From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jun 10 1999 - 21:45:00 MDT
QueeneMUSE@aol.com wrote:
>
> oops. I have to leave any list that censors based on subject, sorry. It's a
> free-spirit thing.
> Maybe I will rejoin again when it's uncensored ( two weeks? ), let me know.
> bye,
> Queen or Art and Love,
One of the fundamental arguments of Libertarianism is that private
enterprise can do anything the government can, and do it better and
without coercion. This includes censorship, which serves the useful
function of filtration, and is unnecessary as a government function only
because private enterprise can produce the same results. There is
nothing whatsoever un-Libertarian about a moderated list. It is simply
a case of private property; if you come into my house and be loud and
boring, I'll ask you to leave.
Nor yet is private censorship a crime against freedom, or free spirits.
Censoring a particular *point of view* would probably get me to resign
from the Extropian list. Censoring an entire subject on the grounds
that it has ceased to be interesting is quite a different matter. I
feel that filtering a list so as to retain only the fun, interesting,
important, and intelligent posts is a good thing. Just as the freedom
to express all viewpoints is the essence of liberty, so too the
intelligence to express them carefully and well is the essence of
rationality. This is the Extropian list, run on the Extropian
Institute's private property, and one of the tolerable and wise uses of
their legal right to control everything is to prevent off-topic posts.
If it's not in the charter, and enough of the list membership doesn't
want to hear it, then it's basically spam.
I do feel that a still better course would have been to announce that
henceforth any *uninteresting* posts on the topic of g*ns would be
censored, after which anyone could walk into the fire if they wanted to.
But banning the subject for only two weeks will serve just as well in
preventing the list from being crippled by a hole in the noosphere.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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