Okay, you don’t respect the idea of international agreements, fine. You don’t think that governments value international respect, okay. That said, your disbelief in this doesn’t matter. You are free to think that the universe works however you want.
Note also, that the reason Republicans didn’t vote for this isn’t because it’s meaningless. They didn’t vote for it, because the Republicans are afraid of the conspiracy theory idiots that form the base of the party.
The Republicans are broken and need to fix their party. Putting complete retards in charge is a bad thing.
Part of this is in the eye of the beholder, but I’d say the Convention on Recovery of Child Support probably doesn’t break any new legal ground, as far as I can tell. It was approved in the Senate in September 2010, without a roll call vote.
Oh, here’s a great one: the International Convention Against Doping in Sport. Approved by the Senate in July 2008, after being submitted for ratification in February. It’s not common to see treaties approved in just a few months’ time, that one just blazed through the system.
It’s great how you don’t have any understanding of what you’re talking about and then complain that it’s really technically complex, when someone who has taken a single class in international law could explain this particular issue to you in just a couple of sentences. Of course, you’d feel compelled to argue with them on such straightforward matters, and put forth your own misunderstandings as fact, and complain again that nobody could possibly know what legal processes are taking place.
As a handicapped, wheelchair user, my love of the ADA is boundless. I used to love traveling. I can no longer do internationally because most other countries are not accessible.
First, even if the treaty is “aimed at” certain goals no, there’s no guarantee that it won’t eventually have effects very different from the current aims. Any complex set of rules churned out by a massive bureaucracy tends to stick around and eventually apply to situations very different from the ones it was intended to address.
Second, what reason is there to believe that the clowns at the United Nations actually know what’s best for every single in the country on the planet? Who’s to say that the standards laid out in this treaty actually are best for every country? Particularly in poor countries there are limited resources. Requiring such countries countries to spend money on things such as interpreters for the deaf and wheelchair ramps may not be a very good use of scarce resources.
Look, you got pulled in by conspiracy hysteria that homeschooling proponents were gripped with because you generally sympathize with them. I understand, but by now you should understand you’re wrong.
I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree then.
I do wonder - is there any UN treaty on human rights that you would support? Because your complaints seem like they could pretty easily be applied to any treaty on human rights whatsoever.
That would require things like empathy and compassion. Signs of weakness. :rolleyes:
To their way of thinking, it’s BMalion’s fault for not saving enough during his working years to hire his own support crew.
Here’s the votes. Talk about an embarassment to the United States. I’m not even deriving any schadenfreude from seeing some of the Republican all stars (“these are supposed to be the good ones”) who voted against it. McConnell, Rubio, Portman.
I haven’t mentioned homeschooling in this thread, and very little on this board in general, nor has anyone else mentioned homeschooling in this thread. When you say that I’m motivated by anything related to homeschooling, you’re saying something that you have no basis for. It’s purely a product of your imagination.
No kidding. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution give a general understanding of rights as freedoms that individuals enjoy, which the government can’t remove. The UN occasionally devote a few paragraphs to those sorts of rights, but most of the bureaucratic pablum is this treaty and others is devoted to “rights” that are actually expansions of government power and reductions of individual freedom. Those sorts of “rights” I generally oppose. I know that the idea of individual freedom and limited government seems bizarre to many people on this board, but I don’t care.
It was an assumption. The frightened people who promulgated the conspiracy theory on the right… a theory that you appear to have some agreement with, were homeschoolers.
I assumed you were part of the community, since homeschoolers tend to be strongly religious. If you came across your version of the conspiracy theory by yourself, you have my apologies.
There are no reductions to American freedom in this treaty.
One thing that this will do is affect UN-administered areas, such as refugee camps. I work with people who work closely with refugee camps, and disability is a HUGE issue. Camps are often implemented without a second thought towards how the disabled will manage, and unfortunately often they end up in some really terrible situations.
And we aren’t talking about installing wheelchair ramps in the tent cities. It’s basic stuff like “put people who can’t walk a little closer to the food distribution point” and “have special education in the schools.”
I think the Chinese care less about the UN than Republicans do. So no, I don’t see any real benefit from China signing this. Besides, China has already signed and ratified it.
Several people have simply asserted that the U.S. ratifying this would impact the rest of the world, but I see no reason to believe that is true. The vast majority of countries have already signed, and let’s be honest, no one else really cares what the U.S. does or does not do.
A brief reading of the convention lays out some requirements that I do not believe the U.S. currently meets. Even if we do, we are now required to compile and submit a report showing our compliance with the convention.
Odd. I heard a snippet of an interview that Glen Beck had with Jim DeMint today (the knob-slobberring almost made me ill) and DeMint made a pointed argument about how Obama being silent on the shit going down in Syria is sending a message to the rest of the world that will cause said rest of the world to think less of America.
But I guess when it comes to UN resolutions, fuck what the rest of the world thinks of us, huh?
So we don’t need to sign it. We are doing all of that already, and the treaty achieves nothing.
Why doesn’t the UN go bother the countries that are treating their disabled citizens like shit, and try to get them to sign the treaty? If the US is supposed to set an example, then we are doing so already.
So when the UN goes to Egypt and tells them to make the Pyramids wheelchair accessible, Egypt won’t do it because we didn’t sign a paper saying we would do what we are doing already?
This is the moral equivalent of not declaring August National Artichoke Month. “Because it is a fucking waste of time when we have a shutdown looming” seems like a good reason to not waste time on it.
If the UN wants to feel good about itself, how about working on something that actually makes a difference, instead of writing meaningless papers and then acting butt hurt when the grown ups tell them to go away and come back when we aren’t so busy.
It’s an endorsement. Literally the only reason to *not *sign it is if you have a paranoid fear of the UN.
That’s it. Zero other reason. This is just hysteria, fomented by frightened, ignorant people who don’t know any better.
Don’t you think the US has a position of eminence in the world?