nichy
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Janet Albechston makes some very good points in this article:
THE intellectually lazy human-rights industry won't confront the hard questions.
OPPOSITION immigration spokesman Scott Morrison got it right when he said the tragedy that occurred last week off Christmas Island was "not a day for policy discussion".
A week later, that same tragedy, which so cruelly cut short an unknown number of lives, raises a very real need for a more honest policy discussion about asylum-seekers and border protection than we have had to date under the Gillard government.
In fact, this heart-wrenching human catastrophe is a symbol of a tough conversation we need to have about human rights in general. That would be a conversation about sustainable human rights. After all, it's been a big year for sustainability.
A sustainable Australia, not a Big Australia. A sustainable Murray-Darling Basin. Sustainable environmental policies. Sustainability everywhere. Except in one area where sustainability is most sorely needed. Rarely do we talk seriously about sustainable human rights.Recently, that human-rights poster boy, Julian Burnside, popped up on the front cover of a glossy magazine extolling the virtues of being a human-rights "do-gooder" and wondering aloud "what's wrong with doing good".
In fact, there is plenty wrong with "doing good" if all it means is offering up syrupy, feel-good rhetoric about human rights. Indeed, the tragic events of last week expose the egregious and positively dangerous intellectual laziness that defines the modern human-rights movement.
Full of sweet nothings about human rights and social justice, Burnside represents the high priesthood of a growing brigade of human-rights activists whose eagerness to pull at the heart strings sits in stark contrast to their indolence when it comes to doing the hard intellectual yards.
In other words, they are too lazy or simply incapable of imagining there might be meaningful - and yes, even compassionate - limits on human rights.
This growing cohort of good time human-rights boys and girls treat any talk about human rights, regardless of the issue, as all upside and no downside. Captive to a kind of moral solipsism, so many members of the modern human-rights movement cannot conceive that other views apart from their own exist, or if they do exist, are worthy of debate. So, they don't bother with debates. Moral posturing is so much easier, and alluring to unthinking followers.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/drowning-in-compassion/story-e6frg6zo-1225974667373
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