No, I'm not a Norwegian bicycle enthusiast. I'm North American.

Yes Jon, life can get very messy, can't it? And chaotic. Which begs the question, why try so hard to control the uncontrollable?

There is no sin in discussing the management of music fora by the people who participate in them. Yes, the discussions will most always degenerate into character assassinations of one sort or the other, because the personalities that populate the forums are human.

So what? We aren't killing each other. We aren't blowing up markets. We aren't destroying ecosystems, or driving species to extinction. We are talking. If the talk gets too belligerent, participants have the ability to turn it off and walk away.

Why do so many people feel the need to have an authority figure breathing down our necks and slapping down our keyboards when the discussion gets dicey? If someone doesn't like the direction a conversation is going, they should leave it. But to insist that it be shut down, or that people stop contributing, or talking about a certain person, or whatever, it gets very tiresome and boring.

Sometimes one needs to be able to say 'the problem is with so and so'.

In this instance, I said that. I think the problem posed by Ian Anderson on his own message board, is him, the way he has managed the board to surround himself with sycophants, and sent a big dog (Countess Richard here, apparently, Diane something or other on fRoots) out to bark and bite on his behalf.

I said that because there doesn't seem to be a technical problem with the fRoots message board (it functions fine from what I can tell). It also doesn't seem to be a problem of conflicting ideologies. That leaves people/personalities. I just named them by name, is all.

I don't expect there to be a collapse in the world economy for having done that, so maybe folks should just step back, take a few breaths, and ponder my take on it. They don't have to agree with me. But it would be interesting to actually see the subject discussed, rather than derailed by a bunch of fraidy cats, who fear a breakdown in society as we know it if the conversation gets dicey.