Thanks for your contributions, people. I think that one neat way of staying polite is to imagine one were addressing Sonny Liston. What you might not say to his face is perhaps the measure of what should never be posted to/about another person.
I hadn´t thought that civility might be confused with timidity; however, that´s not such a bad thing, in a way, because if anything, an attack on such a poster merely shows the aggressive person to be a bully, something nobody can possibly like, rendering such attack kind of self-defeating. On the other hand, perhaps there are those who see it as victory, but should we be too concerned with them?
There is also the chance that attitudes change within a person as age rolls along. There probably is a certain mellowing that comes with the pension - at least there is less of the instant need to defend one´s position because in the greater scheme of things, life has already tended to introduce the concept of being side-lined or, should that be, freed to do other more personally interesting things?
Rob C
