Randall makes a typical mistake: the constitution bans one specific form of censorship, therefore all other forms of censorship are acceptable.

They are not, they just aren't so unequivocally bad that you can ban them in the constitution with a single sentence.

> the constitution bans one specific form of censorship, therefore all other forms of censorship are acceptable

The First Amendment is perhaps the most powerful manifestation of the philosophy of free speech in our world today. As a result, we have a habit of conflating the two. But a culture of free speech can wither while the First Amendment remains strong (and vice versa).

The exercise of editorial discretion in a privately owned publication or forum and censorship are two very different things.

What steams my clams is that the people who complain about private forums exercising editorial discretion tend to be the same people who insist that private property rights are sacrosanct, and so, for example, private property owners should be able to ban union organizers from their property [1]. This strikes me as brazenly hypocritical. Either free speech trumps private property, or private property trumps free speech. You can't have it both ways.

[1] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/supreme-court-holds-uni...

I don't see those things as incompatible at all.

"giving the other side a fair chance to make its point" (from very next sentence) doesn't mean they can't blow that chance by being obnoxious, unfair, offensive, or plain wrong. I don't think the OP argues that this "duty to listen" extends forever, that you have to keep listening after you have determined that "the other side" is being an asshole.

I think a tit-for-tat approach is fair. If the other party is demonstrably not listening to you, you can drop the duty to listen (and you should probably just disengage). If someone is participating in good faith, but wrong or an asshole/obnoxious/offensive, I don't think that justifies censorship.

In any argument at least one and frequently both positions are plain wrong. Both parties think that is true of the other. If that were a reason to drop free speech norms, they would always be dropped.

Civility is an aspirational value, but communities that enforce it invariably will do so in a biased way. Rude behavior is easy to spot in the outgroup and easy to overlook in the ingroup. Offensiveness is nebulously defined- someone might be offended by the word 'asshole', someone else by the banning of vulgarity. How a community defines civility privileges people from backgrounds that define it similarly. Those closest to the issue will have a harder time keeping their emotions in check- eg. a white person might have an easier time arguing dispassionately about racism than a minority.

If you can get around those issues, I think you should. Civil discourse optimizes for a lot of the factors that justify free speech in the first place. Not so with being wrong; a major benefit of free speech is that those who are wrong and participating can be righted, to the benefit of all parties.

That xkcd actually reinforces the duty to listen, but clarifies that nobody has a right to a specific response from listeners.

xkcd isn't exactly an arbiter of truth