Are you implying that in the real world, both sides to any conflict are always equally evil?
Didn’t say “equally”.
Seems to me that so far we had two significant attempts at suppressing opinions on LW.
1) Eugine’s one-person guerilla war of mass downvoting. Had some success for a few months, resulted in a ban.
2) Repeated suggestions that we should remove politically incorrect speech, because allegedly women don’t like it. Multiple proponents, no success yet.
I’m not sure which one of these is more dangerous; I could find arguments for either side. Eugine actually did censor the site for a while. However, he was finally banned, and if someone tries to do the same thing, they will probably get banned, too (hopefully much sooner). Also, his actions didn’t have popular support. On the other hand, censhorship of politically incorrect ideas is proposed repeatedly, by multiple people, openly in public. They demand that their norms become the official norms of the website, enforced by moderators.
Then I believe most people here want to have a debate without any political group dominating the website. About half of them don’t want to see here any politics at all, and I guess the other half would be okay with occassional, as rational as possible, polite debate about political topics.
Didn’t say “equally”.
Seems to me that so far we had two significant attempts at suppressing opinions on LW.
1) Eugine’s one-person guerilla war of mass downvoting. Had some success for a few months, resulted in a ban.
2) Repeated suggestions that we should remove politically incorrect speech, because allegedly women don’t like it. Multiple proponents, no success yet.
I’m not sure which one of these is more dangerous; I could find arguments for either side. Eugine actually did censor the site for a while. However, he was finally banned, and if someone tries to do the same thing, they will probably get banned, too (hopefully much sooner). Also, his actions didn’t have popular support. On the other hand, censhorship of politically incorrect ideas is proposed repeatedly, by multiple people, openly in public. They demand that their norms become the official norms of the website, enforced by moderators.
Then I believe most people here want to have a debate without any political group dominating the website. About half of them don’t want to see here any politics at all, and I guess the other half would be okay with occassional, as rational as possible, polite debate about political topics.