A friend and I talked today about the sheer number of alternative realities represented on the Web, and he commented that Freedom of Speech might have been taken too far. He was joking, but I took the opportunity to vehemently disagree.

I believe that it is CRITICAL to the continued advancement of human knowledge that crackpots be allowed to freely publish their rants and ravings. The benefits are legion:

• Whatever time they spend writing this stuff keeps them off the street and out of traffic.
• Their posts provide continuous proof that the Government is NOT suppressing alternate viewpoints.
• They help identify people whose medical advice, stock market analyses, or concept of reality may not be beneficial to act upon. It’s more humane than a radio collar or spraypaint tag, and effective over greater distances!

As always, there is an appropo Far Side cartoon: Illustrated in each quadrant of the cartoon were a spiny puffer fish, an arched and hissing cat, a coiled rattlesnake, and a man with a boot on his head and an inflatable duck ring around his waist, carrying a bazooka. The caption was “How nature says, ‘don’t touch.’”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 11:10 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.