Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
No matter how outlandish and exagerrated something Penske says, he always gets a response from the left. His points are always addressed yet I often get ignored - why, why, why....
Because this got ignored, I thought I would say it again to see if it gets a rise out of anyone.
I believe that Jefferson's statement is true: "All men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain inaliable right, among these being life liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Unlike Jefferson himself, I believe this rule applies to all human beings on the planet earth. Including Arabs.
So when we are trying to help a country set up a government that will protect these rights, I believe that we are helping promote justice around the world. Arabs deserve these rights just as much as we do, and they are entitled to these rights just as much as we are.
When someone says you are trying to impose western values on these countries, I disagree. I think we are trying to impose universal values on these countries. People said it was naive to try and impose these values on the Japanese and Koreans. But it worked there because these values are not western they are universal.
A moral relativist might say that in Arab countrys these rights are not part of their culture so it is both arrogant and naive to think that we can impose a system to protect these rights. Hello Ty.
I believe these rights are universal and apply to all cultures and people. It is interesting though when you discuss something like female circumscission how all of a sudden liberals discover universal rights and don't think it is arrogant to impose such a right on different cultures. Hello RT.
What I also find hypocritical is when we are critisized for trying to impose these rights on another country, but when we do, and we don't impose 100% of these rights for practical reasons - in other words choosing 95% instead of Zero (like not giving women equal rights with men so we can get a constitution passed that protects most of these rights) then we are critisized for not insisting on 100% of these rights. If it is arrogant and naive to impose our system and values on these countrys, then isn't it better that we only impose on 95% of our values instead of a 100%. If we are not supposed to impose our values in the first place how can you complain that we have not imposed specific values.
Either morals or rights are universal, and we should try and spread them, or they are not, and we should not blink an eye when females are circumsized in foreign countrys or widows are thrown on funeral pyres.
Telling these countrys to stop mutilating their young women and killing widows is either an arrogant and naive attempt to impose our western values on these countrys or cultures or an attempt to promote an absolute universal code. You can't have it both ways folks.
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Spanky, Post 2517:
What liberals fail to realize is that the greatest evil occurs when the individual can be sacrificed for the good of society. That is what "dictatorship of the prolietariate" is all about. If our rights come from man, then those rights can be taken away by man. So when government wants to improve on the state body politic, and can suspend individual rights to do so, that is when you can justify killing millions of people.
However, if rights are God given, and cannot be taken away for the common good, it is much harder to start exterminating people for the common good.
If there is a universal moral code that says we have rights then mass killings are hard to justify. But if all morality is relative, rights are just given by man and are relative and can be taken away for the common good (like in a communist society) that is when the killing fields get organized.
