Polite conversational dodge, as I'm sure you guessed, public control of information also worries the hell out of me but public TV, like public schools, is often advantageous too, so its a subject I mostly avoid delving into. Especially since I'm an active republican and enjoy NPR, puts me in an awkward position 
View original postView original postI'll move to table private v public media for a rainy day. Yes, there is a notably large quantity of "-" on that table (pages 94-103 of
this doc for anyone else reading this) and I think that kind of underscores why I don't like these comparisons. That's one of the better ones for in depth looks, and I don't blame its shortcomings on a lack of effort. Rather I just think its unreasonable to assume these sorts of indexes
can produce meaningful results. Even if we can achieve agreement on whether or not X=Free we always come back to the arbitrary weighting. e.g. why everything on that list is 0-10 but for some reason torture is alway (that I saw) a 0, 5, or 10. Surely if even slavery gets to use the other digits, and even decimal places, they could have done better than "yes, somewhat, and no." considering things like "Age of consent of homosexual couples" apparently is deemed of significant import as
freedom of assembly especially considering I didn't see anyone on that list that didn't get 0, 10, or - for that entry. Apparently proving my hunch that countries that would consider having different ages of consent for gays probably are places that tend to have very iffy notions about 'consent' and usually think homosexuality is an illness best treated with Zyklon B.
View original postI'm not sure I agree that these indexes can't produce meaningful results. If you take real 0-10 scales for everything and somehow manage to get proper data everywhere, it would be a lot more useful than it is now. Still subjective of course in the sense that people have their personal priorities, and you can still skew the results by including or omitting various factors, but at least the results should be a bit more reliable.
Well I'm sure done properly it can be useful, its more that it is so routinely abused and improperly done that I view it negatively. It needs to be set up with very clear switches in it. For instance, on abortion, I do not consider legalized abortion a mark of freedom, obviously, but if we remove every one someone can object to half-reasonably we not only degrade it but ignore that freedom vs other freedoms calculus. e.g. there's no getting around that a gun registry impinges on personal privacy, but if that gets included as an aspect of the personal privacy index but guns themselves get left out a country with free gun purchase and carry, but a registry, would score worse then one in which guns were utterly banned. That's why I think these always need to be not only 'pick your own priorities' but also 'Is X freedom?'.
View original postRegarding the age of consent for homosexual couples, that's actually something that in many Western countries was different from the straight one until very recently (not necessarily higher, iirc there were some cases where it was lower). Your hunch is quite off, I would say - the kind of countries you describe would simply not have an age of consent for homosexual couples as it would be illegal at any age.
A touch of sarcasm in those remarks, I'd never encountered the concept before and was trying to wrap my head around it.
View original postView original postThere's not much one can do to avoid having to make a call on something like "Should legalized [abortion/heroine/suicide/etc] count into the freedom index?", mileage obviously varies, but not too many people would argue that legal heroine and legal slavery would equal a country with bans on both, and especially with so many parameters in there that effect can't just be handwaved aside.
View original postTrue. One could adjust the weights to put the focus more heavily on the more commonly accepted human rights and freedoms, though. Or even leave out the disputable moral quandaries altogether. Then the differences between the Western democracies might become nearly negligible, but there would still be differences that could be of some interest - putting the focus on issues of free speech vs. curbing hate speech (Holocaust denial - should it be legal even in the country that committed the Holocaust?), economic freedom vs. beneficial regulation (how intrusive should pollution regulations be?), personal freedom vs. nanny state (is it really the government's business if a 17-year old is drinking alcohol?), and so on.
The problem is those issues are so politicized that people will climb mountains rather than walk around them to stick to the party line. Stuff gets enshrined and so it isn't just narcotics vs public safety, or narcotics for minors, but an individual narcotic. As an example one of my initial reactions in Germany to the lower drinking age was anger that upon introspection I realized came to a violation of custom. I assume someone sharing drinks with me in a bar is 'of age' for more than drinking, and hence reacted with anger and a touch of scorn in spite of being raised not to think anything wrong with having a glass of wine or beer with a meal at almost any age. It was the presence of underage girls in bars, not the drinking, which bothered me and quite a few of my friends, and it extended to guys as well, because there's a whole range of social interactions or relaxations in play in a purely adult setting, like be able to say 'Let's take this outside asshole' which is constrained if the 'asshole' is 17. That sort of byproduct of a long-standing custom and right/restriction represents a huge factor that isn't really meaningfully quantifiable but exists nonetheless.
View original postBut yeah, many of these issues, instead of being about more freedom or less freedom, are about cultural preferences and customs. As a 16 and 17-year old on my first trips to the States, the freedom I was used to that was denied to me (= being allowed to drink beer or wine in bars or restaurants) certainly left more of an impression than the freedoms I temporarily gained (including the flip side of the same coin, being allowed to drive a car instead, which wasn't exactly of any use to someone without the opportunity to obtain a licence).
Or rent a car, yeah, as above those represent impingements on freedom with major secondary effects. Barring a few year early years, when 24 hour mega-stores weren't yet as common, as long as I've had a car I've been able to acquire pretty much any product at any time on simple whim. That's a huge freedom and like the bar environment was one sorely missed when I lived in Hesse. In terms of raw ethics, the ability to legally torch a flag trumps being able to buy fresh oranges at 3 AM Sunday morning in January but in terms of real impact of personal freedom, well I think that's another story.
View original postView original postIt's the shack vs mansion thing. All these indexes ever do is point out the blisteringly obvious then achieve a hair-splitting list of who sucks most and least. That's why I liked the one Rana had where you could at least adjust your own weighting. That's all these are really good for, some amusing internet survey where you say if you think X=free then rate its importance 1-10 and when you're done it spews out your preferred countries in order.
View original postI guess, but countries like New Zealand tend to score high on all such lists - there must be something to that.
I'm sure it could be run down, of course NZ is a free nation, as are ours, so its inevitably going to come down to nitpicking about specific scores in a lot of categories and the selected criteria for judging them. I've never heard of any particular thing NZ does just way freer then the norm for the West.
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