Freedom. What does it mean to you? This not meant to be political or religious at all. I am just curious.
Thank you, pix
The right to think, do and say what I please as long as I’m not hurting others.
Define hurting and then we can define freedom.
Hurting? How about placing a measurable negative affect on them, from the viewpoint of a theoretical objective observer.
Exactly. 7 billion people with unique personalities and countless groups of people. Somebody is going to get no matter what you say or do.
Then the only place to express freedom is where there is a bunch of people that think similar like yourself.
I think I’ve read the comments of a few people on CGSociety that they may try for not offending any group of people (even smaller groups) when designing the mascots for the Olympics.
And we know how ugly some of them are when they’re approved.:spin:
How about obtaining balance between self and environment? After all, we live in a system that’s interconnected.
You frighten me with your talk about not hurting people with your freedom, it makes me think that your expression of freedom is running around beating people with a baseball bat xD
I myself think that I am pretty free already, I am free to make my own decisions and free to express myself however I want (as long as I abide by the laws though but most of them makes sense to me and I wouldn’t want to murder or steal anyway)
Maybe it would be better to describe “freedom” like this: the condition of being content with yourself on a deep, subjective level.
Like this: an animal that’s in a cage may not be considered free by a person standing outside, but does the animal consider itself “free”? It gets food, water, and shelter, and if it has a mate it is “free” to breed, which is the only thing most animals seem to want to be happy. At least this applies to something like a guinea pig. But a parrot might be different. Birds seem to have an innate desire to fly “freely”, and when you put them in a cage you can sort of see change in their behavior.
I think it comes down to being able to do what you want to do, what seems natural and is good for you. Someone might say, “If we were really free, life would be one big love shack!” But would it, really? Or would we actually be free to express ourselves in deeper, more spiritual ways, bound by morals yes, but not really bound by them because in some way morals are natural.
I don’t think these ideas are well-formed, but hey. I think you might find these things interesting:
why is it in “free” countries you’re not allowed to buy and snort cocaine or other drugs?
it seems to conflict with personal freedom that doesn’t harm others
Freedom to me would be creative freedom. That is the thing I’d but the highest price on.
@dyf
That’s because it can lead to the infringement of other people’s rights, like life, property, etc.
Somewhere, you have to strike a balance between freedom and safety, and some people have different opinions than others about where that should be.
To me, “freedom” is the right to require the Applicable Government to presume that I am not “doing something dreadfully wrong.”
@spacetug,
same thing can be said about drinking alcohol… the fatalities from drinking and driving are tens of thousands each year http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-driving-statistics.html
why is drinking alcohol which has proven to infringe on other people’s life and property legal while using cocaine and other drugs illegal?
freedom means to have the right to do things without being forced.
How about this…If you are a trucker in America and you are coming down the hill with engine brake on (to stop your brakes from getting hot and/or just to add more braking power and this is all for safety you and the others) you get fined for noise. However if you are on your Harley and you are driving down the road creating 10 times more noise for no reason other then attention whoring you do not get fined. In America people dont know what freedom is. Yeah its a free speech and yadda yadda but laws like this make it almost like a Nazi state IMO.
Then again, drinking and driving is illegal in (I believe) every state and country.
I think that drugs are illegal because they create such a big addiction. But I agree that making drugs illegal is pretty stupid while drinking alcohol is legal.
In the UK alcohol costs the government more more money, is responsible for more crime, results in more hospital admissions and causes more deaths per year than any other drug - including class A’s. In fact, for most drugs alcohol causes more deaths per month! Further more, a large amounts of research support the comparative harmlessness of some illegal drugs compared to alcohol.
I’m not pro-drugs, I’m pro educated choice. For me freedom is the ability to make an informed choice, without options being restricted, information being withheld or your choice being forced/biased by another. Wherever a choice is right or harmful to others is a different matter in my opinion.
With drugs there is no freedom, we’re not given all the information, so our choice will be biased based by limited details. Not a truely free choice. We’re always told they’re bad, but governments neglect to mention that there’s not a single reported overdoes from LSD and that it’s as neurotoxic as orange juice or that only 40 something people die a year from ecstasy or that research suggests moderate usage is much safer than a heavy night of drinking.
Not always the case, alcohol is actually a lot more addictive than some drugs cannabis, ecstasy, mushrooms, LSD just to name a few. The interaction of alcohol with dopeamine pathways makes it much more chemically addictive than peolple believe it to be (uses the same mechanisms of addiction that cocain and nicotin use).
(My degree is in psychology and cognitive neuroscience with a heavy focus on brain biology and psychopharmacology - I spent an entire year studying how illegal and legal drugs affect the brain and body)
Freedom to me is the right to smoke pot and not work. While we are slaves to jobs we ain’t free. Just my 2 cents.
Weren’t computers and robots meant to make life easier for everyone? Take away all the things we didn’t want/need to do so we could be free to live your lives. Whatever happened to the optimism that came with the dawn of the digital age?