[ExI] Geert Wilders acquitted

[Stefano Vaj]

On 25 June 2011 00:47, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com> wrote:

> One used to talk in terms of civil rights, e.g., the American Civil
> Liberties Union or the "civil rights movement" of the Sixties.
>
> Civil rights are rights of citizens, usually argued by reference to a
> governing document, like the Constitution in the US. There's the
> vagueness inherent in the Ninth Amendment, but the word "civil"
> keeps it grounded.
>
> Nowadays, the preferred term is human rights, which has the
> strategic advantage that it's boundless. Its promulgators can
> invent anything they like and label it as a right you deserve by
> virtue of being human, that everyone else must provide you
> or be outraged over on your behalf.
>

Personally, while I put myself squarely in the "continental" political
tradition, I am very fond of the concept of "civil liberties".

"Civil" does not only refers to the liberties of the citizens (who may be
whatever a given community decide they should be, robot and chimps
included), but rather to the liberties of a given "civitas", that is,
political entity, so that its diversity and sovereignty is not threatened by
allegedly universal and specieist concepts such as "human rights".

On the other hand, nothing prevents one from fighting to broaden them or to
orient them in one direction or another. For instance, many westerners (or
indians, or... chinese, for that matter, see the Uiguri issue) today see
with a great concern the possible islamisation of their countries, and are
well within their right to oppose it.

On the merits, I think that Dutch populism is however misguided in putting
immigration and Islam in the same basket. Islam is a religion, and it might
well expand in Europe through conversions even if further immigration were
prevented. Conversely, it is hard to see why a community should renounce any
control of its composition as long as immigrants are "good christians".

All in all, I think that the best bet for transhumanism, *and* my favourite
scenario as a Darwinian relativist, is a plural landscape of competing
cultures, being kept relatively sane by the competition amongst them, in a
world where the non-interference principle is not so easily dismissed every
other day out of "humanitarian" rhetoric and in view of global omologation .

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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