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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."
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.
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....
No, I think, it is more likely, that your sample (just the circle of people you know personally, right?) is just too limited to be statistically meaningful.
Would be interesting to get similar stats from a French site, that's visited by different sides, rather then just a club of people in agreement with each other.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think you're forgetting something.
This article is about UK politics. Remember that by British standards, American politics is right wing, or far-right. You need to be very careful when just talking "right" and "left" or "Republican" and "Democrat" if you're comparing UK and US politics.
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
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.
Sounds rather disheartening to me. The internet already makes it really easy to see only the arguements that you want to read, and ignore the points of views that Other People have. It makes for much easier reading/viewing(no need to strain myself to understand another's POV since what I'm reading supports my thoughts). But it seems like a recipe for laz(y/ier) people, who don't have the ability or interest to critically examine a line of thinking.
If I'm reading only the leftist/communist/*nixist side of things then I'll stagnate right? And be less likely to understand how anyone could have any alternate point of view? ewww =(
Frankly, I think they're all fucking crazy. I would say that free software, if anything, is the realm of the more libertarian among us. Arguing left versus right is like a normal person listening to an anal retentive obsessive compulsive and a total slob arguing over housecleaning. I'm for free software, because I like not having to pay money for things if I can get them for free. I also like being able to modify them without restriction and I like the community. Frankly, the idea that we have to be subjected by the philosophy of one side or another (who both want to control our lives and restrict our behaviors, but regarding different aspects) is fucking horrifying.
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.
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
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
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
"Does is mean authoritarian/libertarian, or socialist/capitalist?"
These days it means pretty much fascist/socio-fascist.
Both generalized political leanings have become corrupted with authoritarianism to the extent that neither can be associated with either civil liberties or free market capitalism.
"If I was pro-... make me left- or right-wing?"
It'd make you a dangerous terrorist suspect.
Do not question Authority.
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.
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
No meaningful argument can be made about the typical quality of life of today being worse than any time more than 200 years in the past(based, essentially, on the incidence of slavery). 100 and 50 years are a little arguable, but my position is that today is better. The population in 1800 was less than a billion. In 1900, it was less than 2 billion. So the increase is not exclusively a result of the pie growing, but it is a darn fine thing that it is growing.
To the extent that most Americans enjoy a quality of life 98% as good as that of Bill Gates, 'inequality' is not a convincing basis for measurement(at least to me). As long as my slice keeps getting bigger, I'm just not going to look at the size of my neighbors(sort of, mostly in a fiscal policy sense; circumstance of birth based health care is ridiculous in a society as wealthy as the US).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
You know, that political compass site is somewhat wrong. I'm not disagreeing with the ranking it gave me but i found the questions to be loaded and misleading sometimes. Also the questions didn't pose answers for me. I found myself marking on way or the other simply because i don't care wasn;'t an option. I also found myself disagreeing with questions not because what they asked but the way they were asked. Take gay adoption, I have no problem with Gays. But I checked disagree because i think that the people should be married before adopting or it leads to problems. The question asked about couples not married people.
I imagine it would be next to impossible to get something to cover everything. But i think this is somewhat loaded on purpose from some of the questions.
I'm sorry but you are just plain wrong... it seems that you aren't thinking past 7 years ago and or political sound bites.
A classical democrat believes that the rights of the group is more important than the individual i.e.:
Gun control: believes that the individual right to bear arms is less important than protecting society from the dangerous gun owners
Affirmative action: believes that minorities as a group start so far behind that they need to be given benefits based solely on minority statis rather than by their individual achievements
political correctness/hate crimes: believe that certain speech and actions against an individual act at a nationwide group/race level
Taxation distribution: believe that the government can more efficiently dole out benefits at a national group level, being able to shift money from state to state and manage projects there
Wealth redistribution: believe that the government will effectively redistribute money from the wealthier group and give to the poorer group increasing the overall national economy
Business: believes that the government should be actively involved in regulating the business, to protect the group of consumers
A classical republican believes that the rights of the individual is more important than the group:
Gun control: believes that the individual's rights to bear arms is more important that penalizing all gun owners for the actions of a few individuals
Affirmative action: believes that people are all individuals and each person should be looked at individually
political correctness/hate crimes: believe that peoples actions against an individual are actions against an individual not a group and existing laws are sufficient
Taxation distribution: believe that taxation benefits should occur less at a national group level and more at a state/regional level where state/regional isuess can be more effectively identified and managed since they are closer to it
Wealth redistribution: believes that the
Business: believes that the government should have a hands-off approach in that individual consumers will be the determining factor in how a business is ran
You'll kind of see a trend as to where the two parties differences lies here and their actual historical laws back that up... group level vs individual level. This would be the reason why you are incorrect and the reason why I think you don't have a memory > 7 years ago, the current President isn't acting like a classical anything. He has a good mix of both going on.
Additionally, your statement "living your personal life" is a *moral* issue regarding abortion, gay rights, etc. and is not part of any classical political affiliation. Only very recently has these moral issues crept into party lines. Since it is a moral issue, it's very much an individual there are the gay republicans and there are the anti-abortion democrats and a bazillion shades in between as to the definition: i.e. abortion is legal until the 1st week, 1st month, 1st trimester, 2nd trimester, abort while baby is half out of the body, a week-month after it's actual birth (yes I've talked with people who actually believe that, in the case of birth defects).
Libertarians are awful humans, I'm surprised to have been labelled one twice already from the original question. I view Libertarians as people who desire freedom so that they can behave as poorly as possible without being called to account. The word is pregnant with a sort of ego-driven, selfish fuck-you, I've got mine attitude that I don't want to claim.
you obviously know nothing about libertarianism. it is entirely distinct from libertine, which would be people behaving as poorly as they want. libertarians know very much that freedom requires responsibility. and that's the problem today. people want to be able to do whatever they want, yet want none of the responsibility and desire to blame others. and, libertarians know that freedom can only exist when others act with Aristotelian moderation. Libertarianism is based on the belief that people left to their own will be the most prosperous and will be the most successful.
libertarians also want as little government as possible, but nothing close to anarchy. for example, consider the idea of same-sex marriage. it isn't that libertarians naturally support, but rather, oppose state sanctioned marriage. marriage is a private matter and needs no state imprimatur. issues like joint filing of taxes and property ownership are again, big government issues. there shouldn't be joint filing of taxes, and hell, it's your property, do with it as you please. If given the option in a ballot box, I would oppose same sex marriage, but I don't believe it is a public poliscy issue. and that's a huge difference.
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.
as for the war, libertarians are split. I tend towards an internationalist though many libertarians tend towards isolationism. but internationals not in consistent with libertariansism as being strong and forceful abroad is fully within the consitutional authority of the government and certainly necessary to deal with enemies abroad to preserve freedom at home.
the attitude that libertarians are a "fuck you I've got mine" lot is one of ignorance and stupidity. they are nothing of the sort. socialism tends far more towards this as socialism is basically "this is all you're going to get, fuck you" system.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
You can be baffled all you want, but that's just because that analogy is very stupid.
The government has always favored those with money. They always end up getting more out of it than poor people. Crimes, for example, are not only classified as worse the more is stolen, but often not even investigated below certain values.
Look at the entire concept of 'limited liability companies'. If you have enough money, you can suddenly not be liable for debts you incurred! (Without having to declare bankruptcy.)
Look at the air traffic control system, run for free by the government, and used only by people and companies that can afford their own planes. Meanwhile, the government bails out those same companies.
Look at copyright law. Extended retroactively after death. Yes, in theory this could benefit random individuals, but in practice almost all 'after-death' copyrights are held by rich individuals or organizations. Meanwhile, they don't make the dozens of changes that could actually result in much more fairness in the music industry, resulting in more works being created. (Which is the point of copyright law.)
And thats just the subtle stuff. For more blatant, go look at police operating as private security for companies. Look at police union-busting activities in the first half of the 20th century, where the police would sometimes literally commit assault on individuals at company direction, and other times just look the other way while the company hired people to do it.
Oh, and for the absolute most subtle thing: Without a government, the rich are, by a very very very high margin, one of the first people to be kidnapped and ransomed, and/or murdered and robbed. The odds of someone kidnapping me are much much lower. Likewise, my contracts are tiny. And barring some sort of physical injury, I would have a hard time suffering more than a few thousand dollars worth of damages if anyone did anything to me. They benefit much more from a society of laws and courts, simply by having more things of value and more people who would want to take those from them.
Liberals just want to alter who some of the benefits are aimed at, aiming more of them at poor people and less at rich. Or, more often, just leaving the ones aimed at the rich alone, and adding new ones aimed at the poor.
Like Anatole France said: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. He neglected to add that the law, in its majestic equality, allow the poor, as well as the rich, to donate thousands of dollars to politicians, to hire people to protect them from ruffians, and to deduct golfing trips to Europe as business expenses.
And your 'pie' analogy is nonsensical. Money is non-linear. If you're living on 500 a month, and that's raised to 600, you're now a lot better off than if you were living on 50,000 a month and now you're at 60,000.
If 100 people go from 500 to 600, that is a lot better for society than for one person to go from 50,000 to 60,000.
That is so amazingly obviously I have no idea how you're going to redefine 'pie' to attempt to get around it.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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
Wake me up when Libertarians solve the basic problem of people acting like self-centred greedy fucks
That's an unavoidable issue with every political system. Greedy fucks with government guns can do quite a bit of damage, and libertarianism tries to minimize that threat.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Can you read? He fairly specifically said "classical republican". You would have to be drunk (or stoned?) to think that Rush Limbaugh or Anne Coulter are "classical republicans".
It is interesting how many of the world leaders, even those from nominally left wing parties, that they show are in the authoritarian/right wing quadrant. I suppose it is natural for a political leader to be authoritarian as politics attracts those who want to have authority over others.
No, libertarians (capitalist and socialist flavours alike) believe that the world has this tendency of magically getting better all by itself.
Funny, because I see it as a rush to centre. Both the major parties are in favour of maintaining the current high tax, higher spend policy of Brown (left wing); while simultaneously selling anything that isn't nailed down (right wing). Both parties have policies (if not members) that are broadly pro-American (right wing) and pro-EU centralisation (left wing). Neither party wants to spend much money on the military (left wing) or be overly welcoming to immigrants (right wing). Both parties believe that problems with crime, the NHS, infrastructure and education can be solved with media friendly sound-bites and nothing as scary as major shifts in policy. The only difference is that Labour hates liberty in general while the Tories restrict their hate for people who are poor, black, gay or a drug user.
Which in a two party system, leaves voters with a choice between reactionary puritanical racists and authoritarian power-obsessed fascists.
Another victory for first past the post voting!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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).
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.
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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Me, me, me. What about the people who were enslaved to pay for your 9 months welfare?