Comment by p0w3n3d
2 months ago
Why not toilet control - if you have not enough fiber in your ... the electronic money you have on the bank account won't be able to buy you more meat, suggesting vege instead.
But where is the limit of freedom? Where is the border we should stop before or fight for it somehow?
When I was a kid they told us: your freedom ends where somebody’s freedom starts. I still think it is valid and insightful.
> When I was a kid they told us: your freedom ends where somebody’s freedom starts. I still think it is valid and insightful.
When I was younger, I thought this was a good idea. The problem with this rule is that where the boundary between "individual freedom" and "somebody else's freedom" lies varies a lot between different people (and cultures).
I thing the human rights declaration is a good baseline that is universal.
Every “freedom” has two sides. Positive and negative freedom. You don’t have the freedom to dump nasty chemicals into bodies of water (lack of positive freedom), but I have the freedom to not have carcinogens in my drinking water (negative freedom). Some examples are clear cut, in the sense that we as a society surely all agree on where the line should be between positive and negative, but all examples need to be discussed on an individual basis, because they’re all different in terms of where we draw the line. But you can’t use the slippery slope argument here, because the slope works in the other direction too for any given example, the more positive freedom you have, the less negative freedom you have.
This is a refreshingly balanced take, which seems to frequently get lost in discussions.
The more I think about policy, the more it resembles a multi-objective optimisation problem.
Libertarianism is bunk because of this. It's not about freedom, it's about your freedom and no one else's.
Libertarians say they are anti regulation, but I ask them if I can murder them to steal their property.
Apparently they are all in favor of that regulation.
Similar to anti gun control people. Ok, I'm your neighbor, can I arm myself with chemical and biological weapons? Or a conventional bomb that will definitely destroy the entire block?
Hm, funny, they are in favor of some gun control.
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Surely though limiting the government's positive freedom of ubiquitous surveillance, like this example of printers, is something that I'm sure would be resoundingly popular in a democratic society. This seems as clear cut as limiting the freedom to dump toxic chemicals into water supplies.
It is exceedingly popular in the general case hence why every slime-ball seeking to surveil people so that their pet issue can be enforced with an iron fist reframes it as freedom to dump toxic waste, drive 200mph in a school zone or print counterfeit dollars, etc.
An adaptation of printers most people never notice and which has been used to help catch criminals? I don't think you'll get the support you're expecting from the general public.
How is it anything like having your water supply poisoned. The printer thing doesn't noticeably affect anyone negatively unless they commit substantial crimes. Indeed it likely reduces costs of tracing the origins of printed material when that's important in a criminal investigation.
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