There are Limits

 So Elon Musk has bought Twitter.  He believes in no limits on speech (maybe).

Here is my story:

Back in the late 1970's, I wrote a newsletter for my racing buddies.  It was drawn from influences like The National Lampoon and Monty Python, amongst others.  It was serious, funny, crazy, satirical, and most of free of moderation.  I would publish anything and encouraged people to send stuff in as I could not write the whole thing myself.  It's zenith was one morning at Bridgehampton race track; when all there, drivers, workers, officials, all sat around reading it instead of getting on with their business.  The silence was golden!

Then one day I got an submission from a friend.  I read it and in today's parlance, I was rolling on the floor laughing.  It was really funny. Then it hit me -  I could not publish it.  One of the stories would literally destroy a person, their reputation and maybe their life.  Just like Calculus, I had come up against a limit.  The words were truth, but I had to decide if this truth belonged in a publication that was supposed to be funny, when the end result would have been anything but.  This lesson at age 22 has stayed with me for 44 years.   To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, "There is a time to publish and a time to hold back".

I was talking about truth.  If Truth has its limits, how much more must a falsehood?  One of my favorite movies is Inherit the Wind.  At the end the Spencer Tracy character says to the reporter "You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something."  Free speech was meant to allow us to move forward, if it does nothing but push us back and destroy, what value has it?