Let’s see what is left of the rights in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a world shut down by old rich people anxious to avoid their date with coronadestiny.
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
This is gone, unless you’re protesting Black Lives Matter.
Everyone has the right to education. … Elementary education shall be compulsory.
Gone! Unless a Black Lives Matter School of Protest can be started?
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.
If “full development” means “sitting at the computer” and “respect for fundamental freedoms” means learning how to be a Mask Karen, I guess kids still have these rights. (My friends’ middle schoolers have not left their house/yard since mid-March. They say that they haven’t learned anything from the local public school.)
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
This is gone, unless the License Raj thinks you should be allowed to work.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
This is gone!
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution
Also gone? Or can asylum-seekers still walk across the U.S. border and sign up as customers for the welfare state?
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
What if your property was a daycare business? Given the lack of evidence that young children spread coronavirus, haven’t you been arbitrarily deprived of it?
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Is it “liberty” for a healthy young person, whose life is not at risk, to be locked down in an apartment?
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
What’s the “community” if everyone is stuck at home connected only by Internet?
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Religion in “community with others” is gone, right? Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and other enforcers of coronaplague orthodoxy have eliminated “freedom of thought”, right?
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
As noted above, you still have freedom of expression, but just not on any platform that contains an audience. (Maybe some Virtue-brand toilet paper will help keep the censors at bay? (from a Target near Portsmouth, New Hampshire).)
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Hmm… coronashutdown hit the working class like a ton of bricks: unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, opioids, strife with other household members in tiny apartments. For a lot of upper-middle-class Americans, especially government workers, it meant continued paychecks, a reduced workload, zero commute time, and going for jogs in low density suburbs before turning to the spacious single family house. That’s not “discrimination”?
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Why isn’t being locked into a small apartment “detention”?
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Given the lack of scientific agreement on whether young children can spread the coronavirus, whether Western government lockdowns are effective at reducing the total number of infections and deaths, etc., would it be fair to say that the shutdowns are “arbitrary interference”?
In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
Maybe this is the escape clause. A state governor can say “I think there will be more public order and general welfare if everyone is locked down in apartments and houses, except for those whom I specifically let out.”
Australia is arguably worse. Its policy of not allowing citizens (or permanent residents!) to leave is what you expect from a country like North Korea. It’s a policy that would normally bring swift UN resolutions and diplomatic censure.
The Australian attorney general’s own web site says very clearly “The freedom to leave a country pertains to both short-term, long-term and permanent departures. It cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”
We managed to extract my girlfriend from the grip of this fascist regime, but it took a lot of effort and persistence by two smart people.
One can read countless stories of people who have houses and jobs in other countries, families and dying relatives overseas from whom they’ve been separated, all being denied their right to leave the country — in some cases when they’re not even citizens of Australia! Citizens of other countries are being literally imprisoned in Australia. Back to our penal colony roots, I guess.
It’s heartbreaking, cruel, completely pointless, and entirely out of place in a supposedly liberal society. Yet there’s almost no blowback from a population that has become one with the nanny state.