#reeducation (through labor) rise against

[breedsblood]

Rise Against - Re-Education (Through_Labor) - Live Streaming With Just Jen Reacts

Click Link For Full Video

https://rumble.com/v4735p0-rise-against-re-education-through-labor-live-streaming-with-just-jen-reacts.html?mref=1t2sy0&mc=e0pra

[mariacallous]

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights," according to Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The job of the UN Human Rights Council is to monitor countries' compliance with this fundamental tenet, ensuring that people can live free from persecution, torture and discrimination. 

Several of the countries currently serving as the guardians of global human rights, however, have a poor track record at home — chief among them China, the United Arab Emirates and Eritrea.

In recent years, human rights violations such as reeducation camps, torture and arbitrary arrests, as well as forced labor and suppression of the opposition, have been documented in these countries.

As the number of authoritarian regimes has grown globally, their presence on the Human Rights Council has increased. China, in particular, has exploited this by leaning on allies to vote — or abstain from voting — in favor of its national interests.

Council members becoming less democratic 

In 2023, only 30% of the countries on the Human Rights Council were classified as "free" by the US think tank Freedom House. For its annual Freedom in the World report, the organization examines whether governments provide free elections and meet certain minimum standards for political rights and civil liberties, such as freedom of assembly. A total of 70% of the current council members were classified as "partly free" (such as India) and "not free" (Sudan and other countries). 

Each year, the Human Rights Council elects one-third of its 47 members to three-year terms according to fixed geographic quotas based on the number of UN countries per region: The Asia-Pacific and Africa groups have 13 members each, the Western Europe and North America group has seven, Eastern Europe has six, and the Latin America and Caribbean group has eight. 

Elections for terms running from 2024 through 2026 are anticipated in October. The candidates include Cuba, Kuwait and Russia, which was removed from the council in 2022 following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Researchers from organizations such as Freedom House, V-Dem and Democracy Matrix attempt to quantify members' adherence to minimum international humanitarian standards such as guarantees for civil liberties and compliance with prohibitions on torture. 

The human rights score of the countries that have been sent to the council since its inception in 2006 has declined considerably. In 2023, it is only just above the historic low of 2022.

"This unwelcome development is not only evident in the council but worldwide," said Silke Voss-Kyeck, a research fellow at the German Institute for Human Rights. "Many members are governed in an authoritarian and dictatorial manner." Compliance with human rights obligations seldom plays a role in the election of council members, she said.

'China has Africa in its pocket'

One consequence of the rise of autocratic regimes is that Human Rights Council votes often pit blocs against each other, said Yaqiu Wang, senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch. Unlike the Cold War, however, the driving factor here is not a shared ideology, she said. 

"It's more interest-based," said Wang. Pakistan, for example, often votes with China because economic ties are strong and Pakistan sees China as an ally against an adversarial India. "It's like a trade: 'If you vote with me, I will go with you.'" 

In addition to Asian countries, Wang said, China has especially relied on African governments for support on the Human Rights Council. "I don't think any particular country has stood up to China — except Somalia, which recently rejected demands," Wang said, referring to the Horn of Africa country's vote for a 2022 resolution that addressed human rights abuses in reeducation camps in Xinjiang. "China has Africa in its pocket."

A unifying element, Wang said, is a rejection of Western dominance. "There's a history of Chinese-African solidarity," Wang said, "an alliance against the Western imperialism." China is building on that — and on economic interdependencies. 

Cultivating unlikely alliances 

China has had less success bringing Latin American governments under its sway. Countries such as Costa Rica are economically more self-sufficient than many African nations. Moreover, South American governments are more democratic, according to the Freedom House Global Freedom Score, and therefore less susceptible to China's influence.

Unlike in many African countries with authoritarian governments, for example, it's not enough to "ensnare" the elites, Wang said. That's because in democracies elites are often replaced through elections.

Unlike the UN Security Council, which is unable to act on the war in Ukraine because Russia has exercised its veto power on votes to address the conflict, the Human Rights Council is not blocked.

Resolutions reprimanding specific countries for human rights violations have increased since the council's founding in 2006. Country-specific resolutions are intended to pressure the respective governments to address the issues or face additional loss of reputation, sparking heated debates among members of the Human Rights Council.

The countries most often mentioned in resolutions brought before the Human Rights Council are Syria, Congo, Israel, Mali, Myanmar, Sudan and Yemen. Despite its own well-documented human rights abuses, China has not been on the losing end of a country-specific resolution. So far, there has only been one such effort: A resolution to condemn the UN-documented reeducation camps for Uyghur Muslims in China's western Xinjiang region failed in 2022, with 17 votes for, 11 abstentions and 19 votes against — including by Indonesia, Pakistan, Namibia and China itself.

'China goes ballistic after the vote'

Wang said China used not-so-subtle coercion to maintain support in the Human Rights Council. "It is intimidating," she said. "It threatens veiled. Before a vote, it's like a Chinese diplomat in another country, let's say Chile, just to give an example, he tells Chile: 'You know, you have to vote this way. Otherwise, you don't want to undermine the economic ties between Chile and China, right?'" Should a country not comply with such demands, Wang said, "China goes ballistic after the vote."

Voss-Kyeck confirmed that China's government uses pressure to get what it wants. "High Commission staff and diplomats are being threatened — personally, but also politically," she said. "It's all well-documented. People are getting evening phone calls to private numbers." No country, she said, is as aggressive as China in attempting to avoid criticism.

The efforts of China and its allies to prevent critical resolutions are evidence of their desire to avoid censure by the council. Only Russia has given up on trying to evade condemnation. "They've become such an outsider," Voss-Kyeck said. "They don't care about the council."

Though countries such as China are able to use alliances to diminish the Human Rights Council's oversight efforts, the work of the UN body is important, Voss-Kyeck said, and its "impact is great." One example is its importance to domestic civil society movements and Indigenous groups.

"That doesn't exist in any UN body: that Indigenous people are allowed in the room, that they have the right to speak, to make statements," said Voss-Kyeck. "That's a thorn in the side of many states."

Limited options for reforming Human Rights Council

Despite the stated purpose of the council, the body's current structure prevents it from being effective in the fight against human rights violations. Too often, countries are both the defendants and judges in the cases of their own violations — and they have little interest in judging themselves.

Though critics of the council agree that changes are needed to restore the body to its intended purpose, many have long been skeptical about specific proposals— such as limiting membership to countries that have ratified certain human rights treaties. "Of course, you can make a court only by the good guys, who then judge the bad guys," said Voss-Kyeck. "But the question is: What effect does that then still have on the 'bad guys'? And who decides who are the bad guys, who are the good guys?" 

Wang also worries that making changes to the structure of the Human Rights Council could ultimately weaken the body. "Reforming the HRC can be risky," she said, "given we do not know the outcome of putting it all back on the negotiation table." 

[iamtryingtobelieve]

We crawl all over you

[petewentzisblack1312]

what rise against songs did you listen to ???

reeducation (through labor) because it sounded sufficiently political.

[ms-demeanor]

What makes you believe the idea that god doesn’t exist? I was spiritually abused growing up and as a result have become very anti Christianity but I consider myself agnostic because I can’t quite make up my mind as to whether or not god exists at all in the first place. I think you you’re good at expressing your thoughts so I figured I’d ask and maybe it’d help me come to terms with what I do or don’t believe myself.

I’m sorry about the abuse you dealt with. That’s terrible and I hope you’re in a safer place now.

I’ve just never been presented with evidence compelling enough to make me believe that gods exist. Anything that people have presented to me as proof of a god or gods seems at best like philosophy with no grounding in reality and more frequently like grasping at straws.

My catholic godmother liked to argue that a single eyeball was too complicated to evolve alone, isn’t that proof enough that things must have been made, not evolved, and that always seemed remarkably silly because you can watch generations of bacteria go through tremendous evolutionary changes in real time so with *four point five billion years* of course very complicated things could evolve.

Almost everything that people point at that is seen as spiritual or supernatural has some perfectly mundane, reasonable, usually scientific explanation so it seems like MUCH more of a leap to believe there’s an ineffible spirit illuminating humans that carries on to an afterlife that we’ve got no way of testing for or exploring and no trustworthy accounts of even from people who have temporarily died than it is to simply believe that we’re alive and when we die that’s it, we’re gone, we end like trees and rabbits and stars do, no further magic or mystery than that.

Also people describe their religious miracles to me - eight nights of light, transubstantiation, rising on the third day, floating through focused meditation - and it all feels like hearing about the labors of Hercules. Neat. A cool story. Pleasant if it helps someone find meaning.

And utterly impossible to literally prove or verify.

And I really, honestly do not begrudge people for believing in these things, and I was not joking when I mentioned my friends who literally believe in the Norse pantheon - I don’t begrudge them and I don’t begrudge modern Hellenist practitioners or witches or what have you. That’s all fine. So long as the beliefs don’t hurt people then I don’t have anything to say against them.

(And before we get into it with atheism: yeah, atheist states that subjugate religious minorities DO exist and I think they should stop sending their Muslim population to reeducation camps and should stop persecuting their christians and should stop imprisoning people for political speech)

But I really don’t have a good, compelling argument for you because I don’t feel the need to prove a negative. I’ve never seen any positive evidence that would prove the existence of the supernatural and until I see such a thing I’ve got no need or desire to update my position.

These are literally all just stories to me. A lot of them are beautiful stories, all of them are culturally relevant to someone, many of them are important in ways that I see as good and many of them are important in ways that I see as harmful.

My mother in law likes to tell me about miracles all the time. “And then, even though no one thought it was possible, the little boy walked off the stage.” “And then the woman who had prayed to the saint was cured of her illness.” “And then the little girl came back from the dead and said that she was surrounded by a white light and the love of christ.”

Those. Those sure are stories. I’m glad if they help comfort her, I wish she’d stop telling me that me and my partner would be healed of our illnesses if we’d just go to church because it is harmful to hear that you’re sick or chronically ill or in pain because you just don’t believe enough or you don’t believe the right way.

I know it’s a lot harder to walk away from a faith you were raised in. I know that you were taught miracles as miraculous and were presented with these stories as self-evident, but if you find yourself asking how it’s possible to NOT believe these things I’d say to play with that thought a little. Ask yourself why you DO believe these things. Ask yourself if someone came to you with a claim that no, that wasn’t a flood the god of Abraham wrought, it was pralaya and the destruction of the lower ten realms, if you’d believe that and why or why not (deluge myths are an interesting way to play with this concept because so many cultures have them).

My grandfather was a magician from the 1930s until the 1990s. Sometimes I feel like that explains a lot about my worldview, sometimes I feel like it explains nothing at all. But what it meant to me is that I grew up knowing that magic was something that people could make. You could make people believe a lot of things with thread and mirrors and silk scarves, so if you wanted to know if something was REALLY real, you had to poke it and prod it and ask it a lot of questions and look at it from different angles.

The supernatural doesn’t really stand up to that scrutiny. You poke it and it falls over, you look from a different angle and you see the plywood behind the mirror.

And in spite of all of that I do believe that people in general are good and courageous and wonderful. There are miracles that I *do* believe in but they’re all the very mundane, provable kind. I believe in the RMS Carpathia shutting down hot water to the ship to make it to the survivors of the Titanic just a little faster. I believe in people leaving water in the Arizona desert to help people trying to find their way to someplace safe. I believe in divers swimming in the dark to save some little boys in a cave. I believe in Jonas Salk saying the patent of the polio vaccine belonged to the people because you wouldn’t try to patent the sun. I believe in handing out sandwiches in the park and helping your neighbors.

Laying on hands to heal the sick is a nice story.  Doing all that you can to help the people around you is a miracle. And I don’t really need the nice story if I’ve got that.

[presentableenigma]

Tagged by @ghostextremist Rules: spell your url out with song titles and then tag ten people

P - Points Of Authority/ Linkin Park R - ReEducation(Through Labor)/Rise Against E - Empire Ants/ Gorillaz S - Sunflower/ Post Malone & Swae Lee E - Eres Mia/ Romeo Santos N - Never Let Me Go/ We Came As Romans  T - Take On Me/ A-Ha  A - Anything Goes!/ Maki Ohguro B - Black Rose/ Trapt L - Lucifer/ Anna Tsuchiya  E - Emergency/ Paramore  E - Excite/ Daichi Miura N - No Scrubs/ TLC I - I Never Told You What I Do For A Living/ My Chemical Romance  G - Gunslinger/ Avenged Sevenfold M - Mr. Brightside/ The Killers  A - All Around Me/ Flyleaf

I tag @radroller, @cityofjern, @killerkitty707, @xi-ren and das it(my rules now)

[termitaria]

REEDUCATION (THROUGH LABOR) _ RISE AGAINST . MP3

[marcjampole]

New book on demographics seeks to explain why population growth in the industrial age always leads to a stagnant or falling population

A human tide hit Earth’s beaches, prairies, desserts and mountains like a tsunami at about the turn of the 19th century and will subside only at the turn of the 22nd. That human wave is the population explosion that started in English-speaking countries at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but quickly spread to Europe, Asia, Latin America, and now finally to Africa.

But as British demographer Paul Morland details in The Human Tide, the expression “human tide” not only describes 300 years of unprecedented growth in the population of humans, but also the mechanism by which that growth was achieved.

Morland begins by listing the limited number of variables that determine if a country’s population will rise or fall:

Average number of children born to each woman

Mortality rate of infants

Average life span of individuals

Immigration and emigration.

For centuries before the industrial revolution, human populations tended to grow extremely slowly, sometimes shrinking or stagnating. The population had hit its Malthusian limits, named after Thomas Malthus, an English theologian who postulated that population growth would always run into the limits imposed by Nature. Scarcity of resources would always lead to the misery of famine and poverty and thus place a natural limit on human population.

Of course Nature’s limits expanded tremendously when humans started to transition to the use of carbon power (coal, oil, natural gas and the electricity created burning these hydrocarbons) instead of human, animal or rudimentary forms of wind and water power. At about the same time, the increase and spread of scientific knowledge reached a critical mass leading to improvements in sanitation, medical care, transportation, tools, agriculture, engineering, safety standards and dozens of other aspects of human existence that gave people more material possessions while increasing their lifespans and decreasing the number of babies dying before one and five years of age.

Greater abundance leads to the human tide, first in Great Britain and the United States: the average life span increases and infant mortality declines while women begin having more children—in some countries, many more children, spurred on by society’s greater wealth. This rising tidal wave causes both the population and its rate of growth to soar, sometimes aided as in the case of the United States and Canada by large numbers of new arrivals from countries experiencing rampant population growth. The average age at death increases, usually by decades, but the average age of individuals declines. The population becomes better educated and the standard of living rises, sometimes marginally and sometimes in spectacular fashion. The country is more able to find soldiers for war and industrial workers for factories, and thus often sees its ability to project power regionally or globally expand. People begin to depopulate rural areas in favor of cities.

But then something funny happens. Educated women tend to have fewer babies, so the average number of births per woman falls, often under the level at which the population starts to shrink. Infant mortality and life expectancy rates stabilize. Population growth stops and even turns negative. Meanwhile, because generations of an expanding population are followed by generations of a declining population, the overall population ages. The result: the population no longer expands and in many cases starts to contract. Only nations that continue to have large numbers of immigrants continue to grow after native-born women start having fewer than the replacement number of children, e.g., the United States from the 1970’s until the installation of the Trump anti-immigration project.

The human tide thus consists of precipitous population growth which creates a much younger nation followed by stabilization and decline of the population, now much older. The later in history a population experiences the tide, the faster it plays out: it took much longer in the United States and England than it did in Russia and Germany, which likewise underwent a chronologically longer wave than China and Latin America have.

BTW, Morland reports good and bad news about an aging population. The good news is that an aging population is less likely to go to war and will usually experience lower rates of crime. The bad news is that older populations tend to produce fewer innovations. Morland, among others, also worries needlessly that taking care of a very old population is a major challenge to society; these so-called experts don’t seem to realize how easy it is to reroute working adults from taking care of children to taking care of seniors. Almost as easy as rerouting people from oil fields and coal minds to solar panel and wind turbine manufacture, installation and maintenance. All it takes are the funds and the collective will to educate and reeducate—something the United States had after World War II and China seems to have now.

According to Morland, the human wave—a large increase in population followed by stabilization and some decline—explains much of the history of the past 200 years, for example, the global rise and fall of Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan, the current tensions in the middle East and the looming rise of China, Brazil and Africa, the last continent to experience the wave.

In The Human Tide, Morland labors to make sure his history doesn’t come across as supporting the view that Europeans and Americans are superior to other people because of their technologies and values. Anyone who takes the long view of human history knows that Europeans have dominated politically and economically only over the past 200 or so years and that the rest of the world has almost caught up, and done it faster than it took ancient Rome to catch up with Greece, or Europe to catch up with the Arab world and China in medieval and early modern times. It’s a bit of a challenge, however, to argue against European superiority if you limit your history to 1800-2016. Morland succeeds, and that’s to his credit.

Unfortunately, Morland falls victim to that other great irrationality proffered by right-wing pretending to present well-researched truth: he believes in the invisible hand of the marketplace, which he extends to population growth. Morland reveals his bias inadvertently when discussing China’s decades’ long efforts, now apparently ending, to limit its population by mandating a one-child policy.

Morland berates China both for the one-child policy and it harsh implementation, which evidently included jail time, taking children from parents and forced abortions. His argument is that the invisible hand of the human tide would have lowered the population without China’s draconian policy.

Two enormous logical errors. The first is easy to explain—if China had not enforced a one-child policy, its human tide would have lasted longer and crested higher. The policy did work, although it has resulted in the same problems faced by all rapidly aging nations.

The second error has to do with the very idea of the “invisible hand,” whether in economics or in the natural growth of human populations. Let’s first remember that if we postulate, as right-wingers always have, that the invisible hand emanates from the natural order of things, then we have to conclude, based on the evidence of paleontology and the laws of physics, that the invisible hand’s goal is the extinction of humanity. After all, upwards of 95% of all species ever to exist are now extinct, thanks to the invisible hand of evolution. Moreover, the laws of thermodynamics predict a state of complete entropy in which it would be impossible for life to exist. So instead of accepting any invisible hand, humans should intervene to protect and extend our species, for example through population control or laws that offset the unequal distribution of wealth that all unimpeded markets quickly produce.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the human tide has washed across the shores of different nations in different ways precisely because of dozens of interventions made by societies and their leaders: Build up an army or not? Support rising fertility or support population control? Outlaw or encourage abortion and birth control? Educate women or not? Welcome immigrants or shut the borders? Negotiate trade agreements or invade other countries? Make masses of people move or engage in ethnic cleansing? The invisible hand consists of many conscious efforts, which is why the human tide has not played out the same way everywhere, the way in which an experiment involving the release of a heavy and a light object from a tower would always yield the same results.

China had the right idea. We should promote one-child policies everywhere, although I am opposed to any kind of physical coercion like jailing or forced abortions. Rather, societies can encourage lower birth rates as follows:

An active campaign using all media and public education advocating a one-child policy

Continued education of women and their integration into all levels of the economy and government.

Free birth control and abortion and the removal of most restrictions on abortions.

Financial penalties for ignoring the one-child policy. I would propose that when a woman gives birth to more than one child, both the woman and the father of the baby should be assessed an additional 5% on their gross income and an additional 5% on their net assets from the birth of each additional child until it turns 30.

If every woman had one child only, the population would be cut in half in one generation, which would go a long way towards solving many of the world’s problems, including the global environmental disaster we face. I know I’m an extremist, but we are seriously taxing the carrying capacity of the Earth and if we fail to reduce the human footprint, the four horses of the Apocalypse—natural disasters, famine, epidemics and war—will surely do it for us.

The problem with any kind of population control strategy, be it extreme or mild, is that most economists have refused to consider how to structure a growing or stable economy delivering a high quality of a life to all when the population is shrinking. Economists have also refused to consider how to make sure that the hidden costs of economic actions are assumed by the producer, the seller or the buyer; think of the medical cost to treat people suffering from diseases caused by air pollution as an example of a hidden cost unpaid by manufacturers or car owners.

Morland fails to take a stand on whether the enormous growth in the population of humans over the past 200 years represents a threat to the continued existence of the human species. Maybe he hopes that by the time the world stabilizes its population at nine or ten billion people we will have developed the technologies needed to sustain such a heavy load of wide-screen TVs, private motorized vehicles, plastic straws and air conditioning. Of course to think otherwise would require him to admit that the invisible hand of the human tidal wave has to be controlled and directed, as does the invisible hand of the marketplace.

[presentableenigma]

Tagged by @kajimotomiya to write my url with song titles

Papercut - Linkin Park ReEducation(Through Labor) - Rise Against  Echo - Trapt Sunflower - Post malone & Swae Lee  El Manana - Gorillaz  Never Surrender - Skillet  This War Is Ours - Escape the Fate All That Ive Got - The Used  Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen  Lucifer  -Anna Tsuchiya  Everlong - Foo Fighters Excite - Daichi Miura  Never Say Never - The Fray  If It Means Alot To You - A Day To Remember Give Me A Sign - Breaking Benjamin  Magnetic - Flyleaf Aint It Fun - Paramore

ill tag @xi-ren and @cityofjern