Christ, What an Asshole

boing
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Getting Internet connectivity in rural areas of the U.S. is exactly like Rural Electrification and getting telephone access in rural areas, and it’s amazing that almost none of our government leadership has the historical knowledge to see the exact parallel.

You will not get increase of economic activity in rural areas without high speed Internet availability. Only the most basic of businesses can run without it. The fact that so many idiots in our government see such activity as a luxury shows how uninformed they are. The leaders that DO know about this and do nothing because they are taking money show, once again, how the government is full of corruption at the moment.

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Just because you don’t get it doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to it. Just because its not law, doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to it, just that you have no recourse even if it is so necessary that you’d pay a 100 bucks a month for scraps.
Sorry to hear that though :frowning: that sucks.

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Isn’t it depressingly funny how we solved this fucking problem a hundred years ago, but can’t get our shit together today?

I’m probably wrong, but I blame Reagan.

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I think you miss the point and buy into the red herring.

Government is supposed to support ALL economic activity and citizens, not just the ones that win the auction and pay them the most. That’s why we had rural electrification, this is why we made telephone service a utility, and that’s why we should support internet access is ALL areas of the country.

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Actually, I quite agree. If my post could have been read as whining, I apologize.

I live on top of a hill amid my own ninety acres with breathtaking views…there are a lot of things which offset not being able to stream Netflix.

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Well, it’s doing a pretty poor job of supporting economic activity in heroin and cocaine production and distribution and not quite as poor a job of promoting the production and distribution of confederate flags.

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Oh, they do…

Republicans are entrenched via district gerrymandering, voter suppression and mass indoctrination via rampant astroturfing. And, speaking of indoctrination — like the Democratic elite (see Hillary Clinton), they’re also empowered with massive amounts of corporate money and, therefore, a complicit corporate media (FUD support mechanisms and the like).

These corporatist lackeys are out-of-touch with average Americans (just listen to them talk), yet they feel invincible to some extent because of their Sugar Daddy arrangements. Some of these lackeys who prefer cash over power will simply ignore their constituency and work for their rich owners instead. When the public eventually wakes up and votes them out of office, they are set for life with bribes in the form of cushy lobbying jobs, etc. after they’re booted out.

Lackeys that want to remain in office simply count on the corporate media to support them. For example, they bribe the media to:

• Continue to work for them against challengers (see strategic, local media blackouts on Sanders). Here’s looking at you NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX (of course).

• Induce an ignorant electorate and/or an apathetic, misinformed progressive citizenship that doesn’t even bother to vote at all because they’ve been coerced into thinking it doesn’t matter. Voter suppression has been incredibly successful for our current status quo.

All this makes the wealthy elite and their political lackeys extremely powerful, but with power comes hubris — and hubris will be their downfall.

Except for a few outliers, this corrupt status quo isn’t expecting Sanders to win at all, much less bring with him a revolutionary grassroots movement that does vote and sweeps the midterms afterwards to enact things like a true single payer system for health care, breaking up the banksters and the corrupt war machine, etc.

The status quo still doesn’t quite understand what’s going on here. They’re so used to the same old games, astroturf, etc. that they really don’t understand the dynamics of true grassroots movements — and they’re somewhat out of their element against them.

They realize there’s an election coming up and think the current machine will continue to protect them. However, they’re just not entirely ready for a true grassroots, word-of-mouth resurgence in the United States. The grassroots movements that support, enable and surround Bernie Sanders are completely blindsiding a lot of the status quo and that’s why they’re already going into panic mode and making critical mistakes.

We’re flanking the corporatist right (some elite Democrats and all Republicans) from all sides right NOW. Not next year, not in 5 years… the movement has already started.

“This isn’t a seminar, this isn’t a weekend retreat.” ----

48

It seems that the major disagreement here is no over Internet access but over the definition of “right”. Some say a right is something violence may be justly used to defend/obtain. Others that a right is anything necessary to sustain life. Going even further still others define it as whatever is necessary for a satisfactory life.

Along with this is the question of from whence rights come. Some say rights are obtained from a person’s very existence or from God. Others say by the common consent of society. Yet others say the government is the creator of rights.

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[quote=“HarrisonArturus, post:18, topic:60566”]
Based on the quote alone, I’d have a hard time using the term ‘asshole’ for someone who said it. What’s the counter argument –
[/quote]Well… let’s hope it’s not just a bunch of straw man arguments…

that we’re so addicted to our always on, technology-driven existence that life without it isn’t worth living?

Nope. Straw man, sorry.

How insulting to everyone who chooses to prioritize other values and experiences over access to BoingBoing.

Nope, another straw man, again…

But news flash: we could live without the Internet just fine if need be.

How did you post this here?

Strangely enough, if you didn’t have the Internet, your voice would be silenced here and many other public forums.

Including those for seeking medical advice in a land where we still don’t have a single payer system for health care and people go bankrupt trying to acquire said health care. Yes, even with ObamaCare.

Including those for legal help in a land where we don’t get adequate legal representation unless we’re wealthy or willing to go bankrupt.

Including those for seeking jobs in a land where the banksters ran off with our money, economy and living wages.

Now, if you want to argue that the Internet is the thing governments fear most because it is the greatest democratizing force for independence and free thought since the printing press, I’m right there with you.

There you go. BINGO.

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A neo-libertarian utopia.

They’re incredibly out of touch with what average people deal with on a daily basis. Sure, they could go without Internet for a while because they would rely on other avenues to provide communications, sources of income, etc. (bribes from the wealthy are always nice).

It reminds me of the assholes who perform those bullshit “experiments” where they pretend to “go homeless” for a year to show up all the homeless people. They never seem to factor in all the enormous externalities that surround the issue of homelessness and what really contributes to it. They’re fucking clueless.

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I agree. I think we’d understand each other much better if we understood each other’s definition’s of “right” - we are asking, “Should the govt consider this a right?” But when we say “right”, are we talking about things the govt is supposed to give to us for “free” (paid for by taxes, like public education), or at least make sure we have some kind of access to but we still have to pay for it directly, or just stop other people from taking it away from us if we already have it, like property?
We know the internet is necessary for a lot of people (in this country), because it’s how they make a living, get educated, have a voice in the media, stay informed about things, all these things that we knew were necessary, and we considered them rights, before we had the Internet, and now in a lot of situations, for a lot of people, the Internet is a major way for them to have access to those basic rights.
So even people don’t think it’s a human right the way water or sanitation are human rights, or they think it’s just an “enabler of rights”, it’s deeply connected to all these issues regarding other basic rights we have as US citizens. And that means that the govt at least has to understand it, and think about what it means to be poor without Internet, or a student without Internet, and to be excluded from all these things in a time and place where everyone around you has access to them.
[1]: http://boingboing.net/2015/06/22/john-oliver-on-internet-misogy.html

52

Maybe I’m being thick, but I really don’t get this argument. Maybe it is because I live in the UK, and a lot of our law depends on case law rather than a constitution. Nevertheless, here I am tapping away at a little box to reply to another comment of someone, somewhere else in the world. You can argue that this is not ‘speech’ because I am not speaking, and if I maligned someone the law does distinguish between libel and slander. I don’t think anyone should argue that only ‘speech’ is a human right, and other forms of other communication are not protected. I do not argue that my access to my computer, or the internet, or this newsgroup is a human right. I would argue that if an isolated South African township has its internet connection deliberately cut, depriving a particular community of its voice, then this violates human rights. We can go back fifty years: a newspaper does not print a letter I write to the editor, but intercepting the only mail service to a township is wrong. The issues remain the same.

I don’t think I am using semantics to do something dishonest here. I want to ring-fence the general rights of people to communicate with their peers to a similar degree. I am made nervous by people who want to codify which forms or communication are protected, and which are not. Is access to the internet - a communications body with all the root servers in the US - to be protected, but not other forms of communication? They were discussing the roll-out of broadband in the US: does this human right to access to the internet stop at the US border? Why make a distinction that protects some, and not others? Human rights are supposed to be common to all.

I reserve a particular place in Internet Hell for the people in this group who argue that the internet or the use of sidewalks or X is a basic human right; then argue that person Y should have such rights taken away for expressing the wrong opinions.

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Speaking about rights and access… Unfortunately casting a vote is getting harder and harder to do these days. With some exceptions, every adult has the “right” to vote, but that doesn’t stop some political groups from making it very difficult, and for some, impossible to do.

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do you even workplace?
:^)

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We did this…

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Needs or necessities are not what is required to survive the day. That sort of thinking went out last century with Maslow. While internet may not be at the base of human needs it certainly fits in the spectrum.
As for it being a right, any law maker should know that anything not listed in Federal or State law as not being a right is left as a right to the people.
So yea, it is a need and it is a right.

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Do they have a right to have it regardless of whether or not they can pay for it?

I can see a “minimum tier” of wireless internet being made available to everyone at minimal cost, say 500kbps and 5 gb per month. That should certainly be enough for anyone to access necessary services and apply for a job.

But anyone who doesn’t spend much time in rural areas has no idea of what it would cost to run true high speed broadband to every single home and business in the USA. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.

Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you are within an order of magnitude of the amount. What’s needed is not “development”…it’s thousands of trucks, and tens of thousands of employees, laying hundreds of thousands (millions??) of miles of cable.

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Of course. Just like you have the right to buy a candy bar or a house if you want. Of course, having the right does not equate to having the means to do so. The problem here is that many areas of the country people don’t have the option at all.

I see that trope quite often from people who are unaware that the entire country has fiber optic networks. We gave Ma Bell a huge amount of tax payer subsidies back in the 80’s to run fiber optic to all corners of the country. Remember the “So quiet you can hear a pin drop” commercials? Today, most of it sits there dark and unused. Take a drive through the country and keep an eye out for those green boxes with orange labels or those white pipes with orange tops. They all say 'Warning: Fiber Optic Cable" and instruct you to contact the phone company before digging.

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$2/month rural surcharge for 30/million accounts is… $720 million a year. It would take five years, but I think with microwave links and point to point laser links for, $3 billion would get the ball rolling and make a healthy dent.

Plus the rural access fund goes upas you add subscribers.

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Make it 250 kbps and without limit, or limited to at least 100 GB. Speed can be waited out. Bandwidth limits, not so easy. Or, if 5GB then for a day.

What’s “true high speed”? Where’s the cutoff?

The most obvious way to achieve anything close to this goal is to force telcos to not stay in the way, and allow formation of tiny local co-ops, microISPs for small regions. The same model that the power distribution network used in 30’s. The cost of the necessary point-to-point microwave links is pretty low these days.