On human rights

Human Rights are not an infallible piece of intellectual technology to address the ills and sufferings of the world... After all, when we pronounce certain groups of living beings as Less-Than-Human, then constantly reiterating the importance of respecting "human rights" is a flawed political strategy for changing the course of our conversation. After all, if I am consistently seeing some group of people as "not-human" or "less-than-fully-human" or indeed, even "irreparably flawed human" (i.e. too broken for use), then Human Rights need not possibly apply fully to these beings...

Do I offer an alternative?

Experiment. Experiment with a discourse and practice of human rights as it exists and as it evolves,
And experiment with noticing how we treat all living beings whom we do not regard as human... Dogs, cattle, chickens, birds, rats, roaches, poisonous spiders, beetles, squid, bears, wolves,
or creatures of our imaginations, like dragons and phoenixes and gnomes and fairies
and still, notice how we react...
and notice how we notice. Then I ask myself, "how am I choosing to see the world in any given moment?"

"And to what extent have my choices been shaped, liberated, or constrained because of my circumstances, of my background, of my ancestral baggage, of my inheritance, or my lack of an inheritance, of my physical ability or disability, of my sex or my gender or how I choose to do sex or gender, or because of what I have consumed, eaten, drank, during the course of my life til now that has shaped my body, my face, my health, my energy, my virility?"

How would having answers determine the fate of our historical moment and our future, in determining the choices I could or will make?

In asking these questions, I release my need for answers...
I simply wish to ask the questions
and allow the life I lead
to also be the inquiry.