There's a "Patriarchal Freedom" mindset out there, where people are free but the only real people are the patriarchal heads of households or their company owner equivalents, and everybody else is just an extension of those free people.

There can also be individual and collective freedom. Collective freedom might be "we are free to hold a party" or "we are free to join a union".

"Patriarchal Freedom" is a strictly negative, strictly individualist conception of freedom. That accounts for some of the distinctions made in the article. If employees form a union and go on strike, that is an affront to Patriarchal Freedom, because the collective freedom of the union members doesn't count, but the freedom of the company manager not to be troubled does. If a poor person cannot pursue a career as a doctor, that doesn't reduce Patriarchal Freedom because positive freedoms don't count. If a woman cannot walk down a street at night, that doesn't reduce Patriarchal Freedom because walking is a positive freedom.

When "freedom" is mentioned as a political ideal in modern politics, what's meant is almost always "patriarchal freedom". If you disagree with a conclusion drawn from it, you're called "anti-freedom". But I think that concept of freedom needs to be challenged, because freedom in the larger sense is an incredibly valuable thing. And real freedom is often threatened by the people championing Patriarchal Freedom, who want a world where most people are enslaved to their bosses by their needs for survival.

What I'm Reading
Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch. Another entry in the Peter Grant / Rivers of London series with the magical cop coping with incipient fatherhood and the threat that nobody expects.

I enjoyed this one a lot. Had a couple of great setpiece scenes, and a new and interesting antagonist. Good entry in the series but not a good starting point.

What I'm Reading 2
River Kings by Cat Jarman. Good non-fiction book by an archaeologist about the Vikings, with an emphasis on their river networks in mainland Europe to what is now modern Russia.

However I recently read The Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price which covered a lot of the same material, so it wasn't that new to me.

Even so it had some interesting material. She structures the book through various archaeological items, going through how they made their way across the world through trade and raid networks. She's particularly good on explaining the controversies and practical difficulties around scientific work and investigation. For instance, a diet of seafootd can mean isotope analysis gives very different ages to people, since carbon hangs around in the oceans undergoing radioactive decay: someone who eats a lot of fish can appear a couple of centuries over.

Overall, a good book. Unless you're really into history you probably only need to read one of these books on the Vikings though.

MLP
Sci/Tech. Vibrating pill to treat constipation. ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web.

Pseudo-Kufic script was meaningless Arabic-looking letters used for decoration.