Having given up on several fora on Climate Change because of the level of intelligence and forebearance shown by all the active participants, I am increasingly of the opinion that there should be some sort of knowledge test that people should pass before they are allowed to speak on a subject. Of course, this flies in the face of centuries of people throwing themselves under carriages to gain the right to a voice, but the internet has given everyone (accepting that access to the internet is far from universal - that is another issue) a voice. There are people speaking who do so without knowing, thinking or understanding anything about the subject on which they claim the right to have an opinion. They are at one end of the scale, and there are deep thinking, knowledgable communicators out there who are able to add to the understanding, knoweldege and thought patterns of anyone who reads their work. In the middle are large numbers of people with a partially informed, ill-thought out, poorly understood opinion and an unquenchable urge to go out and express it, before attacking anyone who dares to ask them to stop and think and find out more and open their mind a little. The vast majority of forum discussion is, therefore, a scrambled regurgitation of third-hand opinions and the spiteful flamewars that result. Before the internet, most published opinion was in the form of edited newspapers, books or pamphlets. The checks and balances in place that prevented dross from flooding the market worked fairly well, subject to the vagueries of fashion and editorial bias. The authors had to be, almost exclusively, well educated and careful about their words. Now, opinions are disposable reconstituted junkfood, and finding a morsel of nutrition is harder work now than it ever has been. The internet has made it harder to gain perspective of an issue, and harder to find worthwhile opinion. This site appears to have some sort of editorial vetting on the article content, but the forums rapidly stagnate as debates are taken over by the closed-minded and opinionated majority. Is there any way to have an open debate without this kind of thing happening? Should forum moderators delete 90% of all posts on the basis of poor debatesmanship, so that people who wish to make their point must first learn how to do so constructively and rationally? Is free speech worth the price paid for it?