“liberty”
28 posts under this tag.
In record turnouts, 40% of eligible voters don’t vote. In other words, 60% of Americans don’t vote (because they can’t or won’t). Was thinking of something cool and snarky to answer that excellent celebrity video that’s making the ‘Tube rounds, but really, what need is there?
A lot of people, most on at least one count, aren’t wasting their time already. Some of the best propaganda in the world (the envy of any dictator), none for the cases against voting (1, 2, 3... just imagine if a true don’t vote ad went national—child porn would cause less mayhem), and yet so many still do what makes sense. Can’t really do anything for the rest. What I’ll do is humor the naive we all carry inside, do the simplest thing that could have some impact, this post, and move over to more productive stuff.
And please, please, were you a democra-zealot (good-natured pun, crazy, get it? :), take this not as a challenge to double your efforts, I’m truly saddened by all the misspent electoral effort as it is. Instead, why not make something you want happen that doesn’t need to (attempt to) change everyone else? As I’ll try doing now, over and out.
 Both for what has happened to me and for what lies ahead this year, I knew I had to read Harry Browne’s How I found freedom in an unfree world (download PDF) sooner rather than later.
I just finished it yesterday and can’t believe how different I am already. How freer (me, always so proud of my freedom!). It really is a handbook for personal liberty. It’s so selfish that at times it even angered me (me, selfish as they come!). But then, well looked, the book’s an extended version of that famous parable, existing in some version in most cultures:
When I was young, I wanted to change the world. I found it was too difficult, so I tried to change my country. When I realized I could not change that either, I began to focus on my town. I could not change even that and being older, I tried to change my family. Now being old, I realize the only thing I can change is myself. Suddenly I realize that if long ago if I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the country and I indeed could have changed the world.
Or as Harry put it
As you view any situation in which you have a goal, there are basically two types of alternatives available to you. I call them direct and indirect.
A direct alternative is one that requires only direct action by yourself to get a desired result.An indirect alternative requires that you act to make someone else do what is necessary to achieve your objective.
Once you’ve seen the positions and attitudes of the other people involved, a direct alternative requires only that you make a decision; an indirect alternative requires that you change the attitude of one or more other persons so that they will do what it is you want.
The recognition of the two types of alternatives is one of the most important keys to freedom. Most people automatically think in terms of indirect alternatives — who must be changed, how people must be educated, what others should be doing. Consequently, they spend most of their lives in futile efforts to achieve what can’t be achieved — the remaking of others.
In any situation, a free individual immediately looks first at the identities of the other people involved and appraises the situation by the simple standard: Is this what I want for myself? If it isn’t, he looks elsewhere. If it is, he relaxes and enjoys the situation to the maximum — without the problems that most people take for granted.
He automatically thinks in terms of direct alternatives. He asks himself, “With things as they are, what can I do by myself to make things better for myself?”
I’m gonna be Switzerland. Mind my business. Be my own man. Neutral. Flexible. Pragmatic. Quiet. Living my own, happy, private life. Free in an unfree world.
The plan is to travel, to go places for a year or so, to live for some 2-3 months each time, in Tokyo, Barcelona/Madrid, London, and Toronto (in that order). Both Spain and Canada beckon with legal, short paths to free agency. The goal shall be to find out which city I like better as my fulcrum for the decade, but mostly to learn, to start projects, and to swallow the world.
I didn’t expect to like working remotely so much, as I’ve been doing this last couple of weeks, but I’ve loved the freedom, the flexibility, and the discipline it imposes. Most important of all, it allows for freedom of place and having been kicked out of the U.S. I might as well look around. So I’m looking for some sort of remote job, failing that savings and odd jobs would have to do, but having an unhinged fixed job would accelerate and catalyze everything.
There is, still, the possibility that there will be no place for me like Silicon Valley. If that’s so, then I’ll try to get a tourist visa again within a year and give de facto (ilegal) free agency another shot. I doubt, though, that they’ll grant me a visa, but there are many other, safe, if somewhat expensive means, to get inside. And once inside de facto free agency is not far fetched at all. I’m heartened by the sanctuary San Francisco itself always was for me (as opposed to the dastard federal gov’t).
But that’s just one possibility. Just having done that scenario planning comforts me and sets me free. The world beckons and Japan has always been, after America, the country I’m hungriest for. I’ve always wanted to try the sink or swim approach to learning a language! It’ll take me a month or two to get there, but just you wait Tokyo!
It is said that Alfred Hitchcock, the great cinematic specialist in the art of frightening people, was once driving through Switzerland when he suddenly pointed out of the car window and said, ‘That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen.’ It was a priest in conversation with a little boy, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Hitchcock leaned out of the car window and shouted, ‘Run, little boy! Run for your life!’
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p357
These days I barely even think on religion but yesterday I was skimming Dawkins’s wonderfully readable book, The God Delusion, when I found this quote and laughed out loud. It has nothing to do with physical abuse and all to do with psychological abuse. And the saddest thing about it is that it is true in its parody—the main shackles that bound us, the main horrors that prey on us, are the ones within.
There is in every village a torch—the teacher:
and an extinguisher—the clergyman.
Victor Hugo
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One)
Traditional U.S. motto
Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:
A young person in Palestine and Israel today looks forward to future with depression and with fear, but with Two Stars for Peace, the young people of Israel and Palestine can look forward to a future when they can travel freely throughout the United States, get their education in any part of the United States, or they can travel back and forth between Israel and Palestine. They can look forward to a future of instead of warring armies, everybody is part of a single United States army. The young people have no vested interest in the past of bickering and hostility. It’s depressing. But Two Stars for Peace gives them a way to have a good life.
This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.
Hace ya casi un anho de la FIL y yo apenas subo este cuentito que tan simpatico se me hizo. Libertarianismo para ninhos.
«En el pais de la colmena,
el guardia para a la abeja:
“¡Su carné!
¡El permiso de zumbar,
el permiso de volar,
el permiso de libar
y el permiso de melar!
¡Pronto y deprisa!”
Y a Abeja le da la risa:
“¡A ver!
¡Su permiso de silbar!
¡El permiso de multar!
¡El de parar a la gente
y el de ser tan repelente!”
En el pais de Colmena
¿quién se ríe?
El guardia, la abeja y yo.
Y este cuento se acabo.»
Darabuc, La vieja Iguazú
If the war against terrorism is a war at all, it is like the cold war—one that will last for decades. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world’s sense of what it is and wants to be..
Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.
The deep ethical crisis I’ve been immersed for some weeks now started when I realized that, ultimately, ethics is not a necessity, it’s a stand. You can’t judge without PREjudices. You are never guaranteed to be on the absolute right path, there is no such abstract thing. Your prejudices—your self—determine a range of trajectories, a train of self. And that’s that.
Our values are in practice a deeply enmeshed, deeply correlated network with no one most important end. Every value has its price, is outweighed eventually by some combination of other values. Far from urging us into hasty, thoughtless expediency, this should sober us: we concede when we have more to lose if we not—are we giving our values away at a discount?
That question is what the quote above is about. Liberty is both what civilization is and wants to be, for some of us. Terrorism has recently highlighted for us how dear its cost can be. It is not our nature to bear burdens and so we shall never stop looking for ways around them. But if it comes down to it, we wil bear freedom’s burden.
Never had the bug bit me before—always thinking crypto-anarchismWP a hangover from the cyberpunky 80s. It isn’t. It’s pure magic. And it may be anarchy’s best hope—ever.
Timothy C. May’s WP long, superb essay, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy (which appears in an essay collectionAM around Vernor Vinge’s True Names novel) has made a wild-eyed believer out of me. Fascinating stuff, this. (May, btw, is a former chief scientist at Intel, confirming my hypothesis that the people at the trenches of the Moore revolution had to be among humanity’s very best.)
Crypto anarchy is the cyber spatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to consensually make the economic arrangements they wish to make..
[It] ensures that men with guns cannot be brought in to interfere with mutually agreed-upon transactions, the only kind of economics interaction possible in crypto anarchy. Some people will of course scream “Unfair!” and demand government intervention, which is why strong cryptography will probably be opposed by the masses, unless of course, they are wise and take the long view. This may smack of elitism, but I have very little faith in democracy. De Tocqueville warned in 1840 that, roughly translated, “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” We reached that point several decades ago..
To put it bluntly, crypto anarchy basically undermines democracy: it removes behaviors and transactions from the purview of the mob. And once crypto is deeply entwined into the fabric of life and commerce, it will be too late to pull the plug.
Timothy C. May, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy
Never had I been more than casually interested in cryptography. Now my copy of Schneier’s Applied Cryptograpy is on its way. Can’t wait.
Ultimately, the debate about choice is not about markets but about character. Liberty and responsibility really do go together; it’s not just a platitude. The more freedom we have to control our lives, the more responsibility we have for how they turn out. In a world of constraints, learning to be happy with what you’re given is a virtue. In a world of choices, virtue comes from learning to make commitments without regrets. And commitment, in turn, requires self-confidence and self-knowledge.
Bloody good quote.
And an orator said, “Speak to us of Freedom.”
And he answered:
At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
So true. So true.
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