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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)
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.
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....
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.
Separation of Tech and Politics is as important as Separation of Politics and Religion.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
*Theoretical* education correlates leftward with politics. *Practical* education correlates rightward in politics.
Try telling a Class A nuclear welder that he's uneducated. You won't get very far. It's also very likely that he and all his buddies vote to the right. They're also very likely to vote the same way as the engineering, business and finance faculties of any university, that is, those university people who have to produce ideas of practical value.
Higher education does indeed correlate to the left, but that's only because trades programs aren't counted and there are far more theoretical subjects in universities than practical ones.
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
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
Or to put it a little more bluntly - many college students have not grown up and become conservatives yet. Some college kids never grow up. We call those professors...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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
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.
The problem with the Libertarian Party (big L) is that they're run by ideological purists. They've got about much chance of winning as the Green Party does with a purist progressive environmentalist candidate. Bother parties will get just enough votes to keep themselves on the radar, but neither will be able to win until the field pragmatic realist candidates.
The average voter could support a tax cut, but the Liberatarian Party wants to abolish the IRS. Too extreme. The average voter could support marijuana decriminalization, but the LP wants to legalize all drugs. Too extreme. The average voter could support school vouchers, bu the LP wants to eliminate all public education. Too extreme. There is a strong individualist streak in the American psyche, but there is not an anarchist streak. The LP needs to stop appealing to anarcho-capitalists and start appealing to individualists.
Either the Libertarian Party reforms, or libertarians will gravitate to other parties.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!