The Craziness of Modern Discourse About Human Rights

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Reuters reported yesterday that 78% of 27,000 people polled in 26 countries "believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right." I submit that this sentiment, popular as it may be, is utter balderdash.

It demeans the important subject of fundamental human rights when we shovel trivia into this important category. The US Declaration of Independence famously asserted: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." That's a nice, modest, defensible statement. People have a fundamental right to live, and the government ought not to deprive anyone of life apart from compelling mitigation. People have a fundamental right to liberty, and likewise the government ought not to deprive anyone of liberty without due and just cause. People have a fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness (a phrase not so easy to interpret as you might presume, but not entirely indecipherable either). Those are modest and timeless assertions, and ones that I believe to be true.

The fundamental human rights are those for which I would gladly give my life to secure them for my children. They are those that motivated our forefathers to risk everything in their protection on our behalf. I would not die to secure DSL to my posterity.

BARBER'S LAW OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS: If your great-grandparents could not have possibly had it, then it is not a fundamental human right.

• You do not have a fundamental human right to an MRI.
• You do not have a fundamental human right to air travel.
• You do not have a fundamental human right to cable TV.
• You do not have a fundamental human right to a five-day work week.
• You do not have a fundamental human right to retirement.
• You do not have a fundamental human right to own a house.
• You do not have a fundamental human right to Internet access.
• You do not have a fundamental human right to a car.

Yes, I want all of those things (except for retirement). None of them are bad things (except for cable TV and Internet access sometimes). But people better than you have lived their entire lives without any of those things. Jesus, as far as I know, lived His entire life without any of those things.

There are fundamental human rights. They are imperiled in many places in this world. We ought to be concerned on behalf of those whose fundamental human rights are being deprived. But sometimes it makes me sick to know that Christian believers in many parts of the world do not have basic religious liberty and yet go unnoticed, but the world goes nuts that China censors the Internet.

</rant>

I feel better now.

Great Advice on Wisdom in Electronic Communication

Don't miss the latest thoughtful piece by Gary Ledbetter: "Think Twice, Send Once." Gary knows whereof he speaks, and the effectiveness of your ministry may someday hinge on precisely the subjects that Gary is addressing.

Particularly useful is Gary's reminder about the unknown reach of communiques that you might regard as private. There are some people in Southern Baptist life who are entirely without honor as it pertains to the "personal" correspondence that you might conduct with them. I've regretfully found that to be true in my personal experience, as have others. So be wise out there; be careful. Take Gary's words to heart.

A Creative Way to Attack Internet Porn?

First, why would we bother? After all, some might argue, the publication of lewd material goes back to the dawn of time. Why fight what seems to be unstoppable?

Well, just because pornography has been around for a very long time, that doesn't mean that its perverseness and pervasiveness have not changed down through the years. For example, if a resident of my home town, Lake City, Arkansas, had wanted to view live pornographic action a century ago, such a person would have been forced to travel to some seedy part of Memphis (a then-imposing journey of some sixty miles), locate a suitable establishment, and then hope not to be seen while entering or exiting. Today, the same man must invest money and effort into spam-abatement software and procedures in order to AVOID being solicited by purveyors of porn.

Pornography is a negative influence upon our society. It is a blight upon the face of our culture. It is a growing menace to the sexual fulfillment and happiness of the American people.

But how do you stop it? Efforts to create a special TLD (top-level domain) for pornography as well as efforts to combat wanton internet porn have collapsed when confronted with the fact that the Internet does not behave like other commerce in the world. A web site might be hosted from anywhere on the planet, so enacting tough legislation in a particular jurisdiction is entirely ineffective.

I say that an Internet problem deserves an Internet solution. Something creative and distinctively Internetish that stands a chance of prevailing in the war on porn.

What am I proposing? The inspiration for my plan is SETI@home. Participants in the SETI@home program download software onto their computers that, while they are not using their computers, works diligently in the background to download and process radio signals from outer space searching for evidence of intelligence in the universe beyond Earth (think Contact).

Why not have such sleeper programs installed on computers to chew up the bandwidth of porn providers, hitting them in the pocketbook where it hurts? A sufficient number of computers toiling at this task would degrade the user experience of porn customers and force providers to outlay cash for expensive extra bandwidth just to stay afloat. Such programs would continuously browse the free portions of known pornographic sites to place high demand upon their computer resources. It might not be a knockout blow, but at least it would score as a punch.

Of course, one would have to probe the legal niceties delineating SETI@home on the one hand from something like a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the other hand. At some point tending toward the latter, I think such activities could become illegal. And we wouldn't want that.

Also, I suppose that those who have good enough web filtration to keep people from browsing porn for real would also find that their filtration software would block the porn-hacker program, as well.

It may not be workable, but it seems to me that this is a problem crying out for a good solution. It scares me to think of a generation of children (including my own) coming-of-age with the Internet as it now exists.. I'm willing to take responsibility for helping to keep them from pursuing porn, but we ought to find some way to limit the ability of porn to pursue them. For people who take such responsibilities seriously, the viability of the Internet itself may be the thing at stake.