Beverages On A Plane?
Still might be too early to tell, but it appears that beverages and other liquids are now banned from planes. Everytime something like this happens, we all lose. It is a good thing whatever plans that were made by the offending parties did not come to fruition. It’s not a good thing that terrorists are succeeding, however indirectly, in having freedoms we take for granted taken away from us.
This reminds me of a discussion I once had with someone not long ago. I can’t remember the gentleman’s name, but he mentioned that freedom doesn’t actually exist. And, sadly, when you think about it in its truest sense, he was right.
I wonder if there will come a point where all passengers on commercial flights will have to be handcuffed and gagged. It might actually make for better flights, considering there’s always annoying, obnoxious people on planes who never seem to keep quiet.
We live in an interesting time. I sometimes think about whether or not there will be and end to war in my lifetime. Sadly, it’s unlikely considering our civilization’s unfortunate dependence on the exploitation of other societies.
In other news, that game of Centipede is still going. I played it for an hour and half tonight to the point where I now expect spiders to fly in from the right side of my vision and bounce around. It’s almost worse than the time I kept seeing Tetris blocks falling.
August 11th, 2006 at 10:17 am
There are two issues there. The first is what we give up for security, and the second is what we give up for social benefits.
Security:
Well theoretically, freedom has always been a kind of sliding scale in society. What we’re willing to give up being able to do, in order to do what we really want. The problem with that is that we often don’t get to decide what those things we’re giving up are. They restrictions just presented to us as options; take it or leave it. And almost anything can be justified in the name of personal safety.
Socially:
Freedoms are given up so that people will want to be around us or work with us. You’ve probably heard of positive rights (the right to do a thing) and negative rights (the right not to have a thing done to you). The problems usually arise when people disagree over what goes into those two categories (you’d be surprised what things people think are being done to them, just by those things existing and having to see or know about them in the world).
——
For how both of those areas fit into institutionalized freedoms, you might want to check out contractarianism , or social contract theory. I don’t know if it’s the best way to define the concepts, but here is a wiki article that is a good place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
August 11th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
you are da smart
August 11th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
I would think that suspended animation is the next way to go.