Re: Censorship

["jdow" <jdow@earthlink.net>]

From: "Rik van Riel" <riel@conectiva.com.br>
> On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, DervishD wrote:
> 
> >     Yes, let's have a 'clean web' through censorship. This is an
> > advance. And, oh, well, let's forbid too politically incorrect
> > language, and, why not?
> 
> You seem to be forgetting one important detail.
> 
> The internet is not public property, it is a large group of
> interconnected private properties.
> 
> The owners of each of these private properties can decide
> for themselves what content they do and do not want to have
> on their own properties.
> 
> So-called "freedom of speech" is something that exists in
> public space, I can organise protests in public space and
> you can't do anything about it, but if I were to held a
> protest in your garden you'd have every right to kick me
> out. ;)

More to the serious point here, Rik, he is trying to remove one
of the more excellent twit filter tools that exists. Most of the
time emails which are heavy in profanity are from people who I
have little or no desire to deal with in their "current" mental
state. When they cool off a little and are no longer using
profanity they are rational enough to listen to problem solutions,
in most cases. Of course, there are people who seem to be utterly
unable to avoid profanity. There was a supervisor for the manufacturing
floor at one company where I worked for awhile. He always invaded a
person's personal space for any level of conversation and proceeded
to lace his conversation with "dirty words" as his punctuation marks.
I learned to avoid him. He was also one of the contributing factors,
a modest one to be sure, that led to my leaving that company after a
year and five months. (And no, he did not show any of the other "tics"
of Tourette's (sp?) Syndrome.)

{^_^}