people are reading my half-dead blog. i better sound intellectual :)

i've just completed an essay on 'human have human rights simply in virtue of being human'.
and shockingly, i decided no, humans don't have human rights simply in virtue of being human

Not all humans have human rights (if we take the human rights from the UN Charter of Human Rights). The right to vote for example limited to under sixteen/eighteen/twentyone? and especially not for people under authoritarian regimes (singapore is of course the exception haha!) Even the right to life, something most would consider fundamental and if doubtful about human rights in general, most would at least ask for the right to life, - why do some advocate euthanasia (legalised in ten? countries), why do some advocate abortion?

Discussing the problem of humans as right-holders, I brought up the recent issue of the third generation of human rights - collective rights. right-holders as individuals seem to be a Western concept, with all their autonomy and blahblahblah (oops that wasn't very intellectual) collective rights, though, aren't collective HUMAN rights. in fact, they often contradict human rights - so maybe not.

...

Because Xin has to go read Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia, Xin has to leave 'simply in virtue of being human' - the exciting part - till the next time i blog.

Xin is beginning to have an intellectual blog. BLOG.
Xin has 'The Thin People' on her desktop - it's quite scary.