Jeff, I'm not sure why you have returned to this 'jump the shark' theme once again. How many times have we been there and done that? It is sort of like the periodic obligatory group therapy, get it off you chest venting of frustration that we seem to go through on a regular basis.
One of the modern throw away lines seems to be: "it is what it is". Personally, I don't like hearing that line very often, but unfortunately, it completely applies or defines the problems we sometimes go through here on GCA.com along with its many splendid conversations and benefits.
We all have our warts, and if we've been on GCA.com long enough, know where every other long time participant's goats are tied. So in a way, when we have some underlying need to call attention to ourselves, we often revert to some embedded line of observation or comment that we know will piss off or get a rise out of some others, and then the food fight starts. Some of our participants have taken that sort of posting of 'red flags at a bull' methods of commenting to sadistic levels of confrontation and taunting. What a pity...
For those that are missing, most of them were not chased off. They left voluntarily. Those that were asked to leave or IP banned; they made their own beds with comments that went beyond the pale by just about anyone's standards of decency. With some of them, we lost some very insightful commentatiors of GCA issues, but the nastiness that came with it became too much to suffer, when seeing otherwise nice people gut eachother over basically egotistical demonstrations of; 'my gca accumen is greater than yours'.
And for the record, I have tried very hard to avoid some of the bad GCA acting posts I succumbed to in the past when taking the bait and rising to the occasion of taunts or opportunistic political comment from right wing political off topic discussions, only to interject my equally o.t. irrelavant disenchanted formerly conservative, now liberal views of matters. I go to local newspaper blogs now, where the foodfight posts are generally capped at 1000 characters of raging opinion. Although I can't promise that I am completely over that bad GCA.com behaviour and might backslide from time to time, like a reformed alcoholic slips now and then...