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Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

theguardian.com

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Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#101

Post by lliamander »

gnaritas wrote: post #74
lliamander wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If rights a merely a social contract, then what is absurd about trying to negotiate the terms of that contract? The parent's definition of rights may not be what people often mean; that doesn't mean their definition isn't useful.

> then what is absurd about trying to negotiate the terms of that contract? Nothing, that's rather the point I'm making, rights are not inherent, they are social agreements and are thus always up for renegotiation. You are agreeing with me. That's not what the OP is doing, the OP is trying to claim something isn't a right because it doesn't fit his definition of the word, he's pulling a no true Scottsman on a thing s…

I mean no disrespect, but I don't agree with you. My claim is that the OP, by haggling about definitions, is trying to negotiate the meaning of the word.

edit: and by that, I mean that it doesn't make sense to call the OP's argument absurd.

I don't believe that the OP is pulling a No True Scottsman. A No True Scottsman is really all about shifting your definition of a category in unprincipled ways in response to counter-examples. The OP is simply saying that many things other people call rights should not be.

I do think it's a fallacy to claim that, given the fluidity of language, there is therefore no meaningful concept that we might be trying to point to.

I do think there is a meaningful concept that the OP is trying to bring clarity on by restricting the meaning and usage of the word rights. I think the way the word "rights" is used today unhelpfully equivocates between different concepts and thus impoverishes our ability to think clearly about legal and policy issues.

Language may something that is negotiated, a social construct, but it is not arbitrary.

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#102

Post by clarkmoody »

bischofs wrote: post #2

I don't think internet access is a human right, a simple test is if the internet goes down are my rights being violated? Can you really put this in the same category as the right to pursue happiness or health? or the right to defend yourself? Classifying everything as a right is super fun and feels important but it actually takes away from the actual human rights. Health care is another example - do you have the righ…

I completely agree.

Most people confuse positive rights and negative rights.

The inherent / natural / fundamental rights are the negative rights: life, liberty, and property. These are the rights that nobody else may take away from you unilaterally, hence "negative." These may be further distilled into the basic right of self-ownership over your body. It requires an appreciation of human dignity to acknowledge these rights.

The positive rights are more like privileges: things that somebody else must provide for you. These are not really rights at all, since it makes someone else your slave in the extreme case, hence violating their prior right to liberty. These "rights" should be called "privileges" instead, and we'll stop being confused about it.

Let's go to the extreme: the desert island. If I'm sick, and you're a doctor, and I have a right to healthcare, then what? If I truly have that right, and you are the only one who may provide it, then I can force you to treat my sickness, and you become my slave. The same goes for clean water, food, shelter, education, police protection, internet access, flying cars, etc.

Yes, there are plenty of things that are really nice to have and make living in a modern society a lot better. But these are not rights. Too often we abridge the fundamental rights in order to provide the privileges of citizenship bestowed upon the masses by redistributive governments.

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#103

Post by jwilk »

RivieraKid wrote: post #92
gnaritas wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just being pedantic about what the word right should mean; it's silly. Rights are whatever society agrees them to be, that's it. It's an ever changing mutable list of what people agree to respect, nothing more and nothing less.

One of the few comments that gets it, gets downvoted... go figure.

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#104

Post by AmIFirstToThink »

a_diplomat wrote: post #81
AmIFirstToThink wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3) Yes https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/un-adopts-religious-int... How should I trust your words now?

Freedom of speech is, as you can read in the link I provided, one of several rights, not the only right.

How do you reconcile Freedom of Speech allowed and “defamation of religion” not being allowed?

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#105

Post by nemo44x »

mindslight wrote: post #87
nemo44x wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do. You are given a permit and if it's judged to be out of hand and a threat to the public then they can and do force the crowd to disperse. This happens all the time.

So, one manner in which rights are violated is justification for another? The idea of that a "permit" could be possibly required to exercise one's "rights" is a nonsensical Orwellian sleight of hand - if something is a right , then one does not need permission! Your comments seem to be advocating for democratic totalitarianism, which is directly opposed the concept of individual rights.

You sound like an anarchist.

If you want to organize a group of people to use a public facility you need to request a permit. This is so that proper actions can be taken to make the event safe and to ensure that others have not planned access to that resource for that day.

The state can not refuse to give a permit because of the content of the protest or organization - that would be a rights violation. However, if the gathering becomes unruly and dangerous to the public then of course it can be broken up. You are now violating the rights of others and that's where your rights end.

Society and civilization does not survive in chaos.

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#106

Post by AmIFirstToThink »

msla wrote: post #43
traverseda wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presumed this wouldn't apply, but article 19 does look interesting. """ Article 19 Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. """ There may actually be a case for the US needing to change their laws to extend free-speech protections…

The Constitution already applies to what happens on the Internet. That Article would be more relevant to countries with hate speech laws or blasphemy laws.

What about private corporation that provide platforms for modern day public discourse enforcing their own blasphemy laws?

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#107

Post by lr4444lr »

nemo44x wrote: post #91
lr4444lr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but, I would never want you in any position of power over me.

No offense taken but I'm not sure why my statement provoked a response like yours. I stated that the people delegate these types of decision to elected officials. Their job is to protect the people. If, in some instance, they judged that a protest was in danger of harming the people and cutting cellular spectrum to that protest was the most effective method which could immediately relieve that danger, they could and…

Because in practice it often doesn't work out that way. Republics and representative government, especially in their modern conception from the 18th century, were not simply a different way of appointing kings and their subsidiary advisors with broadly defined powers of "protection" over people under vassalage at their discretionary interpretation. Elections in most modern states don't confer that kind of supreme rule. It is the primacy of law, which constrains leaders from encroaching like that, and applied objectively to citizens in regards to their own rights and responsibilities that drives most countries you and I would probably say we'd like to live in. What you're describing isn't too tangibly different from the Spartan ephors.

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#108

Post by msla »

AmIFirstToThink wrote: post #106
msla wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Constitution already applies to what happens on the Internet. That Article would be more relevant to countries with hate speech laws or blasphemy laws.

What about private corporation that provide platforms for modern day public discourse enforcing their own blasphemy laws?

What about them? The US Constitution only binds on the Federal government and, through the process of incorporation, state (and, therefore, county and local) governments. Private entities can do what they want.

In a more normative sense (that is, describing what should be as opposed to simply what is), private entities should be able to enforce their own rules, there shouldn't be any limits to how many private entities there are, and it should be simple to move from one private entity to another.

In fact, I'd support data portability laws, simply based on the concept that data is an objectively valuable property and should be owned by the people it was generated from.

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#109

Post by ThrustVectoring »

nemo44x wrote: post #91
lr4444lr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but, I would never want you in any position of power over me.

No offense taken but I'm not sure why my statement provoked a response like yours. I stated that the people delegate these types of decision to elected officials. Their job is to protect the people. If, in some instance, they judged that a protest was in danger of harming the people and cutting cellular spectrum to that protest was the most effective method which could immediately relieve that danger, they could and…

"Their job is to protect the people" is a recent and paternalistic innovation. Better, IMO, is to write and uphold a set of laws that provide the best framework for human flourishing. This means deliberately not protecting people from certain risks, where the costs in terms of other values outweighs the benefits of risk reduction.

Like, the US would be safer if we confiscated every gun and made gun ownership illegal. It'd be a worse country to live in, though, according to our own values. It's not worth the trade - we care about more than simple safety.

Re: Internet access is now a basic human right (2016)

#110

Post by ithilglin909 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #96
ithilglin909 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's equivocation. Not the same meaning of the word "press".

It actually is; freedom of the press is the exact same thing as freedom of speech applied to printed matter (it is called out distinctly because historical unwelcome written material, especially when mass distributed as the printing press enabled, was frequently considered more problematic by government and so printing was often tightly regulated even where speech, per se, was less so.) It is not, despite a fairly po…

I agree that the idea of the "freedom the of the press" is derived from the right to free speech. But "press" as in a printing press is a machine, while "press" as in "freedom of the press" refers to people who work for news media or news media collectively. Those are not the same thing, regardless of what wu-ikkyu thinks.
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