But I must respectfully and reluctantly disagree with your suggestion. It might be more cheerful for everyone if those whose comments might give offense, (not out of what was actually said but because of the personal identity of the utterer), were to refrain from posting. Then the sensibilities of those so easily provoked would be spared. Life would certainly be sunnier.
But such is the slippery slope. And I, for one, will not venture down it.
Censorship, like leprosy and syphilis, courses through the body, ravaging it while seeking an opportunistic moment to erupt upon the body as an ugly lesion. It matters not if the censorship is "soft" rather than jackbooted because ultimately the effect upon the body politic is equally ugly. Censorship murders truth. It matters not whether the censor is polite or the manner of its application is subtle, the end result is ultimately murderous to a process which looks for truth within the free exchange of ideas. To suggest that someone ought not to publish his opinion, not because of the contents of the opinion, but because of who he is (or rather what someone else quite mistakenly presumes he is) is a censorship even more to be feared than mere censorship of the material itself. This is censorship of the person! This is the very sort of shameful act which was engaged in by a white berobed night riders. This is why censorship is so damned dangerous: It makes a Klansman of a Wolfstar- the very object of his self righteous contempt. Like slavery, censorship degrades and perverts the master as well as the servant.
More dangerous because it kills discourse because of the messenger rather than his message, this kind of censorship has other characteristics which make it worse than garden variety censorship, if that were possible: It is utterly dependent on the subjective sensibilities of anyone professing to be distressed. In short order we would be utterly without standards of any kind whatsoever. We have seen the baleful consequences of establishing the moving target of the victim's subjective feelings in sexual harassment laws. It matters not whether the gesture or remark or joke was intrinsically offensive it matters only that the alleged victim thinks it was. This is not a standard, this is an invitation to legal extortion. And what sort of person has standing to force his subjective feelings upon all of us? The likes of Wolfstar- a man who, by his own admission, utterly refuses to learn the facts of the life of the man he cites as a reason to censor as he declares them to be irrelevant. Worse, despite all the explicit evidence to the contrary, Wolfstar persists in post after post to conflate me with a pen name and avatar. I have made it clear that there is much about Forests life which I do not approve much less admire. But so long as Wolfstar can continue to deny this reality, he can conflate me with Forrest. As long as he does, he would hold the censor's red pen.
Finally, to submit to this sort of censorship would be to invite it. Once a Philistine like Wolfstar learns that he can rule these boards merely by conjuring up some suitably politically correct contrivance, he will start to swoon like a character from a Jane Austen novel.
I for one will not pander to someone who simply, flatly, declines to deal with the issues in the original post or with the issues concerning his alleged distress over Nathan Bedford Forrest. In refusing to pander to the likes of Wolfstar, I am rendering you a service and every other FReeper too.
