The Great Game

That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech. Free speech is enhanced by civility

Tim O'Reilly via Andrew Sullivan.

This quote is a lovely example of an interconnected story. The O'Reilly article is about a code of conduct that Tim O'Reilly (the definition of internet guru) and Jimmy Wale (founder of wikipedia) have created and are trying to promote.

Now this code is in response, in part, to the incident involving Kathy Sierra. Kathy Sierra is a tech writer and blogger that has received death threats due to the fact that she has deleted offensive, obnoxious and abuse comments from her website. I had noticed the Sierra incident on Ornicus.

Well, Andrew Sullivan is hardcore pro-free-speech, and he saw the above article quoting O'Reilly and decided to fire off a shot. Sullivan didn't seem to realize that he was taking a aim at one of the most revered figures in techie portion of the internet. He has been on the receiving end of quite the blogstorm. He has posted some of the responses so far (here and here).

The thing is both O'Reilly and Sullivan are making correct points. Sullivan is correct in observing that free speech doesn't exist when there is censorship. O'Reilly is correct in his observation that censorship can be imposed through intimidation without the participation of authority. O'Reilly's code of conduct is an attempt to frame when it is permissible to censor so as to limit the effectiveness of intimidation. I suspect that O'Reilly has thought this one through more then Sullivan has, however Sullivan's point is very important and should not be dismissed.