Todd Suomela's Library tagged freedom →  View Popular, Search in Google

"There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism."

economics future capitalism socialism freedom rent utopia communism futurism post-scarcity

A point I've argued many times but usually fail to convince.
"Most American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, which allows employers to hire, fire and promote for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. "

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"The necessary feature of the open systems and networks that Doctorow advocates is that they must preserve the possibility of evil. The systematic exclusion of evil breaks the open (unit operational) nature of the system. From a political perspective, you won’t score too many points campaigning for the preservation of the possibility of evil. The most successful argument of this kind is the theological argument around why God has given humans free will. Being good without choosing good means that goodness isn’t a virtue. The possibility of choosing evil makes the choice of good meaningful. Pre-deleting evil processes from the operating environment pre-empts the possibility of choosing to run good processes and the act of terminating the evil ones."

computing computers freedom open architecture history future law regulation evil good design purpose open-source

"But clearly there is coercion in the workplace; Sanchez readily admits it. And clearly its reach—whether it touches the individual worker or not—is related to, indeed depends upon, that worker’s ability to act, in this case to quit. Again, Sanchez admits as much.

So if liberty is the absence of coercion, as many libertarians claim, and if the capacity to act—say, by enjoying material conditions that would free one of the costs that quitting might entail—limits the reach of that coercion, is it not the case that freedom is augmented when people’s ability to act is enhanced?"

libertarianism freedom work business coercion power ability capabilities

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I have often remarked in the past how libertarianism - at least, its modern American manifestation - is not really about increasing liberty or freedom as an average person would define those terms. An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call "local bullies."

libertarianism libertarian ideology power control oppression freedom

"Oakland's finest flipped with brutal flair. To be expected. The Occupy movement tests our owners' patience. Occupiers not only dig in for a long haul, awareness and desires expanding, they're making the political system look bad.

Official tears shed for Arab demonstrators now seem cynical. Well, to those who took it seriously. Double standards are an American constant. Endorsed by God. Consecrated by the Founders."

wall-street protests activism politics police freedom american illusion dissent

"And here it seems to me that there’s a bizarre and surprising way in which Dennett comes very close to Zizek and Badiou in his discussions of freedom. It seems to me that the work of Zizek and Badiou is primarily motivational. Where, for years, we got Continental social and political theory after theory demonstrating all of the ways in which we are secretly determined by forces behind our backs such as the secret machinations of language (Lacan will go so far as to say we’re “cuckold” by language in Seminar 5, that language uses us rather than we using language), or power or “social forces” or economics or any of the other sundry forces that invade our lives, where theory has paralyzed us with self-doubt, leading us to wonder “are these truly emancipatory aims and practices or are we just reproducing ideology?”, Zizek and Badiou have everywhere sought to cultivate the belief that we are free, that we can act, that we can decide. For them– and they’re right –the belief that we can choose and act is every bit as important as actually acting and choosing. And if this is the case, then this is because without that prior belief we never will choose or act (Zizek is quite explicit on this point throughout all of his writings)."

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capabilities philosophy ethics development morality utilitarianism value justice fairness freedom

capabilities philosophy ethics development morality utilitarianism value justice fairness freedom

"In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them? "

book publisher political-science capabilities morality ethics development value justice fairness freedom

"It goes like this. Tenure, like academic freedom, depends on a certain picture of what goes on in college and university classrooms — high-level discussions tied to cutting edge research into intellectual problems. Tenure protects the freedom of instructors to engage in such research. But in many classrooms, dedicated to vocational or corporate or political goals, that’s not what’s going on, and the instructors who preside over those classrooms need neither academic freedom nor tenure. Only those engaged in the “search for ultimate truths” do."

tenure academic freedom work labor

With some nice quotes by Borges, Luria, and Sartre.

"Filtering is essential to cognitive performance and intelligence. It determines our behavior and is an expression of our free will. Up until recently, our brains were the only filters, and then we started to use machine-based filters (to do things like pick the characteristics for people who would pop up on a dating site). Those filters were were simple and easy to understand. But now these artificial filters are becoming so complex and pervasive that they are performing our precognition, at least as far as what we see and do online.

There may be some merit to computers taking over this function. Maybe they can do it better. Perhaps these filters are just computationally more powerful versions of our own cognitive filters, just as computers already are more powerful versions of other cognitive functions. But the filters are not under our control, we may not even be aware that they are whirring around, and even if we do, we won't understand how they are deciding what to allow through the filter for our consideration. Of course, it is not as if we are about to be subjugated by self-aware computers. Not self-aware. But aware of us, intimately so. "

technology technology-effects filtering knowledge memory existentialism freedom experience

I am currently a Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, where I conduct research, writing and advocacy on global Internet policy, free expression, and the impact of digital technologies on human rights. Due to my background and prior experience (see below), I am also considered a leading expert on Chinese Internet censorship. My first book, Consent of the Networked, a treatise on the future of liberty in the Internet age, will be published by Basic Books in January 2012.

people internet censorship freedom

The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose laws that systematically impede or hamper innovation, especially those enforced in the name of defending "intellectual property," such as patent and copyright; these should be radically reformed or entirely abolished.

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"David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2011). "

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"From Emerson and Douglass to Reagan and Goldwater, freedom has been the keyword of American politics. Every successful movement—abolition, feminism, civil rights, the New Deal—has claimed it. A freewheeling mix of elements—the willful assertion and reinvention of the self, the breaking of traditional bonds and constraints, the toppling of old orders and creation of new forms—freedom in the American vein combines what political theorists call negative liberty (the absence of external interference) and positive liberty (the ability to act). Where theorists dwell on these distinctions as incommensurable values, statesmen and activists unite them in a vision of emancipation that identifies freedom with the act of knocking down or hurtling past barriers."

politics american rhetoric freedom markets conservatism liberalism

"This liberty-order distinction is instructive, but it got me thinking: it’s simply incorrect to imply that American conservatism tilts unequivocally in “live free or die” directions. Here I would call attention to David Sehat’s book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, about the rise and fall of the American Protestant moral establishment. Sehat points out that, insofar as the Christian Right has mobilized since the 1960s to reassert a moral establishment in the midst of an increasingly secular and individualistic public sphere, it is hardly libertarian. "

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