Contributers may well have a tendancy towards a certain area of the political spectrum (I'm sure somebody could point you in the direction of results and discussion on that) and in broad terms we are probably looking in roughly the same direction but when you break it down to individual topics, approaches, ways of thinking, backgrounds, locations, there is huge diversity here.

I personally hope to minimise aggressive conflict because it is unpleasant and intimidating and does nothing for constructive debate and dialogue. That does not in any way amount to suppressing discussion or variety of opinion.  We wouldn't have so many excellent diaries with long discussion threads if we were all bleating a conventional majority opinion.

And we do challenge each other - sometimes people agree totally on one topic and then on another will be debating it out til the cows come home.

The implication from various people that the front page team is acting as a groupthink or as scrambling leiutenants is utterly unfair.