I think the other poster sufficiently deconstructed your argument one way, but I want to point out that you haven't made any case that slavery is a red herring. Like, at all.

If this debate were taking place just prior to the civil war, there would be significant debate over whether slaves had human rights, and many making the economic case for slavery.

RMS is trying to tell you the same thing right now: that DRM is a tool that takes away some basic human rights, and instead of taking a moment to think about it, you simply dismiss it out of hand merely because you can see an economic case for it.

So take a few moments to consider the worst possible outcomes of adopting DRM, and whether history will regard the economic case for DRM as harshly as it regards the economic case for slavery.

You're responding to a bunch of things I didn't say and don't believe. I'm not a fan of DRM, just defending the position that RMS isn't the best source on it.

Also, you yourself haven't made an argument that DRM is anywhere near as bad a problem as slavery was. It's nowhere close, and to imply otherwise is to cheapen the suffering of slaves in America. Is that enough of an argument that it's a red herring?

> Also, you yourself haven't made an argument that DRM is anywhere near as bad a problem as slavery was.

This judgment was made with perfect hindsight in one case, and no hindsight in the other, so the conclusion is immediately suspect.

Like I said, consider the worst possible nightmare for DRM, and then judge whether the comparison is actually fair.

Finally, whether RMS is the best source on it is itself a red herring. If he makes a reasonable case for a nightmare outcome, his perspective is absolutely worth considering when weighing the pros and cons of DRM, regardless of how absolutist you think he is.

You have the same lack of time machine as I do in regards to DRM. For the rest, I think I've made the points I care about well enough.

> I can only listen to so many people. It makes sense to focus my efforts on people who are going to provide the best return on my investment of time.

And those are the people who have plenty of resources to tailor their message to you because they are funded by some marketing department and therefore are easiest to digest?

> Meanwhile, absolutism, while not a proof, is a pretty powerful heuristic in the messy real world of economic policy.

A heuristic for what exactly? That you shouldn't consider an argument at all?

> And yes, this is also a human rights issue, but mostly in the same way that a food or housing shortage is a human rights issue: the roots are economic.

I am not sure I understand this point, and maybe you can explain, but I think DRM is much closer to privacy and control over your own life as far as its human rights aspects go than to lack of resources.

> Slavery in particular is a red herring. In almost any other question, compromise is the way to go, so bringing up the extreme case of slavery adds more heat than light.

I disagree. Because the concept of "almost any other question" doesn't really make sense. How do you partition the world into distinct questions that you then somehow count to determine what percentage needs a compromise as the answer?

The questions that you actually ask yourself are not useful for this, because you don't ever ask the questions where the status quo is something that you find acceptable and where everyone else agrees with you. But for anything that you think is perfectly fine in this world, you could easily construct a hypothetical world in which our current status quo would be deemed absolutist. So, arguably, everything that you are ok with as it is is actually an absolutist position and not a compromise. Whether something is considered absolutist has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the demand itself, but only with how far out it is from the current mainstream consensus. As soon as the consensus shifts, there is nothing absolutist about it anymore.

Also, you can trivially transform any absolutist demand into a compromise by simply replacing it with a completely crazy demand. I, for example, advocate for killing everyone who has ever said a positive word about DRM. But I would be willing to compromise to only outlaw DRM for the future, so I am not an absolutist, right?

Also, how is it even relevant that it is in almost every other question when you are trying to determine whether it is in the case of this specific question?

> And those are the people who have plenty of resources to tailor their message to you...

No.

> A heuristic for what exactly? That you shouldn't consider an argument at all?

No.

> How do you partition the world into distinct questions that you then somehow count to determine what percentage needs a compromise as the answer?

Sample the ones that come up in practice. We're all friends here, or should be, so it doesn't need to be perfectly formal.

> you don't ever ask the questions where the status quo is something that you find acceptable and where everyone else agrees with you

You sure know a lot about me. Oh wait, no you don't. I do my best to question things, which is all you can ask.

> Also, you can trivially transform any absolutist demand into a compromise by simply replacing it with a completely crazy demand.

Yes, lots of terrible things happen when you argue in bad faith. This isn't even the worst one.

> Also, how is it even relevant that it is in almost every other question when you are trying to determine whether it is in the case of this specific question?

Not much, which is another good reason not to bring up slavery. It's not relevant, which is basically all I was trying to say about it.

> No.

But?

> You sure know a lot about me. Oh wait, no you don't. I do my best to question things, which is all you can ask.

Which is besides the point. Whether it's all I can ask or not, it doesn't give you a useful answer. And yes, I am pretty sure I know about you that you are a human being, and therefore, general human psychology most likely applies, nothing more, nothing less.

Have you ever asked yourself whether it is a good compromise that your left thumb has not been removed when you were a child because of your hair color?

You haven't, right?

You haven't because it's just a completely crazy idea that there would never be any reason for you to consider it. One of presumably at the very least millions of equally crazy ideas that you could make up that you have never thought of, because, why would you? That is, except for the completely crazy idea that one should remove part of the genitals of children because of their gender. You probably have thought about that one, right?

And that is my point: The things that you have thought about are in no way a meaningfully representative sample of the set of all facts about how society operates, simply as a result of basic human psychology.

> Yes, lots of terrible things happen when you argue in bad faith. This isn't even the worst one.

Yeah, it's even worse when people reject arguments as "absolutist", you can't really get much more bad faith than that.

> Not much, which is another good reason not to bring up slavery. It's not relevant, which is basically all I was trying to say about it.

Well, except it is. That is, not slavery itself is relevant, but what is relevant is the way how people thought and argued about slavery before it became the consensus that slavery is bad. And if you agree that they were wrong about slavery being a good thing, then maybe it would be a good idea to understand how their thinking went wrong at the time. To understand how they convinced themselves that slavery was the right thing to do. Because if the method of reasoning that they used lead them to the conclusion that slavery was a good idea, then that probably means that their method of reasoning was unreliable, right?

So, if we can understand how they arrived at their conclusion, we can maybe use that understanding to see whether there are any conclusions that we arrive at today using the same kind of reasoning, and to then examine whether those conclusions maybe are also unreliable, and possibly wrong.

Whether slavery was in any way comparable to whatever conclusion we are examining now is completely irrelevant to this. The point is not to determine whether something is as bad as slavery. The point is to determine whether the method we use to conclude that something is right is the same that people used to conlude that slavery was right. And the reason why slavery is used as the reference for this is not because it was terrible, the reason is that it's something that is familiar. People nowadays generally have some understanding of how people back then justified slavery. Noone knows how the unfair distribution of bread in the year 1537 in some spanish village was justified, so it's a useless reference point, even if it might be a closer analogue to whatever we are discussing now.