Rights and Freedoms

How are your freedoms treating you today? Pretty good I guess.

But sorry, your free society is a farce. Your freedom is limited. And thank god for that.

One does not have freedoms as much as they have privileges. You do not have a single freedom this bastion of liberty can't remove.

Think about it. All you need to do is kill some people in heinous ways and all your freedoms would practically become null and void. Your last solid right would be the right to life. A lot of nations don't even give you that much. I guess the big idea in this is you have freedoms as long as you don't encroach on the freedom of others. It is all something granted.

This setup creates some sort of sanity within society as humans cannot be trusted with boundless freedom. You would go crazy in the absence of all consequence. Complete freedom destroys responsibility and accountability. This is why anarchy is about as fun as tossing salad. I'd prefer a totalitarian regime to a completely establishment free society.

One main producer of rhetoric lifting the importance of freedom is The Freenet Project. For those that don't know, the aim of Freenet is to create a program and internet protocol that allows its users to be completely anonymous. Through various crazy encryption and routing algorithms, Freenet lets both the producer and consumer of content remain unknown. A primary aim of Freenet is to become a tool of political dissent, as people wishing to criticize the state would be able to do so without fear of repercussions.

While it is useful that such an application is in development, as it would be handy if a dictator (or corrupt liberal party) somehow seized control of the country. Then again, the ruling party would probably have smashed your networks as well as your independence.

But, as it is now, in Freenet I see almost negligible value for the political dissident.

Freenet blows for talking shit about the government because:

• It's slow
  Freenet is not and never will be the fastest form of communcation. Getting the message out takes time that a critic of a totalitarian regime may not have. If you somehow managed to seize a government document outlining how the shit will hit the fan in the very near future, why bother with Freenet?


• Its existence is itself incriminating
  In an environment that does not support free speech, having Freenet installed on your computer is a good way to end up in jail. An evil government would most likely have control of internet backbone connections, and it wouldn't take much effort to sniff packets and discover who is a Freenet user. You'd probably end up on a hit list for using encrypted email, let alone an application devoted to circumventing authority.


• Nobody is watching
  It doesn't matter what you say about the state if no one will hear you. There is probably already a lot of rants and criticisms about governments around the world on Freenet - but is anyone reading them? The audience of your content would be mostly made up of abusers of freedom (criminals), paranoid intellectuals and maybe a Freenet developer. That is hardly the audience you would require to really make your voice heard.

This shows that Freenet isn't exactly the best friend of a political activist as it is often toted to be. But what other nice individuals find Freenet useful? Lets see:

• Criminals
  It's only natural that ones using a veil of anonymity would not always use it in the most ethical ways. In fact, it would be hard to say if ethics would even exist in such an environment.


• Terrorists
  When does a political dissident become a terrorist? Americans like to think that the rebel in China or Cuba as a freedom fighter. Shit, if you said you wanted to kill Castro, the Americans would give you the bullets to do it. But what is a rebel in America? A terrorist. The attitude is that dissent is fine - as long as it happens somewhere else. Remember the Americans pretty much banned the Communist Party. If you are a militant activist in the western world, the word we use is "terrorist". Anywhere else, you're a "defender of liberty fighting the oppressive oligarchy".


• Distributors of illegal pornography
  Freenet isn't limited to text only communications. Even if developers wished it to be, there would be a workaround. You're exchanging bytes of information, these bytes can be anything and there is no way to force them to adhere to rules of decency. Illegal pornography negatively affects everyone's lives. Freenet will become, if it isn't already, a haven for the perverse. Is real freedom worth the free flowing depravity? What value do your rights have if they also enable the degenerates?

Sometimes we listen to our own bullshit about freedom and liberty a bit too much.

The most bullshit arises in how we love our freedom of speech - except when this freedom is extended to people like Ernst Zündel. Sure, Zündel is a moron. But if he isn't able to say all the incorrect and unpopular crap he wants, then isn't your freedom of speech rather useless? You only need this freedom if you're saying things nobody wants to hear. You need only be worried about what you say if the ruling majority doesn't like your views.

The line between free speech and hate mongering is very blurred, but this is basically inevitable. This makes blather about a "freedom of speech" exceptionally stupid, but the only alternative is letting morons like Ernst spout their mouths.

One very annoying group complaining about their apparent rights is student unions across Canada. Now I understand that they mostly just want to change public opinion to benefit them by waving ugly yellow signs claiming that "Education is a right". That said, I still think it's a rather loaded claim. Education being a right basically implies that no impediments to acquiring it should exist - tuition should be zero and entrance requirements should be ignored.

While a right to information would work, a right to education (also known as information spoon fed to you from a yuppie) isn't as straightforward or beneficial. When a student has something invested in their education, it becomes something more than a time consuming rite of passage. Students are generally more concerned about the quality of instruction when they have paid for it.

Student unions could better spend their time by ceasing to pretend that education is their birthright and focus on convincing the public that low tuition is in everyone's best interest. Good luck though, as it doesn't change the fact that we tend to need more able bodied ditch diggers than self-important philosophy students.

Basically, your rights and freedoms in this free state are mostly bunk.

This paves the way for my benevolent dictatorship.

You won't have to do anything. All the pillars are in place.

C'mon, it will be awesome.

Everyone will have a right to beer.