| |
|
We shouldn't carry on, but at least a beautiful flower has emerged:
I don't think Barbelith has ever been free of ideology—if anyone ever claimed that, it must have been in the innocent days when you could say things like "Break out of your limiting reality tunnels!" and have some people cheer and most of the rest just smile in amused tolerance. For whatever reason, what we have here is primarily a group of people who believe in the equality of people of different sexes and genders, the equality of people of various racial identities and backgrounds, and the need for empirical evidence to back up claims of empirical fact. Crazy as it may sound, those are the kind of books our audience reads, so those are the kind of books we're selling*. Don't come in here and try to sell The Bell Curve, The Naked Ape, or the Truth About the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: We're not stocking it. Open a bookstore of your own—I think there's a domain-name for lease next door.
Herein lies the fundamental difference between banning someone's books (i.e. making their publication, sale, and/or possession illegal by an act of government) and telling someone to go away and stop shouting rude things on your lawn. Barbelith is not a government, it is the Internet home of the people who contribute. We are not, nor do we need to be, dedicated to "freedom of speech" of the sort that holds that freedom of speech means that I am allowed to say anything I want and other people's responses to me amount to censorship. There are many other places on the Internet for that. Freedom of speech means, in part, freedom to accept responsibility for the consequences of your speech. If your speech causes harm to a number of people, it's likely that one of the consequences will be that you are told to go speak elsewhere, where you will not be harming the people who speak here. The one kind of banning and the other kind of banning share a name, but they're different situations.
id entity speaks sense. |
|
|
