Aug 9, 2005

a plea for consistency

In a post titled Put Up or Shut Up, Timothy Sandefur links to a Christopher Hitchens essay about putting words into action, saying it "asks the right questions." Quoth Hitch:
How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East?
Isn't this the same question, though, that Sandefur dismissed only days earlier, calling it "childish" and "stupid?" "You believe X is wrong--so why aren't you directly involved in fighting it?"

Update: Sandefur responds.
...I do think it’s different. “Rights talk” has been coopted by leftists who use the term “rights” without any entitlement to it, because they reject the basic element of all rights, which is an individual’s right to run his own life without interference....

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