Apropos of what we try to offer in Alexandria – an unrestrained choir of raw human speech across the board – the excruciatingly sober Jonathan Turley on
To put it simply, Western nations appear to have fallen out of love with free speech and are criminalizing more and more kinds of speech through the passage of laws banning hate speech, blasphemy and discriminatory language. Ironically, these laws are defended as fighting for tolerance and pluralism.
In our own tiny Western city of Alexandria not everyone finds themselves comfortable with what we offer: the ability to post and comment virtually at will, limited only so as to enable the site itself to meet its own terms of service requirements.
No self-serving, idiosyncratic definitions of what is civil and what is not, no patronizing moderation of comments as if you were children, and no sculpting of commentary by selective acceptance and rejection in order to apply your thoughts like icing from a pastry bag solely to adorn and enhance the posts of only one person.
Not everyone finds this cold, almost infinitely open liberty-space to their liking, and not a few Authors have come and gone because of that, preferring something warmer, more enclosing, and more comfortably customized to their particular needs.
Nevertheless I continue to hope that you who are here and who continue to come here will do so because you have already learned to generate your own warmth and comfort yourselves and so have no need of the parenting we do not provide here, and because you recognize as I do that the trend toward a Balkanizing atomization of everyone into six billion discrete Internet market cells would be equally pathological.
Update: And, just in the nick of time to drive Turley’s point home, Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem, Co-Founders of the Women’s Media Center, on why the
FCC should clear Limbaugh from airwaves:
This isn’t political. While we disagree with Limbaugh’s politics, what’s at stake is the fallout of a society tolerating toxic, hate-inciting speech. For 20 years, Limbaugh has hidden behind the First Amendment, or else claimed he’s really “doing humor” or “entertainment.” He is indeed constitutionally entitled to his opinions, but he is not constitutionally entitled to the people’s airways.
Here, though, I will try to allow all comers to hide behind the First Amendment for as long as I can.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I lift my glass to Mr. Turley *clink*