Well, I think we have a tendency to respond by counterattacking large populations of people who have nothing to do with terrorism. I think that our responses to terrorism have been misdirected and ineffective, and have only served to make a bad situation worse by destroying any sympathy the world had for us.
So, yeah, I think we need to re-think things - to respond, but to respond judiciously.
-Joe Offer-

This not to make any judgement about the relative importance of two totally different issues. But I do think the criticism and the suggested approach has some relevance for this issue - if the word 'terrorism' in the above was substituted for words like ' abusive personal attacks' - 'flaming' - trolling' - spamming etc.

Generally the measures taken to try and deal with the (thankfully still rare) extreme terrorist actions - mostly affect and restrict the daily lives of ordinary people. As we can see currently, where thankfully there has been no loss of life. But the publicity and disruption caused by the new additional restrictions - on top of the ones already in place - for ordinary air-travellers, have had the effect disired by the terrorists anyway.

I have requested a few things here. Most of them have not been accepted. I did NOT request that all recently deleted threads be placed in this one. But now the Chief of the Mudcat Editing Team has decided to do this - no doubt the blame for this will be shifted to me. When posters complain that the inclusion of such posts have offended and corrupted them............

But their appearance unbidden in this thread does not seem to have made the the whole Mudcat world crumble.

So perhaps these posts can safely be left where they are posted and all the restrictions, secrecy and division that is justified to deal with such things - can be seen to be disproportionate and re-thought?

Part of the reason for the request that all imposed censorship actions be recorded was in the hope that this would result in less imposed censorship actions. Especially as the automatic way of dealing with any perceived problems. And that an attempt could then be made to find less drastic solutions and a return to all of our 'moderators' (and posters) setting a better example of posting behaviour and leading by this example.

And that those posters who are currently encouraged by the example set - to only post to make personal judgements about the worth of their fellow posters and complain about what others chose to post - can be told to mind their own business and to concentrate on their own posts - by our (few remaining) known and still credible 'moderators'.