Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

(The scarequotes around 'human nature' are because part of the problem is that people have this really expansive view of 'human nature' where they assume that a lot of cultural conventions are actually innate and immutable, and so deconstructing that idea that "human nature rules everything around me, nothing you can do about it" is part of the work you need to do in deradicalization)

Something I wish more people - especially leftists - would realize, is that fascist beliefs may be *practically* rooted in hierarchy, but *ideologically* they're not; ideologically, people's beliefs hinge on a misguided understanding of 'human nature'.

You need to talk about someone's beliefs regarding 'human nature', if you want to have any hope of changing their mind - because "we can do without hierarchy" sounds completely absurd if your core belief is that most humans are fundamentally malicious and rotten.

Also my hands now seem to be weirdly soft as a result

Shredding and composting the overgrown plants I'd cut down yesterday: done ✅

I think they're a terrible idea, specifically the "license" part. I think the 'ethical constraints' part is good (if anything, a lot of ethical licenses don't go far enough IMO!), but a license is the wrong tool for this.

Why? Two reasons:

1. Licenses are *very fundamentally* a part of the copyright system. The same copyright system that systematically advantages exactly the parties you want to prevent from using your thing, against whom it is notoriously difficult to get a ruling.

Licenses are a copyright mechanism. Copyright serves the wealthy and the powerful, not the marginalized. FOSS licenses are a necessary workaround to mitigate the harms, but crucially they are not and can never be an effective enforcement tool. It's not how the power dynamics work.

2. License conflicts are a huge problem. Ethics are as varied as favourite foods, and that's a *good* thing, but it's incompatible with one of the desirable properties of public licenses, namely consistency and interoperability.

Things are not built in a vacuum. They are built on other people's work, which is built on yet other people's work, and so on. As you stack more and more pieces onto each other whose licenses all forbid subtly different things, you eventually end up with something no one can use due to the non-overlapping exclusions.

This makes any projects of serious scale (say, those trying to build a stateless society and its infrastructure...) pretty much guaranteed to paint themselves into a corner due to the license constraints piling up, and that is probably not what you were trying to achieve with your license choice.

You should absolutely enforce ethical constraints in your project, but if your goal is to sabotage powerful actors, there are much more effective solutions that don't have these problems - like making it abundantly clear that they are not welcome in the community, they will not receive support, their bugtickets will not be handled, and their needs will not be designed for.

The kind of organizations that people usually try to keep out with ethical licenses - corporations, militaries, etc. - are ultimately looking to exploit free labour (*especially* support-wise), and if you deny them that, their interest will wane. You don't really need a license for that, especially if you couldn't afford to sue anyway.