Any analogy will be imperfect. Let's then consider a different scenario. Let's compare a grocery shop to a broad commons or marketplace, where strangers go to find other strangers to do...whatever. Trade ideas, or buy and sell goods.
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Replying to @St_Rev @minandychoi
The grocery shop has a narrow purpose, to serve the interests of the owner, specifically to sell groceries. To that end, the owner can welcome or exclude pretty much anybody they want, and impose rules to protect the shop and its contents.
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Replying to @St_Rev @minandychoi
A forum is like a grocery shop, in that it has to have an owner (individual or collective) to protect it and keep it useful for its intended narrow purpose.
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Replying to @St_Rev @minandychoi
Now compare that to an open marketplace where lots of different people go to pursue lots of different purposes. If the market is to be truly open, ie useful for many purposes not defined in advance by the owner, the rules must be a lot weaker.
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Replying to @St_Rev @minandychoi
Instead of the grocery shop's one basic transaction, owner selling to customer, the market has to allow many transactions, visitor A interacting with visitor B. In a liberal society, the guiding principle for the latter kind of transaction is _consent_.
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Replying to @St_Rev @minandychoi
ie, if A and B want to interact, the owner should generally not interfere. Now, if A _doesn't_ want to interact with B, that's a problem, and the owner may need to intervene. Thus one has police. Online, we have mute and block.
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Replying to @St_Rev @minandychoi
But where things really get complicated is if A and B want to interact, and C doesn't want them to. This can get ugly, particularly if C forms a large gang and stomps around the marketplace demanding the right to examine and forbid all transactions.
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Replying to @St_Rev @minandychoi
In a liberal society, this is generally regarded as a failure. C gaining power is good for C, bad for A and B, and bad for the health of the commons, because A and B are less able to interact for mutual benefit (and may seek coercive power themselves).
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Replying to @St_Rev @minandychoi
In short, politicization and morality enforcement both damage the power of ordinary people to seek beneficial interactions. They also become cripplingly expensive as the size of the commons increases, and tend to degenerate into banditry.
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Anyway, this is just a sketch. For further consideration, I'd start with JS Mill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty
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. Banned in Sweden. SubGenius, Zhuangist, white-hat troll. Defrocked mathematician. Brain problems.