Topic: Human rights (Page 2)
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๐ Ubuntu Philosophy
Ubuntu (Zulu pronunciation:ย [รนษรบntสผรน]) is a Nguni Bantu term meaning "humanity." It is often translated as "I am because we are," or "humanity towards others," or in Xhosa, "umntu ngumntu ngabantu" but is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity."
In Southern Africa, it has come to be used as a contested term for a kind of humanist philosophy, ethic, or ideology, also known as Ubuntuism propagated in the Africanisation (transition to majority rule) process of these countries during the 1980s and 1990s.
Since the transition to democracy in South Africa with the Nelson Mandela presidency in 1994, the term has become more widely known outside of Southern Africa, notably popularised to English-language readers through the ubuntu theology of Desmond Tutu. Tutu was the chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and many have argued that ubuntu was a formative influence on the TRC.
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- "Ubuntu Philosophy" | 2020-08-24 | 95 Upvotes 48 Comments
๐ 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre
The Tiananmen Square protests, also known as the June Fourth Incident (Chinese: ๅ ญๅไบไปถ; pinyin: liรนsรฌ shรฌjiร n) in China, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre (Chinese: ๅคฉๅฎ้จๅคงๅฑ ๆ; pinyin: Tiฤn'ฤnmรฉn dร tรบshฤ), troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. The protests started on 15 April and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army to occupy parts of central Beijing. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded. The popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests is sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement (Chinese: ๅ ซไนๆฐ่ฟ; pinyin: Bฤjiว mรญnyรนn) or the Tiananmen Square Incident (Chinese: ๅคฉๅฎ้จไบไปถ; pinyin: Tiฤn'ฤnmรฉn shรฌjiร n).
The protests were precipitated by the death of pro-reform Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Hu Yaobang in April 1989 amid the backdrop of rapid economic development and social change in post-Mao China, reflecting anxieties among the people and political elite about the country's future. The reforms of the 1980s had led to a nascent market economy that benefited some people but seriously disadvantaged others, and the one-party political system also faced a challenge to its legitimacy. Common grievances at the time included inflation, corruption, limited preparedness of graduates for the new economy, and restrictions on political participation. Although they were highly disorganized and their goals varied, the students called for greater accountability, constitutional due process, democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. At the height of the protests, about oneย million people assembled in the Square.
As the protests developed, the authorities responded with both conciliatory and hardline tactics, exposing deep divisions within the party leadership. By May, a student-led hunger strike galvanized support around the country for the demonstrators, and the protests spread to some 400 cities. Among the CCP's top leadership, Premier Li Peng and Party Elders Li Xiannian and Wang Zhen called for decisive action through violent suppression of the protesters, and ultimately managed to win over Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping and President Yang Shangkun to their side. On 20 May, the State Council declared martial law. They mobilized as many as ~300,000 troops to Beijing. The troops advanced into central parts of Beijing on the city's major thoroughfares in the early morning hours of 4 June, killing both demonstrators and bystanders in the process. The military operations were under the overall command of General Yang Baibing, half-brother of President Yang Shangkun.
The international community, human rights organizations, and political analysts condemned the Chinese government for the massacre. Western countries imposed arms embargoes on China. The Chinese government made widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, suppressed other protests around China, expelled foreign journalists, strictly controlled coverage of the events in the domestic press, strengthened the police and internal security forces, and demoted or purged officials it deemed sympathetic to the protests. More broadly, the suppression ended the political reforms begun in 1986 and halted the policies of liberalization of the 1980s, which were only partly resumed after Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour in 1992. Considered a watershed event, reaction to the protests set limits on political expression in China that have lasted up to the present day. Remembering the protests is widely associated with questioning the legitimacy of CCP rule and remains one of the most sensitive and most widely censored topics in China.
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- "1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre" | 2024-06-02 | 22 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "Tiananmen Square: Protests and Massacre (1989)" | 2022-11-27 | 39 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre" | 2022-06-04 | 52 Upvotes 8 Comments
๐ A baboon who acted as assistant to a disabled railway signalman in South Africa
Jack (died 1890) was a chacma baboon, who attained some fame for acting as an assistant to a disabled railway signalman in South Africa.
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- "A baboon who acted as assistant to a disabled railway signalman in South Africa" | 2019-06-04 | 98 Upvotes 20 Comments
๐ Lie to Children
A lie-to-children is a simplified, and often technically incorrect, explanation of technical or complex subjects employed as a teaching method. Educators who employ lies-to-children do not intend to deceive, but instead seek to 'meet the child/pupil/student where they are', in order to facilitate initial comprehension, which they build upon over time as the learner's intellectual capacity expands. The technique has been incorporated by academics within the fields of biology, evolution, bioinformatics and the social sciences.
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- "Lie to Children" | 2024-03-12 | 52 Upvotes 66 Comments
๐ Bucha Massacre
In March 2022, a series of war crimes were committed by Russian occupation forces in the Ukrainian city of Bucha during the Battle of Bucha, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities said that more than 300 inhabitants of the town had been killed.
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- "Bucha Massacre" | 2022-04-04 | 57 Upvotes 61 Comments
๐ DeCSS Haiku
DeCSS haiku is a 465-stanza haiku poem written in 2001 by American hacker Seth Schoen as part of the protest action regarding the prosecution of Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen for co-creating the DeCSS software. The poem, written in the spirit of civil disobedience against the DVD Copy Control Association, argues that "code is speech."
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- "DeCSS Haiku" | 2020-06-18 | 85 Upvotes 8 Comments
๐ Unethical human experimentation in the United States
Unethical human experimentation in the United States describes numerous experiments performed on human test subjects in the United States that have been considered unethical, and were often performed illegally, without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests have occurred throughout American history, but particularly in the 20th century. The experiments include: the exposure of humans to many chemical and biological weapons (including infection with deadly or debilitating diseases), human radiation experiments, injection of toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children, the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners.
Funding for many of the experiments was provided by the United States government, especially the United States military, the Central Intelligence Agency, or private corporations involved with military activities. The human research programs were usually highly secretive, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.
The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975, and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.
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- "Unethical human experimentation in the United States" | 2016-09-29 | 24 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Unethical human experimentation in the United States" | 2013-10-08 | 36 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Unethical human experimentation in the United States" | 2013-02-19 | 5 Upvotes 14 Comments
๐ Fruit machine (homosexuality test)
"Fruit machine" is a term for a device developed in Canada by Frank Robert Wake that was supposed to be able to identify gay men (derogatorily referred to as "fruits"). The subjects were made to view pornography; the device then measured the diameter of the pupils of the eyes (pupillary response test), perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response.
The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military. A substantial number of workers did lose their jobs. Although funding for the "fruit machine" project was cut off in the late 1960s, the investigations continued, and the RCMP collected files on over 9,000 "suspected" gay people.
The chair employed resembled that used by dentists. It had a pulley with a camera going towards the pupils, with a black box located in front of it that displayed pictures. The pictures ranged from the mundane to sexually explicit photos of men and women. It had previously been determined that the pupils would dilate in relation to the amount of interest in the picture per the technique termed 'the pupillary response test'.
People were first led to believe that the machine's purpose was to rate stress. After knowledge of its real purpose became widespread, few people volunteered for it.
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- "Fruit machine (homosexuality test)" | 2019-06-27 | 40 Upvotes 35 Comments
๐ Holodomor
The Holodomor (Ukrainian: ะะพะปะพะดะพะผะพฬั; ะะพะปะพะดะพะผะพฬั ะฒ ะฃะบัะฐัฬะฝั; derived from ะผะพัะธัะธ ะณะพะปะพะดะพะผ, "to kill by starvation") was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. It is also known as the Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine or the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932โ33. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932โ33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. During the Holodomor, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.
Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. According to higher estimates, up to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. A U.N. joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7โ10 million perished. Research has since narrowed the estimates to between 3.3 and 7.5 million. According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kiev in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficits.
The term Holodomor emphasises the famine's man-made and intentional aspects, such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs, and restriction of population movement. Whether the Holodomor was genocide is still the subject of academic debate, as are the causes of the famine and intentionality of the deaths. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. The loss of life has been compared to that of the Holocaust. However, some historians dispute its characterization as a genocide.
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- "Holodomor" | 2022-11-26 | 50 Upvotes 13 Comments