[Discuss] Govt Source Code Policy

[ingegnue at riseup.net (IngeGNUe)]

On 04/06/16 10:27, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On 4/6/2016 8:54 AM, IngeGNUe wrote:
>> Legal is not moral is not legal BUT, rules exist for a reason and it is
>> good to enforce rules. It would be chaos if no one enforced rules!
> 
> I don't disagree per se. Laws are necessary for a reasonably ordered
> society to function.
> 
> What I disagree with is the enforcement by law of one person's idea of
> morality over another's. 

Unfortunately that is the nature of rule-making: somebody or some people
think thing should be a certain way, and seek to make it that way. There
is no way to enforce rules without ignoring the fact that some person or
people disagree with said rules. That's where the "force" in enforce
comes in. There will almost always be dissidents to a given rule.


> To wit: the Volstead Act. The Volstead Act is
> not about good vs. evil, right vs. wrong. It is about one group of
> people claiming higher morals in order to exert control over the
> activities of the entire country.

Refer to my previous comment above. To expand on this, it is not
sensical IMO to divide rules into being based on some nondescript
morality (it begs the question, whose morality?) and "a group claiming
higher morals in order to exert control", because the two are literally
the same thing. People have different ideas of good, evil, right and
wrong, and only coincidentally agree on some things. Rulemaking is not
so much about being right as it is having people "agree" with you that
you are in the morally correct position, in order for the rule to even
get a chance to exist (even in undemocratic scenarios, wildly unpopular
rules generate resistance); otherwise it, to put it harshly, means
nothing to be correct, whatever it is.

> Greg is doing the same thing. He is using his claim to higher morals in
> order to justify exerting control over those he deems to be less ethical
> than himself. I'm certain he means well but that just makes it all the
> more oppressive. As C.S. Lewis put it:

So as a concrete example, you are doing the same thing as Greg. You are
using your claim to higher morals in order to justify how something
should be. Even though superficially in your situation you are not
campaigning to change the rules as they currently exist, that doesn't
mean the nature of what you're doing is different from Greg's, and I
can't even grant that you're not exerting political influence because
participating in public discourse does exactly that! The only thing I
can grant is that you're exerting a different kind of political influence.

> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
> victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under
> robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's
> cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated;
> but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end
> for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be
> more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell
> of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be
> "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard
> as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the
> age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants,
> imbeciles, and domestic animals.
> 

Is that a quote from like, John Stuart Mill? So, in other words a despot
with good intentions is worse than bad intentions for the whole of the
population? In any case, libre-lovers aren't despotic, the free software
world is more of a lightly-regulated market.