I completely agree with John Mackenzie. Untrammelled "free speech" is a bad thing, and no-one should be frightened of shutting someone up who is being gratuitously obnoxious. I know I keep harping on about it, but The Session (as far as I know) has one moderator who does not suffer fools gladly, he won't let you argue or negotiate with him (don't I know it) and his word is as final as final can be. At one time it was rather like it is here now, but Jeremy didn't half sort it out. Arguably, it's a less feisty place as a result, but it's his gig and I can see precisely why he did what he did in his big clean-up a few years ago. Dick Gaughan's now-defunct forum was a decent place to be. It had a few characters who you could see would have liked to have been obnoxious, but the one moderator, Molly, was a woman you dared not cross (yet she was friendly and cheery and witty too). It's not fair to give Iains the free rein he has here, then keep bollocking the rest of us for not wanting to put up with it. The starting point is that he insults us. So the comparison with pubs falls down straight away. His behaviour wouldn't be tolerated for five minutes even in the seediest pubs I've known (and I've known a few). A firm and silent hand on the delete button for a few weeks, no answering back allowed, would fix him. If we saw that happening it would calm the rest of us down too. And the mods would end up with a lot less work to do. Try it and see. But who am I...