Responding to comments made by Robert:

>I'm inclined to use restraint about censorship because I think people have a
>right to hang themselves with their words. If we'd deleted that post, you
>wouldn't have had the opportunity to alert PAO to add EP to the kook list,
>right?

Doesn't MSNBC provide a forum for the insane to spew their nonsense and sociopaths to be evil? Why can't Habitable Zone simply focus on Space Exploration and leave insanity and evil to MSNBC?

Some propaganda that I've heard for years about the Internet and it's ancestor the Arpanet are:

1) The Internet is the one example where anarchy works?
2) "Free" speech must always be protected no matter how offensive.

IMHO the Internet is slowly failing due to hacking, (DOS attacks), it's support of criminality (pornography, trading in Warez, sociopath organizations, etc.) and simple information abuse, i.e. spam, identity theft, etc.

Along those lines, the other day I was doing what I thought was innocent scholarly study searching the Internet for sites that referred to "Aleia Capitolina" (the name of the Roman city built on the site of Jerusalem after the Emperor Hadrian razed ancient Jerusalem to the ground). My study lead me directly to a neo-Nazi website spewing virulent antisemitic nonsense. I wonder what percentage of the Internet focuses exclusively on pornography, neo-naziism, anarchism, communism, etc.? I would NEVER let my children surf the Internet unsupervised.

We have confused liberty with license. The lunatics and sociopaths are driving the rational and decent people from the Internet. Consequently the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet continues to decay. I strongly recommend to Justin and Robert to keep the Habtiable Zone an "island of sanity and civility" on the Internet.

Gary