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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

They never had a choice.

There seems to be a trend in the US society today to error more on the side of safety than liberty than I've seen ever before. Particularly, this is a change in the tech community which has been a bastion in the fight for individual freedoms since I've been alive.

In the end, when you make that bargain at the levels we are making it today, the safety is only temporary but the damage to liberty is unrecoverable without starting over.

It's a bad bargain.

To be clear of straw men, I'm not saying that individuals (not groups) who have personally demonstrated bad behavior should have complete freedom to repeat such acts. This argument is, and always has been, about pre-emptive actions against the innocent in the name of safety.

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Most people would hypothetically eagerly trade a miniscule amount of freedom for a massive amount of security, because it'd be a good deal.

You're welcome to be an ideologue and paint the world in black and white of course, but more people will try to assess the tradeoffs and have some appreciation for nuance.

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a staunch supporter of open source software and don't own any Apple devices because of it, but I do appreciate and understand why a company or an individual would want to have a device with a more locked down ecosystem.

The majority of people is fine living their lives as to ensure to destruction of all organized human life on the planet, just when it comes to the climate. Thinking of history, all the darkest hours of it involve a majority thinking they're right automatically, by virtue of being the majority, and persecuting minorities, or doing all sorts of stuff that in hindsight is just evil, embarrassing and gross.

> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.

-- Eben Moglen

If people don't understand that it takes away from them, not from the importance of the issue.

But they had a choice. You can always build a pc with linux/uac=0 or buy it from those who know how to do that. Aren't you conflating freedom with everyone living the way you want? And with uninformed choices, which nobody has to inform. And with ecosystems that do [not] fit your particular views. As a conscious informed user myself, and after experimenting, I tend to choose some of Apple's products. Not Apple's as a company, but as an idea of how things should work. You do not take my freedom to be able to do that, do you? Remember that all that Apple has is what their customers chose to give them. You cannot just go and blame them for getting what they want, based on some freedom morals that weren't even trampled for them. Hardware and software that is free in many regard is still there. Don't you think that you just blame people for their choice?

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