The Myth of Human Rights by Bob Black forum discussion

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thecollective
The Myth of Human Rights by Bob Black forum discussion

New book just released by Bob Black (self-published on The Anarchist Library).

"The Myth of Human Rights" (2021) by Bob Black

excerpt from the introduction:

***

There are fashions in clothes and music. And there are fashions in politics. One current fashion in politics, all over the world, is human rights: “Human rights is the idea of our time.”[2] Everybody likes human rights. Not everybody respects them. I will make the claim that human rights are never respected, as human rights. Because human rights have no objective reality, there is nothing to respect. Some humans are worthy of respect, but not their imaginary rights.

Today, it’s scandalous to disbelieve in human rights. A prominent social philosopher named Joel Feinberg is appalled that there are, as he says, “even extreme misanthropes who deny that anyone in fact has rights.”[3] These extreme misanthropes would include Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gottlieb von Herder, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Kropotkin and Friedrich Nietzsche. Until about 500 years ago, everyone must have been an extreme misanthrope, which is certainly not how Jesus Christ and Prince Kropotkin, among others, are regarded. Nonetheless, Professor Feinberg’s writings have been hailed as “far-reaching and subtle”: they “achieve an unparalleled combination of rigor, sensitivity, and clarity.”[4] Imagine what the rest of the philosophers must be like.

***

read the rest here (83 pages):

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-myth-of-human-rights

anon (not verified)
Willy Gilly on Bob Black

Willy Gilly, true to form, is dismissive of the entire text because apparently there are "objectively emergent value structures in minds" which Bob Black is too dumb to understand and because SCIENCE. https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/m2jhwn/new_bob_black_book_ju...

anon (not verified)
Can we start using Willy

Can we start using Willy Gilly instead of that weird term for eerie chills? As in "that statement is so stupid it gives me the willie gillies?"

SirEinzige
Does Silly Willy even define what objective is?

He assumes that it's even obvious. There happens to be a LOT of modern science and math that should be thrown out for obvious anarchic reasons. I does he even know the difference between objective and correspondent? Math and science have a correspondent reality structure that are contingent upon linguistic structures of reification and recursion. There is a reality qualia to them that are linguistic and born in a particular psychosomatic context but that does not make these things objective. He hasn't even caught up to Paul Feyerabend on the problem of mono method science.

This is doubly obvious with the spook of human rights which essentially go back to discursive concepts of granting usually born of a religious or mythic structure.

anon (not verified)
Oh come on Silly Gilly its

Oh come on Silly Gilly its obvious that to believe in rights is to submit to an authority.

anon (not verified)
some thoughts from Julian Langer on text

Some Lazy Thoughts On Bob Black’s Myths.
by Julian Langer

https://ecorevoltblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/21/some-lazy-thoughts-on-bob...

anon (not verified)
How can you lazy thoughts

How can you lazy thoughts when criticizing BB's Abolish Work when the concept of "laziness" is constructed within the slave/master dialectic and the institute of coersed work? That is a bad contradiction because it strengthens authoritarian power.

anon (not verified)
Define a "game"

"Life is a game"... Not sure how this sticks, but more importantly how to trust someone who believes in such view?

Since a game has players and pawns (or cards), winners and losers, no one knows whether you're using or abusing people around as if they were part of your game. There's also the issue of the player-played abusive relationship. This reminds me of the yuppie psychopath character in Burning...

Or perhaps you refer to a paradigm of pleasure... or life being there for your pleasure. In that sense, I don't see where the gamification avails, as enjoyment of what you do does not require rules and processes like a game (or players and pawns, much less losers and winners), all it requires is to connect with the stuff you're doing, and if not, do other things. Do as you please... which can include playing games (also does, in my case) but not limited to, but is not playing games by definition, it's just pleasure.

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