Please bear with me just a moment of your time as we revisit few key facts about the Fine Art of Holding Discussions Online...

1. The Internet Never Forgets - This is a primary principle of the Internet, it is none of my choosing, but you should always keep aware of this simple and inescapable fact:
   

   the Internet never forgets anything that you place into a public forurm.

   I have no intentions of ever purging the archives here on the Peninsular, because the cumulative effect of that readily available archive is a fundamental component of my experiment, but even if I got hit by a bus and the site was taken down it would not matter. Every discussion here has been recorded by Google, by Yahoo! and by the MSN search-bots that frequent the site several times each and every day, and the full text has also been archived in the Internet Archive.

   Your conversations have also been copied to your own computers and those of every person who has ever read what you wrote because that is how the Internet works. When you 'visit' a page you aren't really 'going' anywhere, your computer is fetching that information and copying it to your local hard drive from where it can now show you, or your family and friends, or the RCMP. That's just a fact of how it all works.

   The moral here is that if you speak from your heart, you should choose your words carefully, because they will come back to haunt you.

2. Flame Wars Are Normal - every new generation who comes in contact with this media has the same complaint, and I have received four such complaints in the past 48 hours, but the simple fact of the matter is that the distance implied by the remoteness, and the security implied by the fact that you are very likely sitting alone while you participate in these discussions, and the neuro-cognitive media effects of the back-lit screen upon your unaware consciousness conspire to make all participants more cold, more bold and, very often, much more quick to take offense and to take action.

   This is a normal effect of this media so there is no blame if you fall into it, we all will someday if we use this media enough. It's like arguments with your spouse, it's just a pattern action that can slurp you into its vortex before you even know what has happened.

   Those of us who have been around this media for a while have seen it happen many times before. The effect is fully documented in Wikipedia and I invite you all to check out that link. No one is immune from this effect so don't even try boasting that this warning does not apply to you. The only people who could be exempt from these effects would be certified as brain-dead and duly cremated or buried. You, on the other hand, are alive and therefore watch out because there are snakes in the woods, and the snakes are YOU!

   The best way to handle flame wars is to just stop participating. Tit-for-tat only fuels the fixed action pattern and makes the spiral tighter and faster, and no one will get convinced of anything other than what their own coiled serpentine fire is already reflexively asserting. State your case only once, as clearly as you can, then leave it alone, leave it for the jury (ie posterity) to decide. Put another way: While you are fighting, you are not doing and that just means nothing is getting done.

3. Freedom of Expression is more than a Right - The Internet was designed as a military communications media capable of withstanding a nuclear holocaust. Yes, technically I can shut down people you don't agree with (or people who are letting their serpentine fire get the better of them) but that won't make them go away and it won't make them quiet down, they will simply perceive the outage as an obstacle ... and route around it. So right there, technically, online censorship is not possible, even for the Communists ruling China. That much is just fact.

   But more than this, I believe that if we lose the right to open free expression, then this game is no longer worth playing. I don't ever want to watch Stan Brakhage's Seeing with One's Eyes Open again but I would never ever advocate stopping Stan from making the film, from showing the film, or for offering it to others. Freedom of Expression is a double-edged sword, and it is the unique side-effect of the architecture of the Internet that makes it possible for freedom of expression to flourish.

   So I am very reluctant to Thought Police this site. As the article above illustrates, if there are grounds for legal action, then legal actions can be taken, but that is going over my head and out of my hands -- as happened before, I would far prefer that we simply identify a mutually acceptable peace and carry on.

   The basic posting policy principle here is that I don't allow porn, I don't allow spam and if it is illegal then it is illegal and nothing more need be said about it.

   The bottom line is that this is my website, not yours, so I can pretty much decide anything I want :) My official posting guidelines request that you promise to behave, and I think everyone over the age of 12 basically knows what that means: It means to be mindful of the snakes!

   And be decent to each other

Thank you for your time; we now return you to your regularly schedule discussions :)