[Jeff Higgins]

I don't organize or help run DE's at any level, for most of the same reasons I would never run or moderate a forum like this one. It seems many of those who participate are just too smart, just too good looking, just too special, for any of the common rules of decency to apply to them. They are all special cases who get special exceptions, who must have the finer points of propriety, restraint, and good manners continually explained to them. They neither "get it" nor see how any of that applies to them. They feel they are above all of that.

It is for such people that gentlemen - normally decent, understanding, moderate, quiet types need to come out with such absolutes. Gentlemen, not quite so full of themselves, don't need to hear these things. It remains axiomatic in most endeavors that many of "the rules" are made for those who don't "get it", who will never understand. Their egos preclude that. They inhabit forums like this and, unfortunately, they attend DE's. It's very clearly a case where the "gentleman's rules" that used to be implicit in such endeavors no longer are, so they must be spelled out - with attendant penalties - for those participants who neither "get it", nor are "gentlemen" about it. They cannot understand the "why" (and think it shouldn't apply to them, since they are so special), so those that do understand are forced into the rather un-gentlemanly position of having to make and enforce "official" rules that were once implicitly understood by one and all. Such is the price in a society where everyone is "special"...