Yet, if we question this latter understanding and define fate as a culmination of a process encapsulating all of our historical decisions, the conversation might actually turn reasonably productive.

Yet, they are grounded in the conditions that made the dehumanization possible in the first place. As result, these moralizing acts, winks of good will, are even emptier than if they weren't there at all. They are just a cautious move aimed at shutting his critics before their voices were raised.

The NIH’s mission is to "to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability."
It can't achieve that mission if the review process becomes hostage to political whims.

Isn't that just another way to say "we want to be productive as well," thus, you know, holding to the very ethos of the system we should be fighting; a system which turns life with all it's marvelous disharmonies into a competition of production?

Isn't that just another way to say "we want to be productive as well," thus, you know, holding to the very ethos of the system we should be fighting; a system which turns life with all it's marvelous disharmonies into a competition of production?

I think it's time for the critical take on human rights, law, and jurisprudence more generally (something that Pashukanis initiated so thoroughly) to come forward.

One can feel the internal contradictions of the notion of rights here. When he asks, "Who has the right to have rights?" and then asks us to unite to defend our rights, it already points to the direction that they are anything but given and, therefore, something that can be taken ad hoc.

The answer is obvious—everyone and no one at the same time. You might have them today, yet “your rights” might not be there tomorrow. They are instruments of power and therefore are subjected to its caprices.