Saturday, February 14, 2009

Critical Fora and Free Speech

I don't usually agree with Barbara Schwarz on many things but I think she has a point when it comes to supposedly open critical fora. In my opinion, people like Andreas Heldal-Lund and Emma have failed to abide by their own free speech claims (and of course the WhyWeProtest and the IRC channel jokes).

ARS is currently the only forum that can be said to be truly free-speech abiding, and that's because it simply is impossible for anybody to enforce any rules there apart for mathematically determined spam. It also is the only critical forum where actual discussion is possible, and really the only forum worth reading for that reason alone.

I have to agree with Barbara here - spam and odd behavior is just the price to pay for free speech, and in that ARS is way better than any of the critical fora.

These moderated forums like ESMB, MBCB, XSO or WHYWEPROTEST show the very cultic side of the Scientology haters - alt.religion.scientology | Google Groups

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Barbara isn't the only one who noticed anti-free speech on the anti-Scientology forums. You should interview Roadrunner. (He still posts on ars and you could ping him there.) He is a very moderate poster with good manners but he was kicked from just about any moderate message forum because he does not hate Scientology.