Sorry, first line should read:  "I certainly agree with those who object to
the excessive personal attacks, one-upsmanship, etc. that have plagued the
list."

>
> 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