Re: (renamed) Misc mailing list

[Yasuaki Kudo]

Hi,

(I have just 'replied all' from my (God forbid, proprietary!) IPhone so forgive 
me, the addresses in To or CC are pretty arbitrary)

I am very sympathetic to everyone who live in authoritarian regimes.   
Pre-1945, someone like me, (an anarchist, pacifist, democrat, an apologist for 
enemy states and all the rest... ) in Japan would have been probably arrested, 
tortured and or killed for trumped up charges.

I often wonder what my escape hatch would be, if I lived in North Korea or 
something.   I might learn how to be a good singer, a computer programmer, or 
anything else and stay away from politics.

But there are many in-between states where the regime may mimic a shambolic 
'democracy' just for the show, or strongly suppress unwanted opinions by 
murder, kidnap, etc and the majority would happily live without questioning too 
much, and not call the state totalitarian.  The regime will allow a certain 
range of public discourse that are irrelevant or useful to the regime.

In such cases, and I suspect PRC may qualify, (But I don't know the country 
well enough) the discussion of Free Software might be within the permitted 
range of discourse, as its purported aim is just to promote a particular form 
of software licensing, no big deal.

But of course, there is another dimension in that it is a way of hinting a 
bigger idea such as democracy and free speech, while stopping short of directly 
mentioning them.

My apologies if I am completely off the track here but again, I feel deeply for 
people who don't have the kind of freedoms completely taken for granted in 
advanced industrial 'Western' countries (for which Japan seems to be an 
honorary member from the East😅) and I would love to work with everyone to do 
everything practical to improve the situation!

I am not sure whether this helps in the discussion of what the appropriate 
topic is for this mailing list, etc, but wanted to mention that I think the 
social context could be very different for each participant .

Cheers,
Yasu