Replies

You have peaked my curiosity. How can discussing this issue lead to the destruction of FreeRepublic?

I see the issue as destructive, both in a real sense and as as a matter of perception, in the following ways:

- Drug war threads chew up bandwidth. One side posts a 5 meg chart supporting its position, the other side replies with a series of flying monkey cartoons supporting its position, et al, over and over again. Pretty soon, you've got a thousand or more posts in one thread, some huge, consisting of a Gordian knot of arguments, charges, and counter-charges, and neither side is budging an inch. If your response is that other topics also chew up bandwidth, I agree completely. But other topics (even the cheese and moose stuff) come and go, and a great deal of the attraction of FR is the variety contained herein.

- Drug war threads are repetitive. Frankly, the DW metadiscussions are becoming just plain old boring to me. If you give me a Freeper name, I can pretty much tell you what side they're on, what methods of rhetoric and argument they will employ in the discussions, and how far they will go before stopping, being throttled back by the moderators, or even booted. With the exception of a few excellent movies, there's really nothing I care to watch over and over again, and I don't wish to do the same thing in FR.

- DW threads almost always seem to contain contentious and downright vicious ad hominem attacks between the combatants (not that other topics don't include the same thing, but the majority of the really nasty attacks seem to come in the DW threads). They get personal in ways that other discussions never seem to do. I've personally seen arguments in Usenet that spill over into real life (and even had a few death threats directed to me personally due to my opinions), and I would not wish that on FR, ever.

Many of us participate in this forum because we generally have a conservative outlook on life and generally agree that liberalism and the welfare state are a cancer and should be resisted in any form. The fact that we seemingly find ourselves so torn by the DW threads and are so ready to go after each other's throats when the topic comes up is instructive and disturbing to me.

- DW threads polarize ideas and idealists to a degree that other topics do not seem to do. Nobody likes to be called a jackbooted nazi or a Cheech and Chong wannabe drug pusher, and I have my doubts that either of these extremes are present in this forum. A wise man once said that "Even the devil doesn't honestly believe himself to be a bad guy." When people find that the unpleasurable aspects of participation in a forum outweigh the pleasurable aspects, they will eventually bail and go to DU (just kidding) :)

I have been advocating an end to the War on Drugs in cyberspace for 10 years, and I have never seen any host service damaged by the discussion.

I really hope you're right when it comes to FR. As I mentioned earlier, I've already voted with my feet by opting out of this facet of FR except in a lurking mode.