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> Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them? I don't know your political beliefs, but I'll say that

> Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them? I don't know your political beliefs, but I'll say that conservatives make this nonsense argument all the time. Focus: the person you're responding to is talking about people going to jail for criticizing a leader or being gay or trans. These are violations of human rights. I can't speak for noir_lord, but for me, human rights are more important than any law, full stop. If human rights are being violated by the law, the law is wrong and it is our ethical imperative to do everything within our power to hinder the enforcement of that law (note that what is within our power may not be much). So when you say, "Some country has laws that some other country dislikes, therefore they should be able to ignore them?" my response is that if any country has laws that violate human rights, then it is our ethical obligation to ignore those laws. To be clear: I'll happily break the laws of my own country if those laws violate human rights. Human rights supersede laws in every case. > I think comes down to what influence you think you have. I'm a backend developer and sys admin, when it comes to international law, I think of it in relation to hosting content in other countries or serving users in other countries. Judging the quality of laws on another country is beyond my scope, if it conflicts with my ethical constitution, I just don't provide service to that country, I don't provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local law because I find the law may contain bad parts. Standing up for human rights isn't beyond your scope, nor is it beyond your influence. You can provide service in an anonymous manner that makes it possible for users of that country to evade local laws, you just choose not to. And look, we all have limited resources--I'm not saying you're obligated to help with every human rights issue that you come across. But it seems like you're saying that nobody should help people break local laws, even when those laws are unethical. And frankly, that makes you unethical. It's no inconvenience to you if I help Saudi Arabian gays hide their sexual orientation or help Russians criticize Putin. If you're trying to get other people who want to protect human rights to stop doing that, you're de-facto supporting those human rights violations, whether you explicitly agree with them or not. > What I'm not sure is whether you think of your influence on the subject as a sysadmin that actually wants to provide such services, or whether you think of it as some individual posturing, like a random citizen voicing their opinion on Israel v Palestina knowing full well you have no influence. Disingenuous nonsense. Certainly a lot of what is done in the name of human rights is ineffective. But I'm not even seeing any indication you care about human rights. Why should someone who does care about human rights be taking strategic notes from you?

ipaddr 2mo ago
Humans rights change over time and are different in different places. Currently its not a human right to be able to marry an ai personality or a machine but it will be. 100 years ago it wasn't human right to marry same sex. Human rights are not fixed in time. We may see privacy rights becoming a human right soon or not depending on how things play out. Should having a dark sky at night be a human right currently we don't think so but that could change.
- kerkeslager 2mo ago
  There's a fundamental disconnect going on here. You're talking about what humans believe are human rights. I'm talking about what human rights are. The right to privacy is a human right, even if no government on the planet actually respects or formally recognizes it. The right to privacy was always a human right, it's just that formal protections of that right have become more necessary as technology and society have advanced, resulting in more and more violations of that right. In 1791 the prohibition of unwarranted government search and/or seizure was close to adequate to protect the right to privacy, but with recording devices in our pockets, pervasive public surveillance, metadata tracking, and corporate involvement in surveillance, the 4th amendment no longer adequately protects the right to privacy. This doesn't mean the right to privacy is new--the right to privacy has existed as long as humans have had a psychological need for privacy. It just means that new attacks on the right to privacy require new legal and technical protections against those attacks.
  - TZubiri 2mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law It's an orthogonal concept to human rights btw, there's human rights laws, and treaties, both of which are positive law. Similarly, there's laws proper about almost every non human-rights subject (say investment vehicles), and there's natural law about every other subject (say investment vehicles). Another concept I would recommend looking into are courts and legal process. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you think happens when your belief of what natural law is, clashes with someone else's vision. The body of procedural law tends much more towards positive law out of necessity, otherwise it would devolve into recursive disagreements as to what the process (and the process for handling process disputes(and the process..)) is, a disregard for natural law and respect for the positive law as a sort of convention arises out of practicality at least in the process, arguably leaking into actual substantive law. Jurisdiction might be a good next step to tie it into this thread's topic, what happens when there's a dispute as to whose rules and courts should judge a matter? The importance of positive law in this matter is mostly accorded by courts unanimously, and the borders of countries are written in constitution in blood. We tend to err towards not rewriting those as they are 'expensive'.

ipaddr 2mo ago

Humans rights change over time and are different in different places. Currently its not a human right to be able to marry an ai personality or a machine but it will be. 100 years ago it wasn't human right to marry same sex. Human rights are not fixed in time. We may see privacy rights becoming a human right soon or not depending on how things play out. Should having a dark sky at night be a human right currently we don't think so but that could change.

kerkeslager 2mo ago
There's a fundamental disconnect going on here. You're talking about what humans believe are human rights. I'm talking about what human rights are. The right to privacy is a human right, even if no government on the planet actually respects or formally recognizes it. The right to privacy was always a human right, it's just that formal protections of that right have become more necessary as technology and society have advanced, resulting in more and more violations of that right. In 1791 the prohibition of unwarranted government search and/or seizure was close to adequate to protect the right to privacy, but with recording devices in our pockets, pervasive public surveillance, metadata tracking, and corporate involvement in surveillance, the 4th amendment no longer adequately protects the right to privacy. This doesn't mean the right to privacy is new--the right to privacy has existed as long as humans have had a psychological need for privacy. It just means that new attacks on the right to privacy require new legal and technical protections against those attacks.
- TZubiri 2mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law It's an orthogonal concept to human rights btw, there's human rights laws, and treaties, both of which are positive law. Similarly, there's laws proper about almost every non human-rights subject (say investment vehicles), and there's natural law about every other subject (say investment vehicles). Another concept I would recommend looking into are courts and legal process. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you think happens when your belief of what natural law is, clashes with someone else's vision. The body of procedural law tends much more towards positive law out of necessity, otherwise it would devolve into recursive disagreements as to what the process (and the process for handling process disputes(and the process..)) is, a disregard for natural law and respect for the positive law as a sort of convention arises out of practicality at least in the process, arguably leaking into actual substantive law. Jurisdiction might be a good next step to tie it into this thread's topic, what happens when there's a dispute as to whose rules and courts should judge a matter? The importance of positive law in this matter is mostly accorded by courts unanimously, and the borders of countries are written in constitution in blood. We tend to err towards not rewriting those as they are 'expensive'.