I suspect this has been facilitated by the fact that the forum we are talking about here is on the internet. The internet has a very strange effect on lots of people. I have felt it myself on occasion. It makes people touchy and confrontational and argumentative. There is an unreal quality to it too - like anything you cast into the ether of the web isn't quite a real sentiment, and you can say anything you like without consequence. A lot of it, I think, has to do with the fact it's an entirely written form of communication where the participants are largely anonymous and don't have any non-verbal cues to guage social proprieties with. Add to this the immediate and throwaway nature of the medium (we did not get this with exchanges of letters, which take time to write and cost money to post) and we have a very real danger that otherwise sane people act highly autistically, and borderline derranged people like the ones cited in the article act like psychipathic loons.