It's not particularly meaningful to say that water is a human right. Far better to talk about obligations. Who has the obligation to provide people with access to clean water? That is where the discussion can begin.

I would argue that whoever controls access to clean water should be the first to answer the question of obligations. If those who control water refuse to provide it to those in need, why should we allow them to control water?

1. Something that can't be taken away by someone else.

2. A contract between an individual and the country/state with which they are a citizen. In return for paying taxes and following laws, they can expect services, utilities, military, education, etc.

3. These things are not something you're entitled to morally (like water, as there's no one to sue if you don't have water in your region), but societies should recognize the need for water, and thus it is moral and right to help ensure that all people have access.

Positive rights are very much a real thing, but they're very different from negative rights, and they have very different implementation issues.

Life, liberty, and property are all things that are only guaranteed by societal standards and enforcement. Murder, theft, and enslavement is the norm where the rule of law and enshrinement of rights are absent.

Much of the US enslaved human beings for hundreds of years - liberty is clearly only something we get by being a member of a specific society.

edit: I may have misunderstood your comment. I mean that human rights are things that are violated by taking them away, not failing to give them to you. So while life can be taken from you, doing so would violate human rights. Whereas arguing that internet is a human right doesn't work with this model, because the current violation of that 'right' doesn't just result from someone taking something away, but from someone failing to give it to you.

<Citation needed>.

The conventional Enlightenment-era arguments for natural rights, like those which inspired the American Founding Fathers, claimed that those natural rights were endowed by a Creator. Unfortunately, over the following two centuries-plus, fewer and fewer people accept the existence of a Creator that can endow such rights. Meanwhile, the study of homo sapiens as a social animal has proceeded apace, and it is clear to many – if not most – people today that “rights” are a rather arbitrary thing that human beings in groups posit for utilitarian reasons, but they have no foundation beyond that.

You could live in a totally government-free society and somebody, somewhere will eventually come along and fuck your shit up. Then you are just fighting to keep your rights, which for many might be preferable than trusting a government to do it for you.

The question is are you more likely to retain those rights under a government than without one? If so, what kind of government?

It's not like some made up non-existent issue, it's in direct response to corporations privatizing water, then calling all water illegal.

When you put it like that it, of course, sounds silly but try to see it the other way around: Take all the money spent on wars, where lots of infrastructure (usually among the first targets) and environment ends up being destroyed, and imagine it's instead spent on infrastructure projects helping the actual civilian population.

Yes it's naive, yes it's very unlikely to ever happen, but I still like to think that the US Military acting as a demilitarized "global infrastructure building force" would have done far more good for humanity than constantly waging wars on barely defined things like "terrorism", leaving destroyed wastelands and lot's of disgruntled people in their wake.

It's not a long-term solution but it was effective.

It's their system. The Baby Boomers, and it is an abject failure.

We can create something better Hackernews. We just have to give a shit.

Oxfam would be a good place to start https://www.oxfam.org.au/