Re: Heinlein travelogue

On Jul 11, 10:24 am, Kurt Busiek <k...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-07-11 01:38:25 -0700, Quadibloc <jsav...@xxxxxxxxx> said:
On Jul 10, 8:52 pm, Walter Bushell <pr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<5c5bddca-7973-45b1-8267-4e05bff56...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 Quadibloc <jsav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thus, Greeks and Armenians are more warm and fuzzy than Turks. But
this one's really problematic, because Turkey is friendly to the U.S.,
while Greece has tended to favor Russia recently.

But, of course, and if the Greeks cuddle up to the US, then the Turks
will embrace Russia.

So the idea is to be in complete control,

...and only pretend to call that "freedom," because after all, we like
the (imagined) results.

That would be terribly hypocritical if what we called "freedom" was,
say, American businesses carting of a country's mineral resources for
a pittance through deals with a corrupt government.

Freedom means the ability to live one's life peacefully without fear,
and not to be robbed of the fruits of one's labor.

It does not include the ability to violate the rights of others. So a
country is not non-democratic because it has outlawed murder, arson,
rape, robbery, and so on. Nor is a country non-democratic for
outlawing, say, Negro slavery.

So it is not legitimate to say that we would be depriving the Russian
people of their freedom by taking away Russia's ability to commit
aggression against peaceful democracies in Georgia. Even if there was
popular sentiment in favor of such aggression.

Or that we would be depriving the people of India of their freedom by
ensuring that there was no repetition of the massacres of Christians
in Orissa, or the destruction of a 13th-century historic mosque by
another group of fanatical Hindu nationalists elsewhere.

Freedom means: your rights are not violated.

The ability to violate the rights of others is not itself a part of
freedom, even though some ability to violate the rights of others is
usually a consequence of being free. The more thoroughly crime is
eliminated, the more free everyone is, other things being equal. Of
course, the same government power that can be used legitimately to
suppress crime could be used illegitimately to suppress dissent and
otherwise violate people's rights.

So freedom does not include a diversity of political systems that
reaches so far as to include political systems that would start wars
with peaceful democracies. We are more free when all the criminals are
in jail than when some of them are running countries.

John Savard
.

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