one of the absolute proofs of something being a "right" is that it produces general good and not general evil

RECENTLY THE LAWYER-JOURNALIST Ari Melber was talking about the Covid denialists, both those who spread lies and their dupes and he talked about a "right to be wrong, the right to believe things that are not even true", and, though he didn't go that far as I recall, even in his even-handed, too generous articulation of the problem there would be a "right to lie" behind that. 

Let me say for the record, I like Ari Melber and I do respect him, my reservations about him and his program are generally things I discern are a result of his legal education and his acculturation into the thought habits of educated, modern westerners. 

 The things that he declared a "right to" in his educated thinking on this were things that those who were wrong and believed things that aren't even true believe were put there by FOX, by Facebook and Twitter and Youtube and the Republican-fascist lie machine.   Apparently there is a right to be lied to behind that assertion that being wrong and deluded are matters of rights.   I will note, up front, that here, Ari Melber notes that the United States with our fetish of "free speech-press" absolutism that is the closest thing there is to an absolute and all-overriding "right" to, no matter what is said within the exercise of those absolute rights, is a world epicenter of this oppressive regime of lies and liars that is getting hundreds of thousands of us killed.   Those "rights" he counts in this are certainly, in practice, put in a superior position to the right of people to not be infected needlessly, the right of people to not be injured, hospitalized, intubated, ventilated and to die.   That the legal and judicial professions can put all of that difficult, unpleasant and deadly consequence of their assertions and decisions off on the first-responders, the medical profession, the hospitals and other institutions, not to mention an industry they have been quite deferential to, the insurance industry is certainly one of the reasons they are so willing to put those malignant "rights" in the position they have. 

It reminded me of a time when one of those short lived Lesbian-gay newspapers (it was before LGBTQ) of the mid to late 70s around here asserted, as a rote-off-hand remark,  there was a "right to be stupid."  And that brings up all kinds of other assertions of things which are conventionally called "rights" but which any level of rational thought applied, it would be clear that to call those "rights" would be to seriously diminish the value of the whole idea that there are rights and that such "rights" would be a thing which would promise good to the human and wider population and not be what such carelessly enumerated "rights" are so often in reality, an assertion of selfishness that does everything from infringe on genuine and beneficial rights held by others to fatal to individuals to fatal to the entire planet.

Off the top of my head, here are just a few of the things that have been designated as "rights" by courts.

- A right to lie (the requirement of those lied about to  divine the mental state of the liar being the fig-leaf the courts have put on that permission to lie.)

- A right to lie about history, the Holocaust, American apartheid, genocides, ongoing violence.  Certainly that it is the same political side who lies about Covid-19, vaccines, masking, etc. is not unrelated to that. 

- A right to lie about a whole host of other things.

- A right to broadcast lies and the permission of the cabloid and other media to lie with effective impunity.   This enormously magnifies the power of the lies to such an extent that it is really nothing like the "right" an individual has to lie by word of mouth or even by letter, assuming the letter isn't reproduced and spread like a viral Tweet.

- A right to hire prostitutes and have them crush and torture guinea pigs, gerbils, etc. in "crush porn" videos.  Generally the right to promote all of the evils you can see promoted by pornography. 

- A right to spread even the most dangerous lies about health and snake oil medicines.  Actually, the Congress, and especially the Senate had a big hand in that at the behest of the snake oil industry.

And speaking of that:

- A right of the billionaires and millionaires to lie us out of democracy and into gangster governance.   That "right" in Buckely v. Valeo was peddled on the careless and sloppy "rights" language so successfully that even the Justice who should have known better than any other how devastating a right to lie  and slander for the profit of the wealthy could be for an entire race of people in the entire history of the Court, Thurgood Marshall bought into it.  That, among other things that have resulted, is the destruction of the Voting Rights Act makes his concurrence in that case one of the most tragic in the history of the Court.  That it had the name of one of the premier voice American fascist oligarchs attached to it is no accident.

Lawyer that he is, Ari Melber really should consider just what this whole "rights" business is and that, given that framing,  there must be a real distinction between "good rights" and "bad rights" and that there is no moral obligation on the part of anyone to permit the exercise of really "bad rights," and, in fact, a moral obligation to prevent such "rights" being exercised.   The moral obligation would be to stop the lies and, so, the evils that flow from them.

This whole "rights" business, considering how much of our political, social and moral discourse are caught up in it really should be considered at least well enough so that lying, being duped by liars, willingly believing in lies or asserting to believe in them (I don't for a second believe that all of the people who lie and spread the lies believe what they're saying) is not misnamed a "right" especially for legal purposes and political purposes and other exercises of power which can compel people to do things or restrain them from doing things. 

No rational person should be allowed to habitually believe that such things as lying, intentionally lying, lying about things you don't believe to be true yourself (as FOX as a corporation does), believing those lies, buying into them, pretending to believe them for political and ideological purposes are within the realm of genuine human rights.  

Yet that is the entirely unconsidered default position of a large percentage of, perhaps most college-credentialed citizens of the United States.  They certainly have not up to now had to confront a strong logical and reality based case that a huge number of things called "rights"  by the Supreme Court and other courts, asserted to be "rights" by law professors and scholars and paid-lawyers on the make and by the hardly objective and not financially uninterested "press" and journalists are really rights.  

There is no right to lie, there is no right to believe lies, believing lies sold in the media is a violation of the right to be told the truth and to the benefits of individuals a majority of voters in a democracy believing in the truth and voting accordingly. 

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I have not had time to go far into it but Pope Francis gave a remarkable address to The Fourth Meeting of Popular Movements:

In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.

In the name of God, I ask the telecommunications giants to ease access to educational material and connectivity for teachers via the internet so that poor children can be educated even under quarantine.

In the name of God, I ask the media to stop the logic of post-truth, disinformation, defamation, slander and the unhealthy attraction to dirt and scandal, and to contribute to human fraternity and empathy with those who are most deeply damaged.

In the name of God, I call on powerful countries to stop aggression, blockades and unilateral sanctions against any country anywhere on earth. No to neo-colonialism. Conflicts must be resolved in multilateral fora such as the United Nations. We have already seen how unilateral interventions, invasions and occupations end up; even if they are justified by noble motives and fine words.

This system, with its relentless logic of profit, is escaping all human control. It is time to slow the locomotive down, an out-of-control locomotive hurtling towards the abyss. There is still time.

Earlier in the address he laid out how the pandemic relates to other looming disasters in one of the best articulations of it I've ever seen:

You felt that the current situation merited a new meeting. I felt the same. Although we have never lost contact, it is already five years, I think, since the general meeting, isn’t it? A lot has happened in that time; a lot has changed. These changes mark points of no return, turning points, crossroads at which humanity must make choices. And new moments of encounter, discernment and joint action are needed. Every person, every organisation, every country, and the whole world, needs to look for moments to reflect, discern and choose, because returning to the previous mindsets would be truly suicidal and, if I may press the point a little, ecocidal and genocidal.

In these months, many things you’ve long been denouncing have become totally obvious. The pandemic has laid bare the social inequalities that afflict our peoples. Seeking neither permission nor forgiveness, it has exposed the heart-breaking situation of so many brothers and sisters, the situation that so many post-truth mechanisms have been unable to conceal.

Many things we used to take for granted have collapsed like a house of cards. We have experienced how our way of life can drastically change from one day to the next, preventing us, for example, from seeing our relatives, colleagues and friends. In many countries, governments reacted. They listened to the science and were able to impose limits to ensure the common good, and so they managed at least for a while to put the brakes on this “gigantic machine” that works almost automatically, in which peoples and persons are simply cogs.

The whole thing rests on those "rights" that so many, including Ari Melber, I believe unthinkingly, in the rote expression of a "cog" in the mechanistic apparatus of the law and American journalism declared to be "rights."   I don't think he would make that mistake again if he really considered that one of the absolute proofs of something being a "right" is that it produces general good and not general evil.  There is no right that can produce an evil result and lies, especially in the mass media produce some of the greatest evil there is.