You’re conflating a license to use something granted without charge and something actually free to the public. Licenses come with terms, public resources only come with social pressures of fair use.
It is unfair for SeriousCompany to pretend that resources it releases to the public (usually as a PR move or to advertise a paid product) must flatter their motives and the narrow confines of what they envisioned the public might use them for. That is wishing a free resource had a license when it only has a social contract. If the provider could set limits, it would no longer be free.
I mean, a license to use something for free can still apply to something that is freely given? There's no conflation, since they're just different aspects of the same thing
And no, that's not unfair, that's absolutely within their rights, as the provider of said thing. What's unfair is willfully taking advantage of a free resource in ways that are explicitly against the reasons the provider is providing the thing in the first place. That's just place malice at that point.
After all, a license is just a social contact that can actually be enforced. I would argue the world would be a far better place if people didn't abuse the unenforceable nature of what you're calling "just a social contract".
In such a world (which is, by any means likely ever to be available, impossible), we’d still run against the issue that the state has the authority to kill people. This world would also have to be free of political corruption, and be so politically stable that what constitutes a crime worthy of the death penalty could never change.
That’s one way to define “local,” and in fairness to you, it is the most popular. But the other way of looking at local production - not unlike times before globalized agriculture - had one’s diet actually match the climate available. Perhaps tomatoes don’t grow where you are, but surely something else did: very few places were founded without an agricultural/fishing base.
On a global scale, the huge (emissions) efficiency of loading a single enormous shipment of produce is only true on the receiving end, a number of farms far away all ran their own small deliveries to a depot for shipping at the start of the chain. There is no magic turbo-carrot-farm that harvests the world’s supply in one go.
Compromising informants working for a foreign government invading another foreign land is not a crime, nor much of a moral dilemma.
The risk inherent to collaborationism is also not one anyone but the informant must account for. Just as mercenaries operate in that same high-risk-reward / low-solidarity space, and accordingly join the cast of characters in war zones along with spies and informants without international sympathy.
> Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does.
The lack of positive rights infringes on a society’s own fabric, however. The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct. Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.
Society ensuring some minimum standard of health so that one may properly navigate life (and enjoy the rest of their rights) is framed as a right as health is a general precursor to everything else: it’s not that odd a framing, no?
“You have the right to vote, but not to live long enough to get to the polls” is the outcome of categorizing essential societal functions as somehow out of scope of what society should do. I think the average Republican gets that, though a lower tax bill is always the priority.
In the US, the police have NO legal obligation to help or protect you.
"Rights to healthcare" ultimately means "rights to enslave healthcare workers". If healthcare workers refuse to serve you, you have no healthcare unless you force them to serve you which makes them your slave.
Positive rights always end up in some form of forced labor aka slavery.
The lawyer question is different. The government is given the right to enforce laws, but the responsibility to provide legal council to counterweight the force of government. Lawyers aren't compelled to be public defenders, but if no public defender were available/willing, the government would not be allowed to imprison and try someone, so it is a negative right.
The comparison to slavery is rather distasteful. Both by recognizing actual slavery and by the simple reality of public service being a profession, not a sentence. Your right to health compels tax resources to be spent caring for you, not enslaving people into free cardiology.
The practice of healthcare already comes with the understanding that all who seek treatment (resources permitting) will be treated, and the interrelationship between patient, hospital, doctor, and the duty to care is foundational to the right to healthcare. It is however not the point. EMTALA in the US could be further reading if you’re interested in how refusal of care works in practice re: funding.
As per law, in the hypothetical where no lawyer could be found to take the case and no public defendant compelled to, the situation merely continues with rights violation, instead with a delayed trial or excess imprisonment. Like all rights in general, the loss of one weighs on the rest as if a ball on a net.
> The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct.
This is a negative right: the state cannot prosecute you without a lawyer on your side.
> Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.
Police protection is not a right. The police will come and investigate and follow up, maybe, but you can't assume they'll protect you. They might be far away and unable to do so.
You have the right to live as long as you want to, you just don’t have the right to make me pay for it. Those are two very different things, both ethically and practically. (I am, as I said, pro public health care anyway.)
You are correct that police and attorneys for the indigent are a couple positive rights. I didn’t mean we don’t have any. We just don’t have a culture of them.
Put another way, something that didn’t even exist 100 yrs ago can’t be framed as a right. Saying I have a right to an iPhone is the same as saying I have a right to health insurance.
The right to a gadget and the right to health are incomparable on a number of levels. Even besides that, women’s suffrage is less than a century old in most places, and just about in the rest. Gay rights are even younger. Health, women and gays have all existed since the dawn of time; the “when” in codifying rights has never really correlated with historical prevalence, only societal development.
US support, extraordinarily stalwart as it is, has shown its first cracks. Western allies are considerably less religiously motivated, or defense-industrial-linkage motivated, and can’t be counted on in the same way. Recent ICC news can be read as an indicator of prevailing winds.
The US is not above dropping allies when politically convenient, and as Israel burns its public image (or seeks geopolitical independence), both parties stateside can entertain anti-Zionism.
Watch what was previously far-left/right become normalized as legitimate considerations regarding US support of Israel. That Iran would entertain its recent long-range strike should tell of regional estimations of how likely the US would be to intervene, and then extrapolate from there.
I don't completely disagree. It's clear that the US does not want war in the Middle East: it's bad for business and I think that the US too has had its fill of fighting. I'm also kind of getting the vibe that the US administration is not at all happy with the Israeli government's actions.
But that doesn't change the geopolicical situation: Israel is an important ally of the US in the Middle East and the US is an important ally of NATO, so whatever Israel does, the US will stand behind, and Nato will stand behind the US.
In any case, if the US wanted to stop the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza they would have done it months ago. I don't think they really care, and if the Republicans come into power, with all the looney tune characters from the Christian Zionist right in their ranks, I don't think there's going to be more care.
But, hey, we'll see what happens. It would be great if public sentiment and opinion counted for something in modern liberal democracies, but we have the recent enough example of the war on Iraq and the gigantic demonstrations against it in the UK, and how they didn't change one thing in the decisions of a liberal British PM.
Out of idle curiosity, how did you arrive at Zionism from a non-jewish and leftist background? That has to be one of the rarest identities to simultaneously associate with.
Thank you for asking, it's sublime to see that you're unique in others eyes, very hard to see yourself
Let me really blow your mind: also, raised very conservative Catholic, didn't do Confirmation, then was Muslim for about 6 years
It's all a long story. Catholic, LGBTQ stuff rubbed me the wrong way and in some of the deepest grace I've seen, my religious educator encourage it.
Muslim, I was essentially on my own once I turned 15 (abusive and absentee parents) and transferred from Catholic school to public school (save $$), and the most welcoming people were foreign, the rest had been in the same classes for a decade. They didn't prostelyize, it was fun going there on Friday nights to play dodge ball, it was little incremental work to show up earlier and it felt good.
Zionist...I swear to God there wasn't a single negative word about Jews or Israel or other religions at either of the 2 mosques I went to. There was a quiet understanding that Palestinians were hurt and that it was a bit melodramatic at times, given they had structural issues on their own side.
In general, I'm an inveterate both sides er, and I'm guessing knowing a lot of avowed older Zionist as well as Muslims makes me feel secure in "ugh there's some extremists / ignorant people in group X" rather than "wow group X is inherently evil"
And now you're making me think maybe the parents have more to do with it than I realize. It took a lot to finally say...wait, no...what they're doing is wrong and I don't owe them anything. As long as I'm thinking things out and rational, I'm doing my best. Adds to the comfort with tendatiousness/both sides and confidence in holding to it.
(Ran out of posts on main, so this is from my old backup when I was gainfully employed at FAANG)
Ah! You’re your own Jerusalem; ever in the middle. :)
That does make more sense: unless I read you wrong, leftism wasn’t a real sway here - and that’s easier to square away. Leftist Zionism is (as far as I can tell), almost only advanced by Jews.
Neat, though I’m perhaps confused as to how you might even arrive at Zionism (a rather polar position to take).
The degree of security theatre at airports aside, surely you don’t think public transit should suffer TSA-style security to warrant a solution to that self-imposed problem?
Have you considered leaving this society where people value libraries for one without taxes? It might suit you better.
As per tools, you benefit from having a community that doesn’t needlessly spend on tool duplication or rental, which ultimately concentrates local wealth. But that’s an economic argument when the real one is that it’s a desirable service for cost, convenience and community spirit.
To be fair, the library lovers took over the government from the no tax party, so you are bound to see some friction. No taxes lost their country, and are frustrated.
Tab groups work better with OS functions than multiple windows past a certain number, which is generally dependent on the physical size of one’s screen(s).
Exposé on MacOS can get very, very cluttered with more than ten windows open from various apps, and distinguishing between them can be rather cumbersome if the content between the last opened tab of any given window isn’t visually distinct from another.
The same is true in Window’s implementation and in their taskbar preview feature.
The same is also true with tiling window managers, as every new window becomes something else to manage, where perhaps a “browser” slot should really occupy just one consistent tile.
Full-screen workflows (common on small laptops) also benefit from a singular “browser” screen, flanked by other applications instead of numerous windows whose minimization needs to be managed.
That, and managing tabs between windows is annoying, especially with rules to open a particular link within a given window, since that might break a setup as above. (Imagine a HN link summoning an entire separate window, reconfiguring your desktop setup, when the errant click could’ve just switched tab groups.
It is unfair for SeriousCompany to pretend that resources it releases to the public (usually as a PR move or to advertise a paid product) must flatter their motives and the narrow confines of what they envisioned the public might use them for. That is wishing a free resource had a license when it only has a social contract. If the provider could set limits, it would no longer be free.