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I feel like your statement kind of might just boil down to "things I like are freedom, things I don't like are not freedom".
From an objective point of view, we absolutely have more sexual freedom right now than people in the West did 150 years ago.
Since when has license being equivalent to freedom become "objective"?
"This is not liberty, this is license" has always been a tyrant's excuse.
That's just ad hominem. Who gives a shit if it's a tyrant's excuse?
Is it true? Whatever the answer it, it certainly doesn't seem "objective".
The tyrant is a tyrant because he's taking away your liberty, in this case by claiming it is not liberty at all, but "license" (which is liberty that he doesn't like).
I won't claim this dynamic never happens, that would be silly, but you're not really engaging with the idea if you think it can only be invoked in this sense.
Burke, whom it would seems farcical to call a tyrant, summed up the issue pretty tightly in my opinion:
There may be some platonic ideal of some other way in which it is invoked, but in practice any time someone says "this is not liberty, it is license", it's because they don't want you to have liberty.
Burke, indeed, is explicitly saying that -- he's saying that people who don't "put moral chains upon their own behavior" (meaning the French, apparently) are not qualified for liberty.
And the fact the French he was talking about did push things so far it destroyed them and Europe doesn't move you at all?
Why would it move me? If indeed he was correct and the French weren't worthy of liberty, it does not change what liberty is. That some people, allowed liberty, will destroy themselves and others with the latitude thye have, does not make liberty into "not liberty".
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