Re: [Bug-gne]Ideologies vs. Practicality in GNE

[alexander]

On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 09:50:05AM -0800, Tom Chance wrote:
> I was just wondering where everybody stands on this
> issue of being idelogically sound whilst still being
> in line with laws and societal "expectations".
> Personally, I would love to see GNE try to make a
> precedent by rising above petty differences and try to
> host as much as is possible in the best way possible.
> If in the future we find we a forced to back down, we
> do so, but I don't think we should be shutting too
> many doors now when we don't yet have any _need_ (only
> in some people's eyes a want). What do others think?
> 

well, in the last week I wrote about four emails to this list and you
could not read one, because I cast them away, seeing they were
rubbish. The reason is, that it gets really, really difficult. To
create an encyclopedia, which is really free requires absolute freedom
for submitting articles and no censorship at all. The direct result of
so much freedom might be, that it might be abused by parties, I'm
convinced no one reading this list really wants to see here.

On the other hand this legal stuff can't be a way to solve the
problem. The last week I realized, that taking care of illegal stuff
would result in a combined censorship for all countries. Besides it
would be lots of work only aiming at people closing out. 

The issue gets more and more interesting every day. The problem GNE is
facing now is one of the fundamental problems of mankind: how can we
apply rules (the rule of freedom in this case) in a partly anarchic
field without rules?

I think Tom is right - there is no sense in taking care of governments
and laws across the globe. I don't even can accept every law in
my country as right. I can accept laws which cut freedom of speech
even less. One of the reasons for GNE is to fight the slavery of
thoughts-control. So why should we surrender?
On the other hand I see lots of groups searching for places to publish
extreme material, racist's paroles, or simply sexual aberrations
which do definitely harm to somebody. 

I don't agree on the discussion as far as the guilt-question araised:
Everybody who helps somebody to suppression or violence in any way, of
course is guilty. We are guilty of destroying nature if we buy
mahagony, we are guilty if we continue buying books at amazon as long
as they are on their "patent"-trip. So why should we not be guilty
providing a forum for hate, intollerance and violence?
I would be very unhappy if GNE would be overwhelmed by a racist front
using the ideology of freedom for their ideology of intollerance.

I also don't agree, that reading cannot kill. I suppose the exact
contrary statement would be correct. Every dictatorship started by
extinguishing free thoughts, culture and literature. The only reason
why everybody of us is acting is that we have thoughts. Without
thoughts we would be sitting dumb on a rocking chair not even beeing
able to rock. Everything we're doing - scratching our head, buying
vegetables, writing to this mailing-list - is a direct action
corresponding to a previous thought. So the mere thought might lead to
paradise or to hell. I would prefer thoughts leading to paradise.

And yet the next contradiction arises - how could I fight
manipultaion, by manipulating (or censoring)? In fact I couldn't.

I discussed this issue every day now during the last week, with
friends, with my family, with my wife, with literally anybody who was
unlucky enough to get near me.
And the main difficulty is simply that the more we face freedom the
more we have to face intollerance. 

So what I think would be a good idea is to set rules. In fact to set
one rule and formulating which consequences it implies. The rule yet
exists, and it is written by RMS, saying freedom is the main target. 
On the one hand this implies not setting links to non-free pages. But
I think this is a minor issue compared to the abuse intollerance.

I think something like a constitution, a GNU/GNE constitution would be
a good idea. Something containing the following topics:

* everybody has the right to think and write whatever he likes to, as
  long as he does not harm the freedom of others to think and talk what
  they like to.
* violence is the most radical manifest of suppression, because it
  will prevent others physically of thinking, talking and writing
  freely. Therefore any violence has to be accused.
* Accusations must not be personalized. I.e. not people should be
  accused, but thoughts which propagate intollerance. This would mean
  that someone is not allowed to demand the extinction of a minority,
  but though he tried to he may be well allowed to publish anything
  else, because GNE is not a courtyard. 
* it should not be allowed to discriminate against any person, ethic
  group, company or government in general. (To stay on
  software-issues: Microsoft is only a company. It is neither bad nor
  the incarnation of the devil:) It is only a company: if it attacks
  freedom, everybody has to fight to keep the freedom. But nobody has
  the right to discriminate against anybody, only because he works at
  this company, nor has he the right to disciminate the company
  itself) 

This is just a very raw collection of thoughts I accumulated over the last
days.  And it is everything I can think of, which would make it to
keep freedom as long as this freedom does not result in taking the
freedom of another person and therefore the ability to exclude
intollerance. This would exclude child-pornography, because it is the
direct result of violence, it would exclude articles proposing
antisemitic or rasistic views, because they propose to cut the freedom
of other people, on the other hand it would allow articles on the
chinese opposition. It would definitely allow lots of illegal
material, but as Tom said - we should not bow before every government
on this earth (in fact we even could not).

I don't know yet if this is a good idea to help freedom. But I think
it's a better idea than watching intolerance swallowing freedom.


alexander