Ebbie, I agree with everything you just said. As a moderator, I don't think it's my job to make it safe for people to be assholes. I don't care for what happens when one person has an unpopular, possibly bizarre and just plain wrong point of view, and another person rebuts with personal abuse. They look far more stupid than they'd probably want to.

I said this before, but if you read the Wiki I linked to above, it backs up my theory: the UK has a completely different take on "free speech" and has far more limitations on what they allow. It's a problem here when some inflexible people in the UK think everyone else should have the same limits. Instead of trying to understand, they demand everyone do things their way. This is a very small number of boneheads, but they make up for small numbers with obnoxiousness.

The guy that got jailed was a UK citizen, who is subject to UK limits on speech. I think I'd be happy if the US made it possible to prosecute people who deliberately lied to the public in order to manipulate them for their own gain. That would be the end of Fox news and a bunch of politicians.