Violence is sometimes justified. While I'm NOT going to go around and argue that politicians should be shot you don't wait until your head is on the chopping block to defend yourself either.
If people are making death threats against developers for age gating it's not beyond reason that this could be easily seen as justifiable. There are some lines you can't let people cross.
A juvenile who is being violated (age gates) and enslaved or abused is undeniably justified in defending themselves against any actor that uses violence on them whether that be a school, a parent, a government, or a software developer.
There is a time to say no to age gates and it's long before your leaders start chopping heads off. There is a time to realize owning a gun isn't a terrible idea even when your side is in power. Refusing to comply with age gates won't end with your head on a chopping block, but tolerating their demands today may lead their tomorrow.
Learn from history & don't be stupid and repeat it. We don't need to let republicans, democrats, bernie sanders, or trump utilize violence or censorship to censor the masses.
It's NOT something that only impacts children either, so I don't really care if those death threats are coming from adults. You DO NOT SIT IDLY BY AS YOUR NEIGHBORS are rounded up and shoved into cattle cars. And saying "I didn't know" is no excuse. You ignored it. You contributed to it. You enabled it.
I won't be making any death threats, but I will defend those who are. There are lines you can't allow others to cross. This is a HUGE moral issue & if your willing to threaten my neighbors I have no problem with others threatening you.
Don't want war? Don't initiate it, don't enable it, don't support it, don't make it impossible to avoid.
Nanook
in reply to Mr Penguin • •Mr Penguin
in reply to Nanook • • •@nanook
Of course it is mine. It is all of ours individually and collectively. I don't have to have the same line as you or the guy who has decided his line has been crossed and acts, but ultimately it would be hypocritical for me to say he's wrong because he took steps before me to defend against tyrants. I'm just shy of being a passivist, but I'm NOT a passivist. I believe in the right of self defense. However I don't believe anyone including government has the right to aggress that of others outside of self-defense constructs. When you mandate something via legislation that is inherently backed by violence and someone's violent reaction to that can be justified when said action is against peaceful actors. In this case it's a violent defensive reaction against otherwise peaceful minors and adults alike.
There is however a rationale side to reacting in that you should shoot for achieving an objective. It may not be "winning" in the sense the law changes. It may be to undermine its effectiveness or bring attention to a problem or bring together a people in a place with the intent of providing options. This is what the Free State Project has been about. Freedom is going bye-bye everywhere and at one time people fed parking meters as silly as it was in defiance of a city in NH as it undermined revenue from parking tickets (city makes money off tickets, not the coins you feed the meter). The left ran with it and mocked the cause, but ultimately it achieved its objective of bringing attention to those who care about liberty. People moved to NH and as a consequence NH has 100 times more representatives that support liberty than any other state. At the current rate it'll likely be the case that libertarians cut most government within a decade here.
Nanook
in reply to Mr Penguin • •Torparskytt 🏴
in reply to Mr Penguin • • •Mr Penguin
in reply to Torparskytt 🏴 • • •@w
Too late. Already heavily involved in funding and development of libre software in addition to funding of the leading desktop distribution Linux Mint.
The only question that exists is what will we end up doing to push back on this besides not include it.
I don't know what the stance is of Clem (Linux Mint's lead developer), but it could be we do anything from pull funding/sponsorships to simply funding, developing or promoting a more freedom friendly solution. The Linux Mint project has overall done a very good job by of respecting users overall in comparison to Canonical, Red Hat, and others, but I can't say for certain it will continue to do so. The project already does things I'm not a fan of from including non-free drivers to blocking Tor and I think VPN users (one of the sponsors have a firewall tool). The question I ask every day is what line will they have to cross before we put together a desktop distribution to solve issues they're not. Thus far it's not made sense to do so and I hope it continues to be the case as our resources are better spent elsewhere. I'd rather continue to improve support for GNU/Linux overall than have 'yet another fork' for users to have to grapple over whether to go with it or something else. Forks do make sense at times when projects act particularly egregiously, but it's also true we should avoid them where possible. Debian for example doesn't include the spyware in its build of Audacity. A fork of LibreOffice was developed when Oracle bought Sun. Great examples of when forking makes sense. I'm not sure where my line is with this, but it's certainly one more issue that may need solving and given the long list of issues that need solving it might make sense to fork now and include things like LibreWolf.