liberty

Someone accidentally posted this link in an IRC channel and since I was curious I checked it out. It's a pretty nice and functional map of freedom in the world, mapping countries in three categories: not free, partly free and free.

From a quick survey of the map it looks like the half of the world, and counting such highly populated places like China, even more than half live without essential freedoms, which is quite sad.

Yet, if we push the boundaries in terms of defining true freedom for an individual I think even more countries would be in the "partly free" category, but that's another discussion.

Isaiah Berlin's famous look at the two forms of liberty, positive and negative. I have yet to read it, but have been reading a lot about it of late.