Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You do not extend tolerance to those who would deny your humanity. Straight outta Mein Kampf
Not quite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Posting a wiki article is not an argument
Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
71–80 of 266 posts
Re: Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently you haven't read anything by Jean-Paul Sartre.
One can read and disagree (that's what makes reading philosophy hard; you want to argue, discuss, counter the narrative, take it into another direction, deny the assumption, put forward another hypothesis or explanation... but the book just sits there, static and smug, plowing ahead with whatever very specific point and perspective auther has already made up their mind on :)
It's the authors we disagree with we should read the most enthusiastically, because they may just provide an insight into what it is to have different opinions, and we may just be forced to admit they have a point.
When we read authors too close to home that say things we already think are true and share our views, we'll let almost any nonsense argument slip by. That's a waste of time if I ever saw one.
Re: Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
#73You do not extend tolerance to those who would deny your humanity. Want to know how to fight back against authoritarianism? Look to the folks who've been fighting against racism for (literally) hundreds of years. Racism in the US is just fascism that hasn't hit white people yet.
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Re: Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
#74[flagged]
Chapelle is a "Right Winger?" Is he a "White Supremacist" too, yet? "Clayton Bigsby" was a dog whistle!
Re: Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
#75I spent a lot of time reading political philosophy books from smart people with big reputations and the definition and dynamics of liberty was definitely an overriding theme. My takeaway many years later is that it's a very complex topic and many people, all with contradictory positions, have a lot of confidence in their take on it. I trump them all by having no confidence in my take!
Yeah I m in the same boat. I come from France, an old, maybe aging, proud of itself democracy and... when I discovered Singapore then Hong Kong, two semi-dictatorships in different ways, omg: I had never seen people so free in ways we cant be free in France. So now that Im a permanent resident in Hong Kong, joking with everyone next step is Chinese citizenship, I'm a bit at a loss when it comes to freedom. Not corrup…
are you sure you're not mixing up freedom and stability? Individual freedom is not something China is known for.
Re: Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
#76You do not extend tolerance to those who would deny your humanity. Want to know how to fight back against authoritarianism? Look to the folks who've been fighting against racism for (literally) hundreds of years. Racism in the US is just fascism that hasn't hit white people yet.
> You do not extend tolerance to those who would deny your humanity. Probably a bad ethos to harbour, one that I imagine quickly rationalizes violent behavior. And I think we're all fortunate that in the US there is no prevailing force denying any specific race of their humanity. Is there scar tissue from the past? Certainly. As Snowden states "freedom is a direction" and we've certainly moved in the right direction…
Sure, there's lots of people on the far right saying things like "Muslims are terrorists who are trying to invade us" or "globalism is a plot by the international jewry to do so-and-so".
Re: Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
#77You do not extend tolerance to those who would deny your humanity. Want to know how to fight back against authoritarianism? Look to the folks who've been fighting against racism for (literally) hundreds of years. Racism in the US is just fascism that hasn't hit white people yet.
Racism has deep roots in humanity, and likely other apes and beyond. Its roots are in an evolutionary-beneficial distrust of others that is now maladaptive.
Which groups fighting racism are you referring to specifically?
Re: Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
#78I am glad that they posted this with the subtitle instead of the original title "Cultural Revolutions" which was posted a couple of days ago and sadly got no traction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29247018
The way Edward Snowden weaves Ai Wei-Wei's account of his journey through the Cultural Revolution (1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246165/1000-years-o...) and his own is great:
From the time I began studying China’s quest to intermediate the information space of its domestic internet, as part of my classified work at the NSA, I’d experience an unpleasant spinal tingle whenever I came across a new report indicating that the United States government, was, piece by piece, building out a similar technological and political infrastructure, using similar the justifications of countering terrorism, misinformation, sedition, and subjective “social harms.” I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying “East” and “West” were, or are, the same; rather, it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with “national security”—a euphemism for state supremacy—are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme. A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.
Re: Freedom is not a goal, but a direction
#79> Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed
Uh-huh. I can only assume this refers to the so-called "cancel-culture" which probably doesn't exist (I am not claiming that there aren't "cancellation" incidents, but for this to exist as a "culture" or a trend, it needs to be shown that fewer people today can express and publicly disseminate fewer opinions than in the past; this is probably the very opposite of reality).
Freedom is almost self-contradictory. A person living alone in the world can be free, but two cannot. Either they have the freedom to curtail the other's freedom, or they do not. Either way, someone here is not fully free. So whenever people speak of more freedom, the question is, more freedom for whom and at the expense of whom. Like anything political, freedom is a resource that needs to be allocated among people, and there are valid debates over how. But within reasonable circumstances, there is no one direction toward freedom, but many directions, each giving more freedom to some and less to others.