Tuesday, January 04, 2005

CENSOR THIS BLOG

Another record day for the old inbox:

Why do you allow unsavory characters such as Mis-Nagid to post links to their blasphemous posts in your comment section? Do you endorse these posts and these thoughts? The Satan-controlled blogs aren't nearly as free-thinking as you. Renegade Rebbetzin, for example, makes you get approval for any link that appears in her comment section. Why don't you embrace a similar policy?

The great ideas; the ideas Mis-nagid challenges; need no protection from me. Here is John Stuart Mill in On Liberty:
[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
and from an earlier era, in language no less lovely, we present John Milton in the Aeropagitica
Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter.... Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.... Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.
And finally, Oliver Wendal Holms:
...the best test of truth is is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
If you disagree, tell me why. Don't deprive us "of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth"