World News Thread (Politics,whatever)


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@klapse we are socializing kids to share and be nice. that's eventually how things are going to turn out, though it may take some time.

[edit] i used to be a libertarian, since freedom sounds nice. but freedom doesn't happen without regulation -- sounds counter-intuitive. for example, linux and the GPL wouldn't give users the freedom they are promised unless there were laws (governments) ready to enforce the GPL. you need a government "bigger than" the corporations that are trying to completely dominate the market, just as you need people who have the muscle to enforce the GPL to continue giving users freedom. ergo, if you believe in a free market, you need a big enough government to enforce it.

also, giving everybody universal healthcare would also help the free market. in the current market (in the US), working at a big company has many perks, one of them being access to better healthcare. if everyone had a good level of healthcare, that wouldn't be a consideration in deciding who to work for, and startups/small businesses could have more freedom.

i'm happy to hear opposing sides, but i'd appreciate a high level overview like the above...[/edit]

The GPL prohibits uses of the software. Calling that 'freedom' is an abuse of language. Public domain (abstaining from limiting any uses) is free. Public domain works are free of a 'license', which is another reversed word that actually means 'prohibitions'.

Because the GPL contains prohibitions, it doesn't qualify as freedom and thus can hardly be used to support your claim that "freedom requires regulation". In addition even it if did, one counterexample to my thesis might well represent an exception, and exceptions prove the rule. So even accepting Stallman's use of the word 'free', your argument rests upon a non-sequitur fallacy.

I'm not against rules of conduct and laws. I'm just sharing the view that the monopolist state is a problematic service provider of these.

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true, but the point is that we wish they'd be nice.

free market capitalism feels old, tired, and dangerous (eating up the earth's resources faster than they can be created). not sure what's next, but libertarianism seems a step backwards.

Feelings tend to distort accurate perception of reality.

Resources, are as you correctly imply, not nature-given, but created by the act of transformation by humans. Mineral ores, for example, were largely useless to humans until some smart people invented means of extracting and refining them.

Continuing developments funded by capital enable new and less costly ways of extraction and refining, providing to the market additional resources. In 1980, business professor Julian Simon challenged biologist Paul Ehrlich [Famous author of The Population Bomb] in Social Science Quarterly to a wager: whether or not the cost of chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten would increase in the next decade. Simon bet one thousand dollars that over 10 years they would not go up. Simon won the bet, because instead of humans depleting the resources, the humans harvesting and processing those resources helped create the wealth that a) allowed capital investment in research, exploration, and extraction technology to bring new, and more resources to the market and b) capital investment in other areas of production created new processes that required fewer resources; for example, Aluminum used for soda cans was reduced by a factor of 5, iirc.

In terms of mineral wealth, the planet is one solid mass of potential resources and we have only begun to scratch the surface of it. What limits our use of them is that most are not economically extractable with our current state of technology. Exactly how much of our brainpower, time, energy and other resources to devote to extracting the next unit of mineral cannot be rationally decided without the price mechanism offered by the free market.

With respect to arable land and habitats of other species, we have been transforming the wild planet to the garden planet since the dawn of agriculture. This was not a 'policy decision' but the result of individual humans transforming their environment to better suit their needs. I personally value wilderness areas and biodiversity and many other people do too. If I had the money that's been stolen from me, I'd donate to and pay to visit private wildlife reserves, but almost all of my disposable income (that which remains after necessities have been met) has been taken from me by the State.

What has created all the material prosperity in this world is human intelligence, combined with the freedom to innovate and invent, and the freedom to save and invest, and the freedom to engage in mutually-beneficial trade, and the freedom to decide what uses of scarce resources meet our individual highest-valued goals.

What we refer to as market capitalism is not old and tired in human history; it only emerged against the historical backdrop of tyranny in the 17th and 18th centuries after Europeans beat back the power of the State and reduced its interventions and looting. This allowed for accumulation of savings and investment in enterpreneurial ventures. By contrast, oriental rulers of the time were more likely to simply grab any significant private accumulation of wealth, thus hindering investment and development of more advanced technologies and capital-intensive means of production. Economic liberty is among the foremost historical reasons why the scientific and industrial revolutions happened in Europe and not elsewhere.

Libertarianism is a step backwards - from the precipice of absolute tyranny to which we are heading at breakneck speed.
 
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I'll put it this way, if you are racist/sexist/etc. I don't want you around. I would fire them at least, but probably go further.
 
The GPL prohibits uses of the software. Calling that 'freedom' is an abuse of language. Public domain (abstaining from limiting any uses) is free. Public domain works are free of a 'license', which is another reversed word that actually means 'prohibitions'.
Welcome to the grown up world. Your freedoms may or may not impinge on my freedoms. In the case of GPL, public domain code where you may choose not to ship the source code and just ship binaries impinges on my freedom to modify your code to work better on my particular setup.

And the GPL doesn't stop anyone using your code, if you mean to use as an end user, such as GPLed mp3 player or a word processor. It's if you were to try to adapt that code by linking to it using a linker and a compiler and then *not* ship the source that the license steps in. That's not absolute freedom, true enough, but absolute freedom become absolute tyranny somewhere down the line usually.
 
Welcome to the grown up world. Your freedoms may or may not impinge on my freedoms.

Now see, this is where people get confused about what freedom means. They ask, where do my rights end and yours begin? Answer is that anything that limits a freedom is not itself a freedom. Freedom isn't about being free from injustices, it's about how you respond to them. The proper response is unconditional forgiveness, with no justice attached.
 
Meh. This is why I'm a voluntaryist, not a constitutionalist. Guaranteeing people anything besides freedom is an infringement on freedom. Freedom is what you have in the absence of force. It can't be protected by force.

Don't get me started on "liberty and justice for all". More like "liberty and justice for all except those whom we used justice on".
[doublepost=1532196344,1532194966][/doublepost]I mean, my biggest problem with current liberalism is that they've given up the quest for world peace, opting to quest for justice instead. I'm still on the path of peace myself.

And to clarify one of my earlier statements, there isn't even any such thing as "a freedom" or "a right". There is either freedom itself or a lack of it, and that's it.
 
The GPL prohibits uses of the software. Calling that 'freedom' is an abuse of language. Public domain (abstaining from limiting any uses) is free. Public domain works are free of a 'license', which is another reversed word that actually means 'prohibitions'.
Depends on your definition of freedom. I am in line with @JDTAY on this one, freedom is the absence of (coercive) force.

The absence of (coercive) force does not mean that there can be no contracts nor that contracts cannot be enforced. Only that you cannot be forced into a contract.
The GPL is a contract that you enter willingly (or not). By using GPL'ed software you are bound to the rules of the contract and no rights are violated. Don't like it? Then don't use it.

[edit] I am saying that the GPL does not contradict freedom, however one can indeed validly argue if the essentials freedoms in the GPL is the same freedom as stated above (personally, I do not think so), but it is on the same level as public domain (which is also a contract). [/edit]
 
You can be forced into a contract? There is the social contract I guess, encompassing peer pressure and the police and courts etc, but that was retrofitted to the word 'contract'. Other contracts, have you been forced into any? If you want water piped to your property, or electricity supplied etc., then you have to sign a contract (although the law protects against explicitly unfair contracts), but if you don't need any of that then you don't need to sign a contract for that.

I have spotted some unfair looking policies in my work contract in the past (specifically about doing work outside of the company's control, when the work is pretty much entirely intellectual), but in other contracts they generally seem to only only penalise me if I try to achieve unfair advantage over the other party, which is fine by me.
 
I was wondering if I should speak up about contracts, but I've been speaking up about everything else, so...

Contracts are enforced and therefore are a violation of freedom. Binding someone by their past decisions is still binding someone.
Especially relevant is how the contract only exists for situations in which current desires conflict with past ones. Contracts were specifically designed to limit freedom, rather than merely conflicting with it.
[doublepost=1532229804,1532227871][/doublepost]I also would like to explain why I'm so fervent about everything I've been saying. You know how feminists say abortion is non-negotiable by others, because it concerns their bodies and other people have no right to control their bodies?

I mean, for me, violence against my person or anyone else's is non-negotiable, as in, I shouldn't have to argue against it. This should be a basic axiom upon which everything else is built. The act of governance makes me sick to no end.
 
What the fuck does one have to do with the other, and how does that make feminists your enemies?
 
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Well, I was specifically focusing on the non-negotiable part, the part where feminists say others aren't even allowed to debate abortion.

Noone should be debating my freedom or whether violence against me is ever justified, end of story. The main reason for this is that they wouldn't tolerate death threats from me. Why should I tolerate theirs?
 
Welcome to the grown up world. Your freedoms may or may not impinge on my freedoms. In the case of GPL, public domain code where you may choose not to ship the source code and just ship binaries impinges on my freedom to modify your code to work better on my particular setup.

And the GPL doesn't stop anyone using your code, if you mean to use as an end user, such as GPLed mp3 player or a word processor. It's if you were to try to adapt that code by linking to it using a linker and a compiler and then *not* ship the source that the license steps in. That's not absolute freedom, true enough, but absolute freedom become absolute tyranny somewhere down the line usually.

Someone not giving you something you want isn't "impinging on your freedom".

If you think it is, then you are impinging on my freedom to drive a Ferrari. Please stop that and give me the Ferrari.

[EDIT]

An op-ed on the Finland summit that's worth reading:
https://original.antiwar.com/david_...ad-and-donald-show-a-glorious-blow-for-peace/

"Are they seriously trying to tell us that the two countries who together wield 90% of the nuclear weapons in the world shouldn't be talking?"
 
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very pertinent for the brainstream:
criticalism is piling up near president Performance H. Wilson...
 
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