Just look around the world; they are the norm: East Asia (Japan, South Korea, China - Taiwan, Hong Kong, June 4 on the mainland); North America; South America, almost all of the region; Europe; Australia, NZ, Indonesia, the Phillipines; South Asia (India, and I think they are enshrined if not enforced in Pakistan and some others).
What's mostly missing is the Middle East, Central Asia, parts of SE Asia, and large parts of Africa - though there are Benin, Botswana, Kenya, and many others iirc.
No it's not. There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism, there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam, there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized. That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically (and hence militarily), because it was the first place where people had enough rights for something resembling a modern economy to develop.
> That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically
I tend to agree, though it's of course hard to prove. However, I'm talking about the present, not the past.
> There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism
I said it is "very widespread", not everywhere. Perhaps the confusion is the word Universal: that doesn't mean everyone believes it (false for any belief), but that everyone has the rights, whether or not they know or can exercise them. It's the concept that starts the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and all have inalienable rights.
> there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized
I am talking about the present, where it's adopted in East Asia (including in China - Taiwan, Hong Kong (though suppressed now), June 4 on the mainland), throughout Latin America, Europe of course, parts of Africa, the Anglo world, etc.
> there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam,
There is no country called 'Islam'; if we go by scripture, nobody has human rights. The idea that all practicioners of Islam have the same beliefs is as true as saying all practicioners of Christianity do - and look at HN.
In Indonesia, the largest majority Muslim country, there are human rights, also in India, with the largest Muslim population (but not the majority). I think Pakistan and some South Asian countries probably have them enshrined.
As opposed to slaves in non-western nations? May I remind that slavery was not exclusively a western thing, and that there are more slaves today than there ever was, in absolute terms, almost none in western nations.
Things people did, sure, but not why they did them here and not there is a bit trickier. There's a variety of theories, easy access to coal is my favorite, but some people like to blame the magna carta or something.
Check out Destiny Disrupted. It covers how the Middle East and China both had technology opportunities much earlier but were missing the right economic incentives at the time to handle the disruption to the labor force that came with the Industrial Revolution.
Essentially the major societies before ended up in local maximums because they didn’t have the ruthlessness of capitalism or the economic desperation to adopt technologies that in the short term would unemploy large portions of society and wipe out old power structures.
Jared diamonds an idiot and “guns germs and steel” is among the worst books written in human history - right up there with Republic and whatever the hell sam Harris is doing.
It's not an unusual claim: Freedom breeds innovation - people are not only free to think for themselves, to ignore the orthodoxy and established power, but they are raised and encouraged to do it and admired for it (to a degree).
I think it's accurate to say that all the wealthiest (per capita) economies in history - i.e., the wealthiest economies over the last ten years - are in free societies.
Yes, but: crucially, not in the USA. The EU human rights framework includes non-citizens, because they are still humans. The US constitutional rights framework does not include non-citizens, which is why ICE have free rein to abuse them.
