Jimbo wrote on Oct 21^st, 2013 at 9:56pm:

"That's not to say that we don't need to change things every once in awhile; I'm sure we do" ... "And now we are what we are... for better or for worse."  "If folks have something to say, we'll listen & address it." ... "when I listen to members about issues, about all I'm hearing is... crickets."  If we have significantly deviated from some theoretical "norm" in some meaningful way (good or bad), I suppose the Mod team needs to share some "credit."

Maybe we should change, but we won't. We will listen to you, but we won't really listen.

Proscription of personal attacks is not a "theoretical" norm. It is an explicit rule for (afaik) all discussion boards like QJ. In QJ's case, the user agreement for these forums states "You also agree not to post any material which is inaccurate, defamatory, abusive, vulgar, hateful, ..." This was discussed at length a couple of years ago, and led to the quarantining of BTC. Things seemed to have been pretty clean around here since then. Til now.

IMO the exchange earlier in this thread between PJ and MT was clearly defamatory and abusive, and should have been deleted by the moderators from the first post. At the time, I figured maybe people were off canoeing and this accidentally slipped by. But your post has me concerned that things haven't really changed, and we're headed towards more BTC-type attacks in the canoe boards, not just in the religion-and-politics threads.

As a great American statesman once said "I have seen the enemy, and he is us."