We also reserve the right-and we use it-to delete posts we consider abusive and/or off-topic.

See -- it started off about abuse, and now we find out it's really about control.

What's the harm of someone making a digression? There's no harm at all, except to your sense of control.

I think there has been an effort here to make sure people can't raise certain subjects that might embarass or divide Democrats.

It's disingenuous to tell people who are upset by that to go off and start their own magazines criticizing Salon.

You have the power here, and you known darn well nobody has any chance to talk back to your power unless they can do it here.

And one way to talk back to power is to color outside the lines that have been drawn by the people in power.

Anonymous, if you've read our letters and comments over the last year, or week, and you think we're censoring people who raise issues that might divide Democrats (or embarrass Salon)...well, you haven't been reading very closely.

What is abusive? Is it threats? Or is it:

dirty words?

overly long posts?

jokes about a protected class, women, minorities, republicans, veterans, blondes, the aged, foreigners, muslims, jews, queer, transgendered, catholics?

too many comments by the same person?

comments that disagree with the author?

comments that disagree with the editor?

comments that disagree with the advertiser?

comments that disagree with the government?

comments that might offend someone?

blogwhoring?

attention whoring?

links to relevant but NSFW material?

links to Slate?

What is abusive? At what point do we get to Fahrenheit 451, in which it was society, not government, that burned books, because "special-interest groups and other “minorities” objected to books that offended them. Soon, books all began to look the same, as writers tried to avoid offending anybody. This was not enough, however, and society as a whole decided to simply burn books rather than permit conflicting opinions."

Spam should be deleted and the usernames banned.

Threats should be documented and turned over to the FBI.

The rest should stay.

Yours is the first response I have seen to any of the letters by the author in any of the articles in Salon.

As part of the moderation policy, as part of a conversation between reader and author, I hope you encourage your authors to discuss and take ownership of their posts in the letters.

It's one of the fatal flaws of the current Broadsheet.

Joan, I very much concur with you regarding Imus. I listened to Imus for several years in the 90's and generally found him to be an amusing character. But then I found myself increasingly disturbed by the atmosphere of lazy insults that he would throw around. I am not even talking about the racist insults - although those were frequent as well. But even leaving aside the racist comments so many of his comments were just stupid and inarticulate: "fat sissy" (Bill Rchardson), "most despicable person on the planet" (Al Gore). I mean politics aside there just was not an ounce of wit to his comments anymore.

As for the racism - yes it is almost funny that this incident would explode all of a sudden now. It was very typical - not really very exceptional. And yet all the fawning politicians would still come on and play homage to the great IMUS.

A real message needs to be sent. This kind of discourse is just not acceptable. Apology is not good enough. There needs to be a real consequence. Now a year from now if he wants to come back on the air as a changed man - I might even give him a listen.

Maybe it's more of a question of how open your mind is to alternative viewpoints. Too many bloggers are simply not open to even the hint of other viewpoints. Too many bloggers seem to see blogging as some sort of war and appear to regard even moderate differences as some sort of attack on them.

Banning comments because they're offensive too often turns into a tactic of banning comments just to label them as offensive. And that's a pretty nasty thing to do. The fact that it happens A LOT is one reason blogs have gotten a fairly well deserved reputation as unpleasant spew vents for narrow minded cliques.

Once you start filtering out comments, there's always a risk that what you're really filtering out is something you don't want to hear, but maybe should.

"Misogyny" is a good case in point. Maybe somebody is saying something because they don't like women. Or maybe they're saying it because they don't agree with some aspect of your thinking. Are you sure you can always tell the difference? Neither one might be a pleasant experience, so you might be tempted to ban both.

Take a look specifically at "misogyny". You have published Amanda Marcotte in your pages. At her website she calls out "misogyny misogyny" many times each day. She calls anyone that thinks that fathers may be getting a raw deal as a small dicked FRA misogynist. And then she bans the commenter. And then she and her hordes make all sorts of abusive comments about the commenter, and white men.

And you publish her.

And you don't publish much of anything about the father's rights groups.

Are the father's rights groups as misogynistic as Marcotte claims all of the time? Are father's rights groups only out to reduce support for their kids as Marcotte and Feministe and Feministing and Broadsheet often claim?

Or is it the case that they are interested in a rebuttable presumption of joint shared custody as they claim?

How come Salon gives so much voice to women that freely ban dissent, even when it is made politely? How come Salon gives no voice to fathers?

Are fathers given a raw deal? Does "best interest of the child" have a real meaning or does it encourage capricious and arbitrary and unconstitutional orders from the judge as Professor Eugene Volokh has stated?

Is there a reason that liberals must cede fathers and their mothers/daughters and sisters to the NASCAR right?

Is feminism a third rail?

None of this speech makes it into your pages and there is a lot of vital discussion that society must have.

Amanda Marcotte would find this comment abusive. And because it mentions her banning policy, she would ban me.

When does your rigid definition of abuse start to bend and become fuzzy?