Hurricane Linge tears through Washington, D.C. (and a post script on human rights)

I was feeling very Tucker Max in the evenings. I was feeling very scholarly during the day. In the evenings, I was told I had no filter on the words and sentences that came from my mouth. I drank a lot of alcohol and went to a few bars. (I don't do this very often anymore. I'm over it. I usually drink red wine by myself on my couch and read the newspaper and talk to my roommate.) I am sure there are numerous people in D.C. last weekend who thought I was an idiot, and they were right. In the day I went to some boring, yet also very, very interesting, panel discussions on international law. I heard about arbitration, bilateral investment treaties, the harmonization of food law, what law can do for climate change, et cetera, et cetera. Funny note: arbitrators tend to be "pale, male, and stale."

I met an elderly man (I met many men, some women and girls too.), a German who is now a very respected law professor in Germany and was also, I believe, a judge for, I believe, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), if not another special tribunal. I don't know exactly. What's important is that I talked to him. He was hard to understand, heavily accented English. It was at a noisy cocktail party. He was eating cheese and had a glass of wine in his jacket pocket. He was spitting on my law student friend Claudia as he spoke. He said he liked Americans because often they were so educated. His friends who he stays with when he is in New York live at 5th and 90th (give or take a few blocks north, on the Park for sure). They have books written in Latin in the toilet room. I told him I never go to the bathroom without something to read. He said, "Ah, but are you reading Latin?" "No," I said, hanging my head, "but sometimes I do read French." "Slightly impressive," he imitated.

He said he was a prisoner of war in the Second World War, and when he was captured, they asked, would you like to be an American prisoner, or a Russian? Why, American, of course, he answered. He said no one ever mentioned anything about human rights. In today's world, everyone always wants to be taking about these vague notions of universal human rights that are floating in the ether. The problem with human rights, is that every person, every nation, all have different ideas of what the human rights are. I think human rights reek of the Western powers that be, bossing Africa around, imposing our Enlightenment ideals on the weakest continent. To be overly dramatic, maybe it's a new form colonialism.

This being said, I wish the genocide in Darfur would stop. It won't stop, however, because China and Russia will block any Security Council action, for the time being, and the U.S. has no gumption to act unilaterally. You realize it is an Islamic government slaughtering, I think, Christian/animist/other non-Muslims. How much would the world love the U.S. if it toppled another Muslim country? Not very much, and China loves Sudan's oil. People are all saying that if anything is to be done, it will have to by China, Sudan's huge, thirsty oil customer. I hope it gets better, but people are pretty universally bad, even the Western powers who know all about these so-called human rights.

So there are probably some human rights being violated in Darfur. But the Arab countries aren't likely to be saying this. China not either. China's human rights record, spotty as well. But this is the problem with these human rights. We, as in the global community, can never agree on them.

What may a universal human right be? Do humans have the right to democracy? How can we in the West impose this on the world, though? What if some people want a king? Should the U.S. and France tell them they don't have the right to do what they want? No king for you! The only universal human right I can see is the right to autonomy. Maybe this is a cop out because if people have the right to be autonomous, the right to do what they want, then they kind of have the right to kill, huh? I guess the U.S. has taken that as a right. We invaded Iraq, and we have capital punishment. We kill. We do what we want. Why would other countries not be allowed to? Because we don't like what they want to do?

In the U.S., we have these 9 justices on the Supreme Court disagreeing over what our fundamental rights as Americans are. We have that right to free speech. That's easy. The infallible Framers wrote that in the First Amendment. But there are rights not expressly listed in the Constitution, or so says Amendment 9. Roe v. Wade said abortion was one. There have also been other cases before the Court that said he have a right to privacy. The words privacy and abortion are not in the Constitution. Some justices and other people say these are not fundamental rights. Shit, I don't know. I guess I'll just let everyone else fight about this. One more voice might be a little annoying.

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