[Discuss] free email less intrusive than google

Rich Pieri richard.pieri at gmail.com
Tue Mar 15 22:12:05 EDT 2016


On 3/15/2016 7:23 PM, John Hall wrote:
> Discussion of the politics of linguistics, free speech, or privacy as an 
> exercise in pure logic is not very productive. It's more complicated because 
> much of the nuance lies within ambiguities.

I believe that it is -- at least can be -- productive. If we cannot
agree on what freedom and privacy mean then we cannot use these terms
and still have reasonable expectations that others know what we mean. To
wit, we have to explain the difference between "free as in speech" and
"free as in beer" in order to explain free software because they aren't
the same "free".

> That said asserting that person C is oppressing person A proposes that 
> persuasion is oppression. That is utterly preposterous. Persuasion is an 
> intimate part of the type of discourse that is necessary for any healthy 
> democratic or similarly participatory polity.

When C's "persuasion" takes the form of social or political pressure
applied to A in order to coerce A to conform to C's ideals and morals
then it most certainly is oppression.

As for the rest, I leave it to the reader to research the etymology of
"politically correct".

-- 
Rich P.



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