Ellen Feiss seems to have dropped off the radar. So have an irreverent JPEG that parodies her brief brush with Internet fame.

Again, not a whole lot happened on Saturday. I finally finished reading Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee. This book should be taught in every high school, be discussed in reading groups in public libraries, and be mailed to every legislator summarized in 2 or 3 bullet points for every legislator. There are far too many ideologues on all sides of the political spectrum who think that they can advance their agendas or amass power by saying, “Only the following speech is acceptable.” Those ordinary citizens who think this is a good idea need to get a clue. Those legislators and judges who think this is a good idea need to be removed from office, as their actions go against everything James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and all those guys wanted.

The remedy for people espousing racist, sexist, or stupid opinions is NOT the prohibition of racist, sexist, or stupid speech. The remedy is more speech, from people who have opinions that are not racist, sexist, or stupid. If you have a free marketplace of ideas, those ideas which are the best should become the most popular. When apparatchiks decide which ideas will be allowed into the marketplace, cronyism and stupidity are much more likely to happen. In conditions like that, people can’t learn nearly as much. And that’s not good for anyone in the long term.

The First Amendment should be even more widely discussed and relevant now than it was when the book was published in the early 1990s. The Net has given anyone who has some spare time the equivalent of a printing press. You can start your own newspaper-equivalent if you want. In fact, you should.

At work, one of the things I do is moderate/admin a large comment board. Some of the people on this comment board are a few fries short of a Happy Meal, and they apparently believe that Barack Obama is a Communist Muslim Nazi (or something like that) and frequently post comments to that effect. No one deletes comments for political reasons. Basically, if User N thinks that Alien Space Bats control the United States, then that opinion is not ours. It’s User N’s. If User N continually espouses opinions that are vicious, stupid, and false, then reasonable people would stop paying attention to User N.

The problem is that it’s more difficult to track a person on the Net than it is in meatspace. I’ve used 3 different usernames in my time on the Net, and I haven’t even been trying to do the alt/sockpuppet thing.