Well, I remain baffled about "balance", but talkative (as always).

As an offender on most of Joe's counts, I can certainly confess to making lots of insider jokes, but my experience has been that as soon as anyone joins in, they immediately are part of the game. We are very good here, I think, in being equal opportunity jokers. Little-Neo and many others can attest to that. All insiders always think so, I guess, so it is good to be reminded of one's failings. I have tried and failed to think of a music thread on Joe's intelligence scale that was disrupted, rather than helped along, by reasonable humour. Somebody perhaps could find one. We have funny, gifted, people here. I laugh all the time here.

Joe says: "There are a good number of people who feel that the healing threads and the overabundance of small talk have taken away much of the sparkle of the interesting conversation and humor that we used to have here. To them (and to me), it seems that in the last year, we have started to go down to the level of the Psychic Friends Network and chain letters and spam and all that other stuff that seems to clog the Internet with the same old words, repeated over and over again. This ought to be a place that is different, exciting, and always interesting. Lately, it has joined the rest of the crowd on the Internet, repeating the same old thing."

With great respect, I think this is virtually all untrue. I have seen no evidence that there was ever any more "sparkle" than there is now, or more humour, or more intelligent conversation. In many ways it is much more sparkling -- the "voice" thread, the "Carrickfergus" thread, etc., these are all fine, and there were some before; but a good thread is always hard to find. Most stuff most of the time is average or below!! There was never a time when it was golden threads as far as the eye can see, and we spent our time evaluating songsheets from the 1840s. And this place is like nothing else on the Internet: the only stuff that is repeated is the work of vandals.

Besides, to my mind, though I hardly visit it, The Mudcat Tavern is (after the DT itself) perhaps the greatest common creation on this site, pure idiocy, total nonsense, but -- it is, what, 6 months old? Yet it represents one important neglected aspect of this site in this discussion: time off to goof around here among friends.

I certainly agree that we have had some dark, controversial threads here. In spite of the emotions they cause and some of the bad manners they evoke, I think they are important. If controversy was good enough for Leadbelly and Peter Seeger, if is good enough for me. Otherwise, this stuff is just museum work: it is dead, dead, dead. I always thought folk music was dead, dead, dead, until I came here, and had my mind changed. It lives because it is pursued by people who want living music that is not all about 16 year old sex (not to offend any people who are 16 year old sexual beings), and can be played by ordinary people, rather than a corporate creation. Its roots are in controversy, and they need watering, especially by the people who are making music. That is political to me. If it is going all to be about Botany Bay, I am gone where I was before I rediscovered folk music. If it is not about Mick's young woman getting up the courage to start a union drive, then forget about it. We might as well be talking about how to make Spitfires out of balsa wood (there is a chat group on that).

I think at bottom people are just offended by the healing threads. They find the world view or something so offensive that they cannot pass them by, but must actively "pick at the scab". Some others disrupt them and act viciously so as to get rid of them. Why, I don't know. Maybe they are frightened that they might work, and then what would that mean to their world; or that the site will turn into some New Age mush pit (the Psychic Friends Network of Joe's posting), and we will all be dragged down into soybeans. Come on. It is like worrying about Communists because they will destroy our moral fibre. If your moral fibre is threatened, then you have a pretty weak moral fibre to start with.

What has struck me from the start is that people here are incredibly reticent about doing this kind of thing. More to the point, no one to my knowledge has ever come here and asked for any help for themselves -- and we have people here who are in real trouble, who are sick, unable to work, shutin, whatever. I have never heard of one of these people ask for our help -- they always ask for someone else, or do not ask at all. These threads were started out of the goodness of people's hearts, and maybe they are misguided, but why are they treated as if it were inappropriate to this site, or to a sin against music, or whatever? Is music not a little bit about the hope for healing? In a (dare I say it) circle. To repeat myself: the vast majority of the threads here, all the time -- until some people began acting like barbarians -- are about music. Where is the balance problem? The few healing threads are well marked. It is not being mildly offended by them that I object to: it is actively trying to stamp them out as if they were vermin I object to.

This is a party (to use Joe's metaphor) that we each create as we go along. There are different rooms: if you think you won't like what is in that room, don't go there, don't click. There are lots of other things going on, or there were, until someone started sliming the place. It is not the fault of the healing circles (which at their peak have been 3 or 4 threads maximum ever in total) that this place became temporarily unmanageable. Being goaded by decency is no reason to stop being decent.

However -- I'm stopping now -- as I don't have access to Mudcat Radio, I am most concerned about Max's patience. Ultimately, this is his cafe; we are here on his dime and his time. If he says stop, we all stop. I will do nothing to jeopardise that, if I can; but otherwise, will carry on carrying on.

yours, Peter T.