> Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.
This is a mistake; but don't worry, it's a common mistake. The mistake is to assume that human-constructed ontologies are actually capable of describing the real world, and thus that we can come up with laws or rules that CAN be assiduously (and not selectively) enforced.
This is simply wrong; laws are human constructions made up of language, an imperfect instrument that has no power by itself. There is NO WAY to apply laws without interpretation by the enforcer. It is up to some set of people we designate as agents of the law to decide what the application is.
The same is true of any rule-based system, legal or extra-legal. The rule set by itself can only provide a guide; it requires human judgement to make the rule set work in a particular scenario. Cf. Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement about obscenity:
>I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Since it requires judgement to apply the abstract rule to the particular situation, it means enforcement, by its very nature, must be "selective", and there must always be an arbitrary element to it. That is, judgement, being produced by individuals with their own biases and history which they must necessarily bring to bear on the question, is always questionable.
We have mechanisms to mitigate this problem - mostly precedent and review, i.e., amortizing the problem of individual judgement over several individuals to smooth out the bumps, and recall - the ability to reject individual enforcers. But again, these mechanisms are imperfect (who watches the watchmen, and what makes those watchers any more credible, by the way?).
What's my fucking point? It's that when we begin on this quest, we should recognize our fundamental limit: we CANNOT produce an ideal solution, we are limited by metaphysics itself (the world is larger than we have words to describe). It behooves us to see, then, that the solutions we DO arrive at must be full of compromise, and must recognize all of the ways in which our system is subject to failure.
Your post, then, is a good step along this way. If what we are doing becomes worrisome, good - that worry is a check on whatever authority we have put in place, and your subjective judgements being brought to bear are a way to control the arbitrariness of authority.
But, at the end of the day, all we can really do is worry harder, speak louder, and shape and reshape our institutions, constantly trying to get them to fit the - ever-shifting - landscape of our morality.
See also: Richard Rorty, who was very fond of observing that human society is made up of ugly half-compromises.