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Comment by Hasknewbie | Hacker News Reader

No offense, but you sound like an aging white man slamming his fist on the table and hectoring "what we need is a good war!" at family dinners.

Human rights, and more specifically due process, are not 'Western', they've just been formulated there. Do you believe gravity is 'white' or 'jewish' because it was formulated by Einstein?

And societies that 'get' due process objectively do better: tell me, who does better in social development and public safety, Nigeria or Mauritius? Nigeria or Cape Verde? Conversely, when were Latin American countries worse off, during their "military Dutertre" era, or now? Your position has never worked historically.

You can't _claim_ guilt, you need proof, and to get proof you need due process.

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"Human rights, and more specifically due process, are not 'Western', they've just been formulated there."

Not even that. I'm not sure to what do we refer exactly by (western) "human rights". Is it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? That was not "western", as the United Nations General Assembly, which adopted it, had equal representation of all member nations, including Philippines. Is it something else, something older, like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, passed somewhere in the French Revolution? Well, we can find less "western" versions before that all over the world and history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_rights

> You can't _claim_ guilt, you need proof, and to get proof you need due process.

You don't need it when you are at war. Killing people is normal during a wa even without evidence.

There is no war. There is nothing even close to a war zone. If you consider the society threatened on such a level there are steps to be taken, like declaring the martial law and such. But this... is just madness to me, covered by populist propaganda!

You are missing the scope of the discussion. My point is that abdicating proper law enforcement has historically always failed at improving society. Yes you can "declare war". This will certainly not improve your country (Cf Colombia before, Mexico now). Note that I'm not even making the argument that killing innocents is wrong, I'm just saying that due process works better, period.

> Human rights, and more specifically due process, are not 'Western', they've just been formulated there. Do you believe gravity is 'white' or 'jewish' because it was formulated by Einstein?

Are you saying that human rights are real in some sense? That they're something more than arbitrary legal constructs/a civic religion devised by Westerners in the last few centuries?

Human Rights are about as real as money: you can claim it's a made-up social concept, but good luck denying its worth.

Sure, that's a good analogy. Human rights are a currency printed by the West. They have a lot of weight because of the political and economic weight of the west. But they're still fundamentally Western, and not everyone accepts that currency.

Taiwan never was colonized by a Western power, and they are the most progressive democracy in Asia (quirky-folksy democracy, but democracy nonetheless). Thailand never was colonized at all, and it sucks for them right now, but there are many democrats there. In fact during the colonial era Western powers considered democracy "non-exportable" (for obvious self-serving reasons), yet it was used as a moral and ideological weapon by many independence movements (India springs to mind). So not really "printed by the West".

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