Yeah, I think threads like this one, the Dimensional Door, the Guild, and believe it or not the Neverending Story help the atmosphere of FreeRepublic immensely. I believe that because these type of longrunning threads help us get to know one another and to realize that these are real people with real lives, not just targets to aim at on the other side of the issue.
-Kevin
I am known here and in the Dimensional Door.
It certainly would be useful, because there are far too many flamewars going on. I know I wouldn't be too welcome at the Freeoples thread, because I have gotten into too many flamewars with the strongest libertarians. In other threads I can take Bush-bashing up to a point, but when some of them started referring to him as Hitler, and calling him a SOB the other night, that was more than I could happilly accept. The rest of the time I fight it is with the anti-semitic and pro-Islamist types and I do not think that I run into many hobbits there.
In part I think that we Hobbits tend to have some values in common, not shared by all Freepers. These tend to be those that come through Tolkien's writings. While there are many here drawn to the romantic and colorful aspects of Lord of the Rings, few would care to associate with this literature if they did not feel a connection to these values. So we all know that we have ideas in common, and when we disagree we tend to try to understand each other's viewpoints. In the wider Free Republic world, there are some who despise these values, as we know from some of the comments when there were many threads about reviews of the movie 6 months ago.
So we have these common ideas in addition to the social contact, which makes us more tolerant of each other's quirks (and some of us have lots of those).