It seems to me that oftentimes, the stongest advocates of anarchy are the ones who want to take over, enthroning themselves as petty tyrants. Funny thing - the strongest advocates of control have the same goals. And those of us in the middle often seem to lose out in this polarized world.

I live in a semi-rural area of the Sierra foothills of California, an area that is becoming more and more urban every year. We still have many people who are actual or philosophical descendants of the people who came and stripped this land during the Gold Rush. They want to be able to shoot their guns and dump or burn their trash and run their dobermans and drive their big trucks wherever they want. They continually elect a congressman whose prime purpose in life is to build a dam on our beautiful American River. They talk constantly about preserving their precious freedom, but their guns and trash and dogs and cars and dams have a huge impact on everyone else, and on the animals and the earth.

Then we have the "City folks" who move up here with their Cadillac SUV's and their McMansion homes. The first thing they do when they come, is build a big fence with an electric gate. They cut down the trees and move the earth and bring in professional landscapers to "improve" their environment. They call the dogcatcher any time they see a neighbor's dog roam a bit. They lobby for controls of everything that happens in the county - except for the ecological rape that happens inside their sacred gates and fences.

Then there's the rest of us, the ones in the middle. We don't have much say-so here, because we have lives to live and families to rainse, and don't have time to make a lot of noise and lobby for this and that.

Internet Forums are an intensification of that - if often seems that the ones who post the most words have an inordinate amount of control. Our goal in editing is to level the playing field a bit, so that everybody has a chance to take part in discussions. We really try to be careful about what we edit. If somebody posts information or an opinion they've taken time to think about and write in their own words, we won't delete it unless it is clearly a violation of our established rules (basically - no racism, no personal attacks, and no obvious Spam). If it's a large quantity of words that are available copy-pasted from elsewhere (on Mudcat or on another site), we don't consider those posts sacrosanct - although, if they're not getting out of hand, we'll usually leave them alone.

Note, though, that it's only messages that we leave alone. If our discussions get spread over too many threads, or if we have too many threads on the same topic, we have utter chaos. We reserve the right to combine or close threads. We have over 66,000 threads posted, and about 1.1 million messages. We have to tweak things a bit to make some sort of sense of things. We try to do our tweaking sparingly. I know it's impossible to satisfy everybody with our editing work, but we try to do our best.

We try to stay somewhere in the middle in our editing policy. We don't see a need for total anarchy, and we don't see a need for having rules to guide every step. We try to use common sense - but the anarchists and the rules people really don't understand the concept of common sense, so we'll never be able to please them.

-Joe Offer-


P.S. Why is it wrong for me to express my opinion if I consider a thread (or a person) "tedious"? If everyone else can express their opinion here, why can't I?