womzilla | One of the best political aphorisms I've ever heard

This came from a short-lived alternative magazine called X in the early 1990s:

Oppose censorship. It makes heroes out of assholes.

This is illustrated quite well by today's Glenn Greenwald post about Mark fucking Steyn becoming an icon of speech suppression in Canada.

A similar complaint was recently filed against Mark Steyn, arising out of the publication in Maclean's of an excerpt from his odious book, America Alone. That complaint was also filed by a Canadian Muslim group, claiming that the passage "misrepresents Canadian Muslims' values, their community, and their religion." Steyn will also now likely be hauled before some government tribunal, forced to account for the ideas and opinions he expressed, incur substantial attorney fees in defending himself, and be subjected to the trauma of some government proceeding against him which can result in numerous punishments.

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing "offensive" or "insulting" or "wrong" political ideas. The mere existence of the "investigation," interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.