GUEST MAV,

I actually don't have the energy or the inclination to argue with you. It's just not my idea of fun, and I have other things to do also.

I will make one point. If you find yourself to be the target of flames, you need to consider the possibility that your way of expressing your thoughts, rather than the thoughts, themselves, are making you a good target for flames. If you get flamed repeatedly, it's possible that you are using a tone that comes across as inflamatory.

That's just the way things seem to work, regardless of the nature of the issues that are being discussed. It happens in discussions that don't even have anything to do with politics. It happens between people who do not live in the U.S., and do not fit into our categories of "conservative" and "liberal".

If you spend some time researching old threads in the Mudcat archives, you can see this for yourself. An easy way to do this would be to click on someone's name and view their posting history. Another good way would be to type the words "folk music" and "singer songwriter" into the "Digitrad and Lyrics" search box that is just above and to the left of the thread titles in the forum home page, and click on "search" (I think that's what it says).

When I said "behave like a human being rather than a bully", I was talking about being here for some reason other than just to argue. I can't speak for Uncle Jacques, but I suspect he sees the Mudcat as a potential source of friends and people to play music with. For that reason, I think it might matter to him how he is regarded in this community, as opposed to someone who doesn't seem to care about anything except arguing about a single issue, and is only here for that purpose.

Carol