(08-04-2025, 02:50 AM)benji wrote: Progressives don't believe in property rights (except for themselves) so they don't recognize that they're invoking a right they otherwise usually consistently oppose: the right to exclude others you don't wish to associate with.
Unlike them we're we try to be honest so it's no problem for me to say I never promised this property to be a "free speech" forum. Nor did I write a contract of rules I claim you agreed to only to then enforce arbitrary and hidden ones instead.
Various rights and principles often come into conflict with one another, and when that happens, a winner must be chosen. The winner will depend on the context. You generally have a right to swing your hand around however you want, but not if it involves punching someone. You generally have a right not to be punched, unless you attack them, at which point they do have a right to punch you. Etc.
The principle of free speech is a guiding principle that was conceived to prevent powerful entities from punishing dissent, and the 1A is just one manifestation of that as it pertains to the US Gov't, but the principle itself is far more broadly applicable. More basically, as a strong guiding principle, it says that you should need a really good reason to overcome that right to free speech. When that principle comes into conflict with an individual's property rights, the property rights are generally agreed to be a good enough reason. You do not need to tolerate speech you disagree with entering your home. Every small forum owner has a right to set up their rules for what they will and won't tolerate.
Where things get gray is when the "forum" becomes so large that it essentially becomes the public sphere. In public spaces, the right to free speech and free association are best summed up as: You have a right to walk away from someone's speech, but you don't have a right to throw tomatoes. They do not have a right to an audience, but they do have a right to their audience. No one is forced to listen, but you also can't prevent those who do want to hear him from hearing him.
So when a forum gets as large as, say, Twitter, this is no longer just a matter of you personally walking away. It's you throwing tomatoes. It's making sure his audience has a hard time hearing him. And so this spectrum from "personal forum and personal club space" to "essentially the public sphere" is gradual. And thus, it's gonna be gradual how much property rights and rights of association give way to rights of free speech. Something like RE is (thankfully) still quite small, so while I think they're losers for how they run their forum, they certainly have the right to run it that way. But I would say that, given their size and given how they run it, they're also not, in my eyes, giving sufficient deference--or even any deference at all--to the principle of free speech. They're very much an authoritarian forum.
Meanwhile, you run a much smaller forum, and give much more deference to the principle of free speech. But it's also much more akin to a private club than theirs is. It's far from what people consider the public sphere. So I think your deference to free speech is just about right for the size of forum you're running. You don't have to tolerate anything you don't like, but you do for the most part, and it does make for a much, much better forum. Because the principle of free speech isn't just about asserting rights. It's a guiding principle to make things run better, as things tend to run better when people can be honest with each other.
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