Comment by Ajedi32

> what kind of bad consequences, and how much of them, are we willing to put up with in the name of freedom?

The way I look it is that when someone uses their freedom for evil, the consequences of that are that person's fault, not the fault of freedom itself. Responding to evil done by one group of people by curtailing the freedoms of everyone, including innocents who have done nothing wrong, is fundamentally unjust. Perhaps in some extreme cases it could be justified, but I'd use a standard similar to how the US supreme court defines "strict scrutiny" when evaluating such measures.

Patrick Henry once said "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

Unfortunately yes, for some this is a hard sell. I'm not sure how to convince others of the importance of freedom if they don't already consider it to be important, to me it's an almost fundamental belief that I hold.

>> […] which I don't think is an acceptable thing to do to mentally sound adults.

> I haven’t thought of the psychological damage over-protectiveness may cause

My point was more that taking away a person's freedom for their own protection is the kind of thing you do when they're either children or mentally unsound. Outside of those cases I don't think it's acceptable.

> it’s difficult to find a bank that doesn’t require a locked down phone for online payments

Some of this may be due to regulations making banks partially responsible for things they shouldn't be responsible for (like the customer's phone getting hacked). Responsibility and control go hand in hand. But mostly I think it's just due to lack of demand, which would be solved if running modded OSs were more common.

> Do understand though that such a law comes very close to mandating Free Software everywhere

Yes, exactly. I guess I've been radicalized by Stallman. ;) Though to be fair I do partially disagree with his definition of free software, in that I don't think software needs to be freely redistributable without payment (freedom 2) in order to be libre free.

I understand this a pretty radical proposal, and completely politically non-viable for the foreseeable future. It might even be a bad idea to do all at one even if that were possible. But I think probably there are some smaller steps that could be taken in that direction which would be beneficial even if I'm not entirely sure what those are yet.