Timothy C. May wrote:
Interestingly, I don't recall getting any e-mail from Sandy telling me he was not passing on my messages to either the Main or the Flames list...my messages were simply dropped on the floor. [snip] As conversational threads are often so tangled, and become so much more tangled with time, the job of the censor gets more difficult as time passes. Not only must he excise all mention of banned topics, he must also be alert to later discussions making mention of the act of banning, or of the topics. This is territory well-covered by Orwell, of course. The rewriting of history is a full-time job.
Exactly. I hate to intrude, but some of us kids learned that lesson in something called "Sunday School" way back when. The lesson was "If you tell one lie, you'll have to tell another to cover it up, then another and another until you're buried in the lies and your credibility is shot". A related lesson: "An excuse is the skin of a reason packed with a lie".