Am Mittwoch, den 04.01.2006, 10:50 +0100 schrieb Petter Reinholdtsen: > (And for those of you believing that we should let go of our freedom > to gain security, I trust that you know that there is nothing new > about this discussion, and probably also know this quote from > President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): "Those who desire to give up > freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, > either one." It is still true today. Power corrupts, and giving the > government more power by reducing our freedom will not give us more > security only less freedom) > First I thought this must be Ben Franklin (1706-90) and read:
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" After googling, I also found the Jefferson quote on the net. *Does anyone know quotable sources for either and to what debate(s) these quotes relate?* Anyway it seems to prove that the idea of freedom was current round about 1776. Interestingly the idea of freedom and parliamentary democracy always refers to the (g)olden days of the 18th century and the American and French revolution. I find this disturbing since both seem to me outdated models. The fact that we already lost the battle for civil liberties (R.Gonggrijp: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/920.de.html) should make us think about new solutions. The current technology is not compatible with idealist ideas about freedom and democracy almost 2,5 centuries old, that btw never really worked anyway. If we try to win the battle for freedom, emancipation and our rights we cannot do so using the printing press in the age of the internet. We cannot fight in the streets and build barricades in age of tear gas and sophisticated crowd control tactics. There is no use for a parliament and representative government in a networked society where everybody is just a TCP/IP connection away and nobody needs to travel to continental congresses etc. Insisting on the old way, will make every Western democracy look like Florida in the US presidential election of 2000. We must not apply 18th century solutions to problems of the 21st century uncritically. Imho the solution lies in the erosion of resources of hostile organisations both governmental and private. DEBIAN is doing this by making the business of non-free software vendors difficult, not by blowing up their buildings or stealing their money, but by making their patents on algorithms and their closed source code worthless, supplying better solutions. Ideally we should debianise governments, nation-states and ticket offices in some way, any ideas? Kind regards David -- If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system form the beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. [...] You'll never get the hang of the game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans. - Illuminatus -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
