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A comment on 112 Gripes About the French. Parent comment

Re:112 Gripes About the French by orthoxerox on Saturday July 17, 2021 @12:30PM (#27866897)
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.

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Re:112 Gripes About the French by JumpCrisscross on Saturday July 17, 2021 @12:45PM (#27866999)
> 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).

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Re:112 Gripes About the French by lisper on Saturday July 17, 2021 @12:59PM (#27867114)
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...

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