"Restrictive Freedom" as you call it, is simply freedom.
Freedom cannot exist without discernment.
If you have a free and open society but allow Nazis, because you allow everyone, how long will you be free? Not long. The Nazis will use their freedom to take everyone else's.
Freedom demands a simple rule. We accept everyone who accepts everyone.
Fundamentally, GPL shares this rule. That is the point of it. Our labor, when shared, should be shared just the same when used.
> We accept everyone who accepts everyone.
If we were to accept and enforce this rule, billions of followers of some major religions would not be eligible to be part of a free and open society.
"Tolerate" might be a better word to use for their analogy. I can hate you and all you stand for, but I can still tolerate you. Meaning, I let you be and don't try to curtail your actions according to my personal beliefs.
Nah. The error is the royal "we". We tolerate <subjective judgement>, We enforce <subjective judgement>. And above all, We require everyone to be nice and cultured.
The actual power-wielder who regulates these things is a government (or rather its justice system), a warlord, nowadays maybe an AGI, but definitely not society and not "We, users of orange social media". These mechanisms work for thousands of years, paradoxes gonna paradox.
Good.
What you quoted is just the person restating the paradox of tolerance. It's totally nonsensical once you get past "one-dimensonal evil" cases (or perhaps cases like software, a category is more narrowly and cleanly delineated).
He's right that freedom requires restriction. The problem with the paradox of tolerance is that it masquerades as a meaningful principle while leaving the actual restrictions unnamed.
P.S. it also is worth noting that, to the extent that the GPL works, it's precisely because it doesn't rely on vague principles. It's specific about what's restricted, when, and how.
I don't think the Paradox of Tolerance intends to be a principle. It is a statement of the problem, for which principles could be proposed.
If there is anything prescriptive to it, it's the implication that no principles will ever suffice. In which case you need to find a way to reframe the problem.
Yeah, this is pretty much the rationale behind the Paradox of Tolerance, which you alluded to. Just as a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance without eventually just becoming intolerant, this clearly demonstrates that the same is true for Free Software. If we tolerate the use of Free Software for the use of the non-free software, eventually one loses the freedom in Free Software.
It's of course not a perfect analogy since the original Free Software still exists, but since in practice the dependency was from free towards non-free, like in this instance, it still works. Google and its anti-freedom practices are still in effective control of the Android ecosystem even though it's still technically free by way of AOSP.
And just as how some people argue that intolerance of the intolerant by a tolerant society is bad, so do some people argue that things like the GPL is bad because it prevents downstream modifications etc. going from free to non-free. Maybe this will help re-evaluate the culture around this stuff.
> Paradox of Tolerance, which you alluded to. Just as a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance without eventually just becoming intolerant
I’ve always thought this was hand wavy nonsense. Tolerance and tolerating is so ill defined in these discussions that they end up pointless.
I’m also not sure game theory supports that intolerance wins out if you view it as repeated instances of the prisoner’s dilemma.
Can you explain how you mean this in the context of software?
What you describe sounds like the paradox of intolerance but I fail to see how that can be applied to free software.
Freedom in general: You can't have absolute freedom because that includes the freedom to take the freedom from others.
In software: You can't have absolutely free software because ... ? I fail to see how free software might infringe on the freedom of others.
I hate that you’re being downvoted. You are absolutely right here.
Just because we “allow nazis” doesn’t mean society will turn into an authoritarian dictatorship.
People are not stupid.
In this case, it was precisely the act of "allow nazis" that led Google to its current situation.
People aren't stupid, but the fact that Google is in this situation proves that we should have been less naive.
I don’t understand your point. It sounds like you think someone is making Google take unwanted actions.
They don't need to be stupid. They could be complacent, afraid or morally corrupt.
"i know why you did it. You were afraid. And who wouldn't be?"
Bold move, arguing against yourself like that.
I think a better critique is that these cold-war political basis vectors don't adequately describe today's political landscape (and neither do the revolution-era idea of the left wing vs the right wing; arguably they didn't back in 1950 either).
Best example of how the communist/fascist/liberal democracy triad completely falls is looking at China, which has facets of all three and none at the same time.
This makes it difficult nigh on impossible to have a real political discussion, as they fail to amount to more than connotative terms to be applied to outgroups, and do not map to political reality in any meaningful sense. Anyone can turn into the fuzzy outline of a nazi if you squint really hard.
Nuances needed to make any sort of sense of 21st century politics, especially its newer entries, are the tensions between cosmopolitarianism vs communitarianism and technocracy vs populism.
The problem with using such an outdated political map is that many of our contemporary problems are missing from it, and go unresolved until enough frustration builds that there is an ill-conceived popular upheaval that forces the issue. Rather than addressing the technocratic European Union's lack of accountability to its citizens, we get Brexit instead, which could likely have been avoided if the political map wasn't so out of touch.
American politics at this point is practically defined by being afraid of the other group. The groups themselves have little cohesion, and contain bitter rivals, but they trust each other more than their hated enemies.
Which becomes self-reinforcing: attempting to save yourself is perceived by the other as oppression.
I don't mean to simply blame all sides here. Facts on the ground do exist.I think I can justify how some players are worse than others, and that there might be a way out of the vicious cycle when some individuals say "no, that assertion no longer seems reasonable."
But given that it's gotten monotonically worse for decades, I don't see that happening any time soon.
One side is banning everything related to the other side and concentrating them in camps. The other side... is doing basically nothing, even when it's in power. I guess they gave a couple of bribes to Ukrainian-American businessmen but that was about it.
I'm pretty sure they're not the same.
That's literally how the Nazis happened though? We know what happens if Nazis are tolerated: they grow in numbers, seize the government, and commit the holocaust. We know this because it already happened once.
> People are not stupid.
There are plenty of stupid people around.
We interact with them every day.
Yes. And society with good education has fewer stupid people. You don’t stop “bad” ideologies by outlawing them, you stop them by arguing for a free society and education.
Is that true?
American education isn't great, but it's not radically worse than many other rich nations. The difference doesn't seem sufficient to justify the extreme separation of ideologies. (That is, I'm not arguing in favor of one or the other, but the level of hatred between the two implies that at least one is wildly off base.)
Hmmm. The rise of nazis to power from time to time is evidence to the contrary.
Most people, might not be 'stupid'; but complacency in the population is enough to drop the guard down.
> complacency in the population is enough to drop the guard down.
In the case of the nazis, the population might even support them.
I am not arguing for complacency. I am arguing that authoritarian ideologies are won over with arguments, not by outlawing them.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
You are arguing as if the two sides are acting in good faith. Authoritarianism almost always isn't. Greed and corruption is is inherently tipping the scales unfairly against the fair system to be imbalanced against the good actor.
You can see it again and again in the success of voter suppression acts and the deceitful tactics played by authoritarians.
Arguments only work when both actors respect good arguments.
It's not about outlawing them, it's about not giving them a platform allowing them to rise, like the current major media platforms are doing right now. Social media should be held responsible of the content they publish.