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Re: [ProgSoc] Have you registered to vote yet?



Andrew Halliday wrote:
Interesting. So really all of us non-smokers who experience displeasure as a
result of the activity of smokers in our vicinity have taken up a
multifaceted approach in resisting these assaults on our personal space
because we are warding off the threatening displeasure of ill health, smelly
clothes and stale disgusting smoky air together. Sounds like what we're
doing alright. Glad it's working too! Smoking rates are falling, areas where
you're allowed to smoke are shrinking and the cost of smoking is growing all
to encourage people to not just quit but not to start to begin with.
By extension, another reason to make being gay illegal is so that we 
could then close down Oxford St. That's some prime real-estate right 
there. Obviously if we leave it to market forces we get gay bars. So, 
what we should do is make being gay illegal, so that we (i.e. the moral 
majority) can get this space back.
When are you going to figure out that life's not just about you? I don't 
want to smoke in "your space". I just want to have "my space" in which I 
can smoke.
As I know Ryan enjoys them so much, here's [1] a citation.

[1] The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy

negative freedom/positive freedom: Negative freedom, 'independence of determination by alien causes', and positive freedom, which is the same as self-determination or autonomy, were distinguished by Kant in chapter 3 of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals 1785.
	The contrast between these two concepts, especially as they apply in 
social and political contexts, was elaborated by Isaiah Berlin in 'Two 
Concepts of Liberty', originally delivered as an inaugural lecture at 
Oxford in 1958. Negative freedom consists in the absence of coercion, 
the absence of interference from other people. Liberty in this negative 
sense means liberty *from*. Positive freedom consists in 
self-determination, in being one's own master, being in charge of the 
fulfilment of one's aspirations. At first sight it seems the two kinds 
of freedom complement each other. But, Berlin argued, in the history of 
political thought positive freedom has regularly been taken to mean that 
the individual should be determined by his true, genuine self and not by 
his actual self, which is imperfect because of innate shortcomings (like 
original sin) or the bad influence of society. Since individuals are 
often seen as being blind, ignorant or corrupt, the ideal of positive 
freedom will normally imply coercion: the unenlightened individuals must 
in Rousseau's words 'be forced to be free'. It is an ideal that has 
served to justify much political oppression in the twentieth century: 
the state acts to protect the individual from himself and to help him to 
get what is good for him, rather than what he wants. Since it is the 
individual's own real interests that are being promoted, what looks like 
coercion is claimed to be liberation.





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