Some Opinions Are Best Kept Private.
Opinions are cheap to form and expensive to air. In an age of permanent digital records, the decision to broadcast a judgment about others is no longer a private act of conscience; it is a public self-portrait. When the judgment is poorly reasoned, factually thin, or hysterically disproportionate, the portrait that emerges is rarely flattering. Some opinions, particularly those that casually demand the permanent exclusion of other people from the shared information commons, are better left unsaid. Ill-informed opinions do more than mischaracterize their targets. They function as accidental confessions. A person who looks at complex, contested, or merely disagreeable speech and concludes that the speakers are “a danger to children” sufficiently grave to warrant lifetime internet bans is revealing, first and foremost, the quality of their own cognitive and moral equipment. The claim is not an argument; it is a substitution of moral panic for evidence. It collapses distinctions between ac...
