I am a veteran Internet user, having first "logged on" via Prodigy in '94. I have come to value flame wars for their inherent hilarity as well as their stress-relieving qualities. But I also enjoy good dialogue with people of wit and intelligence. There are very few of those amongst the atavistic, mouth-breathing throngs that infest Salon's letters section. The few who come to mind - like Patricia Scwartz, LeCastor and Tom Reed - can and do make a valuable contribution here.

I have no respect whatsoever for the effete chickenshits who want to have "control" over what and who posts letters. I mean, really, who in the fuck do you people think you are?? If you don't like reading the letters, DON'T. And while you don't, please feel free to lie down in front of an oncoming train. The rest of us enjoy muscular, full-throated debate and rhetorical smack-downs, and frankly most of what the trolls write is more interesting than anything you ankle-biting pansies contribute. So blow us.

Heavily moderated letters forums all have one thing in common: They're fucking boring. I remember when, back in the mid-90s, CompuServe shut down its Alcoholics Anonymous forum because the sheer quantity and length of the letters posted were eating up bandwidth for the rest of the site...or so they claimed at the time. Later I learned the truth, which I had suspected right along: The Twelve Steppers got their panties in a twist over the unfortunate fact that they were losing the debate to the folks advocating rational recovery and other behavioral science techniques to defeat addiction. Two of the most common posters were Jack Trimpey, founder of Rational Recovery, and Stanton Peele, who wrote The Diseasing of America. That's what happens when a letters forum is moderated to any significant degree; eventually the rules evolve to where the politically correct screedheads can always win just by pressing the delete button. And I don't want to see that happening at Salon.

No one censors like the left.

The left invented "Political Correctness" to SILENCE their opponents.

...would be to require people to post their name to their letter (or, failing that, at least a consistent pseudonym), and to also have a regular publication of the most thoughtful and interesting letters of the week.

Starring your favorites is good acknowledgement, and helpful for the reader, but unfortunately, the starred "editors' choice" letters are often lost amid the sea of more mediocre ones. Periodically spotlighting the best - like you used to do, before the open letters format - would address this.

Wow, that's a lot of hands. No wonder so many of us use pseudonyms.

Gary Kamiya says: But getting a lot of letters is not necessarily a good sign: It sometimes just means that you pushed an obvious button. After reading the article, I scrolled down to see what the reader response was to his article and I was surprised.

My personal, informal tracking of “hot button” issues in recent history on Salon shows that The readers strike back hasn’t drawn as many responses as the Guiliani-announcement-for-President. And it has had less than half of the numbers that resulted from the Colorblind article about Barack Obama's “blackness”.

Nevertheless, it’s thought-provoking and strikes a special chord with me because I’m a long-time letter-to-the-editor writer. I've written dozens over the years, and have had a good "publication" record. I regularly hear from people that they like to read my letters, or mention when I've had a slow period. I've even gotten both fan and hate mail! (You know, the stuff with stamps, delivered to you in your mailbox.)

I'm in a good environment because, unlike most mid-sized-city and large dailies, ours has a incredible opinion section, including a wide variety of columnists and local "experts," and letters from readers. Today there were a dozen letters, which is pretty typical more or less.

Being a frequent contributor to the latter I, too, have noticed the lack of civility that permeates the letters of a lot of writers. This wasn't the case in years past where an unwritten code seemed to exist even when writers disagreed.

By way of example, one of those unwritten codes involved the use of writers' names. If it was a columnist, he or she was fair game. You could say Why don't you drop Ann Coulter? She's a nutcase..." or George Will is such a supercilious snob that he makes me ill... or I can't believe you print the liberal trash written by Molly Ivins. But a letterwriter never, never trashed another letterwriter by name. The unwritten code said you could refer to another writer with phrases like In answer to the writer who supports George Bush's surge... Today it's not uncommon to see letters like Why doesn't Mary Jones stop spewing her left-wing vomit and understand that to not support the surge is to support cut and run policies of liberal cowards.

Nowadays, however, lots of writers have abandoned this code in favor of name-calling by name to the point that some writers have dropped out of the public discourse. (And, yes, some did tend to be thin skinned.)

As to the Internet, I’m shocked at the depth bloggers go to insult others who don’t agree with them. Not to mention the language, of course. When is this taking First Amendment rights too far? And while I’m talking about language, I wonder if some of them realize there's a spelling/grammar checker on their keyboards. If they don't, they need to find it. And if they do, they need to use it!

But most importantly, I believe, is the problem of writers going off on unrelated or peripheral issues. It happens, too, in the letters-to-the-editor venue. For instance, starting in early December, spurred on by the inevitable "reason for the season" letter, the letters moved into ugly attacks on atheists and agnostics, then to asking others to pray for their redemption (and the A and As responding with a "no thank you" en masse) to attacks on the editorial staff for allowing the argument to continue unfettered. Several writers left licking their wounds vowing never to enter into any discussion again!

But back to letters from Salon readers. The fact is that the rest of us don't care if you want to contradict each other, or call each other names. Do it somewhere else. Most of us, I think, want to see what readers think of the issue or the content of the article. To offer differing viewpoints, and to correct errors (like there definitely WERE more than 100,000 people at Saturday's peace march!).

In short, thanks for writing this much-needed reminder about public discourse and how journalists (and other writers) feel about what their readers think.