Whew, that's dense! Let's break that down a little!

MUST be entitled to control who can and cannot contribute to that content.

Well, no. Doesn't follow. I'm curious about your justification for that, though!

Don't want to be muted? Don't be an asshat. Muted for being an asshat? APOLOGIZE.

And you and you alone are the perfect arbiter of who is and isn't an asshat? Naw, let the people contributing to your threads come to that conclusion themselves, dole out points to the unasshats, and put the asshats on ignore. I can tell you for certain that your idea and my idea of what a good commenter is are a bit different - And that's likely to be true of nearly everyone you're currently curating for!

all the been-here-for-20-minutes Redditors

You say redditors like it's a bad word. I don't really get that, since you are one yourself.

[un-muting] feels better

I... How... nice for you? I really don't understand why you've brought this up - Good moderating has very little to do with whether doing something feels good or not. You keep the best interests of the community in mind, reasoning and making educated guesses about what the best course of actions to take are.

Do you know how good it feels to unban someone? Do you know how good it feels to be un-banned?

A few years back, I ran a Minecraft server. We probably had a comparable number of daily bans, although fewer unbans and drastically fewer active users. I know what it feels like to ban and unban people - Although I wouldn't qualify either one as a good or a bad feeling.

I know less about the other side of the coin - My behavior is usually innocuous enough that bans are rare. On the few occasions it has happened, though, I haven't been inclined to try to change anyone's mind about the situation.

Because you think you have a "right" to urinate on whatever street corner you want.

My goodness, what tasty words you've put into my mouth!

I'm not sure why you keep comparing unrestricted speech to urine, but I'm not sure it reflects well on you.

I've run places without restrictions on freedom of speech - Any forum for public discourse I'm in charge of, I generally provide explicit "Free speech enforced here" rules. Biggest examples of that are the minecraft server I mentioned, and the (still quite small) community for the game I'm coding. In both cases, the community has ended up being mature, varied in age, varied in type of people, etc. etc. Heck, the community on the minecraft server turned out so well that it lived past my involvement - Still running with my original pro-free-speech rules, last I checked.

Cheers!