How is open access to information not a fundamental human right? Do you believe in a society where people can't find out about things? If you don't, then you believe in the open access of information.
> How is open access to information not a fundamental human right? Do you believe in a society where people can't find out about things?
Non sequitur. I believe in many things that make a society good and better which do not reach the standard of a human right.
This is my personal litmus test: the deprivation of a human right should create a legitimate claim to be violent. If your human rights are being denied, you have the right to take up arms. (My theory being the state, at that point, has lost the legitimacy of its monopoly on violence.)
Blood has been spilled over slavery. Starvation. Torture and free speech. Blood is not owed because someone didn’t pay their Comcast bill.
Agreed - and this is exactly why the concept of "positive" and "negative" rights exists. If no one is providing you with free access to information, free of charge, that is not an acceptable thing to get violent over. But as has already been misunderstood in this thread, the reverse of that is the positive right: If someone was *preventing* you from accessing information, that would be an acceptable time to get violent.
I would argue governmental domestic disinfo programs violate said right (i.e. Russia or China). They change the heuristics for what is believable by many citizens and thereby effectively make much external information useless. This is a form of control by the government, and in extreme forms is grounds for protests or even anti-government riots.
How is "the internet is a human right" related to "the us has disinformation campaign". If blackout removed your internet access for a week, is that a violation of your human rights?
I think your ire stems from thinking I'm pointing the finger at the U.S.
If you re-read my comments you'll see that I don't mention it anywhere.
Blackout is unintentional. Unless it is the result of infrastructure mismanagement stemming from politicians' ineptitude. In any case, it is not an acute malicious action, and quite the strawman argument.
I don't think you're taking my statement in good faith and so I won't expand on it - since you don't seem interested in discourse by offering your thoughts instead of flatly questioning mine.
It the freedom of press/speech thing? First amendment of the Bill of Rights?
The internet is simply the means of the day.
Look at it this way, if the government stopped all paper from being delivered to newspapers, would that have been indirect, but nonetheless a very effective means of restricting the press?
TV was always creepily restricted, although restricted bandwidth did need regulation.
If violence is your standard, I don't want to live in your utopia. Like, what if I just pollute the hell out of your property from afar, and you get cancer five years later. Is that... VIOLENT?
How IS it a fundamental human right? Access to information is conferred through a variety of human made constructs (including laws, which can enable or disable access) and I disagree that universal access to information is generally understood to be a natural right, and by proxy fundamental human right. Believing that something should be bestowed to people, does not make it a fundamental human right.
You can believe people should be able to find out about things.
But not be entitled to it. People don't need to be entitled to everything. There are very few true fundamental human rights in this world. All of them are raw primal needs. Food. Water. Air. Not being killed or tortured. What else really?
> How is open access to information not a fundamental human right?
Someone has to provide that for you. If someone has to provide it for you, who is going to be forced to do so in the absence of such? What right do you have to force them into labor if they choose not to provide it? How does your fundamental right exist then - you'd have to enslave someone/s to enable it.
And thus, it's not a fundamental right. It has to be provisioned to you by someone's efforts, often at significant effort and cost overall.
Material goods that have to be produced by someone's labor inherently can't be fundamental rights (what right do you have to their labor?), even if some silly societies wish to label them under that for propaganda purposes.
Open access to information will in practice be always limited by the underlying economy.
It is much more expensive to provide wideband connections to isolated islands in the middle of the ocean than to a condo in the middle of Tokyo.
In a similar way, monolingual speakers of tiny languages will necessarily be limited to a subset of the world's knowledge that was translated into their language. And it is no one else's fault.
I don't think people should have to live without access to peanuts either, but that doesn't mean I consider lack of them a human rights violation and possible casus belli. Peanut air drops for citizens under peanut-hating governments?
Human Fundamental Rights are just nice things that most of us have agreed upon sounds nice and is probably a good thing. This generally is maintained by the UN
