One thing is sure. Whether Joe's personal attacks upon me – are justified by him as acceptable 'cute personal attacks' or considered by other (apparently abnormal) people to be not-so-cute personal attacks' – no one will be deleting such comments posted by Joe.

http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=77622&messages=34

The above thread was close with the following (brown) editorial comment.

And yeah, of course the thread has to be closed. The basic premise of the thread is personal attack. I don't care who's right or who's wrong - we just need to have them stop, and that means taking action against all combatants. I don't want to bother sorting out cute personal attacks from not-so-cute personal attacks. Personal attacks have been a problem here at Mudcat for a long, long time.
Sometimes it seems like a losing battle.
-Joe Offer-

Perhaps as it is a losing battle and Joe does not want to 'bother' - Joe is going to stop? I really question if this was a battle that was ever seriously joined. For all this imposed judgement and the closing and deleting of entire threads – after the event – does nothing at all to prevent abusive personal attacks from being made in the first place. All this probably just makes it worse and the double standards like those demonstrated here - from those who would feel qualified to judge us – do not help.

It may not be as much fun or make folk feel as important as imposing judgement upon others – but the only way to stop all this abusive silliness – is simply for all of us to set the right example.

That is - never to respond (especially in kind) to obvious provocation or even acknowledge it. Or encourage in any way any response that may be given by others. If we ALL do this – and it really is not very difficult - there will be no excuse for anyone to impose their judgement upon us. And all of our volunteers - can then go away and leave the rest of us to post again - in peace.