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GNU/Linux World Domination for the Wrong Reasons (Datamation)

Posted Mar 12, 2008 7:52 UTC (Wed) by janpla (guest, #11093)
In reply to: GNU/Linux World Domination for the Wrong Reasons (Datamation) by martinfick
Parent article: GNU/Linux World Domination for the Wrong Reasons (Datamation)

I disagree. It is very common in these modern times to talk about freedom as if it was an absolute, but it isn't. When you say "I'm free" or "It's free", one necessarily has to ask "From what?".

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Posted Mar 12, 2008 15:57 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Well, fortunately, some people have thought about these issues long and hard, and they have
even written very nice logical books on the subject trying to clarify what many would like you
to stay confused about (if you can't describe liberty well, you can't defend it well).   Might
I suggest:

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp

Freedom

Posted Mar 21, 2008 11:21 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

When you say "I'm free" or "It's free", one necessarily has to ask "From what?"

Only in Newspeak. From the appendix of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

To give a single example, the word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.