In the past few days the comment threads at TPM EC have been moderated quite aggresively by the TPM Staff. One more than one occasion, regular posters have had their posts deleted or been admonished to "keep it civil" when referring anatomically to the Clintons, or just spouting off with various profanities.

Is this site going to be PG-13 now? Have the editors recieved enough emails from prudes claiming they have been "chilled" by the aggressive posters at TPM EC? Reall, why the sea-change in the standards of moderating?

I always thought the great values of a community like TPM is it's free-flowing and fearless commenters. If someone is scared or offended by something they read on the intertubes, the intertubes themselves are the best place to make that feeling known, and make the cretin look bad at the same time. The answer is not censorship by "management", which is so anathema to the spirit of this site to begin with.

I fear that censoring and overly sensitive monitoring of threads will have a far greater chilling effect on the range of opinion here than a few off-color, offensive or absurd insults.

I am all for civility, but this is not a tea party. It's the the Wild West, Outer Space, the Frontier, all rolled into one. The most beautiful difference being that the internet allows all of us; the faint hearted, the shut-ins, the quiet, the cowardly, all of us can take part in the beauty and danger of the world and all its opinions from the safety of our keyboards. We're all adults here (mostly), let us handle it, and step in only when really necessary.

I would just hate to lose the unpredictable, irreverent and anti-authoritarian ethos that this site is famous for.