Yostivanich

Free­dom of speech, means the free­dom to say any­thing irre­gard­less of it being stu­pid or mean. Now granted you do have to have rea­son­able lim­its of free­dom of speech in order for soci­ety to oper­ate, the stan­dard scream­ing fire in a crowded build­ing clause. But free­dom of speech means just that, you can’t oper­ate in soci­ety with­out peo­ple some­times say­ing things that are just plain stu­pid, mean or wrong. It’s the nature of being human that some peo­ple are just plain stu­pid or mean. This gets mul­ti­plied via the Greater Inter­net Fuck­wad The­ory in an online environment.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t cre­ate an envi­ron­ment whereby experts can debate top­ics. What it means is that those debates are not going to be decided by pun­dits or other experts or the intel­lec­tu­als of the world, but aver­age cit­i­zens who will dis­cuss a range of issues with­out any for­mal train­ing in the area or any real under­stand­ing of the issues.

Just this week I had two peo­ple ask if athe­ism (No reli­gious pref­er­ence is acu­tally the fastest grow­ing answer to what reli­gion you are and one if four peo­ple aged 188 to 22 con­sider them­selves athe­ist) meant that the per­son wor­shiped the devil. Ummm, no. These were both col­lege stu­dents and fairly intel­li­gent. They just didn’t know. That’s a prob­lem, but does that mean those stu­dents shouldn’t be allowed to com­ment on reli­gion in Amer­ica. I would argue it may make their opin­ion not as valu­able but it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have a voice.

One of the stu­dents in par­tic­u­lar once under­stand­ing what athe­ism was able to express rea­sons beyond a stan­dard “The Bible says so” or “Because I feel God” response to why athe­ism wouldn’t fit for her.

So no Robert Scoble I don’t think the com­ment trolls should be deleted. Are they stu­pid, absolutely, are they wrong, almost cer­tainly yes, should their voice be deleted, never.

That isn’t to say that he can do what­ever he wants to on his blog and delete who he wishes. That also isn’t to say that I don’t desire mean­ing­ful and intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion. There is how­ever a prob­lem when to have a mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tion you have to lock every­one out who you per­ceive has noth­ing to add to the conversation.

I don’t want that and I won’t do that.