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Political Leaning and Free Software
00_NOP writes "HateMyTory is the world's first political rating site and occasionally gets blasted or promoted by British bloggers on either side of the political spectrum. But here's something even more intriguing: when the right come visiting they hate the site but they are disproportionately likely to be users of free software, whether that is just Firefox on top of their Windows box, or all the way with some Linux distro. But when the left rally to the cause they are more likely than not to be proprietary software users, albeit with a big bias towards Apple. If Microsoft's defenders think free software is the road to socialism, why don't the left seem to agree? As a leftie, and a free software advocate, I find this pretty puzzling."
Most leftie blog (and just plain lefties) are Linux/Free Software users. Most right-wing people I know are Windows users.
Then again, this is a country where most governement departments are switching to Linux, so...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Left people _tend_ to be richer, so they go for Macs. The far Right (the kind that read the American Conservative) tend to be practically libertarian anyway, so they go for privacy and freedom, which happens to come best with Linux.
Some items a Democrat will mod up are generally the things a Republican will mod down. If you wanted to run a Slashdot style mod system and invite both Reps and Dems to your site, you should have moderation based on their political styles instead of an additive approach. For example: Dems mod an article up 77 points, while Reps mod it down 20. For Democrats, it will be a prime article to read. For Republicans it won't even show up. I think this may be the future of moderation on websites. It doesn't have to stop with just Democrats and Republicans, there are tons of groups that are at odds, or simply different than mainstream.
God spoke to me.
Illiberal Left using proprietary software. I'm not surprised — I'm surprised, anyone else is surprised, though :-)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...a symptom of the subtle switching of poles that has taken place in politics over the past few decades.
Your "right" leaning folks are probably more independent/market minded. I.E. if free software does the job then why would I pay for something that may not be as good?
Your "left" leaning folks will probably (IMO) be more willing to follow the "alternative crowd" I.E. Apple. To my line of thought, many on the "left" are just as intolerable of individuality as those on the "right". The difference being one
side wants power in the hands of corporations and the government while the other just wants government to have the power.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Left / Right leanings are utterly irrelevant to Free software - reasons for choosing free software vary enormously from person to person & are frequently based on traits shared by individuals with widely varying political leanings.
As a leftie, and a free software advocate, I find this pretty puzzling.
As a person, and a free software advocate, I'd be wary of anyone labelling something as left or right. Debate issues for what they are, instead of trying to categorise them as left or right.
than not to be proprietary software users, albeit with a big bias towards Apple.
Interesting. I wrote recently in my journal about Apple's support for the democrats. The funny thing is, from where I'm sitting, the Dems look right (it's just that the repubs look righter).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Why do conservatives disregard conservation?
Why do right-to-lifer's support the death penalty?
Why do liberals promote loss of liberty?
Why do those who dodge military service advocate preemptive war?
A few more conundrums to ponder....
Maybe those to the right using Free Software appreciate its "solve-it-yourself" ethic, or the spirit of individuality and control of one's own property. Can't really say. I use in the majority Free Software, but I refuse to have my views put on some one-dimensional scale. People are complex, there's no reason to suspect a priori a correlation between politics and choice of software. Why assume that Free Software evokes communism and socialism, when it's driven by such a vibrant and diverse community of individuals — as opposed to commercial software, which often feels like the product of a po-faced corporate monolith?
are technically inept. They can only use the software that came on their computers; they stand no chance of getting even Ubuntu installed (even if they knew about it).
Darn, my tongue seems to be embedded in my cheek. My mother warned me that might happen.
As a political moderate I have to say I find that statement of yours pretty idiotic. You say "engineering requires hard work" and imply (but don't have the guts to come out and say) that laziness is a liberal trait.
One could just as easily counter that "innovation requires independent thought" and thus is unlikely to come from conservative types, since conservatism implies adhering to past ideas (that's kind of the whole definition of the word, right?) Equally ridiculous but if you look at the political tendencies of areas where technical innovation is actually happening around the world, it's at least somewhat rooted in actual reality.
> If Microsoft's defenders think free software is the road to socialism, why don't the left
> seem to agree?
You'd have to show that most of `Microsoft's defenders` think something, then describe who "the left" are and how you'd know what they agree on. Finally, you'd have to find a group of people who find the discussion interesting. This must be a blog thing. Frankly I have better things to do with my time that read such ill-informed typing, but whatever floats your boat.
People use/develop Open Source software for different reasons, but I doubt their political leanings are of any consequence.
Education level correlates with leftward politics, and college students tend to be more liberal.
Guess who gets cheap Apple products, and who's exposed to the Apple brand every day through iPods, iTunes, and computers in educational settings? That's right, college students.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Separation of Tech and Politics is as important as Separation of Politics and Religion.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Granting the artist a temporary monopoly to "help them out" - because they couldn't compete in a true free market. So they say, anyway.
Anyone who *claims* to support the free market and copyright and patent in one breath is simply a lying hypocrite (e.g. Bill Gates, Charlie McGreevy), and their rhetorical trickery about intellectual "property" is designed to confuse.
There are different ways to be liberal. Protecting civil liberties need not be synonymous with promoting a welfare state. Indeed, it seems to me incredulous that proponents of both end up on the "left", when big government is both necessary for the latter and the worst possible enemy of the former.
As a libertarian who is often confused as a right-winger, I've been a Mozilla/Firefox user for 5 years and a Linux user for 3 years now. Maybe it has something to do with "rightys" and libertarians prefering less restrictions in every day life and this carrying over into the software realm.
Most conservatives (particularly in America) are either too poor or uneducated to use a computer on the Internet (and hence stick to the the TV/radio), or they are too "pure" to surf the "Pornternet." Hence most "conservatives" online are the libertarian types which tend to support and use FOSS.
Case in point, my aunt stopped visiting foxnews.com after she saw a Sprint Break ad banner with a barechested guy holding a bikini-clad girl: "I don't need this filth"
I'm a Canadian right-winger (without a ./ account). I use free software because I want more freedom and control over my own life. After all, patents and copyrights are government created monopolies: they do serve certain useful purposes, but they are also inherent infringements of individual liberty. Milton Friedman himself believed that patent terms should be reduced... back in 1962.
I don't know any other right-wingers who use free software, so I shouldn't draw any more general conclusions.
Also markets heavily to the homosexual community. (See http://www.angryfrozenhead.com/articles/Summer2006 /applereally.html for a great example of how they do it.)
People who promote the homosexual agenda tend to be left-wing sheeple. (Not only that, but very susceptable to left-wing marketing. For example, even though under the law of the Palestinean Authority homosexuals are sentenced to death, homosexuals in the SF "gay rights parade" can be seen carrying banners for Israel to "end its occupation.")
Most engineers and mathematicians I know are liberal leaning. I think anyone who is fairly well educated because he or she is intellectually curious is probably more liberal than conservative. Now I do know scientists that are not politically curious and they tend to be conservative. If what you are saying that they spend so much time working in their field of interest that they tend to accept politics rather than challenging it, you are correct to a certain extent.
Linux/OSS users represent a sense personal and social accountability.
Apple users represent a desire for change and improvement but expect to get that by switching to a popular alternative.
Windows users represent people who just use their computers and don't think about anything else around them. These are the same people who get pissed off when news of a new terrorist threat or attack is on TV... not because they feel a connection with the rest of the world, but because it interrupted their favorite sitcom.
Windows does not represent a choice, but rather, the lack of one.
Why do we need to bring politics into this? Why do we need to correlate the users of free/open source software with whichever side they 'belong' to politically?
Some use the best tool for the job and some just use out of their preference. I used to use windows-only software but the day windows refused to boot up for some reason and I had a tough time trying to get back certain data from my NTFS drive (used puppy linux in the end( , I decided to use more linux and the open-source software so that my data can be retrieved easily no matter what happens.
The day that people start chanting 'only uses proprietary software. Are you a ? Prove it by using F/OSS' is the day there'll be another movement called Free/Open-source/Non-political software where people can just use whatever the hell they want without being branded anything.
Seriously.
There is a big, big difference between being a free software "advocate" and a free software "user." Those who take a personal stand to advocate free software usually tend to be on the left. But unless you're someone who believes that "stupid Republicans are too dumb to use Linux," then it shouldn't surprise you that the users of free software -- the ones who find it to be useful them -- tend to split right down the middle, like you would expect from pretty much any random sample of the population.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Thanks for showing how much your bias has blinded you, but that's not the case.
Both sides I would say have equal percentages of people following "just because". You have on the right the bigoted, religious, militaristic types that are trained from a young age to be that way. Then you have on the left you have artsy, bleeding heart type people who think it's "cool" to be left-wing and jump on board.
Both sets are equally brainwashed, though at least in the fake-left's case they still have to stand out to some people (parents, church etc) while the right doesn't have to, but that is minimal.
Great Intellect...
My father didn't like to spend money and he really didn't like to be forced to spend money (e.g. paying taxes and buying Microsoft products). He also really didn't like the war in Iraq.
My father loved Linux. The question is: was my father on "the right" or on "the left". Well, based on his views on taxes he would be on "the right" but based on his views on the Iraq war he would be on "the left".
Fundamentally, conservatives are not in favor of wars of aggression and liberals are not in favor of inefficient government bureaucracy. But that seems to be the definition that most people have. I doubt that either your right-wing creationist bible thumpers or your left-wing back-to-nature hippies are going to be sufficiently technologically savvy enough to like Linux.
When it comes down to it, if you want meaningful correlation with open source use you're going to have a more precise definition of what you mean by "right" and "left".
When a political label like right groups together everything from libertarians to fascists, and left everything from anarchists to communists (and in the U.S., what with our power-mad government generally being identified as right-wing, a lot of libertarians too), this shouldn't surprise people.
And it shouldn't surprise people that someone can be on the "right" but at the same time oppose capitalist businesses in favor of collectively-written Free Software. "Capitalism" is an ideological abstract that virtually all people identifying as "right" or "libertarian" support: It's an economic system based on free markets, free trade, freedom of choice in whom you do business with, competition, and so on.
But a lot of purportedly capitalist businesses aren't very capitalist at all -- they use their power to dominate markets, limit choice, get laws passed favoring them, lock in consumers, destroy competition through anti-competitive practices, and so on. And things like Free Software may be collectively-written and therefore, to a lot of people, smack of socialism, but they offer a lot more choice to people, and there's little force that the author of any given OSS package could exert if everyone one day decided to up and go use something else.
So you end up with some people who can call themselves "capitalist" or "libertarian" (and hence they fall under the "right-wing" label) and yet not at all support corporations like Microsoft nor use their products -- people who see through the language and look at what the companies like this are actually doing.
Liberty in your lifetime
I would imagine that free software users are more likely to reject right-left politics altogether. Political "debate" these days sounds like crips vs. bloods - a disinction without a difference.
An R-tard like George W. Bush would be just as bad if he were from the Democratic party.
It's really simple (generalizations coming - yes, there are exceptions):
Leftists/Socialists tend to:
a) follow the herd
b) not rock the boat
c) not have enough independent thought to try something new.
d) be unwilling to work on something that's "too hard"; that's why they want the gov't to do everything for them.
Moderate rightists/Republicans tend to:
a) be more independent, but still follow the herd to a large extend.
b) don't care what anyone thinks but other "conservatives"
c) be market-minded; cost would be one reason they might switch to linux.
"far-right" people/Constitutionalists and Libertarians tend to:
a) value privacy
b) appreciate fiscal value
c) distrust the republicans and the socialists and government in general.
d) like control of themselves and their environment.
When you put all of this together you can see why "right" people would be more likely to use Linux. I know that on the whole more conservative types that I know are open to alternative computing than liberals.
This space for rent.
While I think your idea would be interesting to try, and would probably even be helpful on a mainstream political news site, I think moderating that way is a Bad Thing in disguise. Such a system would very powerfully promote groupthink, which is a phenomenon that occurs quite easily even without "affiliation moderation" / "bias moderation" (for want of better terms).
Consider Slashdot, for example. There are occasions when groupthink can be particularly bad - take any article critical of Linux. What generally happens is that the points of the article (or points that other people raise) are refuted (sometimes not systematically, but even one line rejoinders), then modded up. Then someone disputes the refutations, and will be either modded down troll/flamebait, left as they are, and occasionally modded up. Then you typically have another round of refutations that get auto-modded up and the cycle continues.
It's discussion, Jim, but not as we know it. Now, to be fair, this doesn't happen on every story here; and it has been getting better in recent years, though it can be variable. In fact, the discussion is primarily the reason I spend so much time on /. - despite the trolls, frist psots, and Soviet Russia posts, there will be a good deal of genuinely intelligent discourse.
To get back to the parent's moderation idea. I think it could be useful in a couple of cases:
Case 1: Generic Political News Site - delivers headlines and articles based on party affiliation. Mainly there as a story aggregator, with little / no discussion. Maybe spits out a custom RSS feed based on a combination of the moderation and your preferences.
Case 2: Political News Discussion Site - hybridise /.-style editorial selection with moderation. Most stories will be those that the group wants, but editors can most stories that are important despite making a group uncomfortable.
Admittedly those scenarios are fairly similar, but someone could take them and spin them into a service a good few folk would use. Of course it depends on your objective - do you want to provide a selection of interesting stories that folk can read over lunch (case 1), or do you want to provide stories while promoting discussion (case 2). I'm firmly in the discussion camp. In fact, here on /. I recently friended a former foe because a post of his made me realise that he was making posts that went against the groupthink, but had 'truthiness' and were valid counterpoints. Note that I don't agree with all of his opinions, but I do think his expressing them is important. I might even just try and find the post that made me foe him in the first place...
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
I agree, FOSS has nothing to do with mainstream politics and to suggest so through this article is reading too much into things.
In the blogging sphere there is a growing movement of the left and right that transgresses nationality whereby support is mobilised to browse sites that have features like voting to promote their agenda. It would be interesting to see the nationality of the voters as well as the browser and operating system they use.
Although I'm not from US, I have read enough comments on websites to know that Americans have this irrational fear of anything socialist. If you want the average American to think negative about something you label it socialist.
Actually, I think you have it somewhat reversed. The right wish contol and contort human behavior to their narrow definitions of morality. They are hip to invasive privacy violating behavior as well as forced disemination of their favored religious principles. The right has no real interest in fiscal responsibility, but is hell bent in distributing tax dollars to their cronies.
The lefties are also hell bent on their own social agenda, and though it has privacy and freedom implications, it is not so invasive as the right's. The lefties are about distributing tax dollars in their own way and definitely have an anti-business bent to them. They suck too.
What this country needs more than anything else, is some red blooded moderation. A party that would let people make their personal life choices, and won't go around trying to distribute as many tax dollars as possible. Rather republican style welfare for the rich, or democratic style welfare for the poor, they'd just back off, let people be, and focus on essential services.
I suppose such parties exist, but in our current system, they aren't viable. Given the choice between a rightist theocracy, and some annoying PC BS, that leaves me voting for the lesser evil, Cthulhu be damned.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I'm gonna let this topic fester for a bit, and then I'm gonna grep for 'generally', 'tend to', 'most', 'I think', 'probably' and 'maybe'.
I will then have divided the posts into three broad categories: unfounded generalizations based on wild speculation, the same but confidently stated as absolute facts, and this post.
The worse possible enemy of privacy isn't something that is accountable to me, it's a corperation that isn't. If the goverment doesn't control the accumulation and aggregation of data and kill things like NGSCB then we lose all our privacy.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
I saw Whoopee Goldberg on O'Reilly - "I don't have to support my opinions, it's just how I feel". I also saw Bernie Goldberg (no relation) on CNN - "The conservatives are watching O'Reilly, the liberals are watching "Friends"." To me it makes perfect sense. Rugged individualism or something. A lot of people would be perfectly happy to have the government wipe their ass for them, and God bless them. Then there are those of us who will wipe their own bottoms, thank you very much. I'm been using Linux Mint since last December, and I can't say enough good things about them, but if you don't like to think, Linux is not for you. I learned today that Rudy Giuliani voted for George McGovern in '72, and that makes perfect sense to me as well. If you're willing to think, and learn, there's no telling where you'll end up. Then again, if that's not your cup of tea, I've heard Windows Vista has this "Wow factor"...
Left and right are what remains from cold war propaganda. Today the political world is much more complicated. (i don't know how it is in Britain but thats my impression when watching the world from germany) First, there are 3 Basic dimensions: left, conservative, liberal. Second there are many ways to combine them. If someone thinks people should help each other instead of just trying to make money, he might be a leftist as well as a conservative christian refering to the bible. If a socialist dreams of the russian revolution and the fight of the working class, id say hes conservative. Many groups, which are seen as "left" today, are only traditionally "leftists" regarding economics (they want rich people to be forced to share). But most are pretty liberal when personal freedom is concerned (privacy, etc.). (I for example would consider myself an anticapitalist ,so you might say im left, but i definetly do NOT follow the idea of a traditional communist STASI-state where there is no room for individuality, so you might as well say im liberal).
Free software does indeed fit well into the traditional left spectrum as it is built on colaboration instead of competition (as the "normal" free market is).
The free software movement is all about "freedom", so thats a reason for liberals to like it.
A conservative person might chose free software because he doesn like the big companies, as he might have the impression, they are not following traditional values.
What i want to say is: the world of political attitudes is far too complicated for your experiences having any statitical significance.
I think whether or not someone uses free software rather depends on a level of technical education. The more computer-geekerish someone is, the more likely he is using free software (normal users take whatever comes preinstalled on their box).
Now maybe there is some indirect dependency (like: left people are less likely to study an IT subject, because they want to do something that involves smoking joints, like philosophy => less leftists use free software) but you definetly need more elaborate studies of that field to draw a conclusion in that subject.
To be honest, I don't think I want to see software engineers working on political problems - the respective arenas are too different.
What I'd like to think is that the reason why left wing users are using Windows based products is that they are a hell of a lot more accessible than your equivalent *nix; in the UK , illicit copies of windows are far more easy to find, and have supported than a linux distro, and your kids [possibly the motivators for families buying a PC] can play on it.
There's theoretically little to interfere with your real motivation: voicing your opinions and attempting to influence political thought.
Disclaimer - I work with BSD/Linux/Solaris and have a reasonably liberal viewpoint, and am just asked occasionally to support lefties with children.
F_T
Sort of. It's actually latent racism more generally. There are still a lot of people who want the world to be racially segregated - the whole "ethnic homeland" thing. Until peopl are willing to take stand for the right of every person in the world to live where they want regardless of their race, there will continue to be, what you call, Palestine things.
Nihilists?
I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
I find that here in the USA, many leftwing groups use FOSS, but are strangely silent about advocating its use or understanding how FOSS has evolved as a social movement. As a longtime socialist and FOSS user/advocate I find this strange and disconcerting.
We do a fair amount of work for the labor movement: graphic design, satirical cartoons, illustration,and websites. FOSS is barely on its radar. I explained FOSS to a District Council President and her take was that it sounded like socialism and solidarity, two ideas she was strongly in favor of. Local union websites tend to be static sites built in MS Frontpage with very little in the way of interactivity.
That is starting to change. The Service Employees International Union has done some interesting work with Drupal. We're slowly introducing Joomla to the unions we work with.
We are also working with a feminist-oriented women in technology group and have introduced them to Joomla with positive results. They had heard of Drupal, but knew very little about it.
When we try to explain FOSS to Left groups and social advocacy organizations we use the example of how the Howard Dean campaign was able to use Drupal to quickly build websites around the country. That gets their attention.
I'd like to see some real reporting and analysis of the FOSS movement from a leftwing perspective. It's weird to see the "progressive" movement so behind the technological times.
"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir. Mighty scarce."- Mark Twain
Since when is Linux and FOSS in general not a religion?
Because most "right side" people do not really consider software as a political tool but simply as a tool. As such, many of us (myself included) choose based on which allows me to do my work the best. My guess is that the lefties mostly do the same thing and Apple is the trendy thing in many of those circles right now. Over time I rather suspect it shifts around.
For home, that is currently a windows XP system because of gaming and "free" software for nearly everything else. At work, Linux for real work (being able to access source has *really* helped in many cases) and windows when I have to interface with something like the secretaries end of the world.
My guess is that is a fairly common attitude once people know the technical ends. I know quite a few people who use firefox/thunderbird, gimp, and other "free license" software that have absolutely no idea that it has a political side. They are just happy to get great software, even better for no cost.
Those that feel Linux is the path to socialism are, well, gonna be quite disappointed as few people even think of software as a political tool (and both Microsoft defenders and many Open Source advocates feel that way). People generally choose tools based on how well the solve their problems, not to make a political statement. Thus it is nearly as impossible for software to pave the way for socialism as it is for a screwdriver to sway minds - if licensing gets too restrictive it - and software that uses it - just will not be used and that is true for *both* sides (closed source and GPL type licenses)
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
For those that are saying the right/Libertarian = individual freedom and left = big government control, i think that is wrong.
I consider myself a libertarian socialist (anarchist). I have much passion for individual freedoms myself. As a socialist, I only want to see socialism created by the free association of individuals, not by an all powerful state forcing it upon its subjects.
So there is more than left/right - there is authoritarian/libertarian (or fascism v. anarchy).
I would say I have more beliefs in common with a Libertarian (of the right) than a Leninist or Stalinist (of the left).
oh, and 'big L' Libertarin refers to the capitalist libertarians. 'Small l' libertarian refers to anyone on the bottom of the spectrum, both left and right, opposing authoritarianism.
Simple: "Left" and "Right", even when coupled with adjectives such as "Extreme", "Far", "Moderate", "Center-" etc., offer a very limited set of labels to describe political positions. The political landscape isn't a line, it's more of a multidimensional entity. You have a line that goes from "Anarchism" to "Totalitarianism", another that goes from "Individualism" to "Collectivism", another that goes from "Progressism" to "Conservatism", another that goes from "Monarchism" to "Republicanism", another that goes from "Federalism" to "Centralism", another that goes from "Authoritarianism" to "Democratism", another that goes from "Theocracism" to "Secularism", another that goes from "Realism" to "Idealism" (this one is usually tied to International Relations), and so on and so forth. Any single individual can be at any point in each and every of these lines, and any attempt to group all these differing positionings into a mere two overly-broad categories is by definition bound to ultimately fail. Human beings, thus human politics, are and will always be a complex phenomenon.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
What I found inspiring about the talk by a leading Conservative MP was that it emphasised not so much the savings of going Open Source, but that it embraced the idealogogy as a philosophy to run an entire government. I am not a Conservative, but this talk inspired my faith in UK politics as a whole.
If Microsoft's defenders think free software is the road to socialism, why don't the left seem to agree?
Duh. If Bush's opponents think the Iraq war is the road to fascism, why don't the right seem to agree?
Perhaps because the left and the right are diametrically opposed? Perhaps the Republicans love Microsoft, the Democrats love Apple, and people with more than ten brain cells like Linux?
Fuck it, mod me troll and flamebait, I'm drunk and have karma to burn. But I'm right nonetheless. And I'm done with the Republicans AND Democrats; I'm splitting my vote between the Greens and the Libertarians, i.e. "none of the above". Both the right and left are morally and intellectually bankrupt.
Yes, I'm aware this is a UK thing but I can't vote there, and my vote here is meaningless. We (US) need more parties, we need for it to be against the law to bribe (contribute to) more than one candidate in any given race, and if I or my union or xorporation isn't eligible to vote for a candidate I (or my union or corporation) shouldn't be eligible to contribute.
And copyright should only last twenty years dammit!!!
Yes, I'm drunk. mod me -1, incohenernt.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
There are non-lefty bloggers (mostly with libertarian leanings) who will not venture near Windows since they do not trust Gates enough not cooperate with the state and create Windows backdoors.
After all, the whole SNAFU with governments asking antivirus software publishers not to block off espionage trojans coming from the state is just a sign of the times. I'm asking myself how long it will take to have a free and viable Windows open source antivirus software for that matter, which can also keep tabs on Outlook and Firebird/Mozilla.
Just because a lot of free software users are liberal doesn't mean that all liberals are free software users.
Go take a logic course and come visit us then.
You have an excellent farsighted point.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
..and the mouse is the right side, go figure!
Well, I cant speak for the British "Tories", but as an American, it all depends on how you view both 'open source' and the 'right'. I for one am pretty 'right wing' and 'libertarian' in my political stances, but I have been using open source software for all most 7 years (the last version of windows I bought was win2k but haven't had windows on any of my computers in years). In my opinion 'open source' isn't communism, its just another variable in the greater 'free market' system. If you see 'open source' as in a mandatory monetary cost free thing and the 'right' as being greedy corporate shills, then yeah, this would be quite puzzling. But then you are looking at the two in a narrow and simplistic way, as a 'right' minded person, I see 'open source' as a thing of choice, were each person/group can do as they please. Whether they are the developers (whom may choice to release their work with or without a set monetary value or restriction in use) or the users (whom may choice to use and agree to the set monetary price and or restriction in use (or lack there of)). Its all just about choice.
Wrong. Consider this scenario: The average salary in your country is $30k/year. Some make more, some make less. A socialist government is installed and declares that everyone has a salary of $30k/year. Anybody making more than that (ie, smarter, more educated, and hardworking people) will leave for a better (capitalistic) country. Anybody making less than that (ie, stupid, lazy, or academics) will rejoice.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
There are mirrors of this in Spain. The outspoken 'Neocons' see no disparity between Free Software, Free Market Capitalism and personal liberty and really, what is the contradiction? In fact the most aggressive amongst them seem to be pro BSD users. If you look closely at it there's a fair bit of compatible rhetoric between iron-fisted Libertarianism and the FSF..
Then of course there's ESR, he's about as gun-toting redneck as it gets. Free Software, there's plenty for everyone, from nuclear subs to anti-vivisection NGO's to schools in India.
Exactly.
I'm not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. But neither am I a liberal. I actually find the fact that so many liberatarians seem to think the Republicans are the party to vote for to be quite puzzling and leads me to believe that the libertarian party members don't believe their own rhetoric.
But whenever I talk to a left-winger the attitude I get is that this software stuff just isn't very important compared to the hunger and suffering of everybody. I really wonder at this attitude as it seems that most of them don't seem very pragmatic or even interested in realistic attempts to end this situation. They all seem to think that the rich folks should naturally realize that their gains are ill-gotten and find it in their hearts to give up their money to feed the poor souls who don't have food, clothing, medical care or whatever other thing it is they feel people deserve as a matter of course.
So, truly, software doesn't matter to them. And they see no benefit to free software as they just see it as yet another way for rich people to get richer. The idea that people who don't have money could use the software and perhaps make some doesn't seem to occur to them. They are too wrapped up in their little world in which everybody is taken care of by somebody to think that way.
BTW, if you want to flame me... I think the income distribution in the United States is whacked. I also think we may be the first generation to be giving up the freedoms necessary for class mobility. I think intellectual property is one road by which this might happen. If we ever lose class mobility, we are royally screwed as a nation, especially with the income distribution being so totally whacked.
And I do not think being poor is necessarily the fault of the poor person. But the best way for them to become not poor is by finding something they can do or be that others find valuable. It will do them and everybody else a whole ton of good and is more effective than any handout program anybody ever thought of.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Actually, the "smug" episode could have been describing many Apple loonies, rather than Hybrid owners. Any consumer product - or a free software product - isn't as much of a meaningful personal statement as many seem to believe. In fact, I'd argue that with 6 billion people on this planet, none of us are statistically likely to be saying or doing anything meaningful beyond a small circle of people we know, assuming one ever moves out of one's parents' basement. The way people try to carve out personal identities by the crap they buy or use instead of by the people in their lives is just sad and empty. And it's pretty much the norm in the US now. It's the triumph of the ephemeral. Like Slashdot :)
That is why we like Linux/OSS. A Free (no pun intended) market is best for us all.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Left vs Right is orthogonal from Libertarianism. Some of the most libertarian organisations are the most right wing. eg. the survivalists in USA.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
My friend, you have hit the nail on the head. Well done.
I don't know if you're on the left or right; but, it doesn't matter. Your feelings resonate with mine, perfectly. In the spirit of your post, I won't tell which end of the political spectrum I fall. Although, the very idea that it is quite possible that we're on opposite ends of the spectrum, does amuse me, and strengthen my faith in the tech. community.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Most engineers and mathematicians I know are liberal leaning.
You never took statistics, did you?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I was going to write a post about the political leanings of operating systems, but stopped myself just in time. Because it's stupid.
Stop obsessing with what other people are doing. Stop obsessing with who they vote for, what football team they rally behind, and what desktop they use. It's no one's business but their own what brand of automobile they drive.
So what if I don't use the same software license as you? What business could it possibly be of yours?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The British drive on the wrong side of the road, and so to, apparently, do their political leanings. Another lefty for free (speech) software.
There's lots of flavors of right and left, of course, but I would suggest that socialists would be excited about the "free as in beer", where libertarians would go for "free as in speech".
So to my mind that explains why right-wingers might be using free software. I can't for the life of me imagine why lefties would be so keen on either MS or Mac. Some of the affluence arguments, above, sound plausible.
Why are the UK stories being posted late at night in the UK? I want to go to bed, not read /. till the small hours.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
There's an article at the BBC about how the Conservative party is advocating the use of FOSS in government.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Is that when trying to simplify things to a liberal/conservative distinction people forget that there are multiple factors. For example you have to take personal and economic rights separately. It is possible to support a high degree of one but not the other. A classic democrat is one who is for more personal freedoms, less economic. You are free to live your personal life how you choose, however they want to dictate how the money is spent. A classic republican is more the opposite, they want to tell you what you can and can't do in your personal life, but want as much economic freedom as possible. A libertarian (or anarchist in the extreme) wants more of both, a totalitarian wants less of both.
Now of course the political parties have changed, and with in the parties there are people all over the spectrum. However you have to understand that a given economic policy doesn't imply conservative or liberal social stances.
If the government is truly accountable to you, then you have no need to fear a corporation. Corporations only exist with the blessing and protection of government (witness the recent events in Venezuela, or what happened in the Third Reich, or any communist country).
It is important to get the government to pass and enforce meaningful privacy laws. But those laws applied to companies amount to little, if they do not also apply to government itself.
Government is the elephant in the room in the privacy debate. How happy are they to encourage companies to collect all sorts of information about individuals by having little restrictions on what they can do with it. Then, when they are in the midst of an investigation (witch hunt?), they can demand access (probably without a subpoena), brand someone a security risk, and lock him up, indefinitely, without charge.
Look at the recent revelations: Gonzales, Mueller Admit FBI Broke Law
Whatever laws constrain business, need to constrain government all the more vigorously.
I don't think corporations are the "worse possible enemy of privacy", that title properly belongs to the entity who by legal threat and use of force can already sweep privacy aside (say in the course of a murder investigation): the government.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seus
What this country needs more than anything else, is some red blooded moderation
;)
Mod me down but...
I very deliberately used the word 'politics' where you expected 'state'. I guess one man's enlightenment is another man's confusion.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
In my experience (I'll admit I don't have too much), people who lean libertarian are more concerned about control. Some people who can't imagine thinking for themselves assume anyone who doesn't want the government controlling their life must instead want a company controlling it. That's dumb. Libertarians don't want a company controlling their life either. It's perfectly logical that they would gravitate toward software that gives the user control over their own computing experience.
I feel as though I've got a pretty good idea as to what type of mentality drives the people who put the flamebait and troll tags on this article...I want to suggest something though.
Rather than simply attempt to shout down (and basically censor) anyone you happen to disagree with, why not actually try and refute what they believe via logical argument?
Surely it isn't because (heaven forbid) you don't believe your emotionalism actually has a logical basis, deep down?
I agree with your definition of liberals vs conservatives, but I'm not sure that dichotomy maps directly to left/right. To me, left-leaning people are more concerned with limiting inequalities (and trust the government to do so) while right-leaning people are more concerned with maximizing overall well-being (and trust the invisible hand to do so).
I think you can actually have left-wing conservatives et right-wing liberals, as well as left-wing liberals and right-wing conservatives. At least in Europe, where left-leaning policies are much more persasive and established than in the US, so can be deemed 'conservative'.
I'm struggling with two areas where one can be 'liberal' or 'conservative': the economic one, and the social (moral, cultural, religious...) one. It boggles my mind to see how the right advocates economic freedom, while pushing for a social status-quo, while the left does the reverse.
Oh well...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Anyone looking for the GNU 2 licence may find it at:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
The pre-preamble contains the text:
"Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."
The whole document uses "license" instead of "licence."
In my part of the world, "licence" is a noun and "license" is a verb
(similar to practice (noun) and practise (verb)).
Can I disregard GPL2 because its use of the word "license" is incompatible with my grammar?
Makes sense to me.
Open Source advocates are people who understand that OSS is a functional adaptation of the software marketplace to concentrated market control. For those interested in advocating free markets (in which competition is better for everyone than monopolization), using OSS to break abusive monopolies is a good deal.
So, to clarify, OSS advocates are actually free-market libertarians; Microsoft and Apple apologists are actually the commie fascists. I realize that's the opposite of the convention, but think about it.
Do you have a pointer to a more statistically valid data set, then?
A left-leaning person sees the world how it is, and is unsatisfied. They imagine a better future and are disapointed with today.
A right-leaning person compares today to yesterday, and is usually satisfied with the improvement.
Lefties imagine perfect software, and are happy to complain until the perfect reason to change is available (Apple.) Righties see the improvements and embrace them for their improvement over the propriatary, limited though it may be (Firefox.)
(My conservative friends points out that in most things, we're better off than our parents. Every Liberal friend points out in how many places we have much further to go.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Albeit I consider myself left-leaning, a free software user, and a conservative (yes, that is right. I just look back to a different time in history from the right-leaning conservatives).
Free software is almost the purest expression of "socializing the means of production" I know of. Not in the Soviet sense, but in a different sense. Essentially, those of us who put our effort into the softrware own it. THose who want to use the software get a more limited sense of ownership just by virtue of using the software. But this isn't like soviet communism (what I call Neofeudalism because everything is centrally run by the state) but a real grass-roots communal ownership of the production process (closer in my book to what Marx was talking about anyway).
At the same time, this form of socialism/communism is actually more right-ward leaning than left-ward leaning in that it supports a sense of independance and self-determinism rather than a sense of obedience to legal frameworks built by large collectives (corporations) that we do not own simply by using their products (purchasing power is not ownership if we are afraid to use it).
So there you have it. FOSS is a great right-wing communist conspiracy aimed at world domination!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This is why I'm glad the country I live in has a democratic system that doesn't automatically dismiss anyone who doesn't fit into one of two main categories, but actually fosters a government that's formed by people with all kinds of different views, in a structure that actually encourages them to negotiate and work together.
I don't mean to criticise you personally, but I think the fact that you leapt straight to the democrat/republican divide, just as everyone else does when referring to the US federal political system, exemplifies one of the biggest problems with the US Federal democracy. Most people seem to be so accepting of the status quo that there's little or zero opportunity for anyone different to have a chance. This results in large amounts of inefficiency and corruption, and a system where it's not possible to get anywhere in politics without aligning oneself with one side or the other.
If that isn't enough, people's alignments are thrown around to score political points. For instance, it shouldn't be an issue that Bush's Science Advisor is a democrat, but it's been a fallacy used over and over again to justify that Bush's science policies must somehow be "scientifically neutral" and fair to all. Everyone who's analysed by the media is thrown into one of the two sides, and the have to be on one side or the other or they get dismissed and ignored as irrelevant.
kudos to you all. Both left and right. This has been one of the more interesting discussions I've seen in a thread in a while. Maybe liberals are more attracted to the idealogy of free software while conservatives are more attracted to the practicality. They both have reasons and both are good enough. Getting passed the Democrat Republican label and instead to the essence of a thing is the only answer anymore. Otherwise you are just a sheep. Both labels should be hated. What intelligent person desires to live in such a box?
The left tends to be much poorer than the right.
Rich buisness owners, as well as rich land owners, etc. all tend to be conservative. Poor people, especially poor minorities tend to be left. Even as you move away from extremes, the richer you are, generally the more conservative you are. It makes sense, with rich people wanting to keep their money and poor people wanting the rich people's money.
Due to the prevalence of organized religion in lower class Americans pushing so strongly rightward, this isn't quite as true in America, but it still works out pretty well.
Just because some rich hollywood celebrities are liberal doesn't mean all rich people are liberal. Artists tend to be much more liberal, whether successful celebrities or street painters nobody has heard of. In general, most rich people are conservative.
Find any poster on any social site astroturfing for Windows and posting anti-Linux FUD. Check their comment history. What other topics do they gravitate to? Adobe vs Gimp, evolution/creationism, and global warming fact/fiction. Where do they fall? Pro-Adobe, pro-Bush, pro-creationism, anti-global warming, anti-Linux. 100% check it yourself, anybody who finds different is welcome to post it here. But so far I haven't seen a single exception.
If someone associates it with Socialism or Communism they're mistaken; the closer you get to Open Source the more you realize it's got very little to do with it.
I also don't think the right and left have any direct correllation with Open Source in either direction... these are delusions of grandeur I'd say.
If Open Source has a relation to an economic philosophy, it's to Capitalism - and companies that want to be good stewards of the communities their products are involved in.
The reason no one knows them is because we on the right are busy doing things to make their lives easier, safer, and freer while the left is complaining that we are doing it in the first place, that we are not doing enough, and although they on the left would never take the time to do something themselves they sure have an opinion about everythign we do, and quite vocally too.
The problem with the right/left view of politics is that it doesn't really mean anything. Free software users often have a strong libertarian streak. It doesn't always manifest in the same way (some are _real_ libertarians, some are economic libertarians, some are social libertarians (which has an applicable double meaning) like me) but depending on time, place, and context, they could all end up being seen as "right-wing", "left-wing", or "moderate".
Leftism/Liberalism/ Progressivism is about change and progress. Conservitisim is about maintaining the status quo. I think which sounds better to any invidual is based on whether their wish to change things or have them stay the same.
Yeah fuck those damn stupid uneducated academic pigs! Bravo.
that it depends on precisely the same tenet as Communism: the idea that in one way or another, people will be perfect. Communism depends on people being perfect laborers -- if people don't always work the best they can and produce the most they can produce -- i.e. if they are lazy, the system fails. Libertarianism depends on people being perfectly generous. Libertarians don't deny the need for social services, but claim that charity can take care of it all. The fact of the matter is that people simply do NOT give enough to charity to power all the social services we have today, and furthermore, no, we CANNOT do without the vast majority of them. Moreover, depending on charity often injects religion into the mix, which is decidedly undesirable. We don't need churches deciding who is holy enough to be fed at a soup kitchen in every case.
+++ATH0
The attitude to free software does not correlate well to the left-right axes of politics, but rather to the libertarian-authoritarian axes.
RMS and ESR are on opposite ends of the left-right axes, but they are both extreme libertarians on the libertarian-authoritarian axes.
Socialists want to divide the pie equally, Liberals just put the pie there and tell everyone to grab what they can.
Liberals want to remove government control as much as possible and give all the power to the market. This necessarily means that money equals power, even moreso than it does in a country with a strong government. Removing the biggest power from the picture leads to other powers rising to fill the void. In effect that means they replace the government with an oligarchy of huge corporations.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The right wing are always hypocritical.
They preach small government, but always implement big government. Look at the crazed 'Republican' Party in the US, or the failed 'Conservative' Party in the UK for prime examples.
The oppose open source, but use it because it saves them money.
They talk about compassion, but are anything but compassionate.
The Conservative Party in the UK presided over the most incompetent era of economic mismangement, and total governmental ineptitude that has ever disgraced the UK. The whole fabric of British society has been irreparably damaged by the evil Thatcher women, and the more benignly inept incompetent, John Major-Ball, that followed.
Church is to religion what state is to politics.
Separation of church and state is what all modern states have (using a "True Scotsman" definition of modern states).
Separation of religion and politics is an interesting idea, and suggest that you should not let your view on spiritual matters influence your view on material matters, and vice versa.
The idea that open-source people would be more to the left, and proprietary people to the right, is just silly. I'm to the right of Genghis Khan on most matters, and rejected proprietary software years ago. OSS/GPL software embodies all the virtuous right-wing ideals - giving of oneself without the expectation of remuneration, freedom, open and transparent competition on the basis of virtue, spontaneous human co-operation and freedom from monopolistic control by a "state".
We're running a similar "poll" for the U.S. at yourcandidatesucks.com, where visitors are encouraged to vote against politicians rather than for them. So far, the right is getting out the anti-vote much more strongly than the left. Will run some log reports to see if there are any correlations between browser/platform and voting patterns.
"college students tend to be more liberal"
Over in the UK we'd tend to say that students tend to be more left wing or socialist in their outlook. Here socialist / left wing is one of the two parties that ever get in to majority power, as in Tony Blair (supposedly). Liberal is traditionally seen as more right wing than that.
"Liberal" is traditionally the middle party in terms of left to right. Used to be that our Conservative Party was a bit like your Democrats, your Republicans were more right wing than anything mainstream we'd got (maybe the UKIP people now?), our Liberal Democrats (seen as the fluffy liberals and less right wing farmers) were to the left of your Democrats, and our Labour party to the left of our Liberals , probably making them "goddamned commies" in your country.
These days the LibDems are probably in the same place but Tony Blair is desperate to be vice pres. of the USA (or state governor of the 51st state, aka the UK) so he's pushed his party over so they are indistinguishable from the Tories (right wingers, a bit like your Democrats).
Software is a tool, NOT a political statement.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Most of the lefties I know value government control/planning. OSS is, arguably, uncontrolled and unplanned. Anyone can start an OSS project. Anyone can contribute. No one's approval or permission is required. You could argue that OSS is freer than closed source commercial development projects (if I'm paying the bills, I call the tune). The freedom available (not necessarily taken) to the individual via OSS is surely anathema to lefties everywhere.
I think lefties are more prone to being sheep like huddling in a flock and moved around by the shepherd. But more likely to have principles.
The right are less likely to operate purely on principle rather than cost or pragmatism, so they'll use things even if it makes them hypocritical.
A simple split of users/used, takers/givers meanwhile the people who actually do the development see issues and solutions not problems and party politics (ideology and dogma).
Hah, most people in my circle are conservative libertarians, anti-microsoft and pro-OSS and well educated. Hmm, think it has something to do with the people I choose to associate with? Yea and most homeless people I happen to meet I think are pro free anything, don't like to take bathes or wash their clothes.
I guess he just stumbled over the wrong word. He doesn't believe unmarried couples should be allowed to adopt. So rather than answering the intended question (adoption by gays) he answered an unrelated question (adoption by unmarried couples).
I have to say I am disappointed, but maybe not too surprised at the quality of the discussion. Perhaps people need to get out of their tribal positions a bit more.
/. community is clearly losing out on insights.
The poster who talked about Macs being seen as a rebel movement and maybe that is what attracted the left I think got close to what goes on here, though I just don't accept the point that IT people or engineers are more naturally on the right and therefore that is why more on the right use Linux. Seems like a case of a self-justifying and unthinking argument.
Maybe I should rephrase the question - why does the left see an Apple Mac as more rebellious than subverting their OEM Windows box with a linux CD.
One more thing I've noticed from my server logs - very few BSD users here - I think one out of 400 or so vistors to HateMyTory - all that "BSD is dying" stuff means the
...with the terms "left" and "right". Socialists of all varieties have used these terms for straw man arguments to vilify thier opponents since the 1930's. The terms origionally referred to the Itallian Parliment, where the communists (international socialists) sat on the left side, and the facists (notional socialists) sat on the right side. Since the facists lost the war, they are the 'bad guys'. What doesn't seem to be recognized here is that BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT REFER TO SOCIALISTS.
There is no place on this political spectrum for those who are not socialists. The world is not that simplistic.
Here in the US, there are the Democrats (pro socialism, relativly quickly) and the Republicans (pro moderate socialism) as the two dominant parties. There are smaller parties that are not pro socialism, but they get margianlized by a generally socialist press.
The term socialism was invented by groups in the late 1800's who advocated government control of the economy for various political reasons. These included eradication of income disparity deemed 'unfair'(Mordern US Democrats), creation of large commercial ventures (Monopolies) for national prestige (Modern US Republicans), and simple power grabs (Modern Communists). I have given examples here from the US, but corresponding groups can be found in Europe or Asian politics too.
As you can see, both 'left' and 'right' are Federalists. Federalists are people who advocate a polwerful and controling government. Very Hobbsian. (After Thomas Hobbs, a political philosopher from the 17th Century who advocated a powerful monarch for England.)
Opposed to this are those who advocate allowing personal freedom by having a limited government. These 'libertarians' are in the minority, but are very influential. They are often viewed as 'crazies' of one sort or another by the ruling federalist powers. (Crazies are any group that doesn't want a powerful central government that can control the population.)
As long as you continue to fall for the rherotical device of 'left' and 'right' you will never understand the dichotemy you see here. The division is that Federalists favor controlled products while the Libertarians favor OSS, both for philosophical reasons. You should see that both Tories and Labor are Federalist in thier views, but that both groups have some libertarians in thier ranks. There will be more OSS users in the party that is less distastful to those who value personal freedom. The difference between Torrie and Labor is only in what they want the powerful central government used for. A difference in degree, not in kind.
We face the same dilemma here in the US.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
At least here in the US.
Yeah, I know that a lot of those are conflicting views, but here in the US, most parties are internally conflicting anyway.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
This subject shows perfectly the limitations of the left-right dialectic, which dates back to the society of Europe during the French Revolution.
In the 21st century, the immediate question is: Are we talking society or economy? An economic right-winger may have nothing in common with a social rightist. And being a social leftie does not imply a fondness for leftist economics.
For example:
Free and open-source software is clearly a progressive phenomenon on both axes. In social terms, the emphasis is on the freedom of the individual from the authority of the collective. And in economic terms, FOSS puts a premium on cooperation at the expense of competition.
Perhaps the novelty is this: FOSS's economic leftiness is of a new kind. It is a cooperative phenomenon which uses technology to link citizens to each other directly. For the first time, the agency of the state is not needed.
This just got off on the wrong foot. While I can't say why that British site got the results it got, most of the discussion here seems to accept the premise that free, open source software is somehow related to socialism, communism, leftism, liberalism or whatever you want to call it: It's not.
It's that fucking simple. Socialism (I'll use that general identifier for all of the above mentioned) is about sharing a scarce good.
Back in the day, it was about ownership of the production-apparatus, today it's more about general, monetary wealth. Also here fits issues like affirmative action, to the degree that life opportunities can be considered scarce (which AA advocates obviously are convinced off).
Open source software is to an extreme degree not scarce. That's the whole point. FOSS is about working together for a common goal. It's that simple. It's not more or less socialist that closed source software.
The values of Free Software are such that it views a programmers' labor -- his act of creation -- is his economic contribution, rather than the software itself. The economic cost/value of software is measured in hours, not copies. (Which makes sense to me, because additional "units" of software can be copied for free; don't try to look at automobile manufacturing that way! ;-)
Another aspect of Free Software is that the software can be modified by the user or anyone he chooses to designation. Users can't ever get "locked in" to something they don't want.
The consequences of all this, is that use of Free Software results in a free market for software and the labor used to create it.
Proprietary software doesn't really work very well with a free market. As a user, if you want a feature or bugfix for MS Windows, for example, you'll find you have very few options available to you. Furthermore, to some extent, the prevention of the free market from coming about, isn't merely due to the user not having the source code (though that is, no doubt, the biggest reason); it's also due to copyright law. Even if a MS Windows user somehow obtains the source code to the software he runs, it's unlawful for him to take advantage of that and maintain it, sell his maintenance labor to others, etc. Government enforcement of the monopoly, done for the "common good" (encouraging copyright holders to create products), keeps market forces from deciding who gets the job of maintaining a piece of software.
Free Software is about a free market in programming labor; proprietary software is about centralized planning of software products and the use of force to keep it centralized. A Free-For-All versus Father-Knows-Best.
Why wouldn't these two different ways of looking at software and the free-vs-planned approach, correlate with a person's other political views?
I don't know much about British politics, but in the American system, I would expect Free Software advocates to be generally roughly conservative and proprietary advocates to be liberal. You probably wouldn't see that map onto the major parties though, since the two major parties have nearly identical stands on economic freedom, government management of the economy, etc. It's hard to look at the Republicans and Democrats and say one party is more liberal or conservative than the other, in that way.
There might be some correlation between advocates of each system, and representation of "fringe" parties such as Libertarian or Communist; those parties' platforms have something to say about government's role in the economy, central planning, etc.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm not much into labels, but I suppose if pressed, I'd consider myself a conservative libertarian. In Canada (where I live), all of the major parties have points in their platforms with which I vehemently disagree, but I admit that I find the left-leaning ones more distasteful.
I think Free Software fits better into a conservative/libertarian mindset than a left-wing/socialist one. It's all about individual power and control, saving money (that appeals the the capitalist in me!) and not depending on a large organization (whether state or corporation) for your computing environment.
The lunatic fringe does. The "road to socialism" (a play on "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek) is not paved by people making their own choices on whether to put time and effort into developing software, and then deciding what prices (none to infinity) to sell it at. The free market recognizes the rights of property owners (such as people that create software) to dispose of their property as they see fit. This includes giving it away for free, or more commonly, being paid by others to develop software, which is then given away for free by the employers. There's no socialism here, only the free market at work. I think reasonable people, either pro or anti-MS products, are aware of this.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
The ex-Soviets I know that are living in the United States (and I know quite a few, some very well) are simply better educated, better emotionally adjusted, and much more impressive people than their American counterparts for the same age and level of experience. I don't mean a small difference, I mean a veritable world of difference. They are very fundamentally happy and very, very smart, and they do very, very well here. They also tend to be somewhat anti-Soviet and complain about closedness, bread lines, limited housing sizes, etc.
It's a funny paradox to see, because they also quite clearly perceive that their American counterparts are by and large under- or poorly educated in comparison, have little work ethic, and are emotionally unstable and borderline pathological in their individualist-amoral tendencies, despite having every "advantage" of material wealth and an "open" society.
The question of what the Soviet state got right and what it got wrong and the reasons for its eventual collapse are of course heavily debated between right and left camps, but the one thing I always tell them: the Soviet Union produced you—and as a high-quality, world-class individual, you are not the sort that very often comes from America.
Of course there is some selection bias—the very fact of their being here implies that. Still, I know of zero Americans (myself included) that even begin to approach the degree to which all of the post-Soviets I know are impressive, qualified, warm, and engaging. It's really quite an amazing contrast and it's quite amazing in turn to hear them decry the very system that produced and socialized them to be as clearly happy and well-adjusted as they are.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Conservatives hate giving up power... they want it all to themselves... Liberals love giving up power, they want everyone to enjoy it? Maybe not the best allegory.
Conservatives want to do it themselves and reap the rewards, you can't trust everyone... only those who have proven themselves by also doing things themselves.
Liberals want to share the burden and spread the rewards amongst all, regardless of their level of participation (but we encourage you to do so as participating is a reward all it's own), you can't trust any one person to hold too much personal power because they will always betray you in the end, so better to spread it out so no one can do too much damage individually.
People who organize + develop FOSS should tend towards liberal POV but people who use it should lean towards conservative POV. Two different goals there. Organizing + developing it is for the group... using it is for the individual.
Is it clear yet?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
However in the case of the gplv3 it tilts user's freedom interest over commercial interest.
For some reason, when I read "Political Leaning and Free Software", I was presuming the exact opposite of what the article went on to say. My thoughts were: those pot-smoking-hippie-leftists would like free software, because it's "free" as in "Freebird", "free-spirited", etc.
However, speaking as someone that is often called an "ultra-conservative" (and I don't argue that), perhaps the appeal of free software is the "free" as in "free beer" aspect, because we are fiscally conservative. If we can save ourselves from spending a couple of hundred dollars on an operating system, a couple hundred more on an office suite... you're damn right we're going to find some way out of paying that. In my case, free software is keeping me from resorting to piracy
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Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
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At least not in the UK.
Whether we have anything quite like US Republicans here, I'm not sure, mind you, when I go to the USA I never seem to meet anyone who says he is a Republican. Republicans OTOH, who would like the UK to become the UR, we have a fair few of those. They used to be met with retorts of "President Thatcher".
of Lawrence Lessig's presentation on how the Republican's invented the internet. http://www.archive.org/details/igovernance_rawfoot age_l2a
The problem here is that none of these things have any consistent definition. A Tory in the UK would look an awful lot like a mainstream democrat in the US. A mainstream conservative in the US would look an awful lot like an BNP / National Front supporter in the UK.
The terms left, right, liberal, conservative, all have local definitions that can vary greatly from their meaning in other parts of the world.
Where I come from a leftist/liberal is someone like Michael Moore or Markos Zuniga. In France these two would actaully be seen as moderates or even slightly conservative. A conservative here is someone like Ronald Reagan. Well in Chile or Argentina he would be seen as an extreme liberal.
I don't try to use any of these terms anymore to describe my political and economic philosophies. I've learned that they have too many meanings and too much baggage. If I were to say I was a liberal then some people would sneer and start bitching to me about people like John Edwards, Howard Dean, or Hillary Clinton when I have nothing to do with any of them and almost nothing common with them. If I were to say I was a conservative then a different group of people would start in with the histrionics about president Bush and about how awful and horrible he is.
The term I use to describe myself is "Anti authoritarian." I believe in individual freedom and individual rights. I believe that the government which governs least governs best. I believe that the authority of the government comes from the consent of the governed and that it is the right of the people to dismantle and destroy any government which violates the social contract. These rights do not come from the constitution but are the natural rights of mankind. I believe that the government has no authority over that which is personal and private, but only over that which is public. In other words, laws that attempt to regulate private behavior are fundamentally invalid because they exceed the legitimate authority of the state.
Some would call me a libertarian. I don't call myself that because unfortunately even that term has too much baggage. A lot of people who call themselves libertarians are complete nutjobs and I don't want to be associated with them. Anyone who believes that all roads should be toll roads for no other reason than to avoid paying the gas tax is a moron. There are some things for which a publicly funded solution is best, and others for which a privately funded solution is best. There is no univeral superiority to private solutions.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Proof that free marketeers are smarter than left-liberals? ;-)
But seriously, most free (as in libre) software is also free (as in gratis). Any good capitalist would choose a product that (i) performs as desired, (ii) comes with the least restrictions and fine print, and (iii) is cheaper than alternatives. IMHO, the price/performance of a FLOSS platform such as Ubuntu with Firefox and OOo can't be beat. Windows loses on (i), (ii) and, of course, (iii). Office loses on (ii) and (iii), which on balance is probably enough to justify not using it. Don't know about IE. It just sucks too much to even rate it.
Disliking Microsoft's software doesn't require denying the company's right to act however it sees fit. By contrast, using FLOSS software doesn't require buying into a socialist mindset, which may seem common among its practitioners but isn't essential. I can imagine many FLOSS users who wouldn't dream of releasing their own work under the GPL if that meant starving, or who'd only release some after-hours hacking under the GPL.
Besides, the GPL establishes IP in the form of copyright, and explicitly limits the rights others have to it anyway. Just like one would do with copyright work released under a different (eg. commercial) licence. There's nothing inherently anti-market about FLOSS, so nothing that need inherently scare off right-leaning people. Oh, did I mention it's often free?
see Eight Ways to Run the Country: A New and Revealing Look at Left and Right
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Being a techie (and lefty) person with many techy and mostly lefty associates, I've seen the people around me move gradually from a prevalance to use various unixes to more macs as the mac under OSX became better. This isn't as insulting to conservative minded people as it sounds. It's conservative in the good sense to use something well-tested before jumping along to the next hot thing.
From the way things are now, I'd say the main dogma of the left is to give each and every person the same exact value; whilst the dogma of the right is to give each person a different value according to his/her abilities, knowledge, etc. This would amount to a janitor, an sports star and a rocket scientist getting the same exact pay. Both systems can be socialist: the left would rely on "the regime" to equal everyone out (like in Cuba) and the right would also rely on "the regime" to evaluate the "worth" of everyone (like fascism). Still only the right can be liberal which is not the same as libertarian. Libertarians have been a radical branch of the left that oppose the system as it is: with its traditions, its dogmas and its taboos. In fact, for many libertarians the "liberty" they struggle for is just freedom from work whilst still being fed by the system. Liberals, on the other hand, look for a diminished state to uphold a simple set of laws. They want the interaction among citizens to depend upon a few rules and to have individual contracts for whatever the rules don't cover. In fact, liberals hold the conviction that each law passed by the state is just an attempt to regulate a distortion caused by another law that was passed before. The obvious flaw in this way of thinking has to do with the question: "Which basic rules to write down". Right now in Europe there's lots of intellectuals that have made a small fortune by working in arts, the government, NGOs, etc. which lean strongly to the left. In Spain they're called progres or leftists-on-BMW. They use to live en grande and get along with the bourgeois and still blame the rich people or the big corporations. They are exactly the kind of people that use MS Office to write long articles against Bill Gates, and many of them push for the mandatory use of open software in every level of the government by sending mails through MS Outlook. They've become a caricature of leftism, as shown by the Sokal affair.
Just look at my post in /. politics and my bad karma rating :)
:)
Frankly I think you socialists make better software than the capitalists in Redmond
That and even a right winger like me knows it is not a good idea for one Individual/Company to control information flow.
cheers
If you look at it carefully, big cities are *good* for the environment.
/or hunt for my own food, reducing my energy consumption by a third. A City dweller has no such option, requiring a 1/3 higher energy use. This, by the way, more than cancels out the extra transportation energy I use.
You can argue this either way depending on which data points you want to cherry pick.
That is, it's much environment-friendly to put millions of people into a few square km than having each of them build a house in the country.
They generate huge islands of air, soil, and water pollution and export almost all of their waste where it's concentrated in very heavy ways. I grew up on the Jersey Shore where our beaches were covered with hypodermic needles and tampon appliers from NYC. (gee, thanks) The concentration of pollution is also extremely toxic - hundreds of thousands of city dwellers die from this pollution - when measured, 1 in 4 LA County youths had lung lesions from the smog. Let's not exempt human beings as members of the environment.
Not only do cities require less land per inhabitant (cut less trees), but they tend to also require less energy per inhabitant (at least if public transportation is half-decent).
But none of the people generating that pollution take any responsibility for it. I generate a bit more pollution than average from my motor vehicle based on my location but I pay taxes for 31 acres of forest to more than balance my increased usage. Similarly my water usage and sewage disposal is all taken care of on-site, as well as most of my refuse disposal (only non-recyclable plastics and some building refuse need go out at the curb). I can also grow and
I can also install solar, wind and hydro generation, though I'm still waiting to afford that personally. Not a chance in a city apartment.
Another problem is mass inattention to energy efficiency. Each time I'm in a city in the winter I see thousands of windows open on the top floors of buildings where the steam heating system is roasting the occupants and poorly balanced. 20 years ago I thought this would be solved by now, but it's just the same. Single family homes have strong economic incentives to maintain energy efficiency - this concept goes out the window in shared housing, especially if 'heat is included'.
Saying cities are bad for the environment because there's no trees, etc is like saying buses are bad because one bus causes more pollution than one car.
Again, depends what you're measuring. One stinky diesel bus carrying 40 people puts out far more particulate matter than 10 Prius's running on gasoline or, ideally, 10 Prius's running entirely on electricity from a plug-in to the grid powered by wind or nuclear energy. This is the major cause of childhood asthma. I'm not willing to call that a fair trade-off.
If you're still not convinced. Try imagine what kind of environmental disaster would happen if every Japanese had his own house in the country.
That's an overpopulation problem. There's not great solution there, they have more people than they have room for. There's plenty of Earth that's unsettled and it would be great if they could figure out how to do that.
There are also risk costs associated with Cities. Imagine the costs of patrolling NYC against a terrorist attack, the human life toll of a 10.0 Earthquake in Tokyo, the cost of doing the Big Dig. All of this requires work with massive fossil fuel input (environmentally damaging) to mediate and only occurs for cities.
Cities do have many advantages - I'm not sure big museums would exist without them, and we still don't have telecommunications required to supplant the ease of meeting that cities confer. I do think they're becoming obsolete tools as telecommunications trickle out to the boonies. One only need to look at the statistics of the people migrating out of cities to the country, hooking up to DSL, and continuing to do professional jobs with a better quality of life.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I suppose such parties exist, but in our current system, they aren't viable. Given the choice between a rightist theocracy, and some annoying PC BS, that leaves me voting for the lesser evil, Cthulhu be damned.
Only because you say they aren't.
Go ahead and vote Libertarian next time. It's not like your vote is going to matter if you vote for either of the two big parties, and you'll be able to live with yourself for voting for what you believe in, not trying to game the system.
Plenty of folks are working on prying the vocal nutjobs out of some positions of prominence of the party. If we can go from Reagan to Bush in 20 years, we can get a decent LP too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
.. to actually live up their own ideals.
You prove why Libertarians are more often than not, morons.
"If given the option in a ballot box, I would oppose same sex marriage"
That's anti-Libertarian.
"libertarians also oppose government welfare because it is unconstitutional for the government to confiscate the property of one and give it to another. it is also crippling to those who recieve as well as it destroys their initiative."
Fallacious
"as for the war, libertarians are split."
The half that support the deeply costly war are morons. Anti-Libertarian to support the war
that's the other thing -- it presupposes everyone is perfectly educated. Forgot to mention that.
+++ATH0
At present, there is a natural separation of software from political viewpoint. THE reason is socialism is FORCED compliance from government, enforced by violence and ultimately even threat of death. There is no socialist software just because it's being given away free.
Free software is the CHOICE of those who made it. They were not forced to make it by anyone or any entity. They were not forced to give it away and could have opted to sell it had they wanted to. Note too for those of you who shave, it's been a classical long time marketing ploy to give away the razor and to then sell the blades - in a rather lucrative fashion.
It's quite possible in some cases that many contributors to a free project did so without the realization that those leading the project then profited significantly by consulting fees, maintenance contracts, book royalties and other means than selling the software work for money. Then again, they considered their work product a donation to something which wasn't really a charity. It's sort of like going down to the local used car lot on saturdays and washing the cars for free because you like soapy water and the feel of wax.
Software doesn't just happen and its creation isn't free. When one spends 10 man months working on a project full time, you've got to have food, electricity, computer, perhaps medical, shelter and maybe even transportation and during that time you're not working somewhere else. Note that these are not free since they come from the work product of others. Even in the case where a donation is being made part time, this is either work product which could have been sold or was perhaps even stolen from an employer who was paying for something else to be done.
In all cases, software creation is not free and has an overall expense to society. Perhaps the expense is born by those donating their time and perhaps it's been shifted to others unaware of the activity. In some cases, it can be an investment in self by the donor, chalking up the time spent to self education and perhaps gaining in the long term or perhaps profiting by feeling of making a donation to something they believe in - or perhaps it's the fame part of fame and fortune.
Making a donation is not something that any political viewpoint has a lock on, even though one tends to find those on the left rather skimpy with historical charities. Evidently, they'd rather have gov. force you to 'donate' more than you want and then waste most of that donation before it reaches the intended recipient. Free software tends to be a donation just as working on a free software project is donation of time.
Just because a software product is for money doesn't mean it's superior to a software product that is given away. Choices are made for many reasons of features and affordability and sometimes compatibility - as well as for reasons of security and protection from sabotage.
As for socialism, it's not only the basis of an inferior society, it's proven to fail every time it's tried. It only works with ants, bees and termites. For higher life forms such as human beings, it's an utter disaster doomed to failure. The only questions are how soon and at the cost of how many lives.
I've assumed that the web space, where I work, is dominated by open source. Two days ago, I ran into a Windows consultant friend who I refer all my Windows consulting business. (We actually get very few requests for Windows consulting.) She complained that her business is really hurting, and I replied that we hadn't experienced any slowdown yet. Suddenly she attacked me along the very same lines... real Americans, patriotic Americans should use Microsoft instead of supporting socialism. My experience plus the posting below illustrates that Microsoft must still be pursuing the scoundral's last refuge. It makes sense that MS would try to take advantage of the polarized political climate in the US. But it isn't obvious that the take-no-prisionors strategy of the right can claim even a slim majority of the electorate. And I assume that a 40% market share consisting of rabid adherents, e.g. Macintosh's strategy, is not a long term direction for MS. While stewing over a hypothetical retort, I concluded that the OS model is similar to the way American Medicine works. Technology (in terms of medical advances) is freely shared, and the competitive edge is achieved in the implementation of health care technologies. Can you imagine the public outcry if a hospital chain made all of their medical procedures proprietary in an effort to monopolize the health care market? Presumably, then, every chest XRay also supports socialism. OS really represents an independent organization of programmers similar to the AMA, ABA, AIA, ASME, IEEE, and countless others. All of these organizations own standards, processes, and technologies collectively owned by their members and largely in the public domain. Granted, those organizations emerged in a less politically divided culture. But otherwise, OS is no closer to socialism than any of these other stalwart organizations. -Jim
I don't know that this is true, however, I do know a number of "righties" who are vehemently free/open software users/advocates. But the reason for it is "Libertarian" in nature. They want to avoid being under anyone else's control. They put more weight on this aspect than on the "pro-business." They use free software as a result of having the Libertarian-like point of view, whereas MS defenders make claims of socialistic tendencies as a result of defending proprietary software. The former places ideology ahead of all else; the latter rationalizes to defend their specific position on free/proprietary software. Ask them if we'd be less socialistic with facial tissues only available from Kleenex. BTW, I'm also probably considered "left" (though I reject that to some degree), and I also (unsurprisingly) support free and/or open software AND hardware. Especially for voting!
I myself could be described as a small l libertarian who is about off the left side of the scale on social issues but fiducially pretty darn conservative, ie: cheap. I also have this personality glitch wherein I get pretty annoyed if things do not work properly and consistently. Free Software is about as good as it gets from my point of view. It works very well as a matter of normal course, I can do what ever the hell I want with it on my computer, it is inexpensive to obtain in the extreme. As a bonus I end up connecting with a lot of like minded folks with whom I can share, trade, improve and support others in developing this software without the parasitic authoritarian, bean counting and marketing types demanding their divvy. Oh but if only the rest of my life should fit so well to my inclinations wants and needs....
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
you're still operating on the assumptions that taxes go from the rich to the poor
Here is the actual government spending data:
Department of State 1%
Department of Defense 19%
Environmental Protection Agency 1%
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 24%
Social Security Administration 18%
Interest on the Public Debt 13%
Other 24%
So, you are saying that the DOD only benefits the rich - so the poor don't mind being Muslim. OK, whatever. It sure seems to me that "Medicare and Medicaid" and "Social Security" give basically zero to the rich. That is 44% of the total US budget! The rich pay the most taxes: the top 50% pay 96% of taxes, the top 10% pay 66% of taxes. How is this not "taxes go from the rich to the poor"?
Now you probably say "but those don't count because of X". Well, I only have one question: Do the rich pay for it? Yes they do, so what we have is wealth transfer from the rich (but only the non-goverment rich - note that the democrats in office pay no appreciable taxes) to the poor.
the government has to hire people to provide those services
First, I do not differentiate socialism and communism that much - communism is just socialism taken to extremes. The basic idea behind both is the same. Now, back to this hiring: OK, so your are the governor. Who do you hire? The guy that spent 4 years going to college, knows everything about the field, and will do the best job possible or your friend from high school that will give you a 10% kickback? And how much do you pay this friend? How about enough to allow for an increase in the kickback?
Governments suck at providing services. Please visit the nearest DMV immediately.
the fact that there at many corrupt 'liberals' that will not vote for things
OK, say you are saying that you will only vote for honest politicians. You mean the ones smart enough to hide their corruption, right? There are no honest politicians - here's an easy proof (within reason): You have two politicians, one honest, one not. The one can hide his dishonesty, because they are powerful politicians. The voters determine who is best essentially on 1) what is promised, and 2) how much money is spent (hopefully in that order). The lying one can promise more (because he doesn't actually have to deliver) and has more money (because he can give contributors money from the till). So the dishonest one wins most of the time. Now you get to Congress, where the politicians have to have competed in many races before and won - they are almost all corrupt, and you cannot find the few that aren't because they have enough power to hide their evil.
As for proof of this - the single biggest issue in the last election was the war, right? All Republicans are evil because they support the war, right?
But everyone in government knows that the war is necessary. So what you will see is back-stabbing, everyone screaming that the war is evil, etc. But no one actually votes on measures that would stop the war. If a Democrat wins the presidency, the war goes on anyway...
You are obviously young, and haven't thought this stuff through. Please let go of your anger, and engage your mind. Everyone wants to help the poor (and everyone else, for that matter), but when push comes to shove you help those you know, not strangers.
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Social Security is from social security taxes, not general revenue, and the rich certainly do not pay the lions share of those. Only the first $90,000 of income a year is taxed for that, and, wherever you got your '66%', they were either deliberately misleading you by presenting you with that number, or you've managed to mislead yourself. So there's 18%, poof, vanished from your math, reducing it to 22%. (And I have no idea where you got the idea only 'the poor' got social security in the first place.)
Likewise, Medicare is not aimed at the poor. Medicare is aimed at the old, regardless of income.
Medicaid is the only program listed that pays out of the general revenue that those 10% pay 66% of and Medicaid...ah, Medicaid. 340 billion dollar program, but the federal government only provides about 60% of the funding, requiring the states to provide the rest. So, let's call it 200 billion.
200 billion of that '50%' that the 10% pay goes to the poor. That's 13% of the revenue, but I'll be generous and say it's '20%'. I wonder how much of the 33% that the other 90% is paying go towards the first 10%? What do you want to bet it's more than 20%? What do you want to bet it's more than 50%?
See, your math doesn't make a lot of sense and isn't really demonstrating what you think it is. The question isn't 'How much goes to the poor?', it's 'Is the percentage collected from the poor equal to the amount paid to the poor?' and all sorts of other questions, like 'What helps everyone, and how much does the government spend on funding that?'
So, you are saying that the DOD only benefits the rich - so the poor don't mind being Muslim.
And why did we attack Iraq, again? For that matter, why were we meddling in the Middle East in the first place, pissing off people enough to attack us? I think you failed to notice that I said 'the military and the foreign policy apparatus'. Other countries do not need militaries so large, because other countries do not constantly meddle in other parts of the world.
I'm not against a useful military, but honestly, corruption in spending has gotten so absurd, as have the reasons we've invaded places. We need to take care of our own people first, help where we, and everyone else, want us to second, and then, if we have any money left over, we can play policeman and mess with people who don't want us.
As for proof of this - the single biggest issue in the last election was the war, right? All Republicans are evil because they support the war, right?
Both the war and the economy were pretty big issues.
But everyone in government knows that the war is necessary. So what you will see is back-stabbing, everyone screaming that the war is evil, etc. But no one actually votes on measures that would stop the war. If a Democrat wins the presidency, the war goes on anyway...
Democrats cannot stop the war, they do not have the votes. Luckily, they can, and will, stop reauthorizing it, or only reauthorize it with impossible goals, like soldiers actually being trained and equipped before being sent over. (I'm in favor of that piece of legislation being a permanent thing for all military engagements. If the president want to send unprepared people over, he can make his case to congress. And, of course, it would only apply to sending them out of the country...if the US is actually invaded, he can use anyone in the military to fight.)
You are obviously young, and haven't thought this stuff through. Please let go of your anger, and engage your mind. Everyone wants to help the poor (and everyone else, for that matter), but when push comes to shove you help those you know, not strangers.
Ironically, when I was young I was much the same sort of idiot you were, thinking both political parties were equal and the least government was the best. Then I noticed that only the Republicans seemed to be insisting that the Government
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Only the first $90,000 of income a year is taxed for that
OK, so when you see those poor people earning $90,000, you have a point. Until then, you don't. A person making $90,000 pay in a lot more than they will ever receive. A poor person receives a lot more than they will ever pay in. Wealth transfer, QED. (The same applies for Medicare. Old rich people do not use it, because they self insure. Only the poor people use it. Wealth transfer, QED.)
Your I wonder how much of the 33% paragraph didn't seem to make much sense. I'm probably missing your point.
I am all against corruption, I just don't believe that socailists and liberals are any less corrupt than conservatives and Republicans. Liberals are just more careful to hide financial linkages to corporate america because their constituants care more.
Democrats cannot stop the war, they do not have the votes.
They could stop the war on a dime - just don't vote in the money. They won't do this, for the reasons I've already stated. It's easy to talk big when you are a minority - but now that they are a majority they have to tone back, or people will ask why they are not following through...
to be insisting that the Government
Cut off. But anyway, I would rather have someone tell me that they are going to do something in their own best interest, rather than telling me that they will help others.
I spent a few years unable to walk - and thus unable to earn much of an income (I was WAY below poverty in the US). My family was overseas, my father was in Desert Storm. I had to make do on my own. I went to the government for help, and they turned me down. I was not politically connected or the right color, so no help for me. I couldn't pay my medical bills (so don't talk to me about the poor not getting coverage - I know that doctors just see you anyway and write it off).
So I DO NOT beleive in the government's ability to help people. They just can't do it! Why should I pay for their friends pork when I desperately needed help and they turned me down!
I obviously did all right in the end (I ended up starting my own company from my bed) - but government does not work to help people. My story is hardly unique...
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OK, so when you see those poor people earning $90,000, you have a point. Until then, you don't. A person making $90,000 pay in a lot more than they will ever receive. A poor person receives a lot more than they will ever pay in. Wealth transfer, QED. (The same applies for Medicare. Old rich people do not use it, because they self insure. Only the poor people use it. Wealth transfer, QED.)
A person paying in $90,000, does, indeed, pay slightly in more than they will receive. However, as I pointed out, that doesn't have anything to do with the '66%' figure you quoted, or anything to do with general revenue. And you're completely ignoring that benefits are actually tied to how much you pay in.
There might be a very slight bias to the poor to social security, but, in general, most people get slightly more than they pay in, and that's it. (Assuming, of course, they live long enough.) I'm not a huge fan of how it's set up, it is, in fact, a pyramid scheme right now, and less and less people are paying benefits to more and more people. But it's not a 'take money from the rich and give to the poor' program, it's 'take money from the young and give slightly more money back to them later'. (Well, give them back the same amount, although obviously not technically the same money.)
But this is the way attacks on the poor happen. Conservatives pretend that programs that help everyone are biased towards the poor, and programs that help only the rich are good and unbiased. Heaven forbid if you want to introduce new programs that help everyone, and you're a communist if you come up with programs to help society by mainly benefiting the poor, like food stamps.
I am all against corruption, I just don't believe that socailists and liberals are any less corrupt than conservatives and Republicans. Liberals are just more careful to hide financial linkages to corporate america because their constituants care more.
You're welcome to demand more accountability from the government, and less spending and campaign finance reform. It's actually astonishing how suddenly all the stuff is important the second liberals are in power, despite the fact that the 'conservatives' set up the biggest funnelling-money-to-legislatures system anyone's ever seen, called K-Street.
Well, you're in luck, because the new Congress is digging up a lot of dirt on everyone and everything. Right now, they're still mostly looking into actual lawbreaking, but eventually they'll get around to looking at conflicts of interest and bribery. Halliburton's so worried they're moving their HQ out of the country so it's harder to get to the documents.
You can keep asserting that the Democrats are as bad or worse as the Republicans, but I, and a good position of the country, simply do not believe it.
They could stop the war on a dime - just don't vote in the money. They won't do this, for the reasons I've already stated. It's easy to talk big when you are a minority - but now that they are a majority they have to tone back, or people will ask why they are not following through...
Um, I'm pretty certain that's what I said they would do. They will not vote to continue to fund the war, or, to make things even more fun, they'll vote to let the president have the money only if it comes with fully-trained and -equiped troops who have had enough off-time between tours and are not injured. Thus ending the war, because said troops simply do not exist.
Congress might even put in something there about not attacking Iran.
Luckily, the founding fathers knew what they were doing when they explicitly said military spending must be reauthorized every two years.
so don't talk to me about the poor not getting coverage - I know that doctors just see you anyway and write it off
Don't talk to me about it. I can't get insured either.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I can't get insured either.
Are you serious about that? As I said, I do know a fair bit about insurance (the free or low cost kind), if you need some help.
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I have a pacemaker. Thus I have about $15,000 worth of medical bills every eight years or so when it needs replacing. (I was born with a heart defect, which was fixed, but the surgery weakened my natural pacemaker.) Other than that I'm in okay health.
I call up insurance places, I start telling them my medical history, and they say 'I'm sorry, we cannot insure you.' and hang up.
I live in Georgia. Some states have a 'high risk pool' to insure people, but not Georgia, although we've apparently formed a study group to look into it.
So I don't mean 'I can't get insured for a reasonable price', I mean I can't get insured at all, period.
And, no I don't qualify for any disability or government aid in any way.
And, incidentally, my costs are a good deal higher than they should be because of a) the insurance industry negotiating their prices down, and b) people who use hospital services and do not pay.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
OK. Here's what you do:
1) Form an Illinois LLC. (There are probably other states that work as well, but I only know about Illinois)
2) Hire 2 people - yourself and some random friend. You need to have at least 2 employees.
3) Get a group health insurance package for the company. Just contact an insurance broker. (I can help you with this also, if you need it)
4) By state law, the insurance company must accept you in the plan - and the rate is capped at a certain point (I think 200% of normal premium, I'm not sure). Preexisting conditions may apply for a few months, but after that everything should be covered.
The requirements vary by state, but most states have some form of this available. Call an insurance broker in Illinois. Make sure that they understand that you are starting an Illinois company, and you want group health care coverage. Ask them to explain the qualification process, any preexisting condition problems, and how out-of-state coverage works (you travel a lot, right? Like to Georgia?).
Hope this works for you. The cost to form an Illinois LLC is $500. The insurance costs vary depending on the plan you choose, and whether you have a family, but adding all those up probably is cheaper than $15K in 8 years - and then you have insurance if something else goes wrong...
Back to our original topic - personally, I think the best outcome is what we have right now. Republicans control one part of government, Democrats control the other. That way they fight - and the easiest way to fight is to point out the other side's problems. So then the turkeys are thrown from office. The main problem right now (from my perspective) is that the Democrats have gone to the fringes. That makes it very difficult to control the Repulicans, because they know that the alternative is even worse. In fact, that might sum up the entire problem with our current government - no one is running saying "I'm good", they are just running saying "he is worse".
I mean really, you couldn't beat Bush last time? What was that! I had thought that anyone would be better than Bush (even if you liked the guy, replacing him would have been good for America - too many burnt bridges by him) - but then I saw who was chosen! (Here's a hint: having a commander in chief during a time of war who is famous for betraying the military is just not cool, OK? I'm from a military family...)
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Hope this works for you. The cost to form an Illinois LLC is $500. The insurance costs vary depending on the plan you choose, and whether you have a family, but adding all those up probably is cheaper than $15K in 8 years - and then you have insurance if something else goes wrong...
I'll look into it, but it seems like a lot of lying is required.
The main problem right now (from my perspective) is that the Democrats have gone to the fringes.
No they haven't. The Republican have been yammering about how they have, but they really haven't. The ones on the 'fringes', the evil liberals who talk about how nice Hugo Chavez is and how they're glad 9/11 attack, not only are not part of the Democratic party, but not corrected to American politics in any way. Like Ward Churchill, a guy that no one had heard of, and unlike, oh, Ann Coulter.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Unlike the Republicans, Democrats don't invite horrible fringe-dwellers to come speak in front of them. The Republicans have a lot of fun tracking down people who 'could' hold liberal viewpoints and putting them up as the position of the Democratic party, but they have people who are actually supported by Republicans who are just as batshit insane as the craziest professor they've managed to track down at some university somewhere who advocates a world government or whatever. (For some reason, the batshit right right seems to be a lot more violent than the batshit left.)
They actually do this on purpose. It's a trick to move political debate. When you have 'important people' yammering how we should invade all Muslim countries and forcibly convert them to Christianity, it becomes more acceptable to invade them to 'liberate' them, and more acceptable to torture 'the bad guys'.
But, hey, the Democrats have been in office for four months. What fringey thing have they done? Raise minimum wage? (Not that fringey, considering they explicitly ran on it, and half a dozen other states voted to raise min wage in that exact election.) Implement the recommendations of the 9-11 commission? Starting a weekly orgy in the rotunda? Where's the craziness?
I think the best outcome is what we have right now. Republicans control one part of government, Democrats control the other. That way they fight - and the easiest way to fight is to point out the other side's problems. So then the turkeys are thrown from office.
I used to think that, too. The problem is that you then have the risk of the Republicans gaining control, and we've just discovered they are so lockstep they could do anything, even Obviously Stupid things. Maybe they'll fall apart and the actual conservative will take over. I'm not a big fan of them, they often don't want to do the smart thing, but at least they don't want to do incredibly stupid ones like pass amendments about flag burning.
I mean really, you couldn't beat Bush last time? What was that! I had thought that anyone would be better than Bush (even if you liked the guy, replacing him would have been good for America - too many burnt bridges by him) - but then I saw who was chosen! (Here's a hint: having a commander in chief during a time of war who is famous for betraying the military is just not cool, OK? I'm from a military family...)
Protesting the Vietnam war isn't betraying your country.
But, anyway, the media threw that election, by sitting on stories and not doing their fucking job. All the stuff that has resulting the mid-30s rating for Bush existed back them except the Iraq war hadn't obviously gone horribly wrong. The spying, the NSL stuff, the Scooter Libby stuff, all sorts of crap. The media either knew about it, or could have trivially found the story and started investigating it. With just the slightly amount of the press doing their job, the Democrats could have taken at least the House at that point and done some investigations.
Kerry couldn't have won that
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'll look into it, but it seems like a lot of lying is required.
No it isn't - I'm not telling you to lie. You really would be starting a company in Illinois. You really would have 2 employees. You wouldn't have much of a product or service, but that still puts you ahead of half the companies out there (at least you aren't spending money to create nothing!).
Just using the system in place, the way it was meant to be used.
But, no, the media continued to operate as an arm of the White House
What's funny is that I see it the other way - the media under-reports the excesses of the Democrats, and so they tend to be more corrupt. You aren't seriously suggesting that the media that went out with obviously forged documents were holding back on the real dirt?
Probably, the "evils" of the Democrats outweigh the "evils" of Republicans to me, so I see underreporting on the Democrats and wonder why the heck anyone cares that a Republican is gay. To you, the "evils" of the Republicans outweigh the "evils" of Democrats so you see the opposite.
Protesting the Vietnam war isn't betraying your country.
Note that I never said he betrayed his country. He betrayed the military - his brothers in arms. He said that they were all baby-killers, rapists, etc. What's funny is that he testified before Congress that he imself was a baby-killing rapist - I'm not sure that that qualifies you for the White House, but apparently it does for Congress... (Note also that it doesn't matter what you think, it matters what the men in the military think. And that should have been obvious to anyone that cared enough to ask the question.)
that no one had heard of, and unlike, oh, Ann Coulter
This is exactly what I am talking about. If Cindy Sheenan had not been such a public $*^%%$&, then Ann Coulter would have been thrown out. But since the Democrat party sided with Sheenan and her like, the conservatives and Republicans had no alternatives. We couldn't exactly say "look, if you get that Ann person out one more time I'm going over with Cindy." If the Democrats had just held more to the center (as in half way between the old Republicans and the old Democrats, not some idealistic version of center), the Republicans would have been forced to the center as well. Obviously the reverse is true as well.
There is no party for conservatives, for people that want sound economic policy. There is either "tax your way to socialism" Democrats, or "spend your way to pork" Republicans. To me, at least the pork will work long term - I mean they aren't that large a percentage of the GDP - but socialism will kill the country, and force me into a situation I don't want to be in.
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Note that Republicans (or at least conservatives) own all the guns. And are trained in using them (most of the military is conservative). And believe that killing a man who is stealing from you is moral.
You can say that they are wrong and evil, but that will not prevent them from killing you when taxes get to 60% because of socialism. Let's do something that will work instead?
No it isn't - I'm not telling you to lie. You really would be starting a company in Illinois. You really would have 2 employees. You wouldn't have much of a product or service, but that still puts you ahead of half the companies out there (at least you aren't spending money to create nothing!).
You realize that this sort behavior will actually break insurance, right? If the people who need it buy and the people who don't don't, you realize it will break?
This is exactly what I am talking about. If Cindy Sheenan had not been such a public $*^%%$&, then Ann Coulter would have been thrown out. But since the Democrat party sided with Sheenan and her like, the conservatives and Republicans had no alternatives. We couldn't exactly say "look, if you get that Ann person out one more time I'm going over with Cindy." If the Democrats had just held more to the center (as in half way between the old Republicans and the old Democrats, not some idealistic version of center), the Republicans would have been forced to the center as well. Obviously the reverse is true as well.
See, this is the sort of crap I'm talking about. First of all, what did Sheenan do? Did she call anyone 'faggot'? Did she suggest they were traitors? Did she proclaim that the 9/11 attackers should have crashed their planes into Bush instead of where they did?
Sheenan was an antiwar protester. That was it. The worse thing she's done is hang out with Hugo Chavez, which was stupid, but Chavez hasn't actually done anything to the US, and the fact the Administration doesn't like him or his economic policies doesn't make him our enemy, and neither does the fact he disapproves of the level of US influence in the region. (I don't like him because of the way he operates WRT to Venezuela's government, which, ironically, is near identical to how Bush operates WRT to ours. You just know Bush is wishing we had 'Enabling Acts', he instead has to ram through legislation in the middle of the night that no one's read.)
She hasn't said anything nearly as bad as Coulter or Limbaugh or Malkin say regularly. The worse quote of hers is that she agrees that Bush is a 'terrorist'.
But that isn't the actual problem with lumping her in with the right-wing hate mongers. The actual problem is, that at no point was she supported by the Democratic Party. She wasn't given a radio show to spew her, according to you, 'evilness' at the world and she wasn't invited to speak at Democratic events.
And, incidentally, it's the same thing with Michael Moore. He has money because of his pro-union and anti-corporate movies and stuff (Where he is quite funny) and has taken that money and used to attack Bush, usually quite accurately. But despite him being held up as an Evil Liberal, he's not, in fact, part of the Democratic machine at all. He doesn't get support from them, he doesn't appear at their events, anything he does is completely unrelated to the Democratic party.
There are bad people, horrible people, who claim to support either party, and say horrible things, like we should kill all Muslims or we should assassinate Bush. The problem is, on the right, those people are tracked down by the right and given radio shows, whereas on the left, those people are tracked down by the right and held up as an example of how evil 'liberals' are.
Hell, even the unrelated people on the left who can work their way into the media, like Moore and Sheehan, who aren't anywhere as bad as the right makes out, aren't supported by the left.
What's funny is that I see it the other way - the media under-reports the excesses of the Democrats, and so they tend to be more corrupt. You aren't seriously suggesting that the media that went out with obviously forged documents were holding back on the real dirt?
The real dirt...like the NSA spying story, which the media was sitting on at exactly that time?
I'm suggesting that the media didn't do any wor
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And are trained in using them (most of the military is conservative).
Oh, don't worry. Bush is fixing that as fast as he can. He's killing a quarter of them and maiming another half. Meanwhile, the Democrats are setting up rules requiring they don't do six tours in a row and actually have armor and other equipment before being sent over.
The military, or at least the Army and Marines, completely lost trust in the Republicans at least two years ago.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?