And of course, the main reason I link to other people's writings, is that many of them:

A: Are much better at writing than I am,

Ya see, that's a kind of cheating. Relying on a third party's writing skill is a crutch (and one that you personally don't need). When I say I want to engage a person directly, I'm saying one-on-one, "braino a braino"...a direct competition with another individual, not with an individual plus all the other debaters he/she can copy-and-paste on to the playing field. Using somebody else's words because you think they're better than your own is kind of like calling in your big brother to do the fighting for you.

Isn't it unfair to people who rely strictly on their own wit and writing skills? And wouldn't it take away some of the satisfaction to have to have help to win?

And there you have, perhaps, another clue to something that's gone wrong with the Zone: Winning has become more important than the pleasure of debate and plain old "hanging out".

Have already gone to the work and time of writing up and researching something really good so I don't have to. ;)

Well...OK, now there you have a point. Why reinvent the wheel, or go to the trouble of paraphrasing? It's quite a grey area--at one extreme are essays of fact, first-person accounts, history--narratives that describe something concrete, or rely heavily on compilations of statistics. At the other extreme is interpretation, and pure opinion and statement of position. It's the latter extreme where I think it's most "cheating", the former where it's least. I guess the rule of thumb would be to excerpt the most concrete elements, and wrap them in one's own interpretation.

You're the last person who'd need to rely on either crutch, Tom. You not only write well, your research skills are superb. Maybe it's just a matter of too few hours in the day to do it all yourself?