When I was a kid, I used to get into all kinds of trouble with my parents for saying inappropriate stuff. I was a bit of a motor-mouth at the time, and there was no disconnect switch between my brain and my tongue. If I thought it, I said it. It seems to me that the phrase I heard most in my young life was an exasperated, “Think before you speak!” As a lesson, it was one that stuck. It’s why you don’t tend to find me in the middle of the latest online fracas. Lots of the folks I follow online tend to get involved in every controversy that crops up around their areas of interest, and it’s not that I’m any different from them. Many is the time I’ll find myself in the middle of typing out a tweet, comment or blog post about some egregious thing someone else has said, when I stop. I stop and look at what I’ve written, and wonder - is this helping? Does pointing out how some argument is nonsense add to anyone’s understanding or will it just make me feel better?