Quadibloc wrote:

wrote:

Sorry, John, but FICS is in the USA, where thoughtcrime
is not against the law -- nor should it be.

I don't quarrel with that. However, when people display themselves to
be idiots, pointing that out should not be stigmatized as "whining",
except by people who _do_ support the bigotry.

True, and if all Silverman did was that, I would not have replied.

Instead, he attacked a third party (FICS) for not forcing the
user to abandon the username that Silverman objected to.
One could argue that the user was an idiot for picking that
username (and lose the argument; it is standard gaming-speak
for "kills you"), but insisting that the FICS admins suppress
it by force is, in my opinion, whining and worse.

In a free society, the answer to Nazis (or imagined Nazis)
engaging in objectionable free speech is more free speech
refuting them, not supression. In the US, holocaust deniers
have blogs and webpages, and there are blogs and webpages
that do such a good job of refuting them that anyone doing
a Google search can see who is right. In Germany, they get
to act as if the Big Bad Government is afraid of their ideas
and has no answer to them other than supressing them by force.