I used to stutter. I still do sometimes when I'm exceptionally stressed out. I went through speech therapy when I was a kid and I got over it. Because I had a hard time communicating when I was younger the one thing guaranteed to really make me angry is when someone tells me "you can't say that".

A couple of years ago  monkey_matt and I had a blazing row in the middle of the department about just that issue (yeah Monkey, it wasn't about whether to put salt in the water when cooking pasta, not after you told me I couldn't say that...)

The majority of the people reading this journal live in democratic countries. One of the basic tenets of democracy is freedom of speech. So you have a right to say anything you want, just as everyone else has the right to say the opposite, or to debate your point.

So when I see people on LiveJournal demanding that other users 'filter' posts that they disagree with it really puts my back up. Someone posts to LJ and - so long as they're not promoting illegal activity or contravening the ToS of the site - they are perfectly entitled to post whatever they want, as publicly as they want. They can say whatever they want.

If someone on that person's friendslist takes offence at what they've said, rather than demanding that the poster removes the content because it offends their poor innocent eyes, they should probably think about why that post/comment/whatever appeared on a page they frequent, and if they are so opposed to it, defriend the poster or remove them from their default flist view.*

They have no right to censor someone else's opinions.

They have every right to disagree with those opinions and say so, but trying to shut down someone else's freedom of expression? That is so far beyond not on.

Yes, there is a specific incident I have in mind here, and no I'm not going to link to it because I don't want either the original poster (who is on my flist) or the other party (who is not on my flist but who I am aware of through other friends) to be targeted as a result of what I have to say.