Agreed! You will observe there has been no moderation, censoring, or restricting of people’s freedom of choice, opinion, and expression, etc., with regard to discussing these controversial topics on the forum – and I would prefer to keep it that way.
Yet here comes the caveat…
Ahh so you want people to be able to expound upon their conclusions/evaluations/opinions, be they sensible or not/based on facts or not, without anybody challenging them?
You realize it can’t be both ways? If you want free discussion of ideas, you can’t just allow the stating of an idea and not the following critique of it. That would not be a free discussion of ideas. Plus that would then require judgement calls to be made upon which side should be censored – which judgement calls will inevitably lie according to the bias of the person making the judgement.
As an example only, I could just as well write that I want forum members to be able to discuss ideas freely - even controversial ones like global warming or the neutrality of actually free people - without being told that they have daddy issues or are a “Richardist” or are on “Team Richard” or are turning actualism into an ideology for coming to the same conclusions as Richard! 
Further as feeling-beings have had, do have, and will continue to have varying (from superficial to strong) emotional and (the deeper) psychic-current reactions to various topics discussed, and particularly on controversial ones, plus it being impossible to 100% reliably tell the degree to which someone else is emotionally involved (only that person themselves can know and they can fool themselves just as they can fool others) – then any censoring based on an evaluation of whether someone appears to be aggressive or angry or defensive etc., will have similar issues.
Additionally, as feelings are not facts, even if somebody is feeling worked up or aggressive or defensive or malicious or sorrowful, etc., when they write something out – that feeling does not change the factual content whatsoever of that which they are saying. It took me a while to get this at first, but if you observe Richard’s correspondences, he never judges, shames, castigates, criticizes, or discards what people say strictly and solely because of the feelings they may be feeling when they say it or their intent in saying it. He always addresses what they are actually saying (even if he may additionally point out possible underlying motivations and guesses at intent etc.). That is where valid critique lies, not in the internal (and thus inaccessible-to-others) state of the person writing it.
As such I really don’t want to get into any of that type of moderation nor would I want the forum to take that direction. It seems better to let people discuss things as they will so that a genuine resolution, if one is possible, can be reached – with whatever necessary conflict along the way as is unavoidable with contentious issues. If there be any moderation I would restrict it solely to the blatant and obvious trolls, i.e. those that violate common courtesy/general decency rules and are apparently there just to stir up trouble rather than engage in a genuine discussion. This will also require judgement calls, of course, and I prefer Richard’s method of not moderating but rather engaging with each and every one – but that takes a lot of time and energy which may not always be available.
Thus as it stands I don’t see any issue per se – people can and do criticize Richard and Vineeto etc., and they can and do say they are biased or lack critical thinking, and then other people can ask them for evidence of this, and other people can certainly freely point out where after ~2 months of discussion still no evidence has been provided, and people can definitely surmise therefrom that there still be no case to consider said fully free people to have bias as far as anybody has been able to determine, and others are free to read all that and shrug and think that they are probably biased anyway (lol).
Well this is nothing new, it’s just a new take on an old idea. It used to be that “Actualism is a cult” or “Actualists are all clones of Richard”. Now it’s “actualists have daddy issues” lol 
. Though I see you are resurrecting some old themes with the Team Richard and Richardist ideas.
They certainly don’t and actual freedom certainly does stand on its own – as do the facts.
But just because they don’t need protection doesn’t mean that it’s not worth engaging people who claim to have found flaws or faults with it. With that logic Richard should have just come out and reported his experience of becoming free, maybe a few thousand words on the topic, then left it up as a single web page on the internet, ignoring and not engaging with anybody who found a fault with it – because it didn’t need any protection!
That would be silly of course… and I’ll just refer you to the millions of words on the AFT site, a lot of which is indeed Richard, Vineeto, and Peter, engaging people in discussions about this very topic (possible flaws, faults, etc.)
How is challenging people on what they write, and critiquing, and pointing out not only that what they say isn’t valid but also the specific ways in which it’s not valid, equivalent to trying to control how people think about it?
If that were the case then you can say almost the entirety of Richard’s correspondence is his attempt to control what people think about actual freedom - by challenging people, not letting them get away with saying something is a fact when it isn’t, pointing out where they are completely and arrantly wrong, etc.
You’re saying a world full of actually free people will be one where everybody just says what they think, regardless of how well-considered it is, and everyone else just agrees with them without challenges or discussion? You realize that isn’t how (genuine) science works? People certainly will present ideas and others will challenge them, etc. That’s how ideas are developed and how the good ones win out – by surviving critical discussion. That is what critical thinking is! It’s in the phrase itself – thinking critically, as in, being critical of that which is being thought about!
I don’t see any issue with this. All the malice and sorrow that normally underlies and derails such discussions will be totally absent. It will all work much more smoothly and effectively. And will be much more fun for everyone involved!
Just to step back, what happens with these topics isn’t that they are being presented as a package deal per se. Rather, Richard or Vineeto or Peter etc., write something of what they think about a non-actualism topic. Then somebody challenges what they wrote. Then there’s further discussion on it. Just because what they write is successfully defended against contrarian arguments, doesn’t mean that it’s a “package deal”.
Basically anyone is completely free to ignore or not engage on these topics. Indeed, it doesn’t particularly matter with regards to becoming free – if it’s not an issue for someone then there’s no reason for them to take the time to look into it. But when it does become an issue for someone, and they do look into it, then it’s certainly worth having the discussion on it.
You may be asking why, or implicitly criticizing Richard, Vineeto, and Peter, for even publishing these things on the AFT site in the first place – to which I refer you to their rationale here: Discussion of Non-Actualist Topics .
Also you will observe these topics are in “The Watercooler” category and not the “Actualism” category – which seems like the right way to segragate the discussions (with some cross-posting about the meta aspects of the discussion like groupthink or peasant mentality in general, that may belong more in the “Actualism” category).
Ahh so only the conclusions of actually free people are valid? Okay. But this already presents a problem:
i.e. you are actually free, and you disagree with Richard and Vineeto, who are also actually free. All three of you can’t be right at the same time – one, or both, or all three of you, must be mistaken. Therefore just being actually free does not automatically make your conclusions valid.
A second problem presents itself – since we’re not free and therefore we can’t make up our own minds about it, what are we supposed to think until we are free? Shrug and say we don’t know? But then we’re just agreeing with you. Why not just agree with Richard or Vineeto instead, if we can’t make up our minds anyway? It amounts to saying that our passion-enfeebled minds prevent us from thinking for ourselves and we should all listen to Big Daddy Srinath instead of Big Daddy Richard.
But why believe you over some other actually free person? Well that’s the point – we are not to believe any of you! The only sensible thing is for each of us to evaluate the facts for ourselves, as best as we can – and indeed, with the explicit purpose of nothing other than becoming actually free ourselves!
To attempt to censor or constrain this free-thinking process by only allowing certain types of discussion on the only active actualism forum – seems to me to be nothing other than misguided!
———
As a final thought I will point out that literally the only basis for your Richardist, Pop, daddy issue, Team Richard, etc insinuations is for people agreeing with or coming to the same conclusion as what Richard wrote on this topic of global warming. If what Richard wrote is factual then it’s obviously ridiculous to disparage them for seeing the facts — Richard said the Earth is spherical (not flat), it doesn’t make us Richardists for agreeing with him. So the only way what you wrote holds water is if Richard wrote something not factual, either something wrong or an opinion. And the only rationale you gave for Richard being wrong about global warming being an unscientific groupthink fallacy — is that you will just go with the very people that would be perpetuating that groupthink fallacy since they do it for a living! Lol.
In short you didn’t give any good reason and thus your disparagements don’t have any valid basis.
It is of course entirely possible Richard is wrong and you are right — but you would have to show where he is wrong to make the case. And as you said you wouldn’t due to lack of time … it means your conclusions on the topic will remain without basis.
And to what end, I might say? As you said you yourself really don’t know any won’t take the time to find out for yourself - why assume Richard is wrong? Isn’t it an equivalent mistake to assuming he is right?
Cheers,
Claudiu
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