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Comment by throwawaygulf | Hacker News Reader

>I've argued against this POV here

And spoonjim and ghaff kicked your teeth in.

>That said, I'm not opposed to them becoming the modern day public square.

Saying that "you don't need to use FB/Twitter, you can write your own blog" is like saying in 1789 "You don't need to be allowed to distribute your pamphlets in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston, you can exercise your free speech on the top of a mountain in Colorado."

To which you said: >Being able to speak "only" from one's own blog only makes discovery difficult, it does not limit people's access post-discovery.

This applies to a random mountain in Colorado as well. Discovery is difficult, but after people discover it, they're free to go back ad much as they want.

>But de facto isn't de juris

That's literally how "town square" is defined, de facto, not de jure. You're literally arguing for our position without realizing it.

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in 17XX, the mountain top in Colorado (a) wasn't even a part of the country (b) even if it was, remained several thousand miles of arduous cross-country travel from the entire population of the newly emerging state. People would almost certainly die en route to hear your pontifications. There's zero comparison with a browser address bar.

Even if you posit the top of Mt. Washington rather than a peak in the as-yet undiscovered (by northern Europeans) Rockies, the difference remains unchanged in more or less every essential way.

And actually, "town square" isn't defined at all, de facto or de jure. In the USA, there's essentially no standing right to speak in a public place. You can't be stopped based on what you say, but you can routinely be stopped from speaking at all.

This is, perversely, one of the things that makes London's Hyde Park Corner so unique: there is an accepted policy (not law) that you can't be stopped from speaking there unless engaged in incitement. This fallacy of "the public square" is just that - a fallacy. Since independence (and certainly before it), there was no freedom to speak in a public space without being blessed by some authority.

It was only the printing press that was really "free speech" , in the sense that you could print anything and make it available and the 1st amendment could not prevent access to it.

And btw, "kicked your teeth in" as a description of that thread exchange seems like a great reason to avoid further interaction with you. ghaff was supporting my POV, and spoonjim's comment was downvoted (and incidentally wrong). Even if they had both disagreed with me and presented a cogent argument supporting their positions, "kicking teeth in" is a particularly violent metaphor that I prefer to see left unused.

>in 17XX, the mountain top in Colorado (a) wasn't even a part of the country

Which is relevant, since Parlor and other small sites may not have servers on the country due to the big corporation squashing them.

>even if it was, remained several thousand miles of arduous cross-country travel from the entire population of the newly emerging state.

Exactly like how there's no promises now that small blogs will be indexed, will be cancelled with AMP, may outright be banned by ISPs and CDNs, etc.

>People would almost certainly die en route to hear your pontifications.

Packets would almost certainly "die" en route as well due to what's laid out above.

>There's zero comparison with a browser address bar.

Wrong, it's really apt. Thanks for fleshing it out actually.

So bring it forward now like I originally stated: BLM and other leftists can protest in areas that are not high traffic roads, freeways, main streets, federal courthouses, etc. They can protest in the Mojave desert, they won't be censored there. The can all drive there easily, by no means dangerous. Probably safer than the "town square" in many of the Democrat ran cities.

>And btw, "kicked your teeth in" as a description of that thread exchange seems like a great reason to avoid further interaction with you.

You admit defeat and don't have a response, that's fine.

>spoonjim's comment was downvoted

Can't have any wrongthink now can we.

>and incidentally wrong

No it wasn't, it was 100% right, and you didn't have a response.

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