyone else disagreeing with you. You don't need to, you have yourself to talk to I guess.

<age related comments edited out>

<shortened> Sermonising fact-free about the sin and evils of abortion is what makes it so unbearable to read your posts. It is more than I can take.

Edited in: A discussion isn't a last-man-ranting-contest, only because people are sick of trying to get through to you that doesn't mean you've won.

* * *

Gnarff,
murder sure it is the ultimate violation of human rights, but perhaps, as an American, you can understand how this thing dubbed national sovereignty restricts the UN's options in actually changing the situation.

You remember the insulted US right when the EU and the UN wanted to send in election observers in october? There was no end to the rah-rah-ing on their internet blogs.

Imagine the UN going to India or China and Arab countries to tell these peoples: "Listen up, we gonna change your societies now, okies? Behave now!" They would end up like America when they went to liberate Iraq from the Iraqis.

Their calls are the best they can do with what they have at their disposal. Because they can't change the societies themselves, they have to persuade the respective governments to want to do that.

You noticed that you actually nearly reiterated the UN agency I quoted?

Can we now close this dreadful thread, pretty please!

[Warning pending.] -Tal

[ December 21, 2004, 08:22: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Ragusa.
First of all, I'd like to thank you on how you are admitting of insulting me. That makes me feel a lot better, especially since you're so happy about it.

It didn't occur to me. You were providing your points, I have answered to them and put up my counter points. Which you dismissed and put another set of easy ones. Which I have answered. If there is anyone that is coming out of here as a boneheaded fool who is not listening to the other side, it is you, my dear, not me.

Here is example number one:

Example number 2:

Example number 3:

Example number 4:

As well as multiple others. You have said you were drunk. Are you sure it is the past tense?

BTW. I'm not a teenager. I'm probably older than you are. In any way, I do feel insulted and I do believe you should get punished for that. I don't care whether the admin is partial to you or to me. Either way, you are not tackling the discussion, you are rather throwing insults one after another. I don't care. It's the internet. People are allowed to have their own opinions. But why does your kind of all people suddenly decide to go to message boards to present your point and defend it so vehemently that you don't even notice that you have been proven wrong? It's beyond me.

 

But am I in the minority in the very first place? First of all, we need a point of reference here.

Which, unaltered, applies to your opinion as well, not to be a nitpicker.

Please explain the expense part, at least in the context of our tiny little off-topic debate. I can't possibly divine where you're driving at.

By analogy, should we make it legal to kill one's unwanted neighbours in special hygienic facilities where one won't get his hands dirty and the neighbour won't suffer long?

Also, making abortion legal won't solve the problem. No matter how you put it, allowing parents physically to exterminate their unwanted children won't make them any more responsible for the future. It will only act as a safeguard. Post-coital contraception.

Oh well, should I call it "physical extermination of unwanted foetus on the part of his own mother" from here on?

Making an exception and not calling this one homicide serves one purpose: making it legal. Or, deep at the core level, squelching the voice of conscience shouting that something here is not being all good. This way we end up in a loop: it stops being called homicide in order to make it legal, and then it not being called homicide is brought up as an argument in favour of legalisation.

What was to explain is whether by "sanctimonious preachers" you meant to single out a part of preachers on the grounds of being sanctimonious, or if you meant to stick the sanctimonious label on all preachers who oppose abortion without exception. I think you'll agree that the difference is quite substantial.

Well, you do have the right to an opinion, but you need some serious backing for it, if you want that opinion to serve as an argument.

 

Well I tried to stay out of the abortion discussion in this thread but now I just can't resist the temptation. The UN is doing exactly what it should. Abortion is every woman's right and the UN should protect that. Now I do not care about statements about sanctity of life and how abortion is murder, the issue has been discussed enough in other threads allready. Chev, toughluck, the pope and all the other catholics can complain all they want but it won't change anything. Poland is now part of the EU and quite frankly it would not even matter if the majority in Poland would be against abortion since there is no way any politician would try to get through an abortion banning law.

Abortion is a fact of modern society and it pisses me off that now when some Christians can not get their will through in the western societies about the abortion ban they go to the undeveloped world to preach about the evil of abortion (and how using condoms is now way to protect oneself from AIDS etc.) and quite frankly screw up the situation there even worse than it is now. Ah well eventually sense will rule even there and the "pro-life faction" may build a space ship and start preaching in Mars for all I care, they have done enough damage to this globe anyway.

 

Morgoroth - how is that woman's right to decide on killing another human being?

As for that - explain what is the difference between a foetus and an adult. In other words - what makes one a human, and other not. If law applies to all specimens of the Homo sapiens sapiens species, how is it that some are exempted from the right to live?

In short, define "human." No, seriously.

 

Is anyone using force on the legislators or what? People can have and voice opinions, organisations can, too. Don't see why a church shouldn't.

Again, I'm not aware of the Church using force on legislators.

You have problems with the Church lobbying for abortion being outlawed. But for some reason you don't have any problem with pro-choice organisations lobbying for abortion being kept or made legal. Why so?

Why should secular social organisations not associated with the state be allowed more rights than religious organisations? We can have movements for this, movements for that, everything seems fine. When a religious organisation comes up with some agenda, now it's wrong. Why so?

Does it even have means of enforcing said view?

You can have a gun onwers lobby, a car industry lobby, a gay lobby, a militarist lobby... whatever lobby you like. So why not a church lobby?

My analogy isn't valid to you because you consider the latter killing murder (I didn't use any such name in the example) and the former abortion. Does coming up with a different name make the act any different?

Has the child raped anyone? What crime has the child committed that you want it to be put to death if his mother so chooses?

Not for the sexual act which resulted in pregnancy, sure. But responsibility (or lack thereof) does come into play when one decides to put an innocent to death for a crime committed by his father. We don't normally punish people for their father's crimes, do we? And we don't normally consider it legal to kill someone who is less than wanted in his environment. Heck, the same people who want it to be legal for a raped woman to have the child killed, they would object to the rapist himself being executed for that crime. So what now... the child is more culpable for rape than the rapist?

I'm not judging a woman who aborts a child conceived by rape. But I still object to her being legally allowed to do that.

A surgical procedure that relies on doing exactly what?

We can switch names and all, but if we come up with a nice name, does it make the act itself any nicer? Surely, abortion sounds nicer than, let's say, induced miscarriage.

It's too late now! I'm going to devour you.

Want my opinion? It sucks a lot that any priest to whom molestation could be proven would be allowed to work with children again. And surely pretending that nothing wrong is going on and not preventing him from contact with children is guilt by association. The problem should have been addressed and solved, not just kept secret. However, it's not like all priests are paedophiles. Not even a big share of them, let alone the majority. And even of those who do have such inclinations, not all fail to control themselves. And not in all cases it ends up in criminal abuse. The issue is being inflated so much as it was being downplayed in the past. If you ask me, priests who have really done that, should face the same consequences as any other people would. But accused priests have the same rights as all other defendants. It's all too easy to destroy someone with a false accusation. And, as I said, it's still not enough to generalise about all or almost all priests.

When I hear some priests or bishops and compare that to what the Pope says, it sounds like two different religions, sometimes. Still, I don't believe that the majority of priests is corrupted.

 

toughluck, I have had quite enough abortion discussion on these boards for a lifetime so please do not force me to start it again. If you want to know my views feel free to search the previous abortion thread (and I mean a thread about abortion not threads which abortion hijacked), you should find them there.

 

Morgoroth - once again: what is the difference between aborting a foetus, a 2-year old child, a 12-year old child an an adult person? What is the difference? Basically, if you say there isn't, we should all be allowed, in specialised clinics, to tear people we don't like limb from limb. If you say there is, tell me what is the difference and back it up.

 

I'm not judging a person that has stolen a loaf of bread. But I still object to him or her being legally allowed to do that.
Is that double standard?

Wrong. I have already mentioned the genetic point of view. Let me repeat:
From the moment of conception, the fertilised egg already has all the genetic material that the person will have up until their death. The only changes that happen to it will be pathological. Today's medicine assumes two people are different human beings if their genetic codes differ (and even in twins they do differ). Besides that, how are you going to tell how old the child is? It is basically impossible to say so until changes in the mother's organism are already in progress. Even if you say it is not a child, doing abortion will have ill effects on the woman's health one way or the other. The woman isn't usually sure until some two or three weeks after conception. After ca. 20 days, the foetus already has a beating heart and a functioning brain. If this isn't sign of sentience, what is? If it is the ability to know feelings and not act on urges or instinct, you could safely say that even a child six or seven months after their birthday is still not a sentient being, thus they should be legally aborted.

 

Now you have forced myself into this. Tal forgive me for opening this can of worms.... Suffice to say that there are several neurological and kognitive differences between a 3-month old foetus and a 2-year old child. There is actually a limit to when a woman can have an abortion and and it exsists for a reason. While a foetus may be human (noun) I do not consider it human (adjective).

 

So, let's say that a handicapped child has no cognitive abilities at age of 2. Should his or her parents have the right to abort it?

 

A 2-year old that lacks cognitive abilities can never ever live by itself, think by itself or enjoy life by itself. It is not human in any way. If a child is severly enough handicapped then yes it should be let out of its misery, otherwise it is like keeping alive the braindead with the help of machines. One should note though that such disturbances are noted before birth and certainly before the child ever becomes 2-year old and so the child will be aborted most likely before birth and at latest after birth. The law in Finaland even state that children with severe handicap are to be aborted and when I talk about severe handicap it is in no level similar to that of downs syndrome or similar where the child is every way human.

EDIT: If you mean that the child would actually get cognitive abilities after completely lacking them after 2-years of age then I would just confirm that such a thing is biologically impossible, and I'm quite certain that a child without cognitive abilities could not in 99% of cases even survive birth.

 

Actually, this argument is misleading. Humans have somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 genes, yet brains are made up of billions of neurons. Consciousness emerges out of the massively parallel processing of these billions of neurons; genetic material in itself does not produce "consciousness." In fact, one can't even draw an analogy between genetic material and the human organism and architectural plans and a completed building; architectural plans hold a complete picture of what the building will be like, while genetic material does not contain a complete picture of the developed organism; it only contains a number of subroutines, if you will, that come into effect when certain environmental conditions are met. So a brain is in no way present in genetic material; it has to develop over time.

If there is a moment when consciousness occurs, it would have to be at the passing of a critical threshold where enough neural material is active to allow for the complexity out of which consciousness emerges. Before this, the brain would still be functioning, regulating certain bodily processes etc., but it would not be producing consciousness. The idea that the fetus possesses consciousness at the moment of conception is of course absurd, as it has no neurons; to protest that the zygote is human because it has the potential for life is misleading from the standpoint of human development, as it still essentially braindead (by dint of having no brain) at this point.

Again, I suspect that the "life begins at conception" arguments are always based on a dualist idea of human consciousness: that God imbues the zygote with an immortal soul at the moment of conception, and that the soul will live on after the death of the body. If you are a dualist of this sort, the idea of consciousness (and thus moral choice) emerging from the complex interaction of billions of neurons might be hard to take, as the human "soul" is always viewed as a distinct individual entity capable of making moral choices and taking responsibility for those choices; in other words, something which either exists fully formed, or isn't present at all. This is a far cry from the current scientific view of consciousness.

 

Thanks, I think...

Actually, Reason is away to clarify, even if only for my own benefit, what I believe. It also allows me a platform to share some of it with all who will read this.

Actually, I'm Canadian, but I see your point. That's actually one of the main points in the original post: What authority does the UN have with respect to National Sovreignty? The document quoted suggests that Poland should change their laws to better suit some of their people.

If the UN can't make some nations comply, then it shouldn't expect others to comply. The UN didn't topple Iraq, the US did. And the UN couldn't do squat about it.

I didn't know that. I get outvoted over the remote control quite often. But I could imagine the slap in the face to the US over that one...

[ December 20, 2004, 07:52: Message edited by: Gnarfflinger ]

 

What does personal judging have to do with law? I may feel personally that something cannot be judged as negative, as you and Ragusa seem to be in agreement about:
tackle the consequences if it is not possible to root out the problem.
In the case of minor larceny, the root of the problem is poverty of the society. If it cannot be rooted out quickly, it should be agreed that consequences should not be punished. Thus - stealing is to be made legal.
No? So I guess every minor thief should be incarcerated and/or ordered compensation, right?
If so, what is there to stop us from making anything else legal?

Now for your other point - what is the exact point of "gaining sentience" and how can it be measured?


As for dualism... We can waste time on debates. However, let's ponder this argument:
Assuming that sentience comes from the structure of neurons. What will happen if a person would be reconstructed atom by atom, along with the neural network? Will it have a seperate sentience, or will it be the same sentience as its source?
Let's tackle it a bit differently: If two perfect copies are created at the same moment, both are put in identical, 6 m by 6 m boxes, in the same place (assume non-gravity, or at least the same latitude), blindfolded and ears covered, will they:
- have a single sentience, or two seperate?
- behave precisely the same, or will they have free will and choose differently?
If there are two separate sentiences and/or they choose differently despite having an identical configuration of neurons, how is sentience associated with it?
And what if, despite that re-creation, no "clone" gains any sentience? Would your argument about sentience seated in neural network stand?

 

Your argument is an impossibility in reality. There is no pair of exactly similar development cycles and there is no pair of exactly similar enviorments. A difference will allways come but cloned beings will share some similarities to each other. If we in theory assume that there will be exact same development in exact same enviorment (which is impossible) then there will be two sentient species that think in exactly the same way and make exactly the same choices, but as I allready pointed out this is in every way impossible.