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Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by jacquesm on Sunday October 18, 2020 @08:40AM (#24817394)
World War II has been over for a while and Germany has a scientist as the leader of the country.

Human rights in Germany improved as a result of WWII because Germany - unlike any other country - has seen first hand what will happen when you let human rights slide.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by mrkramer on Sunday October 18, 2020 @08:45AM (#24817430)
I was referring to the guy who said "Societies with largely rational, educated populace are weathering COVID just fine, wrt. democracy and respect for human rights."

My conclusion was that education does not equal to rationality with regards to human rights and that democracy is not good but it is the best system we had so far.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by jacquesm on Sunday October 18, 2020 @08:47AM (#24817452)
Sure. But China, arguably not much of a democracy did just fine.

So the whole link between the pandemic and political systems is mostly nonsense, the countries where the impact is least are simply the ones that reacted fastest and most decisive. Everybody else is playing catch-up and they may have to substantially pause their 'freedoms' and 'democratic rights' to get through to the other side.

This is a simple result of early incompetence and refusal to assign sufficient gravity to the situation.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by mrkramer on Sunday October 18, 2020 @08:59AM (#24817547)
So you believe in information that Chinese communist party is providing. A totalitarian regime with mass violation of human rights?! I love China and Chinese people but people suffer a lot under the rule of CCP. They are faking their financial data and they are faking their COVID data as well.
Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by jacquesm on Sunday October 18, 2020 @11:04AM (#24818331)
I believe that if a regime shares information that is at face value negative for that regime that we can believe them in so far as that aspect is concerned. China has shared a lot of information around the pandemic that can be classed as 'draconian countermeasures', but they do seem to have the COVID situation under control.

If you want to argue the opposite then you should substantiate that with data and sources, rather than just with claims left hanging without support.

I'm sure there is going to be some discrepancy between the facts and what we get from official communications but at this point in time there are very few governments left that have been 100% transparent during this whole saga. China likely is no exception to that but I would not expect them a-priori to be worse than say Russia or some of the countries of the EU.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by sanp on Sunday October 18, 2020 @11:00AM (#24818305)
OK, don't trust the numbers from China. Do you trust the numbers from South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, NZ?
Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by throwmeaway_pls on Sunday October 18, 2020 @04:29PM (#24820886)
I definitely do not believe NZ’s claim they eradicated COVID with “95% probability.” [1]

I do not trust that number at all.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/world/australia/new-zeala...

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by varjag on Sunday October 18, 2020 @06:07PM (#24821504)
I'm the guy you refer to. You are confusing broad education with STEM. It is very possible to be poorly educated while being OK at math or engineering.
Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by pasabagi on Sunday October 18, 2020 @09:51AM (#24817872)
I think it's more that Germans, unlike most nationalities, had great psychological and political incentives to imagine themselves as the victims of human rights abuses, but unlike real victims of human rights abuses, didn't face an entrenched establishment designed to keep them from asserting their rights.

It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw first hand' the atrocities of the Nazis, unless you count the perspective of the perpetrators. A large part of the post-war German identity was based around the idea that they did not know what was being done, that they would have never allowed it if they had known, and so on.

My opinion here is obviously controversial (especially in Germany), but it goes a long way to explain why Germany, unlike most post-genocidal nations, has very robust defence of human rights at the core of its state. Most survivors of genocide (e.g. the Armenians) face an establishment committed to defending itself against any assertion of wrongdoing, and a society committed to keeping hold of stolen property and lands. In Germany, there were essentially no survivors, and no advocates for the dead, so there was no real pressure either to bring the perpetrators of the holocaust to justice, or to defend them. In Turkey, recognition of the genocide would have been extremely expensive, both in terms of reputations of establishment figures, and in terms of property and land. In Germany, most Nazis and Nazi businesses (VW for instance) could simply go on.

In any case, I'm not sure how you would respond to the Holocaust within the framework of human rights. Retroactive justice is against the german constitution, and what the Germans did in the second world war was predominantly legal. It would have been very hard, even if there was a great desire to do so, to convict anybody of doing acts which were fully lawful at the time.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by jacquesm on Sunday October 18, 2020 @11:05AM (#24818345)
> It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw first hand' the atrocities of the Nazis, unless you count the perspective of the perpetrators.

On the contrary, the vast majority of the Germans alive today are the descendants of those who saw these things 'first hand'. You have this about as backwards as it gets.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by watwut on Sunday October 18, 2020 @10:07AM (#24817981)
Yes to some extend in relation to holocaust.

No in relation to Nazi victims in general. Jews were not only German victims of it all and most killed Jews were foreign. (German Jewish minority was rather small). As any other regime, it had huge amount of other victims too.

The crimes against non-jewish germans are part of the whole thing and part of reason for robust rights. So was the destruction of Germany after all of that which was pretty profound.

Re:The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human r... by pasabagi on Sunday October 18, 2020 @11:06AM (#24818356)
>crimes against non-jewish germans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_...

makes for interesting reading. Particularly the line: "some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps". Although it's hard to say if that was the Germans or the Allies who were responsible. Perhaps both?