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Without any hint of irony or humour, The Guardian worries that Western influence within the United Nations is waning — worrisome because it wrecks “efforts to entrench human rights, liberties and multilateralism”.

Drop in influence at UN wrecks western attempts to push human rights agenda

The west’s efforts to use the United Nations to promote its values and shape the global agenda are failing, according to a detailed study published yesterday.

A sea change in the balance of power in favour of China, India, Russia and other emerging states is wrecking European and US efforts to entrench human rights, liberties and multilateralism.

This perhaps belongs in the same category of new-found Republican concerns regarding sexism and the Bush administration’s alarm at Russian unilateralism (vis-à-vis Georgia). Dare we remind them that the United Nations came about as a response to the two disastrous wars that these nations inflicted upon the rest of the unenlightened world? Or would that explicit notice have as little effect as the implicit caution offered by a history of colonialism, political mischief and unilateral intrusion (Iran, Iraq, Latin America, Afghanistan, Africa, India, Pakistan,…)?

A recent article in the New York Times presents an altogether different picture than the one The Guardian offers, when it comes to US interest or respect for other values and thought. The article ends with a quote from Northwestern law professor Steven Calabresi:

In “ ‘A Shining City on a Hill’: American Exceptionalism and the Supreme Court’s Practice of Relying on Foreign Law,” a 2006 article in the Boston University Law Review, Professor Calabresi concluded that the Supreme Court should be wary of citing foreign law in most constitutional cases precisely because the United States is exceptional.

“Like it or not,” he wrote, “Americans really are a special people with a special ideology that sets us apart from all the other peoples.”

Discussing the use of international opinion in judicial analysis, the NYT articles draws a telling contrast:

Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

[...] American constitutional law has been cited and discussed in countless decisions of courts in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere.

But many judges and legal scholars in this country say that consideration of foreign legal precedents in American judicial decisions is illegitimate, and that there can be no transnational dialogue about the meaning of the United States Constitution.

[...]

The Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning, said John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern, and recent rulings, whether foreign or domestic, cannot aid in that enterprise. Moreover, Professor McGinnis said, decisions applying foreign law to foreign circumstances are not instructive here.

“It may be good in their nation,” he said. “There is no reason to believe necessarily that it’s good in our nation.”

[...]

In any event, said Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, many Americans are deeply suspicious of foreign law.

“We are used to encouraging other countries to adopt American constitutional norms,” he wrote in an essay last month, “but we have never accepted the idea that we should adopt theirs.”

“It’s American exceptionalism,” Professor Posner added in an interview. “The view going back 200 years is that we’ve figured it out and people should follow our lead.”

[emphasis mine]

In contrast, the New York Times describes the attitude elsewhere (including in India, a country that The Guardian laments is gaining influence in the UN, and whose UN soldiers are prominently pictured at the top of The Guardian’s piece):

The openness of some legal systems to foreign law is reflected in their constitutions. The South African Constitution, for instance, says that courts interpreting its bill of rights “must consider international law” and “may consider foreign law.” The constitutions of India and Spain have similar provisions.

and explains why a shift away from US standards and opinion is occurring:

Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia, wrote in a 2000 essay that the Canadian Supreme Court had been particularly influential because “Canada, unlike the United States, is seen as reflecting an emerging international consensus rather than existing as an outlier.”

Hmm! I wonder why…

BBC NEWS | Obama win preferred in world poll

The margin of those in favour of Mr Obama winning November’s US election ranged from 9% in India to 82% in Kenya, which is the birthplace of the Illinois senator’s father.

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House Chairman Failed to Report $75,000 in Income - NYTimes.com

Representative Charles B. Rangel has earned more than $75,000 in rental income from a villa he has owned in the Dominican Republic since 1988, but never reported it on his federal or state tax returns, according to a lawyer for the congressman and documents from the resort.

A while I ago I linked to Stanley Fish’s excellent criticism (Our Faith In Letting It All Hang Out) of those propagating the Mohammed cartoons under free speech justifications. Julian Baggini visits the issue in The Guardian via the Christ penis sculpture:

Julian Baggini: Christ reveals limits of free speech | guardian.co.uk

[...]

Doughty defenders of free speech will have no truck with such quibbling. They insist on a right to offend, wheeling out John Stuart Mill’s venerable “harm principle” to clinch the case: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” And, no, “mere offence” does not constitute harm.

There are two problems with this simple view. Saying that we have a right to offend skips over the question of whether we are right to offend. I have a right to tell random strangers that I think they’re ugly, or that they have terrible taste in clothes, but it would be wrong of me to exercise that right, and not just because of the pots and kettles principle.

But isn’t mockery good, and any belief system incapable of putting up with it deficient in some way? That’s true, but you can’t just ignore the background against which lampooning takes place. Christians, for example, are not oppressed, despite what some wannabe martyrs would have us believe. British Muslims, in contrast, are a somewhat beleaguered minority. We should think twice before mocking them because, while comedy speaking truth to power is funny, the powerful laughing at the weak is not. The difference is only subtle to those too dunderheaded to spot the obvious. Witness Alan Partridge asking a Jewish comedian who uses Jewish humour to “tell us a joke about Jews”.

That does not mean that we should never do anything that causes Muslims offence, or that shows Islam in a bad light, of course; only that we should not do so lightly. The choice is not between an all-out offence offensive and craven silence.

The other reason absolutist claims for speech acts are misguided is that we don’t just utter words, we do things with them, as the Oxford philosopher JL Austin put it. When words belittle or mock, they can reinforce prejudice and hierarchies that have very real effects on people’s lives. Mockery of those already on the margins can shore up the very barriers that limit their life chances.

Free speech is indeed precious, but that doesn’t mean that we have to defend without qualification every moron who abuses it.

[...]

House politics strikes ones of its savviest players:

House Tables Resolution to Censure Rangel - New York Times

The House of Representatives decided on Thursday afternoon to table, by a vote of 254 to 138, a Republican resolution to censure Representative Charles B. Rangel, the powerful New York Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The resolution said Mr. Rangel “dishonored himself and brought discredit to the House,” citing a report in The New York Times on July 11 that Mr. Rangel occupied four rent-stabilized apartments in a Harlem building, including one that he used as a campaign office.

Rangel, to refresh your memory, is the same toad who thundered against Hugo Chavez (whose generosity fuels his constituents, unlike the lack of compassion of the leader he defends) in favour of the Imperial Presidency:

“You don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district and criticize my president,” Mr. Rangel, a Democrat, told stunned reporters on Capitol Hill.

Pinker while pimping his book in Seed Magazine throws in this insight:

Seed: Steven Pinker on Swearing and Violence

Contrary to the popular belief that we are living in horrifically violent times, rates of homicide in the West have plummeted ten- to a hundredfold over the centuries. The sociologist Norbert Elias noted that this pacification process, correlated with other changes in everyday manners. Starting in the Late Middle Ages, people stopped blowing their noses onto the dining room table, urinating onto curtains, defecating in public, and giving their eight-year-olds advice about prostitution. Taboos on speaking about excretion and sexuality were part of this development. Ellis lumps these trends into a “civilizing process,” in which the formation of states and complex social networks forced people to exercise their superego (today we would say their prefrontal cortex) to inhibit their first impulses.

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From The Guardian:

Vivisection: Study finds 115 million animals used in tests worldwide

About 115 million animals were used in scientific research globally in 2005, according to an estimate based on official national figures and extrapolations from the number of scientific papers that were published involving animals.

The vast majority of the animals used were rodents (83.5%) with primates, cats and dogs making up 0.15%, 0.06% and 0.24% of the total respectively.

In case primates are the only thing that give you the warm fuzzies of empathy, that’s 172,500 chimps and friends a year. Or you like dogs? Well that’s about 276,000 dogs. But that’s not too much for a bottle of Chanel, is it (however the % of testing is for cosmetics)?

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Doing their best to propagate the loutish Bela Karolyi’s rants about the age of female Chinese gymnasts, the NYT throws out this excellent bit of analysis:

Chinese Grab Gold in Gymnastics; U.S. Is Second - NYT

The Chinese gymnasts lack curves, have an average height of 4 feet 9 inches and weigh an average of 77 pounds. [...] The women on the United States team, generally more muscular and shapely than the Chinese, are an average of 3 ½ inches taller and 30 pounds heavier.

I am guessing it is something as benign as misplaced nationalism that prompts the perverts at the NYT to wonder about the curves and shapeliness of young teenage girls. Fortunately, the lack of curves or shapeliness on the part of US, Chinese or other young female athletes will fail to make an impact on other sports fans … I hope!

Fortunately, the NYT redeems itself with this Op-Ed:

The Throwback - Creep Show - NYT

But most of all I will watch the enormously popular women’s gymnastics competition. The performances are incredible and fearless, but it isn’t the athleticism that draws me in. In fact I can’t think of any competition in the Olympics, or all of SportsWorld, more creepy and disturbing: these largely shapeless girls in their leotards and flaxen-waxen hair and bouncy-wouncy ponytails. “They look like girls from the neck up,” I was told by Joan Ryan, whose 1995 book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” blew a sky-high lid off the sadomasochistic training regimens that young female gymnasts were being subjected to. She continued: “From the neck down they look like prepubescent boys.”

During the Olympics, when a female gymnast finishes an event and hugs her coach, often a man three times her age, I cringe at what I believe is the unsavory stench of the sport in general — children under the wing of men who based on lengthy documentation have proven to be abusive, relentless, intolerant, humiliating and, in some instances, accused of sexual misconduct. “These girls will do anything for these guys,” Ms. Ryan told me. “They have such control over them.”

Which also reminds us that if indeed we are looking for soft-porn masquerading as a sport, there is the ever popular beach volleyball (what next, strip volleyball?):

I will watch women’s beach volleyball, not because it’s a sport, but because skimpily-clad leggy women rolling in sand does put me in a state of excitement right up there with mud wrestling (no doubt the next sanctioned Olympic sport given NBC’s need for strong television ratings and the correct calculus that soft-core porn under the guise of sport does have its benefits).

And goes on to document what this race to the extreme entails:

Former United States Olympian Dominique Moceanu, who at the age of 14 was part of the 1996 team that won the overall Olympic gold, called for the ouster of Marta Karolyi, the coordinator of the women’s Olympic team, in a recent appearance on the HBO show “Real Sports.”

Moceanu told me she feels the training methods of Marta Karyoli and her legendary husband, Bela, are obsolete, outdated and center on intimidation. As a result, injuries are often ignored; Moceanu suffered a lower-leg stress fracture right before the Olympics in 1996 and says Marta Karolyi initially scoffed even though she collapsed twice one day while trying to train. But seeing as Marta Karolyi has helped produce 13 gold medals for the United States at world championships since 2001, don’t count on any changes, in particular if the women’s team finds itself drenched in gold in Beijing.

“Why is winning the only thing that matters?” asks Sey. “There must be some national crisis of self-esteem for us to push so hard for these medals. Otherwise why would you need it?”

From the ATP web site, a couple of images.

I guess the hope is to turn the above, into the below: