To me it felt that a possibly "sensible discussion on the wider issues" was being diverted into a manifesto about narrower issues, which would better have been explored in a separate thread. However the rather gratuitously offensive title given to it by Amergin in opening it rather ruled this thread out for that purpose.

It's always slightly absurd to suggest that a thread would be better allowed to fade away, because in the process of saying that one is refreshing it once again. But I think that it would be better off dropped out of sight.

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Incidentally, there seems some doubt whether Voltaire actually ever said or wrote "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", even though some Dictionaries of Quotations do say so. But that's the case with any number of quotations - they get coined by some relatively unknown person, and then ascribed to someone more famous, which make them more convenient to use. ("As Samuel Johnson once said" is more effective than "As Charles Higgenbotham once said", and gives more weight to an argument.)

I'd doubt if Voltaire would actually have agreed with it - except insofar as "a right to say something" means "a right not to be thrown in jail for saying it". He had no qualms about verbally bullying people he disagreed with into silence. I suspect if Voltaire had been running the Mudcat, Shambles would have had much more reason to complain.