Quote:
Mark Murray wrote:
To the group of people who are happy with the decision for a new forum, shame on you. Are your beliefs so tenuous that you cannot weather criticisms such that you must silence some opposition to them? Do you believe that people like Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Parks all had to have a peaceful environment without other groups trying to contradict them?
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Those who attempted to silence Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and others whose names are vaguely conflated with them, were attempting to deny them access to various public spaces and forums to which they, as citizens (or as human beings who had every reasonable expectation of being accorded a citizen's rights), had every legitimate right. Furthermore, the silencers did so by means of non-symbolic imprisonment and violent repression. I'm sure you see a stark difference between that situation and one in which not every forum (including privately owned ones such as AikiWeb) is open to every subject. If I wanted to come into your living room this very evening and hold forth at high volume on the virtues of nutritional yeast, and you put a stop to this unwanted intrusion and turfed me out of there, I think you'd probably see it as insult added to injury if I then accused you of having tenuous beliefs, being unable to weather criticism and seeking to silence my free expression.