So Scalzi makes a post about receiving a boring email from "one of those nutbag childfree folks". Gretchen shows up and takes exception to his description of childfree people. To which Scalzi responds by basically telling her to shut the hell up. There is some back and forth between the two of them, before the thread turns to a discussion of childfree lifestyle between other commenters.

That is, until electric_bonzai jumps in, presumably linked from cf_hardcore. Several commenters respond to tell them how wrong, wrong and utterly wrong cf people are.

Scalzi makes a second post, snarking both Gretchen and, especially, the person who commented on cf_hardcore with a "lesson" for him. The snark is, as always, delicious:

spitzandeyeball: 1. Internets 101: When you publish something on a public blog and neglect to disable the comment function, you have already given readers your permission to reply. This little slice of Internet magic is also known as the First Amendment.

Scalzi: Reading this person’s understanding of how the First Amendment applies in these instances is like being slathered in a thick coat of ignorant, and then being put out into the sun to dry out before a second coat is applied, which itself will be topped off by a sealant of complete and utter stupid, and lightly drizzled with a glistening varnish of epic fail.

More comments from people baffled at the thought of a childfree comm. Baffled, I tell you.

Back at the first post, Scalzi and Gretchen make up, though that doesn't stop people from continuing to share their thoughts over multiple comments.

It's already on clairvoyantwank, but with 1000+ BoingBoing comments and half the blogosphere a-titter, this wank has matured.

San Francisco sex blogger Violet Blue used to be chummy with the folks at Boing Boing, and naturally, they linked her a lot. However, she recently discovered that they "unpublished" all posts that mentioned her, effectively excising her from the internet's most popular purveyor of wonderful things. Last week, VB wondered what happened (and note that all links to her blog are NSFW). Valleywag, "Silicon Valley's tech gossip rag" (must be thrilling) picked up the story, and promptly started sensationalizing the shit out of it: Did the Internet's free speech guardian try to hush up a girl-on-girl love affair?, they wondered, and speculated on How [Boing Boing editor] Xeni and Violet's Boing Boing affair went sour." It gets Dugg, of course, and pretty soon we're hearing about censorship, Trotsky and "strangely unethical" goings on. Violet posts a tiny-violin follow-up and people start pestering the Boing Boing editors in comments to unrelated posts.

So finally, Boing Boing responds. They say they did the "unpublishing" a year ago. They say they notified Blue. And then, in (*checks bottom of page*) 1100 comments and counting, the shit hits the fan. People accuse Boing Boing of hypocrisy, 1984 allusions fly all over the place, and the Boing Boing comment moderater completely fails to hold the moral high ground as she dances around explaining what Blue did that was so "evil." It's a huge game of they-said, she-said at this point, and figuring out what the hell is going on is frankly less interesting than tracking the endless comparisons to Stalinism. Nothing is like the gulags, people. Nothing.

Now with highlights!

Metafilter commenter sends BB a note from Winston Smith
Scalzi gets his teal deer on, defending Cory Doctorow from the mean metafilterians
Boing Boing's haters are worse than Donald Rumsfeld!
Whether it is redaction, bowdlerization, expurgation, or censorship I see no place for it here."
Boing Boing hates your freedom, just like the Republicans. :(
The OED doesn't deserve this kind of abuse.
BB Moderator Teresa COULD say something mean about that evil, lying attention-whore ... but she won't.

The Emmy censorship brouhaha has moved off the D-List and onto that bastion of political incorrectness... Sally Field?

Sally Field's win for Best Actress in a Drama brought with it an unfocused, rambling speech that would have passed without notice had FOX not apparently cut off an anti-war statement she made at the end. She was to have ended with "If mothers ruled the world, there would be no god-damned wars in the first place."*

I'll let you all recover for a moment.

Right as she was saying "god-" FOX rather abruptly went to silence and a still shot of the audience, then peppily cut back to whatever the hell else the Emmys were awarding like Best Cinematography On A Tony Bennett or At Least Non-Colbert Special. (Okay, bitter.) Predictably, since the blogosphere hadn't finished toasting the Emmys over its censoring of Kathy Griffin's directive to "suck it, Jesus," everyone's going apeshit on the usual places and it only happened a few minutes ago. This is a perfect example of what I call the "D. H. Lawrence Principle": the mediocre only becomes notable if the public detects its suppression. Let the mediocre pass without comment, and it will join the faceless rabble of sensationalist acts. (Seriously, wouldn't we have just rolled our eyes at yet another political award speech and not paid much attention to it? Now we get to be angry at FOX.)

The woman played Norma Rae and survived several movies with Burt Reynolds. Frankly, I fear for the network.

*We know this thanks to the Canadians, who heard the sentence and as a result of the scandal will surely face riots in Toronto and Vancouver. You sacrificed your society so we could know of a naughty word. God bless.

Edit: Some back-and-forth here on another Democratic Underground thread. "It was censored!" "It wasn't censored!" "Duck season!" "Wabbit season!"

And apparently people are more upset on Ms. Field's behalf than Field herself, who was surprised she didn't utter more curse words.