The Cult Of Safety

November 12, 2024

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On GNU's website under "Malware", the page lists 19 types of malware. Each in one way or another hinders freedom of the user. Only one of those is "Surveillance". Yet the vast majority of Free Software advocacy focuses only and primarily just on Surveillance. It seems like we are losing our goal.


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The Free Software movement started with a simple goal - Freedom. In a decade it made immense progress and for the first time computer users around the world could use their computers in freedom. Then, a few years later, a split happened. Unable to understand each other, the Free Software movement split into two. One proudly holding onto the goal of Freedom. The others changed their goal to quality and changed their name from "Free Software" to "Open Source". Open Source is not about Freedom. It lost its goal long time ago. The people of "Open Source" are not talking about freedom anymore. They are concerned with other things. Things that are important. But things that are not as important. Unfortunately "Open Source" has way more crowd than "Free Software" today.

The current Free Software movement is losing it's goal too. Focusing primarily on privacy it attracts an immense amount of people, but those people do not see the full picture. When I looked into the Free Software movement almost a decade ago, and when I looked into the website of the GNU project. I failed, at first, to see that those 19 types of malware are problematic by themselves. I thought that back doors, for example, are a problem, since those having access to those back doors could read my personal information through them. But that only scratches the surface of the problem. Back doors are a problem because somebody else has control over your machine. It doesn't matter if they read your messages, or delete a file you like, or even do something potentially good for you. The fact that you lost control over your device is the problem. It is precisely the same problem that makes fight for Right To Repair so crucial. The company should not have control over a device it sold to you. It is not a problem of privacy. Even though it could touch privacy. It is not primarily about privacy.

Apple, ridding a wave of post-Snowden privacy hysteria was able to convince a hell of a lot of people to lose their freedom to Apple's extremely restrictive devices, because for a moment it let people choose if they want to share data with Apple's competitors in data harvesting. And it is very good to see people saying "no" to surveillance, and "no" to targeted advertising. But those same people said "yes" to essentially loss of freedom, for that.

It could be argued that one of the safest places for a person to be in is in a solitary confinement cell in a maximum security prison. Think about it. Nobody could get to you, because they have to go through a lot of heavily armed guards and various very hard contraptions like, heavy steel doors, thick concrete walls and more. And since it is a solitary confinement cell, nothing will happen to you from the inside because you are essentially alone in the room. Nobody else is there to harm you. But would you willingly put yourself there to escape the dangers of the world?

I am not blaming you if you said yes, by the way. Sometimes with desperation the only choice is to give up. I know people who had to sleep on the street in cold winters. They told me that they would break store fronts with a stone or a brick, to break enough laws, to get put into prison, so they could survive. Prisons are warmer than streets.

Perhaps people are desperate. The overwhelming sense of danger that comes from the shier amount of corporate stalking, probably, no... definitely, made people give up. Some gave up by just accepting their fate and stopping to try to do something about it. A lot of those rationalized their choices, after the fact, claiming that all this surveillance is somehow for "the greater good", or that a good person has "nothing to hide".

Did you know that there is some body of research suggesting that the pre-frontal cortex, responsible for rational thinking fires a few milliseconds after a decision is made by the rest of the brain? Basically people do things, because some system in the brain decided that it was a thing that has to be done. And only then the brain tries to come up with a reason for why. If you focus, you can even observe yourself do that. Smarter people come up with far better excuses for their actions than dumber people. And we probably had plenty of smart people who gave up trying. And stalking people turned from trying to harm them, to trying to protect them.

This desperation turned into apathy, either toward privacy itself, or for the rest of us toward freedom. And people gave up their freedom to gain even a little bit of privacy. I am afraid that this is what will happen to Free Software.

There are good arguments made by various people, some of which are biased toward Proprietary Software, that Free Software is inherently insecure in one way or another. Some rightfully observe that people can wreck their entire operating system, with just a few terminal commands, which is not very easy to do on Proprietary operating systems. Others argue that GNU / Linux has not implemented this or that trending new security idea, or not implemented it well enough. And all this pretty much argues for restriction of freedom in one way or another.

You should be able to wreck your entire system if you wanted to. You don't have that freedom in those other systems. You should be able to show everything about yourself, expose every last dangerous fact about who you are, doxing your entire life, if you want to. Some people excusing themselves with privacy want to take that ability away from you. Privacy is a freedom. A freedom to choose what to tell people about yourself and what not to tell. It is not just secrecy. If you could not tell nobody nothing, you would not have any freedom.

If you extend that onward safety is a freedom to not be harmed. Meaning that if you want to be harmed you should be able to be harmed. Readers of this article hopefully understand that things like tattoos and piercings, for example, are rightful self-expression. But a lot of people find them harmful and want them to be banned. Perhaps the overwhelming amount of this self-mutilation among teenagers is a rebellion again having no freedom at all.

Safety being the utmost priority of the last century or so, turned parents from caring and loving to prison guards. They put their children through experiences akin to solitary confinement of a maximum security prison, because, by god nothing should ever harm the baby.

That in turn, makes every successive generation more and more paranoid even about the smallest things, taking one freedom after another with it. The last two generations do not even care about privacy anymore. They believe stalking protects them. Why? Because parents stalked them all throughout their childhood. They got used to it. And they were given the same paranoid arguments of how it should be for their own good, over and over again. To the point that proving the importance of privacy to a young person today is near impossible.

In war people go to war, often voluntarily, to protect the country from invasions. To protect the freedom of the people from being violated by those trying to conquer them. They die for freedom. Life is therefor less valuable than freedom. Safety is even less. We don't think killing is bad not because life is somehow sacred, but because freedom is. Killing, it taking control over a person's body. Killing is taking that person's freedom.

I was not able to understand for years and years how is that Rape and Murder are held at identical level of atrocity. I thought, for sure Murder should be worse. Right? At least after Rape you could potentially recover. No... Those are the same. Rape and Murder are both fundamentally a violation of a person's body. A violation of a person's freedom.

Free countries around the world understand that. In most free countries suicide is a human right. A person should be able to take his own life. There is no violation in that. It is the same freedom as being able to wreck your entire operating system. Something that would probably be stupid to do. But because you and I have no reason for that, doesn't mean that nobody has. People sometimes suffer through so much that pretty much the only way out is out. Some might do suicide for fun. Hell, Russian roulette is a thing. And a lot of computer people break their systems for the fun of it. And it is fine. This is freedom!

We live in a world possessed by a cult of safety. A cult so powerful that we lose our freedoms slowly degrading them one after another. A cult so insidious that we will all end up in our own personal solitary confinements in maximum security prisons. And all just because simply choosing not to harm one self apparently isn't enough anymore. Apparently now it should be impossible.

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💬 Opinions:

Blender Dumbass does not endorse any of the opinions listed below. The website allows for Anonymous users to send opinions. So some of them could be quite repulsive to read. You have been warned.

  Anonymous Guest


"The Free Software movement started with a simple goal - Freedom."

Ummm... no.
Actually it all started with the goal of Stallman wanting to keep living at MIT, in the same manner it has always been (for him!!!!)
lifelong student: get up at noon, don't have breakfast but an immediate meal, walk around the campus, sit in front on a computer, play around with code (so as not to get bored), and just be all-around-lazy (for example get the printer to send messages when it is jammed, so that other people (termed "someone close to the printer") can unjam it for you), ...

Make no mistake, the founding basis for it is not freedom, but the wish (or the "freeeedom") to live a certain kind of lifestyle: all-expenses-paid, jewish-computer-nerd, lifelong-student.

Stallman never learned the most simple things. He just vegetated around MIT. He began sleeping in his MIT office. He actually lived there: permanently (until 1998)! When being invited to give speeches, he overstayed at people's homes, sometimes for crazy long periods
(ask Miguel de Icaza
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103356
https://x.com/migueldeicaza/status/1173981287037751297
https://xcancel.com/migueldeicaza/status/1173981287037751297
)

Take a look at stallman.org . What a leftist bum Stallman actually is... amazing: he hates families, children, people; preferring instead saving the climate and other ridiculousness.
He surrounds himself with all these leftist, academic, "intellectuals" who have the same strange worldview. Campaigning for housing, food, shelter on behalf of illegal immigrants, gangsters and other bums; probably because they never really earned it themselves, being so "privileged". That campaigning and guilt-ridden propaganda has become their "surrogate activity", to quote Ted Kaczynski; a man whom I respect, because he could cut through all the leftist bullshit, and analyzed it very well.

  blenderdumbass


It seems like Anonymous Guest here wrote an opinion on a different article of mine, where I support this or that Stallman view on this or that.

  Anonymous Guest


It fits many articles. But I really did intend it for this article.

FSF = GNU = Stallman (or Stallman-loving groupies)

  Anonymous Guest


"It seems like Anonymous Guest here wrote an opinion (...), where I support this or that Stallman view on this or that."

No. The comment is not an opinion on anything you wrote, but more an opinion of Stallman and the way he actually (!) started free software;
and a description of his values/lifestyle.

  blenderdumbass


Anonymous Guest just proved that his comment is even less relevant to the article in question. And if it is trying to be relevant, it just comes out as a non-sequitur.

  Anonymous Guest


"The Cult Of Safety"

hmmm... what about... "The Cult Of Freedom".

Misinterpreting freedom to mean... allowing yourself to be victimized, by granting others uncontrolled freedom... is dumb. Real dumb.
Time to end that lunacy.

  blenderdumbass


Interesting. Anonymous User is apparently agreeing with me here.

For the reference, in another article I word the same concept like this:


And in a more recent article I worded it differently:

  Anonymous Guest

Advocates for Discrimination!

I don't think we agree.

You do not emphasize "other" enough.
Neither did I, but let me correct it right here, right now:

We need to emphasize heritage, culture, identity, etc.
It allows you to distinguish, and differentiate.

You need to know the "we" and the "other".

So your rules must never be for everyone. Freedom-for-all is bullshit. You cannot go and apply things that work for free software (which is a very specific, limited, and curiously... global (!) domain), to things like people lives, and their identity, heritage, lifestyle, etc.

No! Because one man's freedom, is another man's degenerate-lunatic-hell.

And if you think that thought... to the end... you might realize that it isn't even about freedom, to be honest.

It's about a people linked by heritage, tradition, identity... () to determine their destiny!

() = (having the "freedom" / means)


It's NOT about people having to subscribe to some globalist one-size-fits-all agenda, full with propagandistic bullshit-concepts like anti-racism, one-family, we-are-all-the-same, one-global-family, people-of-the-world, people-of-the-planet, non-oppression-supporters, freedom-for-all, etc.

So it's not about people subscribing to lunatic progressive modernist oppression-free society, because that's globalist world-oppression-agenda in disguise.

  Anonymous Guest


PS: sad to hear, that you are Jewish, but not religous any more.

"Born in Ukraine. Jewish. Living in Israel. Raised in a religious family. Not religious now. A fighter for freedom of all humans. A fighter against power of any human."

I hope that one day you can find it in you, to revise that to become:

"Born in Ukraine. Jewish. Living in Israel. Raised in a religious family. Religious again! Have a Jewish family. A fighter for heritage, identity and fulfilling destiny of my people. A fighter for allowing other peoples to strive towards their heritage, identity and fulfilling destiny. As such: against oppression and thwarting of other peoples destinies. No to globalist world-agendas that undermine, ridicule, subvert, engineer, manipulate a people's identity and freedom, to become something that they are not.".

If you have no account and want to send an anonymous opinion, you can just ignore the username and password fields. Your anonymous opinion will be reviewed by the registered users. And if they decide that it's good, it will be posted for everyone.