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If you go for something other than wholesale freedom - 'freedom with restrictions' - then you find yourself in the position where there is going to have to be s

If you go for something other than wholesale freedom - 'freedom with restrictions' - then you find yourself in the position where there is going to have to be somebody who creates and polices those restrictions. Even if there was a full-scale revolution and everything we consider to form 'the state' fell, the people who thereafter created and policed any restrictions would be the de facto state, and I'd bet there'd be people on forums like this criticising them too, just maybe not you. And we're back to square one. Edit: And freedom is a binary choice unless you restrict the problem domain from 'life' to some subset of life, in which case all such subsets must be 'free' in order so say one is free. If one is not free there logically must be oppressors. You see? All we've done is reshuffle things.

coldtea 13y ago
>If you go for something other than wholesale freedom - 'freedom with restrictions' - then you find yourself in the position where there is going to have to be somebody who creates and polices those restrictions Yes, and this is what civilization has done since time immemorial. Where did I argued against this as a practice? What I said boild down to that people that recognize this need for "policing" can also recognize a need to restrict the powers and information given to those doing the policing, and that there's nothing contradictory about it. >And freedom is a binary choice unless you restrict the problem domain from 'life' to some subset of life, in which case all such subsets must be 'free' in order so say one is free. I don't think it's a binary choice. In some ontological, philosophical way maybe you're right, but people understand that it's perfectly fine to call you "free" is you are not a slave and can say whatever you want, even if you're free to, say, drink and drive. This "restricting the problem domain from life to a subset" has always been the case for freedom. You don't have the freedom to come and kill me, for example. >If one is not free there logically must be oppressors. You see? All we've done is reshuffle things. What we did is far more impactful that reshuffling, we changed the scale of constaints. And quantitative change also brings qualitative change at some point (like water after some temperature starts to become vapor). In this case, we went from 20% freedom (say in medieval times), to 70% freedom. Suddenly, you got something there.

coldtea 13y ago

>If you go for something other than wholesale freedom - 'freedom with restrictions' - then you find yourself in the position where there is going to have to be somebody who creates and polices those restrictions Yes, and this is what civilization has done since time immemorial. Where did I argued against this as a practice? What I said boild down to that people that recognize this need for "policing" can also recognize a need to restrict the powers and information given to those doing the policing, and that there's nothing contradictory about it. >And freedom is a binary choice unless you restrict the problem domain from 'life' to some subset of life, in which case all such subsets must be 'free' in order so say one is free. I don't think it's a binary choice. In some ontological, philosophical way maybe you're right, but people understand that it's perfectly fine to call you "free" is you are not a slave and can say whatever you want, even if you're free to, say, drink and drive. This "restricting the problem domain from life to a subset" has always been the case for freedom. You don't have the freedom to come and kill me, for example. >If one is not free there logically must be oppressors. You see? All we've done is reshuffle things. What we did is far more impactful that reshuffling, we changed the scale of constaints. And quantitative change also brings qualitative change at some point (like water after some temperature starts to become vapor). In this case, we went from 20% freedom (say in medieval times), to 70% freedom. Suddenly, you got something there.