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| Originally Posted by twpd But by the same token that doesn't mean we should tolerate an erosion in our ability to express our opinions and thoughts. The next step will be them.
I am against all forms of censorship. I believe that rubbish, libellous comments, spurious statements of "fact" will eventually be outed or destroyed by good reasoned debate and the support of solid facts. To rely on censorship to quieten the vocal minorities/idiots is failure. |
I agree with all of that, but in the context of this thread it depends on whether everybody who uses this board has the ability to employ good reasoned debate in support of their arguement. It is abundantly clear that not everybody has that capability, and some are quite capable of causing a great deal of offence very quickly.
In my view, these offensive remarks are more often levelled by members against other members rather than directly at the webteam or the MT, so to interpret this policy as something for the MT to hide behind, or exert greater control over views expressed by the members is illogical and, in my view, takes 'MT conspiracy' theories to new heights of paranoia.
Failure it may be to exert some form of 'censorship', but the fact remains that control exists over what people say in public to an enormous extent. As a simple example, supposing that you were in a pub with your partner and someone started to insult them in an extremely offensive way. Supposing that you tried reasoned debate, but you were up against the most oaf-ish individual who was quite clearly too thick to understand the eloquence of your arguement. Would you stand behind your principles of using reason or decide that the time honoured censorship of a smack in the teeth would be more appropriate? If you did that the landlord would be entirely within his rights to throw you both out, since causing an affray might have legal repercussions for him.