Libre Culture
What is libre culture?
Libre culture is all about empowering people. While the general philosophy stems greatly from the free software movement, libre culture is much broader and encompasses other aspects of culture such as music, movies, food, technology, etc.
Some beliefs include but aren't limited to:
- That copyright should expire after a certain period of time.
- That knowledge should be available to people, not locked away.
- That no entity should have unjust control or possession of others.
- That mass surveillance is about mass control, not justice.
- That we can all band together to help liberate each other.
Check out this link for more.
Rules
I've looked into the ways other forums handle rules, and I've distilled their policies down into two simple ideas.
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Please show common courtesy: Let's make this community one that people want to be a part of.
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Please keep posts generally on topic
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No NSFW content
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When sharing a Libre project, please include the name of its license in the title. For example: “Project name and summary (GPL-3.0)”
Libre culture is a very very broad topic, and while it's perfectly okay for a conversation to stray, I do ask that we keep things generally on topic.
Related Communities
- Libre Culture Memes
- Open Source
- ActivityPub
- Linux
- BSD
- Free (libre) Software Replacements
- Libre Software
- Libre Hardware
Helpful Resources
- The Respects Your Freedom Certification
- Libre GNU/Linux Distros
- Wikimedia Foundation
- The Internet Archive
- Guide to DRM-Free Living
- LibreGameWiki
- switching.software
- How to report violations of the GNU licenses
- Creative Commons Licenses
Community icon is from Wikimedia Commons and is public domain.
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Lojban also has all these nice features, but better. It's a newer, more sophisticated effort to do basically the same thing. It has some important good features that esperanto lacks.
There is a serious argument to make lojban the lingua-franca of the EU, to replace English. This would abort the erosion of the local languages. If the EU mandates that everybody learns lojban at school instead of english, it becomes a common second-language to everyone and a first language to no-one. Much more satisfactory situation.
I think it is great that you bring up lojban. This brings more nuance to the discussion.
I have not looked into lojban, could you describe some of the features you like that esperanto lacks?
I'll look into it myself to get some impressions.
But that being said, constructed languages like these are very easy to learn. I don't necessarily believe that we should only embrace a single conlang. Each language might have their own unique advantage over other constructed languages.
Could you give an article on this? Sounds potentially very interesting.
It's a more modern attempt to do the same thing. I can skim wikipedia to find the main differences:
But TBH it doesn't matter which one is chosen. The important thing is to agree on one constructed language, and create a large international body of speakers - larger than the body of English speakers.
Later on, it will be easy to refine the language, or switch to a different one.
And here is an actual list from the lojban wiki:
Lojban:
I agree to some extent with this. I'll elaborate further down.
You might already know this, but languages shape the way we think. This was shown in the book The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics, which you can read a summary of here.
With this in mind, I'll tell you one reason I really like esperanto. It is designed around the idea of hope. Esperanto means 'somebody who is hopeful'. We can see that words with positive conotations are elected as root words, which shapes the speaker to see the positives rather than negative. So you can easily hypothesize that the language makes you more optimistic and solution oriented. To make people see the possibility of change in the world.
I'm not sure how lojban is on this aspect.
Regardless, that is not to say that it determines it's usefulness. A language designed primarily to be logical could be very useful in problem solving. It could be adopted in among others technology, mathematics and other fields to shape us into thinking more abstract and precise.
On the other hand I must say that considering that nobody has learnt lojban, this conversation feels quite hypothetical. There might be a possibility that it is hyped up, and I have no way of knowing that.
In a lot of things maybe. Communicating clearly is so difficult, especially about anything technical. I'd love to see how a lojban-speaking society handles its politics, bigotry, business, everything.
Do you ever walk into a huge argument and realise the whole problem is people's different understanding of the meaning of a word? There is much more misunderstanding in the world than understanding. And natural language must be partly at fault.
But to get back to the point, having a logical lingua fraca for business and politics would solve a lot of problems. It would also help to preserve dying natural languages.
Nice article, thanks. I didn't know that example. The one I know is where they play memory games with objects of different colours. For example russian (IIRC, it might not have been russian) has distinct words for dark blue and light blue. English speakers had more difficulty remembering which blue things were light or dark, because they don't have different words for it.
I might be forgetting some details though. It's famous though, you'll find it easily enough.