GUEST,Kol Baseder (Lo), it is that nature of Mudcat to allow free and open debate. Any suppression of viewpoints is, obviously, censorship, and apart from deletion of personal insults and abuse, it simply isn't practiced here. It is essentially in the same spirit with which the American Civil Liberties Union endeavors to defend freedom of speech for all individuals and groups, no matter how offensive the individual or group may be. You cannot have true freedom of speech if you allow suppression of unpopular viewpoints. In fact, in this day and age, that direct path to tyranny is like the many-headed hydra, and must be fought wherever it attempts to appear.

If you spend much time around Mudcat, you become familiar with the viewpoints of the people who post here regularly, and you can pick and chose who you feel are worth reading. There are some who have viewpoints diametrically opposed to my own whom I read, because their posts seem to be well thought out and they quote their sources. I am sufficiently open-minded (although, I am sure there are those here who would disagree) be willing to changing my views if they can convinced that I am wrong and they are right. Thus, one learns, and I am always open to learning.

But there are others who are ill-informed, or whose beliefs are so locked in that the best they can do is sit back and make snide remarks or try to refute a well-reasoned post by slapping a label on the poster with no attempt to offer an equally well-reasoned counter-argument. And, of course there are a few like Dreaded Guest who are locked into posting long screeds about fancied worldwide conspiracy theories who are a total waste of time to ever bother reading. Some time back, I wasted a ridiculous amount of time and energy trying to set this individual straight about something I have first-hand knowledge of and s/he only read about on some conspiracy web site, but to no avail. So I no longer bother with DG's posts, neither to read them, nor (especially) to waste my time answering them.

Apart from this, I find that I have learned a great deal by reading and participating in these threads. There are some very knowledgeable people here.

Don Firth