“The reverence that people display toward human rights — it almost makes one want to defend horrible, terrible positions. It is so much a part of the softheaded thinking that marks the shabby period we were talking about. It’s pure abstraction. Human rights, after all, what does that mean? It’s pure abstraction, it’s empty. It’s exactly what we were talking about before about desire, or at least what I was trying to get across about desire. Desire is not putting something up on a pedestal and saying, hey, I desire this. We don’t desire liberty and so forth, for example; that doesn’t mean anything. We find ourselves in situations.”
http://makeworlds.net/node/97