Відео

@@deanrane1961 thanks so much for this tip, I'll definitely read it. She sounds brilliant.

@@Del350K4 well said - it is a brutish act by Gutei, and incredibly powerful on the boy's part to take it the way he did.

@@inclusivemagic On another note - I love your choice of thumbnail for this Koanversation!

@@Herbie1978 that's a fair point. This is the era of Victorian workhouses and the grotesque Poor Laws. I'm not denying that. But the story of these indentured Indians is not well known, and what's unique is that they went (often being bamboozled into going) to the other side of the world, away from everything and everyone they knew.

@@Del350K4 this koan is quite a formidable one (and very long)! Well said about anger.

Thanks very much for watching!

Hi Jose. Lamento mucho enterarme de lo que esta pasando en Venezuela. Les deseo a vos y los otros venezolanos mucha suerte. Gracias por ver y comentar.

Gracias por tus buenos deseos, mi pana! Excelente español, btw

Thanks for sharing. These kinds of protests also frequently occur in the UK, particularly obstructions of highways and vandalising of paintings. The UK Supreme Court considered protests that block highways, and held that the protesters' rights to express serious views in a potent and symbolic way had to be balanced against the right of others not to have serious disruption, but this was nuanced and had to be asked on a case by case basis. The police have criticised this as confusing in practice. But nonetheless it does seem like since then protesters have been prosecuted, and the government increased the sentence for it a couple of years ago.

@@inclusivemagic Thanks for the insight

Yeah, the commodification of our personal data and online behaviour happened very quickly and stealthily while we thought all these products and services were fluffy and innocuous. I have to say the GDPR and many of the stuff the EU does is pretty good at articulating privacy interests and making sure they are not steamrolled over by business.

Thanks a lot Rirk - I think you're right, I always find it's too quiet when I'm editing and I have to boost the levels. Think I have to turn up the levels when recording.

Fantastic points. With the rights drafted in quite general terms, how they apply in concrete situations can often create knotty and contentious questions of interpretation, and as you say, it can push the limits of what we might think a court's mandate ought to be. Discrimination is a really interesting one, particularly the notion you mention of something producing unequal outcomes that isn't the result of a specific malicious. Article 14 of the ECHR us actually parasitic on other rights, so you can only use it to say you're being denied another specific ECHR right in a discriminatory way. More generally, it's been a while since I worked in law so my understanding might be out of date, but my impression is the courts do hear cases of what's called indirect discrimination in the UK, or disparate impact in the US, in certain situations where an ostensibly neutral policy by government, employers or housing (among other things) causes a disproportionate disadvantage to a given group. The onus is on the government or employer to show a strong justification for the policy, in which case it will be allowed to stand in spite of the disparate impact. However I don't think you can sue for structural inequalities where you can't point to a defined action that caused them. On the flipside you've no doubt heard of the US lawsuits challenging affirmative action. There it is people arguing that a policy aimed at correcting certain alleged structural injustices now causes other groups discriminatory impacts. And courts have at times been asked to judge whether diversity goals are sufficient justifications to warrant the impact it has on others. And that's of course highly disputed. Re self defence, I think if someone were convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a situation where the undisputed facts showed self defence, and for some reason the legal system didn't allow them to even plead self defence, then that would surely be a human rights violation. Where a legal system allows you to plead self defence, it's not necessarily wrong to charge someone as the trial will hear their arguments, but if the trial process were so flawed that they were wrongly convicted then the ECHR might step in. As for slavery, the ECHR only applies to the government, so you can't sue a private citizen for enslavement under this particular law, but you could sue the government in certain circumstances for failing to protect you from it. This has helped some of the people who have been trafficked here and then held in domestic servitude with their passport confiscated by the slaver. The ECHR imposes a duty on governments to criminalize slavery and effectively investigate and prosecute instances of it. Another commenter has pointed to the workers in China who work in highly exploitative conditions that are tantamount to slavery. Economic coercion can force people to accept certain work, but in the law's eyes what matters is they've entered into a contract freely (theoretically anyway). This is why labour law is so important as it is what gives workers protections and minimum standards.

They do exist as legal rules (for now!). I agree that underneath that, they are ultimately subjective political claims that have to be argued for and they may or may not win the public debate. They're not like the laws of physics which are undeniable truths. A country can define its borders how it likes, subject to the legal rules it has committed to (or it can ditch those rules as our government might) - I guess my argument is, those rules are still compelling and let's not forget why we signed up to them (nay, wrote them) in the first place.

I'd disagree to the extend that they are still used to prevent some of the unreasonable damages caused to people that used to be "normal", but at the same time people do twist them to avoid them and others just don't care if it doesn't fit their plans. Being part of a group/nation doesn't mean you can treat other people like garbage you can toss around. But the definition of nations, nationality and borders seems to be more and more unclear, and where borders are disrespected, war follows, which again leads to the violation of human rights. A question I have asked myself recently is why we even accept that people who disrespect laws get to claim them for themselves. Even someone who took every right of someone by killing them gets to have protection by the same laws they stripped. How is that right? Then again, where would you set the line if you were to take their rights based on disrespecting them? It would not seem right to "abandon" someone just because they didn't respect a traffic light once. But what if that caused the dead of someone else, accidentally? It would be taking someones entire set of rights, but also wouldn't be something they did intentionally, so how does intention fit into all that if you want to have a fixed written down version?

@@inclusivemagic The problem is that they’re inconsistent. You cannot afford someone rights when they consistently trample on the majority’s right to nationhood and self-determination. In the modern world of today, we should take the gloves off and stop pretending that there magic laws that apply to the entire world. British rights for British citizens.

This is also why stuff like making it easier to see where stuff is produced to do informed purchases, but that is deliberately made hard by many companies. But yeah stuff like wish, temu, and Ali express is just buying straight up from China. Hell often it's just a issue of quick purchasing

Thanks for this comment - I completely agree with you. We as consumers place savings and convenience above all, either unaware or turning a blind eye to the fact that something is only so cheap because it has been made in exploitative working conditions. I do think in general that when people are informed about this, they want to be more ethical consumers. For instance several years ago I learned that chocolate often has had slavery or child labor in its supply chain, so I make a point of only buying fairtrade chocolate to avoid those chains. Similarly fairtrade bananas do not support companies that violently suppress workers who want to unionize. But this is the tip of the iceberg. Much of the cheap clothing in western stores is made in Bangladesh, and garment workers there are on starvation wages (and get fired when they try to demand more). We should all work much harder to educate ourselves, because this system is designed to drive prices down and the only way to achieve any kind of fairness is through our purchasing choices.

@@luclin92 And if you order from a small local company for ten times the price, you will often recognize the product images they use on one of the Chinese sites, as they buy it from there and then sell it to you with a huge profit.

This is a great point. One of the difficulties is that we don't all agree on one moral philosophy, even within a single national society much less globally. The UDHR era notion of human rights has proved to be a relatively persuasive concept of rights around the world (in terms of getting countries to sign up) but they are loaded with compromises to make that possible, and as you say, they often give way to realpolitik, making them feel hypocritical. There is a quote from the poster of The Godfather III: "power cannot be given, it can only be taken". You're right that it's highly dangerous to allow a government in power to define human rights. Most constitutions have been created at the founding of a new society post-revolution and the hope there is that this focuses the mind of the people on asserting a vision that liberates them, and consenting to a system of government that respects this on pain of dissolution. But these rights always have to be continually fought for.

@@inclusivemagic Exactly. Human Rights as an institution have always been a way for America to push its interests abroad, utilizing WW2 as a catalyst. That's why the UDHR was based on FDR's political campaign and not something that took into account a clear code of ethics. The United Nations itself was a formalization of the WW2 alliance. It's a political bludgeon to entrench the Western social hegemony post-war, and which has been over time subverted by the intelligentsia as post-marxists dominated academia in the 70s onward. So now it no longer serves the interests of the countries that formed it per se, but the interests of its intellectual class. The UN never did any major or meaningful condemnations of the US for things such as Tuskegee, MK Ultra, COINTELPRO, Panama, Yemen, Iraq, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, nor punished countries like the arab states; but they were always quick to wag their finger at Russia, China, and other countries aligned against the Western Bloc. It's also why, as time went on, Israel became disfavored with the UN despite the VERY generous deals and resolutions it benefitted from in the 40s and 50s. The UN back then was for American and Western interests, now it's for Western Progressives' interests. Just like how the WHO is subverted by China.

Since most laws tend to only apply to humans, they rarely need to define what a human is, so this was an interesting question. The only legal definitions I found basically draw on the scientific definition, i.e. "homo sapiens". In fact in the UK, I could only find it as part of a definition of animals - 'any vertebrate other than homo sapiens'. So the meaning of human is mostly taken as given. Certainly as our understanding of animal sentience grows, we should accord correspondingly more respect to other beings with the capacity to feel things.

@@inclusivemagic Thank you for taking a serious question seriously. There are many corollaries to the question. For example, are any animals sentient enough to deserve defacto human status? Are human fetuses deserving of human rights? When is an artificial intelligence deserving of a classification of human ? Should Corporations be granted human rights, considering they are legally human?

@@soylentgreen6082 all those corollary questions are fascinating and they speak to one of the main things about legal rights - whether you have them primarily depends on your negotiating power to win them. Animals have no voice apart from the humans who advocate for them. The same is true for foetuses. Whereas corporations interestingly have successfully managed to win the right to freedom of expression in the US (or some might say, a cynical decision that enabled corporations to spend limitlessly on election campaign donations) because they have a fair bit of clout in society. If you lack power to assert your basic rights within a given system, often the result is revolution. In the case of AI, it'll be really interesting to see what if any kind of sentience emerges and how we treat it. Battlestar Galactica is one of the best TV shows (well the 2004 version) but we don't want to get to that situation!

Thanks so much for watching and engaging with the ideas as always!

@@inclusivemagic The ideas are good; the algorithm, however, isn't optimised to encourage their dissemination without help. I'd encourage every viewer who recognises their importance to make an effort to share this video.

Hmmmm we don't feel offended 2 b clal coleeeee in guyana then why ...d amerianadian""" and d African get offended when they cal d local name ....like buck and n.........

Thanks a lot, I'm glad you liked the video - and thank you for subscribing! My channel has been quiet for a while but with the new year I'll be making more videos! Happy new year to you.

LOL that was a bit of fun. Thank you for noticing.

Slavery and Indenture of Indians During the British Rule ua-cam.com/video/AFtbEPzo0vg/v-deo.html

My mom's is black and pops is cooley from svg

Thanks for watching, Rubin! I'm working on turning it into an animated series. Will post updates on this channel!

Thanks so much for watching!

Hi - thank you for your comment and sorry for the late reply. I have seen a lot of people (including descendants of indentured people who have published on the topic) reclaim the word as a badge of honour rather than a pejorative, but it was only after making this video that I realised how a lot of people still strongly feel it is offensive, and its sting cannot be easily taken away.