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Those rankings are very biased. The press one used to penalize countries at one point for not having journalist unions (don't know if they still do).

As an example, the US press was allowed to publish on the Snowden leaks but in the UK policemen forced The Guardian to smash their hard drives. UK is 11 places above the US: https://rsf.org/en/ranking/2021

The freedom ones often pick and choose freedoms. For example: none include self defense possession, but do include same sex marriage (something that was invented two decades ago).




I assure you, same sex marriage wasn't invented two decades ago. [0]

What was invented two decades ago is treating gay people with enough humanity to begin to CONSIDER giving them the same universal freedoms as straight people get.

So yeah, at this point, in 2022, same-sex marriage is an objective basic freedom. I am not interested in any religion-based counterarguments. Anyone's freedom to hold religious beliefs cannot impune on OTHER people's freedom, regardless of what religious people will claim.

Self-defense posession is a subjective one, I agree. I personally think it's an archaic freedom desire [1] (Honestly, to me comparable "I want the freedom to be able to beat my slave"). But I understand the alternative arguments. This one happens to be something on which the US is a massive outlier from the rest of the "developed" world.

The main point, though, is I don't think people on HackerNews seeking "freedom" are talking about freedom to own guns. I might be wrong.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Ancient

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000520/gun-risk-death


>The freedom ones often pick and choose freedoms.

Is there another way to index multiple countries and measure against each other?

Sounds like you might disagree with the freedoms they chose rather than the process of defining and measuring "freedom." That may be an expression of your own bias.




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