If someone is banned from a forum, they can still do plenty of other things in their life, like go to another forum. Or even start their own competing forum dedicated to the same topic, if they feel that the original forum has a bad moderation policy and that its users are likely to move to a better-moderated one (and sometimes this actually happens).
People vanished by the secret police rarely have a comparable option.
True, I was talking at extreme example to demonstrate the type of totalitarian logic underlying Vladimir’s argument. Namely, finding open discussion of important issues to be “distracting”.
If someone is banned from a forum, they can still do plenty of other things in their life, like go to another forum. Or even start their own competing forum dedicated to the same topic, if they feel that the original forum has a bad moderation policy and that its users are likely to move to a better-moderated one (and sometimes this actually happens).
People vanished by the secret police rarely have a comparable option.
True, I was talking at extreme example to demonstrate the type of totalitarian logic underlying Vladimir’s argument. Namely, finding open discussion of important issues to be “distracting”.