Dear Mods, Members and the EA Community

First and foremost I wish to apologize for any disruption I have caused. Over the last couple of days I have really missed the old neighborhood and the intellect of the neighbors. No other Board I have ever visited is as diverse, thoughtful and graphically well laid out as this one. Bravo to the responsible persons.

I was confused by my banishment as well as the missing messages. It is my sincere hope that kristoff and I have cleared up any of my misunderstandings between us.

Thank You to my neighborhood friends who kindly spoke on my behalf.

Glad To Be Back

Sincerely

Moi

Wow. I think a big round of applause is due to you and to the moderators. It looks to me like all show maturity here.

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Fri Jul 31, 2009 12:39 pm Wow. I think a big round of applause is due to you and to the moderators. It looks to me like all show maturity here.

What a lovely topic this is and you guys have to bring it up during the week I don't have computer access!

Most of my life I have been against censorship in any form on principle. In my naivete that meant political and porn/erotica type censorship.

However, I now realise that hate speech should be censored and for a very good reason. From time to time I read on this board that a person went through a period of self loathing early on in his life. Usually that was because he was different from the norm in some way: gay or coloured perhaps, or even that he just spoke with a different accent. The different person, with limited life experience, had no choice but to accept the values of his peers who were no wiser than he was.

A very similar thing happened to peoples who were colonised and whose cultures and traditions were despised by the colonists. They too came to accept the values of their colonial masters and that led to the loss of self confidence in whole communities, nations even.

Even today the descendants of those peoples have not completely recovered from a sense of inferiority.

Each of us is born with our own potential for achievement and deliberately to denigrate a person for just being different is to steal his potential away from him. I acknowledge that the denigrators often do it to mask their own personal anxieties.

However, hate speech as such is completely negative. I suspect that merely having hate thoughts is more harmful to the person who thinks that way than it is to the people he affects to despise.

So moderators, keep up the good work. It seems to me that you have a well thought out position on censorship and are doing a good job.

This is not directed towards anyone. Just something I felt I needed to get off my chest.

I am actually all for hate speech, and against laws banning it. People should feel free to express themselves, and openly air their views against people of certain sexual orientations, religions, skin colours, politics, opinions, beliefs, whatever. If nothing else, this makes it easier for me to tell who the idiots are, and avoid them.

That being said, while I am all for free speech, a website is more like your home than Trafalgar Square. You don't like people wearing sheets and burning crosses in your home? Well, you should have every legal right to toss them out on their ass. Whatever the laws are protecting free speech, they do not, and should not ever, trump your rights over happens on your property.

You want to express whatever opinion you want, you should have every right to do so in your own home, or on public property. You should have absolutely NO right to come into my house and do so. Not any more than I should have the right to come into your house and do whatever the hell I want there, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

You feel the censorship is too much here? You think that no matter what the people who've dedicated their time and energy to running this site feel, your right to say whatever you feel like trumps their right to say what happens in their house? The Internet is a big place. Start your own site, where you can do what you want. Just be sure to give me two pieces of information. One, I want the address of your site, so I can come there and see how much 'free speech' you tolerate once it's your ass, your house on the line. Two, I want your home address. Why? Because if you feel your right to do whatever you want trumps my right to say what happens in my house, I'm gonna come stay with you for awhile. And unless you're a hypocrite, you'll let me. Even if I set the couch on fire, just to watch your place burn. After all, freedom of expression trumps everything, right?

moi621 (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 30, 2009 5:43 pm Dear Mods, Members and the EA Community

First and foremost I wish to apologize for any disruption I have caused. Over the last couple of days I have really missed the old neighborhood and the intellect of the neighbors. No other Board I have ever visited is as diverse, thoughtful and graphically well laid out as this one. Bravo to the responsible persons.

I was confused by my banishment as well as the missing messages. It is my sincere hope that kristoff and I have cleared up any of my misunderstandings between us.

Thank You to my neighborhood friends who kindly spoke on my behalf.

Glad To Be Back

Sincerely

Moi

Dear Mods and the Community.

The inappropriateness of using my avatar to share web images had not occurred to me and I do apologize, again for this oversight in my judgment.

Seems like I always find a way to really, "step in it" no matter how 'good' I try to be.

Again I apologize for any disruption this may have caused to the community.

Sincerely

Moi