I certainly agree with the excessive personal attacks, one-upsmanship, etc.
that has plagued the list.  I am more interested in people communicating
with some other purpose than to prove themselves correct and others wrong.
As a courtesy, I would tend to extend debates of these kinds into personal
(off-list) debates.  That said, however, I cannot really sympathize with
complaints about tired delete keys.  If you don't want to read a particular
message or a line of tendentious or trivial tit for tat, just delete it.
All messages are appended with sender and subject lines.  If you want to
discuss something else in a different vein, just use a different subject
heading.  All of the sniping has been going on under the same subject
heading, providing an easy way to simply put the messages directly into the
trash, if you aren't interested.  Restricting the forum in other ways would
seem to me to violate important criteria of free political debate.  The
Chomsky forum, of all places, should encourage free political debate.
Civility, collaboration, mutual respect, and a sense of common purpose would
also be nice, but not at the expense of freedom, in my opinion.

Soren