Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Derrick M. Nault
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
The Us ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
Democratic Constitution ◽  
White Minority

Shortly before the end of apartheid, Nelson Mandela, on 26 June, 1990, delivered an address before the US Congress in Washington, DC in which he discussed the aspirations of black South Africans. Seeking American support in ending white minority rule, he spoke of his movement’s struggle to ‘ensure that the rights of every individual’, regardless of ‘race, colour, creed or sex’, were protected under a new democratic constitution and bill of rights. ‘To deny people their human rights’, he asserted, ‘is to challenge their very humanity.’...

John Philip Sousa’s Historic Resistance to Technology in Music Learning

2021 ◽  
pp. 153660062110339
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Thibeault
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Music Learning ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
The Us

In this article, I explore John Philip Sousa’s historic resistance to music technology and his belief that sound recordings would negatively impact music education and musical amateurism. I review Sousa’s primary arguments from two 1906 essays and his testimony to the US Congress from the same year, based on the fundamental premise that machines themselves sing or perform, severing the connection between live listener and performer and thus rendering recordings a poor substitute for real music. Sousa coined the phrase “canned music,” and I track engagement with this phrase among the hundreds of newspapers and magazines focused on Sousa’s resistance. To better understand the construction of Sousa’s beliefs, I then review how his rich musical upbringing around the US Marine Band and the theaters of Washington DC lead to his conception of music as a dramatic ritual. And I examine the curious coda of Sousa’s life, during which he recanted his beliefs and conducted his band for radio, finding that in fact these experiences reinforced Sousa’s worries. The discussion considers how Sousa’s ideas can help us better to examine the contemporary shift to digital music by combining Sousa’s ideas with those of Sherry Turkle.

scholarly journals The mission thing

1994 ◽  
Vol 23 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 38-42
Author(s):  
Ted Turner
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
The Us ◽  
Laissez Faire

While the US congress was debating whether to continue China's Most Favoured Nation status, and Clinton was going back on his election promises, CNN's boss in Hong Kong was appealing for a laissez-faire approach to human rights

Privacy

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita L. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Public Disclosure ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
State Statutes ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The idea of privacy has played a role in constitutional thought, formulations of human rights, and both common and civil law. The US Supreme Court has recognized that five of the original Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment protect privacy interests. In US tort law, interests against intrusion upon seclusion, public disclosure of private fact, publications placing one in a false light, and misappropriation of a person's name, likeness, or identity are potentially protected through civil actions styled ‘invasions of privacy’. Federal and state statutes protect interests in the privacy of records relating to, inter alia, health, finances, consumer transactions, Internet use, and taxes.

scholarly journals Humanism in the Autobiographies of Edward Said and Nelson Mandela: Memory as Action

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-99
Author(s):  
Jihan Zakarriya
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
The Political ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Bear Witness

This paper focuses on the concept of memory as a form of humanist activism in the autobiographies of Nelson Mandela and Edward Said, namely The Long Walk to Freedom (1994) and After the Last Sky (1999), respectively. I have chosen Mandela and Said because they dedicated their lives and efforts to the service of the cause of freedom in South Africa and Palestine. Their engagement with the political causes of their countries turns into a concern with worldwide struggles for human rights and racial equality. While Mandela emerged as a vital force against apartheid in South Africa, Said was a well-known and influential Palestinian critic and intellectual whose writings tackle the Palestinian struggle for justice within the worldwide experience of imperialism and its binary oppositions of white/black, male/female, superior /inferior. I argue that their autobiographies bear witness to the plight of Black South Africans and Palestinians as both a shared memory resistant to erasure and as a call for justice. Mandela and Said use their personal memories and life stories to construct a public reading of the meanings of the events that shaped them. Both are concerned with the ways their people have been represented by others, and how they struggle to represent themselves.

scholarly journals A policy mapping analysis of the U.S. Congressional approach to medical aid-in-dying

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 905-906
Author(s):  
Nancy Kusmaul ◽  
Ji Hyang Cheon ◽  
Allison Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Health Care Services ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Legal Assistance ◽  
Medical Aid ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
Care Services ◽  
The Us ◽  
Aid In Dying ◽  
Policy Mapping

Abstract Oregon was the first state to legalize medical aid-in-dying (MAID), in 1994. Since then eight states and Washington, DC have legalized MAID through legislation. Despite literature exploring the legal and ethical aspects of MAID, very little research examines MAID policy at the federal level. This study aimed to 1) examine the objectives of MAID legislation introduced to the US Congress, and 2) investigate whether these bills increase or decrease access to MAID. This study used the congress.gov website to search for bills related to MAID introduced by the US Congress between 1994 and 2020. From the 98 bills identified, we excluded bills that were not directly related to MAID or were introduced in subsequent congresses. In total, 23 bills were retained and analyzed. The greatest number of bills aimed to restrict funds for MAID, followed by bills that sought to regulate the drugs used for MAID. Other bills prohibited the development of policies supporting MAID, regulated penalties for practitioners related to the drugs used for MAID, and restricted legal assistance for accessing MAID. These bills intended to block or limit patient access to MAID by restricting drugs, funds, health care services, legal assistance, policy, and research. These findings suggest that the federal approach is incongruous with the growing numbers of states that have legalized MAID. Federal policymakers must develop policies to 1) prevent discrimination against vulnerable groups, 2) support funds to study MAID, and 3) build a system to allows eligible individuals to access MAID equally.

Digging Up a Painful Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-84
Author(s):  
Omar G. Encarnación
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Military Personnel ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Federal Employees ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
Briefing Paper ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government

This chapter talks about the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, an organization that takes its name from the pioneering gay rights organization of the pre-Stonewall era. It looks at Charles Francis, the president of the Mattachine Society and a leading figure among American gay rights activists, who was a former Republican public relations consultant from Texas with close personal ties to the Bush family. It also discusses Francis’s activism aimed at securing an acknowledgment and apology from the US Congress for discriminatory actions taken by the federal government against LGBT Americans. This chapter analyses the Mattachine Society’s briefing paper “America’s Promise of Reconciliation and Redemption: The Need for an Official Acknowledgment and Apology for the Historic Government Assault on LGBT Federal Employees and Military Personnel,” and it emphasizes the mission of the new Mattachine Society on adjusting the legal struggle to secure an apology from the US government.

scholarly journals Neither Adopted nor Borrowed: A Critique of the Conception of the South African Bill of Rights

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Felix Dube
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
The South ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The People ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
International Human

The failure of the post-apartheid government to deliver on some of the promises of the South African Bill of Rights, coupled with the appropriation of the Bill of Rights by the international human rights movement, create the impression that the Bill of Rights is a neo-liberal instrument which is irrelevant to the needs of South Africans and the realities of their circumstances. If the people of South Africa are convinced that the Bill of Rights embraces a Western agenda more than it expresses their collective aspirations, it will lose its legitimacy. While acknowledging that the conception of the Bill of Rights is contested between the international human rights movement and some South Africans, this article shows that the Bill of Rights was neither adopted nor borrowed from the international human rights movement. South Africans did not assimilate the International Bill of Rights but conceived their own Bill of Rights in the early decades of the 20th Century. The conception of the South African Bill of Rights was a response to colonialism and apartheid and was not a consequence of tutelage by the international human rights movement.

Australian Legal Exceptionalism and the Bill of Rights

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Binoy Kampmark ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Australian Context ◽  
The Us

This paper provides a systematic legal and cultural overview of the reasons behind the opposition to an entrenched Bill or Charter of Rights within a special liberal democratic setting. Specific reference is made to Australia given that the country remains the last liberal democracy to resist adopting such a measure of protection for human rights. The paper further argues that Australian opposition to such a bill has assumed the category of exceptionalist rhetoric couched in a very specific socio-legal argot. A bill of rights is not needed, goes this assumption, because institutions are either reasonably functioning or self-correcting of any defects. Any legal changes made, goes such line of reasoning, should be reflected in the supreme will of Parliament, a body both sovereign and sagacious. This paper challenges such readings, suggesting that the argument against any bill of rights in the Australian context involves a core misunderstanding about what such an instrument actually does. It also identifies a fundamental parochialism, notably against the US legal tradition and instances when grave human rights abuses have been sanctioned by Parliament.

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