I am not one of those who were here in 'the good old days', I think I came in in late 2002. But I have been here long enough to have definitely seen better days.

    Jay Baldwin, from the old 'Whole Earth' and "Co-Evolution Quarterly" days observed more than once that 'Don't shit in camp' is one of the basic rules of a tribe.

    I imagine that there were expectations that young children or people absolutely new to communal living were given a little time to learn this rule. And that the tribe understood that on occasion, anyone can mess their britches. But I bet that any person, tribe member or not, who continually and repeatedly defecated within camp perimeters was ostrasized and otherwise excluded.

    Mudcat IS a tribe. It IS a community. Tension between the individual and the community is inherent in social relationships. When the rights and individual needs/wants of individuals gain ascendancy over what is needed to sustain the group, the group falls apart. Chaos and 'lawlessness' reign. Every community or tribe needs some one to function as enforcers of rules that are held for the common good. Most people in a tribe understand the need for balance and do a pretty good job of maintaining it. With insufficient rules to protect the community as a whole, or no enforcement of those rules, it only takes a very few people acting out to disrupt the whole community.

    Mudcat is definitely worth preserving, but there are enough people (myself included sometimes) who put themselves first to the detriment of maintaining this tribe, that greater external social control is warranted to pull the forum back into balance. I definitely would favor restricting BS to members only, and I think Joe and the clones must have the ability to act as enforcers-even if their actions may at times appear arbitrary. If and when the pendulum swings too far toward control to the detriment of the forum's survival, then we can always give it a shove back in the other direction. But it is clear to me that right now the balance is tipped way too far in the other direction. We haven't policed ourselves well. We need help to get back to the center.

Janie