You haven't been banned, as far as I can see. You've simply been asked to back up your assertions with evidence/links, which is a completely reasonable request and it's just the decent thing to do in a debate anyway. If you refrained from deflecting and just dealt with the matters under discussion, that would probably help too. Name-calling doesn't help your case either. I don't think you called me anything and whilst P_Stu referred to you as a "convicted paedophile", it was quite obviously used with a heavy dose of satirical sarcasm in order to expose the ridiculous logic of your position. When you threw that back at him, it just seemed like petty name-calling as I'm not sure how it was supposed to bolster your position. It actually undermined your argument because you appeared to be using the accusation as a way to attack him. Thus, you must believe that some words
can have a potentially harmful effect, after all.
You're not entitled to use this platform as you wish considering it is dahamsta who maintains and pays for it, as far as I know. In fact, you're not entitled to use this platform at all; you use it as a guest ultimately with his permission, just like every other user of the forum.
Anyway, this is a sensible summary of the free speech issue by Noam Chomsky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdvYbG3U_U
He is widely regarded as a strong free speech advocate (and justifiably so), but even he acknowledges that it's not a black-and-white issue and that "even the most passionate advocate of freedom of speech does not believe that, say, I have a right to go into your living room and put up a pornographic poster or something".
On free speech generally, Chomsky once
stated the following, and it's a view with which I concur:
There are still certain spheres in which regulation is sensible and broadly non-contentious, however. Absolutism is just juvenile nonsense that fails to consider logical consequences.
I also came across this Al Jazeera debate - "Should free speech be protected, no matter what?" - between Glenn Greenwald and Stanley Fish (chaired by Mehdi Hassan) via Facebook earlier and thought it was relevant:
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/...5083726784.htm
Interestingly, just on the issue of Trump, that great free-speech champion (
), for someone who has publicly complained about the alleged chilling effect of "political correctness" on expression (essentially, his way of attempting to discredit and police liberal or left-wing criticism of his right-wing ignorance and bigotry), it is astonishing that he has taken the move to actually prohibit the use of a list of specified words by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...=.c16dd6e391f2
It seems these words weren't "correct enough" for his politics. A very dangerous hypocrite is Trump.
Bizarrely, right-wing media outlets are spinning this prohibition on expression as "the Trump administration ... scrubbing the CDC of political correctness":
https://worldpoliticus.com/2017/12/1...l-correctness/
This is inverted reality.
Just on your claim that "the info on a bus time table is always correct" and that "[whether] it coincides with the running of buses is a different matter"; if the info doesn't coincide with the running of the buses, then the info evidently isn't correct. How are you even disputing something as straightforward and self-evident as that?
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